The Demon in the Freezer Part 10

One day a few years ago, I drove up the slopes of Catoctin Mountain on a winding country road. It was a cold, raw day, and winter clouds over the mountain formed lenses that let in loose splashes of sunshine. The Patricks live in a comfortable house that resembles a Swiss chalet. It sits at the high point of a small meadow on the mountain, looking down on Fort Detrick. From the house, you can see the roof and vent stacks of USAMRIID, nestled among trees in the distance.

"Come in, come in, young man," Patrick said. He squinted up at the sky. He is exquisitely sensitive to weather.

We sat in the living room and chatted. "There's a h.e.l.l of a disconnect between us fossils who know about biological weapons and the younger generation," he said. After the offensive program was closed down, Patrick joined USAMRIID for a while, doing peaceful work, but he became quite certain that one day some knowledgeable person was going to use a germ weapon in a terrorist attack, and he began a personal campaign to warn the government of the danger. He was a consultant to various agencies and governments, including the city of New York, and he gave presentations in which he described what small amounts of different powdered bioweapons would do in the air. He also gave estimates of casualties. His projections for a bioterror attack in New York City would appear to be cla.s.sified.

A few minutes after I arrived, Ken Alibek showed up, driving a silver BMW. After lunch, we settled around the kitchen table. Patrick brought out a bottle of Glenmorangie single-malt whisky, and we poured ourselves drams. The whisky was golden and warm, and it moved the talk forward.

"There seems to be a belief among many scientists that biological weapons don't work," I said.

"You hear these views quoted a lot."

The two ex-bioweaponeers looked at each other, and Bill Patrick let out a belly laugh, put his head down, and kept on laughing. Ken Alibek looked annoyed. "This is so stupid," Alibek said. "I can't even find a word to describe this. You test the weapons to find out what works. I can say I don't believe that nuclear weapons work. Nuclear weapons destroy everything. Biological weapons are more ... beneficial. They don't destroy buildings, they only destroy vital activity."

"Vital activity?"

"People," he said.

Patrick invited us into his bas.e.m.e.nt office. We followed him down a spiral staircase to a room that had sliding gla.s.s doors. He took a paper bag out of a filing cabinet, and he pulled out a little brown gla.s.s bottle. The bottle had a black plastic cap that was screwed on tightly, and it was half full of a cream-colored, ultrafine powder. "That's a simulant anthrax weapon," he said. "It's BG" Bacillusglobigii, a harmless organism related to anthrax. "Take a look at that, Ken."

Alibek held the bottle up and shook it. The powder turned into a cloud of smoke inside the bottle. The smoke swirled around, and the bottle went opaque.

"Now, that is a beautiful product," Patrick remarked.

Alibek nodded. "It has the characteristics of a weapon."

Patrick removed an insecticide sprayer from the paper bag. It was an old-fashioned hand-pump flit gun. He pumped the handle, and a cloud of white smoky powder boiled out of the nozzle. "Isn't that a beautiful particle size?"

Alibek started laughing. "Don't point that thing at me, Bill!"

"It's actually my wife's bath powder." A pleasant scent of baby powder filled the room.

The room had become a bit stuffy with the powder, so we went outdoors on the lawn in front of the house. Alibek lit a cigarette, and we admired the view down the meadow and over the piedmont of Maryland to a blue line in the distance, the Mount Airy ridge. The patchy clouds now covered the sun.

"Wind's ten to twelve miles an hour, gusting a bit," Patrick said. "Which way is the wind going, Ken?"

Alibek turned around and looked up. He seemed to be feeling the air with his face. "East? It's going east."

"Smallpox would get to Frederick from here on a day like today," Patrick remarked.

Alibek nodded in agreement and pulled on his cigarette.

"Hold on," Patrick said abruptly, and he strode up the hill and disappeared around the corner of the garage. We heard the electric motor of the garage door. He returned in a few moments, carrying a mayonnaise jar that contained a powder. He unscrewed the metal lid and showed me the jar's contents.

It was half full of an extremely fine powder of a mottled, pinkish color. He explained that it, too, was a simulated bioweapon. The pink color in the powder came from the blood of chicken embryos. The powder was a surrogate of a weaponized brain virus called VEE, which travels easily in the air-but the powder was sterile and had no infectious material in it. He shook the jar under my face, and smoky, hazy tendrils wafted toward my nose. I fought an urge to jerk my head back-the mind may know the fog is harmless, but the instincts are hard to convince.

Patrick walked across the lawn with the jar and stood by an oak tree. Suddenly, he straightened his arm and heaved the contents of the jar into the air. The powder boiled out, making a small mushroom cloud, and then the simulated brain virus blasted through the branches of a dogwood tree and took off down the meadow, moving at a fast clip toward Frederick. Within seconds, the cloud started becoming transparent, and then, abruptly, it vanished. The particles seemed to be gone. It had looked like steam coming out of a teapot.

"See how it disappears instantly?" Patrick remarked.

Alibek watched, tugging at his cigarette, mildly amused. "Yeah. You won't see the cloud now,"

he said. "Depending on the alt.i.tude of the dispersal, some of those particles will go fifty miles."

"Some of them'll get to the Mount Airy ridge. It's twenty miles away," Patrick said. The simulated brain weapon would arrive at the ridge in a couple of hours. A couple of hours after that, the simulated brain virus would be beyond the horizon.

Patrick was eyeing the clouds, seeming to sniff the wind. He turned to Alibek. "Say you wanted to hit Frederick today, Ken, what would you use?"

Alibek glanced at the sky, weighing the weather and his options. "I'd use anthrax mixed with smallpox."

OCTOBER 25, 2001.

Tom Geisbert drove his beat-up station wagon to the Armed Forces Inst.i.tute of Pathology, in Northwest Washington, carrying a whiff of sterilized dry Daschle anthrax mounted in a special ca.s.sette.

He spent the day with a group of technicians running tests with an X-ray machine to find out if the powder contained any metals or elements. By lunchtime, the "machine had shown that there were two extra elements in the spores: silicon and oxygen.

Silicon oxide.

Silicon dioxide is gla.s.s.

The anthrax terrorist or terrorists had put powdered gla.s.s, or silica, into the anthrax. The silica was powdered so finely that under Geisbert's electron microscope it had looked like fried-egg gunk dripping off the spores.

Geisbert called Jahrling on an open telephone line and said, "We have a signature of something."

Jahrling asked him to stop talking on an open line.

Geisbert asked someone if he could use the stew phone, and he was shown into a secure room.

The stew phone looked like a normal telephone, except that it had an LCD screen and an encryption lock. They gave Geisbert the encryption key, and he unlocked the phone.

Jahrling, meanwhile, had gone to the Secure Room at USAMRIID. He unlocked his stew phone and waited. Geisbert called in, they spoke a few words in open mode, and then Jahrling pushed a b.u.t.ton on the phone. The screen flashed: GOING SECURE.

The phones went silent. The two men waited half a minute. Then the screen on the stew phone read: US GOVERNMENT SECRET, and their voices came back on the line, distorted.

"So-what-do-you-have?" Jahrling said.

"Wisten, Weed We ow-wowo-wooow, wow" Geisbert's voice turned into a stretched-out robo-gargle. "Slow-it-up."

"We fow wow-wow! "

"Whoa. You-have-to-speak-distinctly."

"Pete! There's-gla.s.s-in-the-anthrax."

You could go on the Internet and find places to buy superfine powdered gla.s.s, known as silica nanopowder, which has industrial uses. The grains of this type of gla.s.s are very small. If an anthrax spore was an orange, then these particles of gla.s.s would be grains of sand clinging to the orange. The gla.s.s was slippery and smooth, and it may have been treated so that it would repel water. It caused the spores to crumble apart, to pa.s.s more easily through the holes in the envelopes, and fly everywhere, filling the Hart Senate Office Building and the Brentwood and Hamilton mail-sorting facilities like a gas.

No one knows how many anthrax spores leaked into the air at the Brentwood mail facility. At least two letters containing dry skull anthrax went through the machines. The skulls were crumbling and falling apart, and individual spores were leaking through pores in the paper and perhaps coming out through the corners of the letters. If all of the spores that went into the air inside the Brentwood building were gathered into a heap, it's doubtful they would have covered the head of a thumbtack. The Environmental Protection Agency spent an estimated thirty million dollars trying to get rid of the spores there.

The Feds The Washington field office of the FBI is a new stone-andgla.s.s building at Fourth and F streets, a few blocks east of the FBI headquarters, on the edge of Chinatown. The Washington office was given overall management of the criminal investigation into the anthrax attacks, which came to be called Amerithrax. There were five homicides in the Amerithrax case. Robert Stevens in Boca Raton and the two Brentwood postal workers, Joseph Curseen, Jr., and Thomas Morris, Jr., were the first to die. Then a sixty-one-year-old woman in New York City named Kathy Nguyen became ill and died of inhalation anthrax; the source of her exposure was never identified. On the day before Thanksgiving, in Connecticut, a ninety-four-year-old woman named Ottilie Lundgren also died of anthrax. The source of her exposure was not found either, but was likely to have been a few spores that she inhaled from a piece of mail that had touched some other piece of mail that had gone through the Hamilton, New Jersey, sorting facility and had probably been in close contact with an anthrax letter. This was a murder and terrorism case that cut across jurisdictions. The FBI termed it Major Case 184.

The Washington field office was run by an a.s.sistant director of the FBI named Van A. Harp.

Directly under him were three special agents in charge of the office, or SACs. One of the SACs was Arthur Eberhart, who had served earlier as a section chief at Quantico, overseeing the Hazardous Materials Response Unit. In early October, as the first anthrax deaths occurred, Eberhart began a.s.sembling a.s.sets-calling people into the team, sometimes drafting them out of other units, "for the needs of the Bureau." A working group formed up quickly, and eventually it became two squads, known as Amerithrax 1 and Amerithrax 2.

Eberhart put John "Jack" Hess in charge of Amerithrax 1 and David Wilson in charge of Amerithrax 2. Hess's squad handled much of the cla.s.sic detective work, while Wilson's squad took care of the scientific side of the investigation. Jack Hess and David Wilson were basically given the job of solving the Amerithrax case.

I first met David Wilson in 1996, when I was doing some research at the FBI Academy at Quantico, and he had just been a.s.signed to the HMRU as an agent. He was a quiet man who stayed in the background and said little, but like many FBI people, he had a casually aware manner, as if there was a part of him that was always evaluating things. At that time, FBI scientists were saying that a bioterror attack could be very difficult to solve, because the evidence left in its wake might only be dead people with a strain of a micro-organism in their bodies, and precious little else. One evening, I drank beers with some FBI scientists at the Quantico Boardroom, a bare-bones cafeteria and pub, and they started tossing out all sorts of ideas about how you would actually solve a bioterror crime. Most of them were high-tech solutions, involving sensor machines and exotic lab techniques, but a section chief named Randall Murch, who had created the Hazardous Materials Response Unit, told the group that he thought that, in the end, traditional detective work would solve a biological crime. "Ultimately, humans make mistakes," Murch said.

David Lee Wilson is a tall man in his mid-forties, with broad shoulders and large hands. He has straight brown hair, dark eyebrows, and pale gray eyes. On the job, he usually wears a starched white b.u.t.tondown shirt. He was raised in Tennessee, in a farmhouse that his grandfather built out of sawn planks of poplar, and he has a Tennessee accent. When he speaks, his voice goes along rapidly and softly over a wide range of topics. He has a degree in botany, with an emphasis on marine biology. He spent time on research ships studying the biological productivity of seas full of phytoplankton. When he joined the FBI, he gravitated to the forensic examination of trace evidence. At home, to relax, he picks a Martin acoustic guitar. He picks precisely and with a flowing musical sense. He told me that he doesn't like attention. "It makes me uncomfortable to have any kind of single focus on me," he said. He was careful to explain to me that he was only one member of a large FBI operation. "Teamwork is critical for this case," he said. "A major case is like an organism. It is almost alive. It changes in response to evidence that comes in, and it has feedback loops."

Wilson was the head of the HMRU between 1997 and 2000, and during those years the number of credible bioterror threats or incidents rose dramatically, up to roughly two hundred a year, or one biological threat every couple of days. Most of them were anthrax hoaxes. The HMRU teams were constantly doing flyaways, taking helicopters or FBI fixed-wing aircraft to various places around the United States in order to a.s.sess a threat of anthrax and collect evidence. Running the HMRU was a little like running a firehouse that went out on a lot of false alarms, and Wilson got a little tired of it, particularly because he was trying to build a national program and kept finding himself sitting on a jump seat in a Huey loaded with biohazard equipment, flying to another bioscare. His young daughter would ask her father to leave his cell phone behind when they went to a restaurant, and if his pager beeped, she would roll her eyes and say, "Not again, Daddy." Wilson wanted to supervise field investigations in which he could develop and pursue criminal cases. He ended up transferring to the Washington Field Office.

Then along came Amerithrax, and they put him in charge of the science in the case.

Wilson's case strategy for Amerithrax 2 involved reaching out across the spectrum of scientific talent in the United States and getting help wherever he could find it. He developed relationships with the national laboratories (which are run by the Department of Energy), with the Defense Department, the CIA, and with the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation. He recruited dozens of outside scientists-chemists, biologists, geneticists. He pulled in a Navy expert in anthrax named James Burans, and he took in a CDC epidemiologist, Dr. Cindy Friedman, who joined Amerithrax 2 as a full-time squad member.

Kenneth C. Kohl, an a.s.sistant U.S. attorney, was attached to the Amerithrax squads full-time, and he moved into an office in the building on Fourth and F streets. He advised agents about developing evidence that could be used in court. The FBI was mindful of the case of Richard Jewell, a security guard whom the FBI had suspected of planting a bomb in Centennial Park in Atlanta during the summer Olympics in 1996. Jewell was exonerated, and it was a huge embarra.s.sment to the FBI; it made the Bureau look incompetent and prejudiced, and the case is still unsolved. Of all the pressures. .h.i.tting the Amerithrax agents, the most potent was the knowledge that, in the end, all the paths of Amerithrax led to a jury.

It was quite possible that if anyone was charged with the Amerithrax crimes, Kohl might seek the federal death penalty. But to bring a prosecution in a multiple murder case in which the murder weapon was a living microbe, the evidence would have to be tight and clear, persuasive to a jury, and sharp with proof-probatory, in the language of police work. There would not necessarily be any testimony from eyewitnesses. The crimes could have been perpetrated by one person acting alone, and so the Amerithrax case might have to be tried largely on forensic evidence: on the science squad's work. "I wonder, though, if Randy Murch's words of yesteryear may prove prophetic for Amerithrax," Wilson said, recalling that evening in the Quantico Boardroom. "We just don't know how it's going to go, and sometimes you just get lucky. Somebody calls you and says, 'You know, I saw something.' And you say to yourself, 'That's it. "' Amerithrax became one of the most complex cases ever run by the FBI. The two Amerithrax squads occupied half of the seventh floor of the Washington field office. Each squad was small, with only about ten or so members, but they were supported by teams of a.n.a.lysts, and the squads were given the power to order practically anyone in the FBI to follow a lead or accomplish a task. There are twenty-five thousand people in the FBI. The Amerithrax squads used them to cover thousands of leads, and they relied on the work of many other people across the federal government.

Trenton was an obvious place to examine, and FBI agents went all over the area, looking for sites where the letters had been mailed, setting up surveillance, checking out connections to possible al-Qaeda suspects. But there was remarkably little to go on. Wilson and his squad began grinding on the science of the case. "Not that Dave won't work the case to death," a former top FBI official said to me, "but basically all the leads, all you get, are what is captured in the biological material in the letters, in the tape that sealed the letters, and in the writing in the letter itself."

The Quantico behavioral profilers went to work on the handwriting and language of the letters.

The profilers came to be convinced that the anthrax terrorist was a white male, a loner, perhaps quite shy, with a grudge, and with scientific training, and they felt the terrorist would be a native speaker of English, not Arabic. A native speaker of Arabic would be more likely to have written "G.o.d is great," not "Allah is great."

On November 16th, another anthrax-laden letter was found in a sealed plastic bag full of mail.

This letter was addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont. It was among the mail in the Hart building that had been sequestered. The Leahy letter contained something like a gram of finely powdered anthrax spores, bone white, treated the same way as the Daschle spores. The FBI delivered the Leahy letter to USAMRIID, where diagnostic scientists began a.n.a.lyzing the powder.

FBI forensic experts in hair and fiber a.n.a.lysis also examined the letter, most particularly the tape that sealed the envelope. Tape is a valuable forensic material because it picks up dust, including tiny fibers of hair, carpet, and clothing. Forensic samples that are collected from criminal evidence are known as questioned samples, or Q samples, because they come from an unknown ("questioned") source-which may be a.s.sociated with the unidentified perpetrator of the crime. These Q samples may be matched to known samples, or K samples, which are reference samples that are fully identified. In this way, trace evidence can be understood and can be linked to a known source, such as the perpetrator or the perpetrator's environment. A single human hair can contain unknown human DNA-a questioned sample of DNAwhich can be matched to a known sample of a person's DNA. The FBI's hair and fiber experts can take a particular questioned fiber and match it precisely to a fiber that has come from a known manufacturer in a particular color and style. Manufacturers use constantly changing formulas for dye and for materials, and fibers can come in all sorts of sizes and shapes-round, delta, trilobal, oval, wrinkly.

The top hairand-fiber person in the FBI is a unit chief named Douglas Deedrick, who works at the Laboratory at FBI headquarters. They say that Deedrick has a near photographic memory for fibers he may have seen just once before in his career. He'll throw out a line of patter: "I've seen this before.... I know this fiber.... That's a carpet fiber from a stinkin' seventy-three Bonneville," is the sort of thing he can say when he's working." If a Q sample can be matched to a K sample, it can have probative value-it can lead to a suspect and, ultimately, to a conviction in a criminal trial. (When O.J. Simpson struggled to put on the ove at his murder trial, he gave a dramatic show to the jury of an apparent blundering attempt by the prosecution to try to match something questioned to something known-the glove to his hand.).

The FBI's forensic scientists apparently had great difficulty getting Q samples from the letters.

They won't comment, but it seems that they found no hairs or fibers of particular interest on the tape.

The anthrax terrorist or terrorists had perhaps been quite careful to load the letters in an environment that was free of dust and hair-possibly inside a laminar flow hood. They did find that the cut edges of the strips of tape matched one another. The perpetrator had loaded and taped the envelopes one after the other using the same roll of tape. They tested the paper of the envelopes for human DNA, using the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) method, which can amplify tiny trace amounts of DNA. The method is so sensitive that if a person breathes on a sheet of paper, the paper can retain fragments of the person's DNA that can be detected. There was apparently no questioned human DNA found on the envelopes or on the stamps. This suggested that the perpetrators might have worn a breathing mask while loading the letters. There were no questioned fingerprints on the letters, either, which probably meant that the perpetrators had worn rubber oves. The anthrax terrorist or terrorists seemed to have been careful to avoid leaving any evidence on any of the letters. What was left was the powder inside the envelopes, and the handwriting and contents of the letters. Those were apparently the best Q samples that the FBI had to go on, and it was precious little.

In November, the microbiologist Paul Keim, working with his group at Arizona State University in Flagstaff, identified the strain in all the anthrax letters as the Ames strain. It had been collected from a dead cow in Texas in 1981, and had ended up in the labs at USAMRIID. USAMRIID scientists had later distributed the Ames strain to a number of other laboratories around the world. By showing that the strain in the letters was the Ames strain, Paul Keim gave the FBI a sort of incomplete or partial K sample: it was not a really precise K sample, but further a.n.a.lysis of the strain in the letters might provide a tighter match to some known substrain of the Ames anthrax. The Ames strain was natural anthrax. It had not been "heated up" in the lab-had not been genetically engineered to be resistant to antibiotics.

Nowadays it is so easy to make a hot strain of anthrax that's resistant to drugs, intelligence people simply a.s.sume that all military strains of anthrax are drug resistant. The fact that the Amerithrax strain wasn't military pointed to a home-grown American terrorist rather than to a foreign source, to someone who had perhaps not wanted large numbers of people to die. Someone who might have wanted to get attention.

The CIA had a secret program called Bacchus, in which a group of researchers with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), working at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, built a miniature anthrax bioproduction plant using inexpensive, off-the-shelf equipment. The idea of the experiment was to see if it would be possible for terrorists to buy ordinary equipment, make anthrax with it, and not be noticed. In January and February 2001, roughly ten months before the anthrax terror event, the Bacchus team succeeded in making a powdered anthrax surrogate, BT, but it was crude. Now the FBI investigators focused a lot of attention on scientists who had access to Dugway, where the U.S. military tests various biosensor systems and where there are stocks of anthrax.

The Amerithrax squads seemed to have a case that was cooling off. The FBI was letting it be known-whether accurately or not-that the list of potential suspects had never gone below about eight individuals and was really more like twenty to thirty people.

There were mysteries and loose ends that seemed to baffle the FBI, including hints that the anthrax might have been part of an al-Qaeda terror operation. In January 2001, several of the men who would later hijack the four airplanes involved in the September 11th attacks rented apartments near Boca Raton, Florida. The real-estate agent the men dealt with was the wife of an editor at American Media, where Robert Stevens, the first man to die of the anthrax, worked-but the realestate agent felt that the hijackers could not possibly have known that her husband worked there. Mohammad Atta, who was believed to be the operational leader of the hijackers, made inquiries at airports in Florida about renting crop-dusting airplanes: he obviously had it in mind to spray something from the air. In June 2001, two men, Ahmed al-Haznawi and Ziad al-Jarrah, who would later be among the hijackers of United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, went to the emergency room of the Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale. AlHaznawi was complaining of an infection on his leg, and an emergency-room doctor named Christos Tsonas examined him. The man had a blackened sore on his leg that he told Dr. Tsonas he had gotten from b.u.mping into a suitcase. The doctor didn't think that sounded likely. He prescribed antibiotics to al-Haznawi and never heard from the men again. Tsonas contacted the FBI in October and told agents that the sore had been consistent with cutaneous anthrax. Agents apparently went through the hijacker's possessions and swabbed them for anthrax spores, and found none. "We've debated that one informally a lot around our shop," an FBI source at Quantico told me. "Everything I've heard basically discounts it."

In Trenton, FBI investigators became interested in various people living in an apartment complex called Greenwood Village. They arrested a man, Mohammad Aslam Pervez, who was listed in the phone book as living there. Pervez was thirty-seven years old, a naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, and he had recently worked at a newsstand in the Trenton train station and also at a newsstand in the Newark train station with Mohammad Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, who were arrested on September 12th on an Amtrak train in Fort Worth, Texas, carrying box cutters, five thousand dollars in cash, and hair dye. The FBI evidently suspected that they were al-Qaeda hijackers who had not been able to get on a plane. Pervez had lived with them in an apartment in Jersey City, while listing his address as Greenwood Village, and he was allegedly moving large amounts of money around. The FBI charged Pervez with lying to federal investigators about the nature of more than $110,000 in checks and money orders. The neighbors in Greenwood Village told reporters that they had noticed unusual numbers of Arabic-speaking men congregating in Pervez's apartment during the summer, in the months before September 11th. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal managed to get inside the Jersey City apartment, where he found articles clipped from Time and Newsweek on the use of satin nerve gas and biowarfare agents. On October 29th, FBI agents raided another apartment at Greenwood Village. Eight to ten agents carted away many trash bags full of evidence. An FBI spokesperson, Sandra Carroll, told reporters that the September 11th and anthrax investigations were "not necessarily separate."

But it just didn't seem to go anywhere.

A few months before the first anniversary of the anthrax attacks, I visited the Amerithrax squads in the Washington field office. The two squad supervisors, Jack Hess and David Wilson, had offices side by side, facing an open floor of cubicles. The CDC doctor on the squad, Cindy Friedman, was meeting with two FBI agents, talking about something in low voices. They asked me to stand out of hearing when there were any discussions about the case. Large posterboards leaned against filing cabinets, covered up from view.

David Wilson led me to his office, where we ate salads from the FBI canteen for lunch. The Capitol's dome and the top of the Hart Senate Office Building were visible from the window. His office was almost bare. Three heavy briefcases sat on a desktop, and a table had a full inbox. "Until we have someone under arrest and charged with a crime, we literally can't rule anything out," he said to me. The Amerithrax case held many dimensions of crime, but at bottom it was murder. "I don't give a rat's tail for what they thought they were doing when they mailed the letters. People died," Wilson said. "Damaged facilities can either be repaired or replaced. The Brentwood building can be fixed. But the deaths can't be fixed."

One day, I spoke with a scientist who is an expert in forensic evidence, knows a lot about biology, and until recently was an influential executive in the FBI. "The Unabomber took seventeen years to solve," he said. "We just don't know who these perpetrators are, and it could be years before we get a break. I'm saying 'they.' I personally find it hard to believe that it was done by only one person. That's just gut. I don't know why, I can't put my finger on it, but if I wanted to keep tight operational security I would send a package of anthrax to someone else with instructions for how to load the envelope and mail it-you know, 'Don't lick the envelope, do this, do that.' I would do it with opsec."

"Opsec?"

"Opsec-operational security. It's a standard security approach for making yourself as invisible as possible. There's a leader who organizes and directs an operation, and a different person carries it out."

The person who does the operation is expendable. The September 11th attacks were done with opsec, and the Palestinian suicide bombings feature opsec. He went on: "I have a feeling that, in the end, it's going to be like one of our fugitive cases, where a girlfriend rats on the guy or someone talks. I'm a forensic scientist, but unfortunately I have a feeling that traditional investigation is going to solve this case in the end, not science."

Ebola in the Afternoon Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, the chair of the Federation of American Scientists' Biological Arms Control Program and a professor of environmental science at the State University of New York at Purchase, believed that the anthrax terrorist was an American scientist. She began speculating, in speeches and on a website, that the terrorist was a white male who had worked in cla.s.sified programs for the government. She wondered publicly if the terrorist had once worked for USAMRIID or another government laboratory. She felt that the terrorist might have been a contractor working for the CIA, with access to secret information about government involvement with offensive biowarfare programs. Rosenberg is a trim, middle-aged woman with a forceful manner, and she is not afraid to speak her mind. Her web site got a lot of traffic, and in late June 2002, Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy asked her to come meet with them. She was very happy to oblige them.

A few days later, the FBI searched the apartment of Dr. Steven Hatfill, in Frederick. Hatfill, the colorful Ebola researcher who had trained Lisa Hensley in blue-suit work and who liked to eat candy bars in his s.p.a.ce suit, had left USAMRIID in 1999 and gone to work for Science Applications International Corporation, the defense contractor that conducted the CIA's Bacchus program. Hatfill was divorced and had continued to live in Frederick after he left USAMRIID. He lived by himself in the Detrick Plaza apartments, a brick complex right next to the gate of Fort Detrick, a stone's throw from the Abrams tank. From his apartment unit, he could look over a fence and across a lawn, where he could see the FBI helicopters coming and going next to USAMRIID, ferrying evidence from the Amerithrax case. FBI agents arrived at Hatfill's apartment with a rented Ryder truck. (The apartment manager told a reporter that Hatfill was "traveling abroad" when the FBI came.) They put on bioprotective suits and searched the apartment, and then removed some computer devices and plastic bags of Hatfill's possessions, which they loaded into the truck and took away. Hatfill had consented to the search. He had a storage facility in Ocala, Florida, two hundred and fifty miles from Boca Raton. He also had access to a cabin in a remote part of Maryland. It was reported that he had asked visitors to take Cipro before entering it. The storage facility was not far from a ranch in Ocala called Mekamy Oaks, where Hatfill's parents, Norman and Shirley Hatfill, raised Thoroughbred horses.

The FBI said that Steve Hatfill was not a suspect in the case. He told journalists that he was cooperating with the authorities in an effort to clear his name, and he insisted that he had absolutely no involvement with the anthrax attacks. In February 2002, Scott Shane, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, became interested in Hatfill. Shane spoke with Hatfill on the phone and asked him some questions, and then talked with some people who knew Hatfill. A month later, Hatfill lost his job at SAIC. Soon afterward, he telephoned the Baltimore Sun and left a message with the paper's...o...b..dsman. "I've been in this field for a number of years, working until three o'clock in the morning, trying to counter this type of weapon of ma.s.s destruction, and, sir, my career is over at this time," he said. The FBI interviewed Hatfill several times, but there was nothing particularly unusual in this; the Amerithrax investigators had interviewed a number of American scientists more than once. FBI agents gave a polygraph test to Tom Geisbert.

Nonetheless, Hatfill's background attracted investigators' attention. "The Bacchus program suffered from a lack of adult supervision," a scientist said to me. (It didn't, however, produce anthrax that was anywhere near as pure as the Daschle anthrax.) Hatfill had a secret-level security clearance, and he knew Ken Alibek and Bill Patrick. Soon after he went to work at SAIC, Hatfill and a colleague commissioned Patrick to write a study on the effects of anthrax mailed in letters. Patrick, who had done many studies of this sort for the government, worked out a scenario in which a letter containing two grams of dry anthrax spores was opened inside an office building. The anthrax in Patrick's study was pure spores. Bill Patrick had imagined key elements of the Amerithrax attacks at the request of SAIL and Steve Hatfill.

Hatfill's resume said that he had served with the Rhodesian Special Air Squadron (SAS) and with the Selous Scouts, the white antiguerrilla forces. In 1979 and 1980, during and after the Rhodesian civil war, an anthrax outbreak occurred in livestock in Rhodesia that killed large numbers of cattle, gave ten thousand people cutaneous anthrax, and killed a hundred and eighty people. The U.S. government was said to have had suspicions, and perhaps evidence, that this anthrax outbreak might have been an act of biowarfare caused by the SAS or by agents working for the clandestine South African internal-security service, the Civil Co-operation Board (the CCB). During those years, CCB people had been using biowarfare agents for a.s.sa.s.sination attempts. When he was studying medicine in Zimbabwe, Hatfill had reportedly lived a few miles from a neighborhood called Greendale. The return address of the letter to Senator Daschle was the fourth grade of the Greendale School.

After the FBI searched his apartment again, this time with a criminal search warrant, one of Hatfill's lawyers, Victor Glasberg, wrote an angry letter to Kenneth Kohl, the a.s.sistant U.S. attorney working with Amerithrax, saying that "improper decisions" had been made in the FBI's treatment of Hatfill, and that Hatfill was doing everything he could to cooperate fully with the FBI. He said he was "working with Dr. Hatfill on how to address a flurry of defamatory publicity about him which has appeared in the press, on TV, and on the Internet." Shortly afterward, Steve Hatfill read a statement to the press in front of his lawyer's office, in which he forcefully defended himself, and said he was a loyal American who loves his country, and he a.s.sailed "calculated leaks to the media" concerning him. "Does any of this get us to the anthrax killers?" he said. "If I am a subject of interest, I'm also a human being. I have a life. I have, or I had, a job. I need to earn a living. I have a family, and until recently, I had a reputation, a career, and a bright professional future."

I became acquainted with Dr. Steven Hatfill and interviewed him in 1999, a few months before he left USAMRIID. He worked in the virology division, and he was closely connected with Peter Jahrling's research group. He was doing research in Ebola and monkeypox. Hatfill had a tiny office, with no windows, white walls, and little in the way of decoration, but he filled the room with his physical and intellectual presence. He was a vital, engaging man, with a sharp mind and a sense of humor. He was forty-five years old, with a good-looking face, brown hair, and a neatly trimmed brown mustache. He was heavy-set but looked fit, and he had dark blue eyes. I sat on top of a counter in a corner of the room, and he sat in the center of the room, in a chair at his desk, leaning back and looking up at me, and he told me a little about his life.

"I was in the Army for twenty years," he said. "I was a captain in the U.S. Special Forces, and I was in Rhodesia-Zim-but I can't say what I was doing there. I went to medical school in Rhodesia and graduated in 1984. I have two C.V.s, the cla.s.sified one and the uncla.s.sified one. I've seen a lot of diseases. There was an outbreak of anthrax in Rhodesia when I was there." He went on to say that the South African CCB had been blamed for the anthrax, but he didn't think it was likely. "It was not a weapon. It was a natural outbreak that happened because there was a harsh terrorist war going on and a breakdown of veterinary health."

He was having a great time doing research at USAMRIID. "Where else can you work with monkeypox in the morning and Ebola in the afternoon?" he said. He explained that he was working to develop antiviral drugs for smallpox. His quest was similar to Lisa Hensley's and Peter Jahrling's. Like them, he regarded smallpox as the number one threat. He wanted to find some way to test and develop drugs that would work on smallpox. He had an idea that smallpox and drugs could be tested directly on human tissue with the help of machines.

Hatfill's office had small pieces of equipment sitting in it, of types that I did not recognize. Hatfill was a gadgeteer. He picked up a gla.s.s cylinder about the size of a soda can, with metal ends, and handed it to me. "Take a look at that."

I held it, but I had no idea what it was.

"It's a bioreactor. It's called an STLV. It was developed at NASA. You can grow human tissues in it and then infect them." He explained that using a device of this sort, you could test new drugs against smallpox and other exotic diseases that could not be tested ethically in people. In other words, you didn't necessarily have to test smallpox in animals-you might be able to test the virus in a machine.

He was optimistic that there would be drugs to cure smallpox, and he felt that machines would speed up the discoveries. "You can put a bit of tonsil tissue in this thing, and it actually grows a tonsil," he said. .

"The bioreactor grows a tonsil?"

He grinned. "You get a tonsil. The architecture of the tissue is preserved."

"Could you grow a finger?"

Hatfill started laughing, and explained that someday we might actually be growing spare body parts in bioreactors. He explained how it worked. "What you do is, you collect tissue from the body, and you chop it up. You can use prostate tissue, lung-cancer tissue, liver, lymph, spleen. You put the tissue pieces in the reactor, and you fill it with growth medium. The bioreactor turns around on a motor."