Anthrax War. Bob Coen
for their findings.
Matsumoto said his agent was pushing him to write a book on germ warfare and that he had key military co-authors in place. “A Russian general and a US general, you see the level I’m getting at?”
One day in the fall of 2007, Matsumoto announced that he was coming to see them “right now.” He arrived bearing a box of chocolates. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate to bring gifts on the High Holy Days,” he said guessing, correctly, his hosts’ religious heritage.
Matsumoto was momentarily silenced by the walls of the office, covered as they were with the ephemera of the anthrax trail. Coen and Nadler watched fascinated as the former ROTC cadet, now in his forties, walked over to the whiteboard where they had mocked up the web of players and sources they were cultivating, and began to talk. He recognized key names and spoke for an hour about how the anthrax affair was “very bad business” that he personally wanted out of. “Why are you guys doing this?” he asked almost plaintively. Nadler picked up the box of chocolates and told Matsumoto, “Gary, it’s holy work. We’re doing it for our kids—all the kids.” Matsumoto shook his head and told Nadler and Coen that they were at the tip of an iceberg, that his own book’s revelations would “blow them away.” Still, he said, they were foolish for thinking their work might make a difference.
“I really don’t know why you guys are doing this,” he said again, turning to the journalists, who were already regretting at that moment that they didn’t have a camera trained on Matsumoto to catch this performance. Matsumoto said he was probably done with anthrax. He spent much of his free time these days dreaming of designing a video game. After an hour or so, he wished his fellow investigative journalists the best of luck and left.
But by the time Bruce Ivins died, it became clear that Matsumoto, despite not having written about anthrax in some time, had not retired from the germ war game. At the 2008 FBI briefing, he went at the experts with detailed questions far beyond the ken of fellow journalists in the room. There were thrusts and parries about the reliability of “silica signal detection capabilities of EDX machines,” “dry weight percentages,” and the “discrepancy between your findings and those of two US Army laboratories.” Under the stern gaze of a government official who conducted the meeting but refused to give his name or position, Matsumoto finally got one FBI consulting scientist to admit that the silica weight percentage was “high”—a victory in the eyes of the cognoscenti only.
The debate over additives and silica endures. The more Coen and Nadler listened to the range of expert opinions, the more they became convinced that the anthrax found in the letters to the senators required a skill set and equipment not found even in Ivins’ high security lab within Fort Detrick. They tended to believe Jacobsen and his ilk. But they listed to others as well.
In the fall of 2007, they had gone up to Harvard to interview Matthew Meselson, a professor who had advised the CIA and the FBI for decades on germ warfare and who had supported the FBI assertion that the anthrax in question appeared to be free of special weaponized coatings. Meselson had examined micrographic photos of the Senate attack powder and saw no additive. “The spores looked very pure,” he said. The journalists pressed him on the findings of the AFIP that did find silica in the samples. Meselson said he couldn’t really comment because “they haven’t released their data for independent verification.” The release, he noted, was prevented by the ongoing Amerithrax probe. Nadler then brought up the letter of a UN representative named Kay Mereish that was published in the August 2007 issue of Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Mereish’s letter noted a recent speech in Paris by an unnamed US scientist who had examined the attack powder and concluded it contained an additive that made it a more effective weapon. At that Meselson rose and extracted a document from a folder nearby. “I can show you this,” he said, “but you can’t make a copy.” Nadler read what he took to be an internal FBI memo, which suggested that the forensic expert who had given that speech may have violated security statutes and could face investigation.
“These are very sensitive areas,” said Meselson. “One should be very careful here.”
They had been warned. Just as Dallas had its second gunman, Amerithrax had its silica—a forensic detail that implied conspiracy.
Nonetheless, the FBI publicly would contemplate only the theory of a lone mailman. And even before Bruce Ivins, they had one. His name was Steven Hatfill, and by March 2002, they put him on the hot seat.
A PERSON OF INTEREST
Steven Hatfill is broad-shouldered in the way that makes his suit coat sit funny unless his arms are crossed in front of him like a bouncer. He walks with a slight limp that he sometimes attributes to a combat wound. He has a deep cowlick and a grim set to his mouth. He looks like a mashup of a Soviet apparatchik and used car salesman, but he’s also gifted with natural charm. Not to mention expertise on scuba and submarine medicine. He could save you if you got the bends. Or got sucked out of a depressurized plane. He can do a skin graft or a C-section and he’s worked with monkeys infected with the Ebola and Marburg viruses. When the FBI named Hatfill a “person of interest,” a bioweapons specialist who trained CIA agents and commandos in counter-terrorism and germ-warfare preparedness, he fought back.
In October 2001, Steven Hatfill was developing a mobile germ unit similar in schemata to the units the Bush administration would shortly be accusing Iraq of building. The unit would be used for training, it was posited, since it would be “real in all its non-functioning parts,” including a mill that would grind anthrax into inhalable powder. The project, contracted out to Hatfill’s then-employer Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), was considered “highly classified,” perhaps because it skirted the 1972 ban on biological weapons. Whatever its covert nature, the secret Pentagon project was nothing but suspicious to FBI agents on the hunt for an anthrax assassin. Investigators were also struck by an earlier Hatfill endeavor—a paper outlining bioterrorism scenarios, and detailing, in particular, the most effective method of staging an anthrax attack, using fine powder, delivered in the mail. Hatfill did not author the paper; he only commissioned it from an anthrax specialist who held multiple patents for the weaponization of the bacteria. But soon after its publication someone appeared to follow its blueprint, which, along with the mobile germ unit, had Hatfill’s name on it, and so Hatfill became, in August 2002, a target in the Amerithrax investigation. This formal interest-taking by the government happened in a press conference, not in a court of law. Hatfill was never charged with a crime, but he was dogged by the Feds 24/7 for the next five years.
Hatfill made good TV, so camera crews would frequently tag after the agents in their slow-moving pursuit. There were the raids on his apartment and a search of his rented storage facility in Florida, carried out by bloodhounds and men in Hazmat suits. There was heavy machinery for dredging of the pond in the hills of the nature reserves overlooking Fort Detrick with implications that Hatfill himself had dumped his toys in the isolated spot—federal agents helpfully provided a helicopter to the media to film the $250,000 operation from on high. There was the near comic confrontation between Hatfill and his handlers on a Georgetown street, ending in the FBI car running over the suspect’s foot and a policeman handing the offended party a ticket for “walking to create a hazard.” Everything this guy did, it seemed, was malice aforethought.
Hatfill’s resume was curious to be sure. And it was not without its incriminating moments. For starters, much of it was made up. Hatfill’s lawyer Tom Connolly admitted as much on the television newsmagazine 60 Minutes when he said in reference to his client’s “forged” PhD diploma: “Listen, if puffing on your resume made you the anthrax killer, then half this town should be suspect.”
But Hatfill was bolder. He huffed and he puffed and lambasted the FBI with two back-to-back press conferences in which he accused the bureau of launching a smear campaign. “A person of interest,” he told journalists sarcastically, “is someone who comes into being when the government is under intense political pressure to solve a crime but can’t do so, either because the crime is too difficult to solve or because the authorities are proceeding in what can mildly be called a wrongheaded manner.” He spoke for twenty minutes and declined to take questions. Some reporters said he was close to tears. Other observers saw a man capable of extreme