The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (31 page)

C
layton Lee Waagner, 45, stared straight ahead. His brown shaggy hair touched the back of his collar and a mustache drooped over expressionless lips. It was this mug shot that had adorned FBI and U.S. Marshall Service posters of the Most Wanted. Then on December 5, 2001, just before 1 p.m., Waagner was apprehended at the Kinko’s copy center on Princeton Pike in Springdale, Ohio, 10 miles north of Cincinnati. An employee recognized his picture and called the police. Waagner reportedly was trying to program a computer to fax threats to abortion providers around the country. “We knew he frequented Kinko’s,” said Deputy U.S. Marshall Bruce Harmening. “We’d been watching the Kinko’s and we had a flier in every one in America.”

Ten months earlier, in February, Waagner had escaped through the roof of the county jail in Clinton, Illinois, where he was awaiting sentencing on firearms violations and automobile theft. Now, with his recapture 2 months after the anthrax crisis began, he faced additional charges. The arresting officers had found a bag of white powder in his stolen Mercedes. Waagner told them the powder was not anthrax but that initial tests might suggest that it was. A February 2002 publication of the Feminist Majority Foundation reported that the powder “initially tested positive for anthrax [but] later turned out to be an insecticide called
Bacillus thuringiensis
.”

The day after Thanksgiving 2001, Waagner visited Neal Horsley at his home in Carrollton, Georgia. Horsley, an antiabortion militant, taped their conversation during which Waagner read off a list of Federal Express billing numbers. He recited the numbers to prove that he had sent hundreds of threat letters to abortion clinics in the first week of November. They were in addition to another batch of threat letters he had sent via the U.S. mail in mid-October. Altogether Waagner was charged by federal authorities with mailing about 550 letters to abortion facilities in 24 states with the intention of shutting them down.

At court hearings in early 2002, Waagner was sentenced to 49 years on charges related to his escape and to theft and weapons violations. But in a Philadelphia court on October 17, 2002, he pled not guilty to the new federal charges involving the threat letters. Despite his taped admission, Waagner denied threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction and making and mailing threatening communications. The indictment cited a message that Waagner had posted in June 2001 on a Web site called “
ArmyofGod.com
.” The message read in part:

Waagner warned that he “would go after” anyone who worked at an abortion facility and that “I’ll drop you a note and we’ll get this terrorism thing started in earnest.” The indictment also indicated that “on or about October 12, 2001,” Waagner mailed numerous letters to reproductive health care clinics. The envelopes contained powder and a letter saying that “you have been exposed to extremely high levels of
Bacillus anthracis
(commonly known as anthrax).” The letter explained further:

The letter concluded with “Stop now or die” and was signed by the Army of God—Virginia Dare Cell.

The batch of letters sent “on or about November 7, 2001” by Federal Express said: “You ignored our warnings, so now you pay. Enclosed you’ll find the real thing—Anthrax, very high grade. Be careful not to bring any of the spores home to your children.” Again, the sender was the Army of God—Virginia Dare Cell.

Before the powder was found to be harmless, according to the indictment, people at the targeted facilities underwent decontamination procedures and unspecified medical treatment. At the court hearing in October 2002, Waagner acted as his own lawyer. He would continue to do so, he said, although he had accepted legal counsel from the public defender’s office in Philadelphia. Pending a future trial, he remains at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 110 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Waagner, the most productive of bioterrorism hoaxers, had engaged in a phenomenon with a surprisingly brief history.

One block from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., across the street from the Governor’s House Hotel, an eight-story building stands at 1640 Rhode Island Avenue. It had been the headquarters of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish service organization, until 2002 when the organization moved to another Washington location.

At 7:45 a.m. on April 24, 1997, Carmen Fontana, the chief of security for the B’nai B’rith building, pulled his pickup truck into the building’s underground garage. He took the elevator to his small office on the second floor, picked up his messages, and went down to the security desk in the lobby. Dressed in a dark blue blazer and tie, he greeted the 100-odd employees as they filed past him during the next hour.

“Good morning, Mr. Berk,” Fontana intoned in a warm gritty voice. Just the right sound for a former police officer, Harvey Berk thought. Fontana had retired from the D.C. force 6 years earlier and then came to work at B’nai B’rith. “Morning, Carmen. Supposed to be a beautiful day,” Berk answered. The sky was cloudless and the temperature rose to 60° by midday. Berk, director of communications for the organization, headed to his office in the 7th-floor executive suite.

During his years with the organization, Fontana had seen plenty of crackpot mail. But the one that Rusty Mason, the mail clerk, showed him that morning was different. At 11 a.m., Rusty came down from the second floor mailroom with a stuffed 8 × 10 inch manila envelope. Lined with bubble wrap, the envelope was stapled along the sides. “It was leaking this red substance,” Fontana said. “We were thinking, ‘bomb.’” He and Rusty placed the package in a waste paper basket and ran outside with it. Fontana then went back and dialed 911. Minutes later the police arrived.

The bomb squad took an X ray and found no evidence of an explosive. But inside the package they came upon something unexpected. A broken petri dish was oozing a red gelatinous material. The dish was marked “Anthracis Yersinia,” according to an after-action report prepared by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). (Some news reports indicated that the dish was labeled “anthrachs.”) A threat note was also in the package, but police would not reveal its contents other than to say it was written by someone claiming to be with the “Counter Holocaust Lobbyists of Hillel.”

Out of concern that the package contained anthrax, the fire department’s hazardous materials (HAZMAT) unit was summoned. The unit isolated a number of people who had been close to the package. Fire officials sealed off a one-block area around the building. The 109 people inside were quarantined, as were unknown numbers in nearby businesses, offices, and the Governor’s House Hotel across the street. Behind a graying mustache, Fontana offered a sense of mature calm. But his insides were churning: “I was a little nervous when I thought it was a bomb. When I found out it was anthrax and [realized] I had taken a deep breath of it, I believed I was dead,” he told me.

HAZMAT and emergency medical personnel consulted with officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who advised that the victims be decontaminated with a 1 percent bleach solution. Meanwhile, the package had been turned over to the FBI and then delivered to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The tension and confusion were captured in the FEMA report:

The quarantine ended after 9 hours, when laboratory analysis confirmed the material in the package was not dangerous.

The FEMA report highlighted the shortcomings of the response procedures. Fontana’s summary is more direct. “No one really knew what to do,” he told me afterward. He said that the responders went to a supermarket and bought Clorox bleach off the shelf. They then sprayed it at the 30 civilians, police, and fire personnel who had stripped to their underwear. After decontamination, the victims were given coverall suits and escorted to a bus. “We sat on the bus for 8 hours, reeking of Clorox,” Fontana said.

He elaborated on his initial reluctance to obey the directive to stand in front of the building, undress, and be sprayed. “I got into an argument with the fire commander. I told him I did not want my 14-year-old granddaughter to see me stripped down on television.” The fire commander said that the decontamination site would be next to a fire engine, which would block the view of outsiders. However, television cameras on a nearby rooftop had perfect visual access. Videos of the event, including the spraying, appeared on the evening news. “Ironically, my granddaughter did see me on TV, stripped. She panicked,” Fontana said. Another B’nai B’rith employee was so embarrassed by the ordeal that he never came back to work again.

The FEMA report noted that the absence of tents for decontamination meant that people had to “disrobe in front of television cameras.” As a result of the experience, the report hoped that HAZMAT departments in the future would consider “the public’s modesty.” The report also cited contradictory views about whether people should have been quarantined in the first place. It referred to unnamed “experts” who said that by “isolating people in an unventilated and possibly contaminated area, the victims were in effect exposed . . . for an extended duration.” The report’s concluding observation left the matter in limbo: “More research is needed to address the question of whether it is best to protect in-place or to evacuate to a safe haven, those civilians exposed to chem-bio agents.”

It was assessments such as these, that failed to even distinguish between “chem” and “bio” agents that distressed people like D.A. Henderson. The Keystone Kops response to the nation’s first ostensible anthrax threat made clear how ill prepared the authorities were. Moreover, few people realized that the hoax attack on B’nai B’rith was just the beginning of a new kind of epidemic.

In the 18 months after the B’nai B’rith incident, only a few other anthrax hoaxes were reported, though the frequency began to accelerate toward the end of 1998. The incidents usually involved letters claiming that the reader had been exposed to anthrax or telephone calls claiming that bacteria were in the ventilation systems. A report by the CDC in February 1999 reviewed seven recent bioterrorism threats. Responses continued to be chaotic and inappropriate. At some locations, presumed victims were told to go home, place their clothes in plastic bags, and shower. At others they were quarantined, made to disrobe, to undergo scrubbing with diluted bleach, and to begin taking antibiotics. In a few cases, victims were hospitalized.

These responses reflected contradictory guidelines from different agencies. A 1998 anthrax advisory by the FBI said that if “there is confirmation” of anthrax exposure, victims should undergo decontamination with a diluted household bleach solution, specifically “Clorox—5.25 percent hypochlorite.” When confronted with a threat, many local authorities ignored the requirement to confirm the presence of anthrax. Erring on the side of caution, they required potential victims to be scrubbed anyway. The CDC’s February report advised that presumed victims be washed with soap and water but also suggested decontaminating “the environment in direct contact with [a possibly contaminated] letter or its contents . . . with a 0.5 percent hypochlorite solution (i.e., one part household bleach to 10 parts water).” Whether or not the “environment” included the people who had been in direct contact was not made clear.