Anthrax War. Bob Coen
Then it was the turn of Senator Patrick Leahy, head of the committee and himself a target of one of the anthrax letters. Leahy spoke with gravitas in a gravelly, languid voice chiding the director for bureaucratic bamboozlement right out of Catch-22. Finally he dropped the detachment: “I have been very reluctant to even ask questions about this because my office and myself were put at risk because of a letter that was addressed to me and I realize we did not suffer like the families of those who had people die . . . I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that [Ivins] is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all. I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or after the fact. I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.”
The chairman of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee was charging conspiracy and cover-up at the center of one of the FBI’s biggest cases ever—and it was broadcast live on C-SPAN. This was not Internet chatter, but a powerful challenge to powerful interests by an impeccable source. It was a fantastic and important story—but one that for whatever reasons, would be ignored by the media.
“Even cable,” noted Nadler.
DEATH IN THE MAIL
Bob Coen arrived in New York just two months after hijacked jets slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was a hell of a welcome back for a man who had fled the violence of Zimbabwe for the sake of his newborn son. Like many New Yorkers, Coen experienced a certain atmospheric anxiety throughout that extraordinary autumn; some moments of mild panic as he tucked his son in at night, making sure his bedroom window was closed against the choking cloud that still hung over lower Manhattan and draped the river between his Brooklyn apartment and the still-burning pit of Ground Zero.
But it was the anthrax in the letters that made Bob Coen stop sleeping at night.
The first batch of anonymous missives was mailed via regular US Mail the week after 9/11, postmarked September 18 in Trenton, New Jersey. One of the envelopes was addressed to Tom Brokaw at NBC News. Inside was a note that read 09-11-01 this is next / take penacilin now / death to america / death to israel / allah is great. Also inside was a powdered substance. Brokaw never opened the letter, but his assistant did and broke out in a nasty rash. The opened letter, turned over to authorities, tested positive for anthrax spores.
Bacillus anthracis is a bacterium that occurs naturally throughout the world. Just not usually in Rockefeller Center or in Boca Raton, Florida, where the first fatal anthrax infection took its victim. Rather, anthrax is generally found in the blood of grazing animals—cows, goats and sheep. When an animal dies and decomposes in the environment, the bacterium is released as spores that can resist almost any force in nature and linger dormant in the soil for years or decades. The majority of anthrax victims (and there are up to 200,000 a year according to the World Health Organization) are therefore generally farmers, veterinarians and meat-workers. They are usually infected through the skin. Cutaneous anthrax causes blisters and ulcers. It is easily treatable and rarely fatal. But the second wave of letters to find a human target, letters that were sent to the offices of Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, contained a fine powder, created to cause pulmonary anthrax, in which the pathogen enters the respiratory system, spreads to the lymph nodes, and from there chases through the blood stream releasing the deadly bacteria throughout the body. Pulmonary anthrax causes lesions, hemorrhaging and in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, death within a week. Until the deaths that came by mail, there had been only eighteen recorded cases of pulmonary anthrax in the United States in the twentieth century. The last one was in 1978, when a knitter became too enamored with the smell of his imported yarn.
Anthrax was a microbiological breakthrough. It was anthrax that demonstrated, in 1876 to a German biologist named Robert Koch, how bacteria cause disease. One hundred years later it was widely considered the ideal biological weapon—cheap to make, convenient to stockpile and easily modified with modern genetic engineering techniques. Most major nations have experimented, tested or stockpiled the stuff for ostensibly defensive purposes in case of a biological war. Some have actually used it, deliberately or unintentionally. In these state-sponsored labs, each country has developed its strand of anthrax, varying in natural regional mutation or genetically engineered makeup, and therefore, in virulence. But even with these national anthrax “trademarks,” it is difficult to track the source of any one strain because transfers from lab to lab and even country to country have gone almost entirely undocumented since the international community outlawed weaponized anthrax thirty years ago. FBI agents hunting the source of the anthrax in the October letters would have almost as tough a time as the Hazmat crews rifling through millions of envelopes in post offices up and down the Atlantic seaboard.
Within ten days of the first mailing, many people were infected, but none of them was diagnosed. Only when Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the tabloid Sun in Boca Raton, was confirmed to have died on October 5 from inhalation anthrax did the story grow legs. By then, a second batch of anthrax-tainted letters had been mailed—among them were envelopes addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, postmarked October 9. Daschle’s letter appeared to be from a precocious youngster with a social studies assignment—the return address said 4th grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, New Jersey. The town exists. The school does not. Inside this envelope was a note like those sent to newsrooms in September with a few more helpful lines reading: We Have This Anthrax. / You Die Now. Once they arrived, the country was well primed for another panic. Congress shut down for the first time in modern history, newsrooms began plying employees with the antibiotic ciprofloxacin (Cipro), and Senator John McCain told David Letterman that the anthrax might have come from Iraq. Within a week, there were two dead postal workers in Washington, DC.
By the end of October, there were twenty-two anthrax victims. Four of them were dead: They were Robert Stevens, Kathy Nguyen, Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen. Their names, like those of collateral damage throughout history, have since returned to near obscurity, despite the fact that their deaths sparked a national panic, revived a booming biodefense industry and birthed a federal probe that stretched across six continents, interviewing more than 9,000 people and issuing 6,000 subpoenas.
The fatalities ended in an inexplicable coda one month later, when a ninety-four-year-old woman in Connecticut with no link to the media or to politics died of inhalation anthrax. Her name was Ottilie Lundgren and for a time after her death, many in Oxford, Connecticut wore facemasks. The era of death in the mail was over for now, but the hoaxes had only just begun.
In the aftermath of the anthrax mail scare, there were dead people and sick people, but there was also all of Capitol Hill needing Hazmat cleaning, and four post offices closed indefinitely pending decontamination. Other post offices, government offices and schools would close periodically on bio hoaxes. There was also a rumor mill working overtime to establish a connection between the fictional Greendale School, Al Qaeda and the leg lesion that appeared on one of the 9/11 hijackers while he was taking flying lessons in Florida. And by the way, if somehow these attacks could be linked to Saddam Hussein, so much the better.
Meanwhile, on no budget, Bob Coen had started doing his own investigation from his computer in Brooklyn. Coen knew more about anthrax than most laymen, and what he knew made him less worried about innocent Americans being killed by spore-wielding terrorists, and more worried about the number of significant arsenals that included deadly anthrax. It wasn’t fear for his safety or the security of his home and his family that kept him awake . . . it was the reemergence of anthrax as a weapon of choice.
Coen’s first encounter with anthrax dated back to his childhood. Growing up in what was then called Rhodesia, Coen had heard of the terrible effects of the bacterium when hundreds died and more than ten thousand were sickened by anthrax in the course of that country’s independence war. True, the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak in 1978, the largest in recorded history, killed more cattle than humans, but many have long suspected that it was the result of Rhodesian Special Forces applying biological warfare in the last stages of a lost war. In the case of Rhodesia’s civil war, anthrax did not prove to be the ultimate weapon—only a nadir in the code of war and a poor legacy for humanity. But it also served as a very real precedent, and for some scruple-less scientists, a working basis. Rhodesia, in Coen’s youth, was a pioneering bioweapons locus.