Anthrax War. Bob Coen
for “Amerithrax” detectives—were also destroyed (with, astonishingly enough, the approval of the FBI), making it impossible for investigators to compare them when it seemed possible later that the anthrax in the letters may indeed have been linked to Ames, Iowa as well as to the Ames strain.
As the congressional showdown in the fall of 2008 eventually evidenced, the precise nature of the Ames strain anthrax found in the attack powder used in the Daschle and Leahy letters—the most sophisticated powders used in the attacks, and perhaps ever seen—would become one of the most complicated pieces of evidence in the investigation. Years after the attacks, Coen and Nadler found that there was still no unanimity on whether the spores that caused the deaths of five people were easily acces-sible to individuals with connections to ordinary labs, or whether the anthrax mailer would have needed access to more sophisticated equipment. Though pulmonary anthrax may be a perfect killer, it is not necessarily the perfect weapon. So to find the anthrax murderer, you needed to find the weapon as well as the ammunition. And for a while, the FBI seemed bent on convincing the world that both could be found in a basement lab rigged with about $2,500 worth of equipment. That claim lost credence for many once the Army failed to reverse-engineer a replica of the Senate letters’ powder, even with the help of the most high-tech facilities in the country.
The complexities of the science were tough on the media. Reporters often confused the issue, interchanging revelations about the anthrax found in the letters to the senators with news on the samples sent to the media outlets, which were powders of the same derivation, but different grades. Then there was the debate over additives: the heart of the matter. Did almost magical ingredients transform the Senate attack-powders into super lethal anthrax?
Newsweek reported early on that sources found in the powder a “compound previously unknown to bioweapons experts.” ABC News in a much-hyped “exclusive” reported that the anthrax contained bentonite, which, it further reported, is a “trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program.” It took six years for ABC to retract the scoop, which had no factual basis but was useful in the drumbeat for the coming war against Iraq.
The question of additives and silica weight created a sharp schism between the Pentagon and the FBI—one unresolved to this day. Initial analysis of the powder as undertaken by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Maryland suggested to Army scientists that this was a very sophisticated anthrax concoction—milled to an almost infinitesimal size with additives designed to make it float right into the deepest part of human lungs and kill the host.
“Fort Detrick sought our assistance to determine the specific components of the anthrax found in the Daschle letter,” Dr. Florabel G. Mullick, the principal deputy director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), was quoted as saying in the Institute’s October 31, 2002 newsletter. Mullick described a method using an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer to detect the presence of otherwise-unseen chemicals. The test identified the previously unknown substance as silica. “This was a key component,” Mullick said. “Silica prevents the anthrax from aggregating, making it easier to aerosolize.” The AFIP finding was considered by some to be consistent with a multi-disciplinary state program. And even if Ivins was culpable, said observers who believed the AFIP was an honest broker, he did not—indeed, could not have—acted alone.
Not long after Ivins’ death, Coen and Nadler went to see Richard Spertzel, a former deputy commander at Fort Detrick’s germ warfare research unit, who had written an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal soon after Ivins’ suicide insisting that the spores in the Daschle and Leahy letters could not have been produced at the USAMRIID by Ivins alone.
“The material that was in the Daschle/Leahy letter, according to FBI releases, was 1.5 to 3 microns in particle size,” he told the journalists. Then he characterized the refinement as “super sophisticated . . . phenomenal.”
“I’m fully convinced—as are other experts, I’m not alone by any chance—that Dr. Ivins could not have done this with the equipment that he had . . . and I contend that that kind of powder could not be made at Fort Detrick, because they don’t have the equipment necessary to get down to that particle size with that kind of refinement,” continued Spertzel. “It readily floated off the slides when they tried to examine it in the microscope.” Spertzel noted reports that said the spores were “individually coated with a substance called polyglass.”
Spertzel was one of several experts who initially credited the idea that the powder came from one of Saddam’s suspected germ labs. Even at this late date, he was sticking with that theory.
Leaving his comfortable home in suburban Maryland, Coen and Nadler thanked Spertzel for his time and in particular, for his golden quote about Ivins’ death: “He’s dead and they can close the case and he can’t defend himself. Nice and convenient, isn’t it?”
Spertzel’s words echoed an interview they had had a year earlier with Stuart Jacobsen, who saw many hands behind the manufacture of the powders. “It’s a multi-disciplinary effort,” he said during filming in his home on the outskirts of a Texas city. “First of all you need some biologists to understand what kind of strain they need to use the bacteria. In this case Bacillus anthracis bacteria. Then you need a chemical engineer to get a high yield of these spores. You then need more chemists to be able to separate these spores, process them and concentrate them.”
Coen and Nadler took careful notes, underlining what Jacobsen said about the importance of chemical engineers to the effort. Jacobsen, after all, was one himself.
Jacobsen spoke at length to Coen and Nadler about the complexities of Bacillus anthracis and about the effect of friction on electrostatic particles. He speculated about the effect of mail-sorting machines on the anthrax spores’ charge. The ghoulishness of the brave new world upon which he reflected was heightened by his matter-of-fact tone of voice, his thick Scottish brogue, even his casual khaki trousers. Outside the window, Coen could see that every house in this featureless subdivision was virtually identical to its neighbor. Like liar’s dice, he thought. You would never know from the looks of it which one is empty and which housed folks—like this guy—who claimed important knowledge about the intricacies of mass annihilation.
Jacobsen, an opinionated man waging Internet war battles with critics, explained that the scientific schism could be settled only when the FBI disclosed just how much silica was present in the powder. Some of the researchers who had actually examined the stuff claimed that the silica was naturally occurring. But if there was more than 1 percent, Jacobsen insisted, there could be no doubt that the killer powder had been processed to make it as lethal as possible. Jacobsen considered the anthrax in the letters to Daschle and Leahy to be “weapons grade.” This was in alignment with sixteen US government employed biodefense experts who wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association in May 2002 that the attack powders had the classic weapons signature of “high spore concentration, uniform particle size, low electrostatic charge, [and treatment] to reduce clumping.”
But the FBI saw it differently, and called in experts to support its assertion that the Senate letter powder could have been made by a single operator. The agency’s post-Ivins briefing panel of scientists reported that the anthrax was not coated with silica, and that if there was some silica in the powder, it was naturally occurring. Like FBI Director Robert Mueller a month later, they would shed no light about the percentage weight of silica in the powder.
One aggressive reporter influenced by Jacobsen and other US Army sources he trusted had a go at the FBI panel at its briefing. Gary Matsumoto, employed in 2008 by Bloomberg News, had grabbed the germ war issue by the short hairs while writing his 2004 book, Vaccine A, about the controversial vaccine against anthrax used by the military. He was also one of very few non-scientists to have work published in the prestigious Science magazine, when his article on the schism between the FBI and the Department of Defense over the anthrax refinement question was published in November 2003. Matsumoto’s intelligence and sources interested Coen and Nadler, who courted the reporter as a source for years after the article appeared. There were phone conversations and coffee meetings and one lunch date for which the journalists were kept waiting for two hours. During all of these meetings, Matsumoto dropped hints about depths of collusion, secrecy and