The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America

Copyright © 2009 by Leonard A. Cole

Hardcover edition published in 2003 by Joseph Henry Press, an imprint of the National Academies Press.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cole, Leonard A., 1933-The anthrax letters : a leading expert on bioterrorism explains the science behind the anthrax attacks / Leonard A. Cole. p. cm.

Originally published: Washington, D.C. : Joseph Henry Press, c2003.

9781602397156

1. Bioterrorism--United States. 2. Anthrax--United States. 3. Postal service--United States. 4. Victims of terrorism--United States. I.

Title.
HV6432.C63 2009
364.152’3--dc22

2009003784

Printed in Canada

M
embers of the Senate Judiciary Committee were furious. “We
never
get the answers!” shouted the chairman, Democrat Patrick Leahy. He was referring to questions that members had sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation during its seven-year probe into the anthrax attacks. His frustration was echoed by Arlen Specter, the committee’s ranking Republican. The FBI director, Robert Mueller, refused to assure Specter that the committee could help choose a panel to review the scientific aspects of the investigation. That would be up to the National Academy of Sciences, Mueller said. Specter replied coldly, “That’s not far enough.”

The bipartisan scold was offered during a three-hour hearing on September 17, 2008. Mueller sat expressionless while hunched over the witness table, a contrast to his ramrod posture when he had entered room SH-216. The wood-paneled hearing room is in the Hart Senate Office Building, where reminders of the 2001 attacks abound. The anthrax bioweapon had been used against “the American people, Congress, and this senator,” said Leahy, emotionally recalling that one of several letters containing spores had been addressed to him. That letter never reached his office because it was mistakenly routed to a storage area in a different building. But another anthrax letter, addressed to then-Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, arrived at its intended destination.

On October 15, 2001, one month after the 9/11 jetliner attacks, a staffer in Daschle’s office opened the envelope and read a threat message. The powder that floated out, later confirmed to be lethal spores, created hysteria in the senator’s office and beyond. Even before the letter was opened, spores had been leaking out and spreading. This was belatedly recognized in an inspection of the Hart Building after the Daschle letter had been opened. The building, which contains offices of half the nation’s one hundred senators, was then closed. No one was permitted to return until decontamination was completed three months later, at a cost of $41.7 million.

Weeks before the senate hearing in 2008, Mueller hardly could have imagined that he would soon be undergoing a grilling about the case. By July, unknown to the public, the FBI believed it had identified the perpetrator of the attacks. Seven years of harsh congressional criticism for the seeming failure of the Amerithrax investigation, as it was called, would finally come to an end. At least that was the bureau’s hope. Dr. Bruce Ivins, 62, a longtime scientist in the army’s microbiology laboratories at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, had become the sole suspect. The FBI and Justice Department were planning to charge Ivins with the crime. But on August 1, a stunning story claimed front-page headlines: The FBI had determined that Ivins was the anthrax killer, but he had committed suicide three days earlier. Ivins’s alleged guilt would never be tested in court.

Still, as Mueller reaffirmed at the senate hearing, he believed that Ivins was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. There would be no trial, but the FBI was convinced that the evidence was strong enough to close the case. When word about Ivins surfaced, several people who had been intimately affected by the attacks expressed relief. Shirley Jackson, whose aunt, Ottilie Lundgren, had been killed by anthrax spores, spoke of the pain caused by the event. Now she hoped the FBI’s findings would “bring some closure.”

A few days later, a federal judge released documents that the FBI had developed in support of its claim. The new information amounted largely to circumstantial evidence, but nevertheless was strongly suggestive. A key was the purported matching of genetic features of the anthrax spores in the letters with those of spores produced in Ivins’s laboratory. Ivins was also found to have returned to his laboratory to work alone late into the night on dates just before the letters were mailed. (Four anthrax letters were eventually recovered, two of them postmarked September 18, and two October 9.) The government’s case was comprised of these and other presumptive indicators.

After briefing survivors of the attacks and members of Congress about the evidence, officials released the information to the public. But if the FBI and the Department of Justice expected their openness to quell doubts, they were quickly disabused. Some survivors now believed that the FBI had solved the case while others remained unconvinced. Several members of Congress also remained skeptical. None had been more attentive to the Amerithrax investigation, and more critical of it, than New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt.

Holt’s district includes Princeton, where a mailbox contaminated with anthrax spores was believed to be the one used by the killer. But that was just one of the reasons for Holt’s special interest in the case, he told me on the day of the senate hearing. We sat in his office next to a low table, which, like the large desk behind him, was stacked with magazines and papers. Some of the publications he reads, including
Science
magazine and the
New England Journal of Medicine
, are rarely found in other congressional offices. Holt, a former physics professor, is one of few scientists in the U.S. Congress. (Of the 535 members in both houses, only eight list themselves as engineers or scientists.) With a grin he noted that
Bacillus anthracis
, the bacterium that causes anthrax, was not part of his physics curriculum. Still, he knows more about the organism than most of his fellow representatives. He has read about the etiology of anthrax and, unlike others in Congress, he is comfortable talking about statistics, incubation periods, and genetic morphology.

The five-term representative also chairs the congressional Select Intelligence Oversight Panel. Since terrorism is a major subject for intelligence, Holt planned to hold his own hearings on the anthrax investigation. But his engagement with the issue was especially rooted in a personal circumstance: in 2001, his office in the Longworth House Office Building was contaminated with anthrax spores. Hanging on his wall is a vivid reminder—a photographic enlargement of spores signed by his office staff at that time. Holt assumes that the bacteria arrived at his office on cross-contaminated mail. Probably true, since mail from his district is processed at the large postal sorting center in nearby Hamilton. It was there that the actual anthrax letters had been processed and leaked bacteria. (All four recovered letters were postmarked “Trenton, NJ,” which indicates that they went through the Hamilton facility.)

Holt emphatically rejects the notion that the case has been resolved. Maybe Ivins was the perpetrator, he said, but “it also may be that he is not the culprit or not the sole culprit.” His skepticism about the investigation reaches back to actions he witnessed at the outset. When evidence was being taken from his office in 2001, “I was struck by the sloppiness, verging on incompetence, in the way that this was handled.” There was confusion about who was in charge, he recalled, and agencies at the scene were tripping over each other—the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the DC police.

In the following years, additional missteps were as apparent to the public as to Holt. Before Ivins was deemed the culprit, the lives of others who had come under FBI scrutiny were hugely disrupted. Several lost their jobs and suffered emotional distress. One of them, Steven Hatfill, who had been publicly designated a “person of interest” by Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002, sued the government. After a protracted legal fight, in 2008 the government acknowledged error and agreed to a settlement that awarded Hatfill $5.8 million.

In one notable area, however, the FBI apparently had made creative advances. Anthrax bacteria commonly exist as highly durable spores. Under certain conditions, including when inhaled deeply into a person’s lungs, a spore may transform into an active state, reproduce, and release toxin. Otherwise it remains static and does not undergo mutation. Since the DNA structure remains largely unchanged during these long periods, genetic differences are hardly perceptible among organisms of a common strain.

But during the years of the FBI investigation, the bureau’s scientists, along with sixty consulting experts, identified four genetic mutations in the bacteria found in the letters. They then developed specific molecular assays that could detect the four mutations. This venture into microbial forensics enabled the bureau to match the anthrax spores in the letters with those in Bruce Ivins’s laboratory. Since others at Fort Detrick also had access to Ivins’s laboratory, this linkage alone did not prove his guilt. But it was a central element of the FBI’s case.

To counter any skepticism about the scientific techniques, Mueller announced at the September senate hearing that he had asked the National Academy of Sciences to make an independent assessment. The customary response by the National Academy is to assemble a panel of experts to review the matter and issue a report. Contrary to Senator Specter’s wish, this procedure leaves no room for the judiciary committee or anyone else outside the National Academy to appoint panel members. But Specter’s request was yet another expression of unease about the FBI’s investigation.

Even if an independent panel were to validate the scientific techniques used by the FBI, it is doubtful that skeptics would be satisfied. At the senate hearing, Charles Grassley made that point:

“I appreciate that the director is referring to the National Academy, but I’d like also to suggest that the National Academy would not be reviewing FBI interviews, summaries, the grand jury testimony, internal investigative memos, other investigative documents. The academy would only be reviewing the science and not the detective work.” Grassley forcefully concluded: “I believe we need an independent review of both.”

Mueller did not respond to Grassley’s observation.

Underscoring the thicket of uncertainty about how quickly the case could be resolved, Leahy unleashed another provocative observation. If Ivins sent the letters, he said, “I do not believe in any way, shape, or manner that he is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people.” Without offering reasons for his certitude, Leahy nevertheless embellished on it: “I believe there are others involved, whether as accessories before or accessories after the fact. I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.”

The hearing room fell silent. Then, Mueller volunteered that if the case were officially closed, the FBI still would pursue any new evidence of participation by additional persons. But Leahy’s vehemence demonstrated how difficult would be the task of satisfying all the interested parties.

The original edition of
The Anthrax Letters
, which follows, was published in 2003. The narrative, of course, reflects an understanding of the issues at that time. It also provides a springboard to the new concluding chapter in this book, which reviews matters that have since been resolved, and others that remain open. Some issues, notably the identity and motive of the killer, continue to be debated. But a more global question about policy has also emerged in the wake of the anthrax letters.

As a result of the attacks in 2001, federal spending for biosecurity projects markedly grew in an effort to prepare for and respond to future bioattacks. Much of the impetus was based on an assumption that the principal biothreat to the United States comes from external sources—rogue states and terrorists. The focus now on a disaffected domestic perpetrator, however, has prompted uncertainty about the wisdom of current biosecurity policy. This most serious question will be taken up in the concluding chapter as well.