Anthrax War. Bob Coen
military and civilian programs to determine just how extensively anthrax has infiltrated the global armory. They found traces of it everywhere. Like the bodies of the five unfortunate victims of the October letters, the twenty-first century map was thoroughly contaminated. And the infection was spreading, fueled by fear, cultured with money.
On the anthrax trail, Coen and Nadler had followed many divergent leads, traveling with their cameras, contacts, and growing suspicions to Siberia, South Africa and London, along paths that always seemed to converge just at the point of an apparent dead end. They had learned to recognize these crossroads by a common landmark—the body of a dead scientist. And they had learned to navigate beyond these crossroads with a dead man’s ghost for a guide. Because none of the deaths met so far on the anthrax trail had ended in silence. Indeed, Bob Coen and Eric Nadler had grown adept at hearing the dead speak. Bruce Ivins, they agreed, told them more now than he would have ever told in life.
The journalists embraced the dead scientist as the newest character in a profoundly haunted cast: an erratic vaccine maker whose psychological profile seemed well suited for psychotic behavior. A slim, eccentric man of science who was known to dress up as a clown at county fairs and to put unexplained miles on his family van. A man who had written hundreds of unmailed letters and who had ransomed his own dead body. A man who owned a makeup kit . . . and body armor.
They had seen him coming—sort of. A few weeks earlier, a well placed source within the US military had tipped them off to an imminent breakthrough in the anthrax case—a tip that could possibly prove catastrophic for their working thesis—that there was a cover-up at the highest levels and that a systematic and sincere investigation into the source of the deadly anthrax would lift the veil on a world that the government wanted to remain secret at all costs. So when the FBI trotted out a dead suspect and at the same time slammed the door shut on the seven-year case, the journalists could only laugh in relief.
“We couldn’t have scripted it better,” said Nadler. “Another dead body and dozens more unanswered questions.”
Amerithrax would not be put to rest. Dogged by controversy and an incredulous press, the Justice Department hedged, saying that another three to six months would be needed to take care of “loose ends.” Critics balked. “If the case is solved, why isn’t it solved?” asked Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, as prelude to a direct accusation of a cover-up. By mid-September 2008, the clamor for answers forced FBI Director Robert Mueller himself to appear before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to face questions about anthrax. Coen and Nadler drove to Washington to be in the front row.
Mueller, a career litigator, former marine and pretty tough hombré, had been FBI director for almost exactly as long as there had been an Amerithrax investigation. Since his swearing in one week before 9/11, Mueller had weathered political shit-storms over warrantless wiretaps, whistleblowers, and the so-called National Security Letters, which allowed unprecedented data collection on civilians. Mueller was the first FBI director to send agents into combat zones since World War II, and under his tenure more than 500 investigators would ship out to Iraq and Afghanistan. He displayed an independent streak at times and had the gumption to anger the White House in March 2004 when he publicly threatened to resign over what he interpreted to be an attempt by the Bush administration to subvert the authority of the Department of Justice over a controversial surveillance program run by the National Security Agency. As he made his way to Capitol Hill that morning in September of 2008, a long, fawning profile in a Washington magazine proclaiming him “The Ultimate G-Man” was still on the newsstands.
In the press gallery, Nadler could hardly wait for the action to start. It had already been an unsettling few hours in DC. The Capitol was an uneasy place during the final stage of the regime-changing presidential campaign, and an episode the previous evening had raised its own red flags. Nadler had a run-in with an old acquaintance, a guy he had worked with while investigating Saudi Arabia’s nuclear weapons connections back in the day. This source, hard-wired into the Capitol’s military and intelligence circles, was now running an Internet investigative journalism consortium and was all over the Ivins affair. He—we’ll call him “Teddy B”—agreed to meet Nadler and Coen at the Ritz Carlton in Arlington, Virginia near the Pentagon. Teddy B arrived in a long black limo leading a small C-list conga-line entourage that starred a provocatively dressed dynamite blonde who he introduced as a “fucking Emmy Award-winning producer for the shit we did together in Somalia.” Nadler and Coen took part in the requisite “how you been, man?” But they steadfastly refused the repeated slurred suggestions to “get in the limo and party.” When it was clear that Nadler and Coen would not be moving outside the Ritz, Teddy B slurped the dregs of his cocktail, pushed himself well into Nadler’s personal space and issued an incoherent stream of invective, slander and threats that promised an IRS audit of Nadler’s financial records. Then he stormed out with his posse, the blonde apologizing for the sudden turn of events in the twenty-minute encounter.
“They wanted us in that limo, man,” Coen sighed. “They were up to no good.” Nadler shrugged. “He was always a party kind of guy, but I’m not real sure which parties Teddy’s working for these days,” he said. “Maybe it was nothing.”
“Or maybe it was something,” replied Coen. “This town gives me the creeps,” he concluded before heading for his hotel room.
Later that night, Nadler spent some time going over the holes in the Amerithrax science with his brother, a congressman who would be sitting on the House committee questioning Mueller the next day. Despite the promises from the Washington Post that the congressional hearing would feature a dramatic anthrax showdown, Representative Jerrold Nadler, as it turned out, was the only member to address the anthrax issue over the course of the hearing. On his kid brother’s suggestion, Nadler, a liberal Democrat from New York City, asked Mueller to provide the relative weight of the additive silica reported to have been found in the attack powder. This arcane forensic detail, Coen and Nadler had learned, could help to determine if the anthrax had been manipulated in a highly sophisticated, multi-disciplinary operation, thereby cutting the heart out of the FBI’s lone gunman case. But FBI Chief Mueller deferred. He’d have to “get back” to him on that, he said. Representative Nadler pressed on, noting that “only a handful of laboratories” could achieve a silica content over 1 percent. Had the FBI investigated all of those labs? And how had it ruled them out as potential sources of the deadly anthrax?
“You can assume we looked at every lab in the US and several overseas that had people and facilities capable of preparing the anthrax powder,” Mueller answered. He said he would soon get back with an answer to Rep. Nadler’s follow-up about how his bureau cleared individual labs of suspicion.
In lieu of hard data, Mueller promised an independent review of the science with the aid of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). But at the Senate hearing the next day, he took heavy flak from politicos on both sides of the aisle who didn’t trust him or the lame duck Bush administration to be completely forthcoming about Amerithrax. Ranking GOP committee member Senator Arlen Specter, the one-time district attorney of Philadelphia, blamed the FBI director for the air of distrust that had prompted the hearings. “You can’t run a government on separation of power without good faith among the branches,” he said, “and you can’t pursue the matters to the courts to have them adjudicate disputes between the legislative and executive branches, but that’s what it’s come to.” Specter brought up past episodes of “unsatisfactory relations” between Congress and the bureau and then waved his trump card. “We’re not interlopers here, this is an oversight matter,” he chided.
Mueller sat facing the grim senator, his mouth set in the unpleasant half-smile of a man tasked with humoring the guy setting his trap. He noted the “extraordinary and justified public interest” in the investigation and announced the intention to set up an independent review of the Amerithrax conclusions by the National Academy of Sciences. Specter jumped, demanding that the Senate oversight committee be allowed to name scientists to the independent investigation. Mueller hedged, leaving it to the NAS to name panelists. Specter countered, “What’s there to consider, Director Mueller? I’m talking about the Judiciary Committee of the US Senate which has a constitutional responsibility.” Eric Nadler grinned—he liked the heat in the room. Coen remained stone-faced, his