Anthrax War. Bob Coen
ANTHRAX WAR
Dead Silence . . .
Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail
Bob Coen and Eric Nadler
COUNTERPOINT
Berkeley, California
Copyright © 2009 Transformer Films.
All rights reserved under the International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-58243-509-1
eISBN: 978-1-58243-694-4
Front cover design by Nadia Coen
Interior design by David Bullen
Printed in the United States of America
Counterpoint
2560 Ninth Street
Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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Contents
CHAPTER ONE The Ghost of Bruce Ivins
CHAPTER TWO Enter Stephen Dresch
CHAPTER THREE The Ghost of David Kelly
CHAPTER FOUR The Ghost of Frank Olson
CHAPTER FIVE The Ghosts of Sverdlovsk
CHAPTER SIX The Ghost of Vladimir Pasechnik
CHAPTER SEVEN The Ghosts of Africa
CHAPTER EIGHT The Ghost of Larry Ford
CHAPTER NINE The Ghost of Sunshine
CHAPTER TEN The Ghost of Stephen Dresch
Preface
When the 2001 anthrax attacks hit the US in the days following 9/11, it was like a one-two punch against the Republic. Workers in New York’s media center who had seen the planes swoop too low over their heads en route to the Twin Towers were now ter-rified of their mail. In Washington, DC, Capitol Hill was evacuated and White House staffers were chewing Cipro tablets.
It was our scariest collective nightmare come to life—the attack of deadly invisible bugs. It seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the preceding years filled as they were with scores of films, best-selling books, TV shows, and articles on the coming of “bioterror.” Indeed, for the first time in history, national leaders and the military actually acted out high-tech “germ attack” war games, one of which had a scenario shockingly close to the actual events.
So when the government pledged the most thorough investigation it could muster, we hoped the Feds would get to the bottom of it all. Thus, we were saddened but not really surprised when the attacks disappeared from public discourse—unmentioned, for example, by any major candidate during the 2008 election contest. And when the FBI announced suddenly last summer that the cold case was red-hot, identifying a lone culprit—US Army Scientist Bruce Ivins, just slain by his own hand, and quickly closed its seven-year investigation, it felt to us, and to most polled citizens, that something was not quite right.
In the thirty years we’ve covered international politics for newspapers, magazines and television networks, rarely, if ever, had we seen such a big story buried so deep. Relying on our network of government, journalistic and intelligence contacts, it soon became clear that the powers that be were for a variety of reasons loathe to open wide the Pandora’s box where the real anthrax answers could probably be found. We made a non-fiction film ignited by the germ attacks of 2001. And we wrote this book with Elizabeth Kiem to fill out a story that our 90-minute documentary could only outline. We hope that the open minds that elected the new president are just as open to what we’ve learned.
Bob Coen and Eric Nadler
Brooklyn, New York
March 2009
CHAPTER ONE
The Ghost of Bruce Ivins
A PERFECT FALL GUY
Bruce Ivins wanted no grave and perhaps not even the notoriety that his death generated. In his will he asked simply for his ashes to be scattered. And so, for weeks after he died in the summer of 2008, with his body cremated but not immediately disposed of, Bruce Ivins was in limbo. Reduced to ash, his body languished in a Maryland funeral parlor for more than a month as his wife, a devout Catholic, came to terms with his final request. His will stated that only with “documented proof” that his wishes had been granted would his wife receive her dead spouse’s modest bequeathment. It was strangely, morbidly appropriate that Ivins, an anthrax expert, had been reduced to powder.
Dr. Bruce Ivins was a civilian researcher at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick—the government’s leading biological defense lab. He was a church-going, piano-playing husband and father, a sixty-two-year-old microbiologist from Lebanon, Ohio, and an accomplished amateur juggler. He spent most of his adult life in the Fort Detrick facility or in his modest house just outside its gates. The Ivinses raised two children in that house. Once they were grown, Ivins’ wife ran a daycare center there; Ivins cultivated an extravagant garden in the backyard.
But Ivins messed with scary stuff: cholera, plague and then, for the last two decades of his thirty-year career, with anthrax. Scarier than the germs he worked with was the state of his mind as he worked on them. “I’m a little dream-self, short and stout, I’m the other half of Bruce—when he lets me out,” he wrote during breaks between composing scientific papers on peritoneal macro-phages and antibiotic post-exposure prophylaxis. There were other “eccentricities.” There was a secret personal post office box. There were threats to his therapist. There was an unhealthy fixation on the star of a reality TV show and with the women of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, whom Ivins considered “lovely, highly intelligent campus leaders,” who had nonetheless issued a “fatwa” on their adoring fan. There were the multiple e-mail identities: kingbadger, goldenphoenix, jimmyflathead, prunetacos. And there was that spiteful condition in the will—have me cremated or fifty grand goes to Planned Parenthood, he instructed his wife, a former president of the local Right to Life chapter in Frederick, Maryland. Years before his suicide, Ivins confided to friends that he suffered paranoid delusions and schizophrenic symptoms.
Then on July 27, 2008, Ivins is said to have taken a heavy dose of prescription Tylenol with codeine and collapsed