Anthrax War. Bob Coen
he did do was sue.
It wasn’t Hatfill’s germ unit or his ties to “spooky contractors” like SAIC, a well-connected Beltway outfit with military and intelligence contracts (whose acronym, it was frequently pointed out, should be played backwards like a Beatles record), that made him a person of interest to Coen. It was the fact that long before he had become a “rising star in the world of biological defense,” an expert tapped by both the Pentagon and by the UN weapons inspectors program, Hatfill was messing around in Africa.
Doing his own research, Coen traced Hatfill’s resume: a biology degree from a Kansas college and a short stint at the Army’s Fort Bragg installation, followed by a year in Zaire to work with a Methodist missionary doctor. Coen took note. He found that he could never rid his voice of quotation marks when he spoke of Hatfill’s unorthodox medical background, since from his time in Rhodesia he knew that one of the favorite covers for CIA operatives based in Zaire supporting the US-backed faction in the civil war next door in Angola, was, in fact, the guise of missionaries.
Africa apparently appealed to Hatfill, as did the nineteen-year-old daughter of the Methodist doctor. Hatfill and Caroline Eschtruth were married in 1976, but less than a year later, Angolan rebels backed by Cubans seized Hatfill’s father-in-law, Glenn Eschtruth, during a cross-border incursion into Zaire. His body was found a few weeks later.
In 1978, Hatfill left his wife and moved on to medical school. This is where Coen’s interest really picked up. Because the school Hatfill enrolled in was the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, Rhodesia.
“What a curious place for an American to do his residency. Curious time too. At the height of one of Africa’s bloodiest race wars,” Coen noted to Nadler. “It looks like he had quite a temper. When he failed a course, he got pissed off and smashed an office window. But here’s the crucial thing. You know who taught at Godfrey Huggins? Bob Symington, that’s who.”
Robert Symington was the head of anatomy at Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine and considered the father of Rhodesia’s biological and chemical weapons program. According to reports, he recruited like-minded students to work on his secret experiments that included crude weaponization of anthrax, ricin, and thallium. Coen took note that around that same time Hatfill has claimed that he was working with Rhodesia’s Special Air Service (SAS), an Army special forces unit some say was involved in the deployment of chemical and biological agents.
Later, at the end of the Rhodesian war, Symington joined tens of thousands of other white Rhodesians fleeing south ahead of the transfer of power to a democratically elected black government. Symington reportedly assisted South Africa, the last bastion of white rule on the continent, with its sinister covert germ warfare programs: the apartheid regime’s Project Coast.
Steven Hatfill, after completing his medical degree, also moved to South Africa. He was attached at various hospitals as well as a mission to Antarctica. After his adventures in Africa, Hatfill returned to America—not to the heartland, but to the biological weapons orbit around Washington, DC where he worked at the National Institutes of Health, then at Fort Detrick, and then at SAIC where he worked on the mock-up of a “bioterrorist laboratory” for training exercises. Hatfill was apparently connected with well-wired operators on two continents. “This is a guy who’s been around some very interesting places,” said Nadler.
“And now someone is making him the fall guy,” added Coen.
Neither journalist was surprised when in July 2008, Hatfill was awarded $5.8 million for damages in his case against the US government. “He’s a rugged man who fought back hard. They’re paying him to just go away. I haven’t even heard a hint of a book deal—which is par for the course in DC scandals,” Nadler summed up. A month later, the FBI officially exonerated the man they had dogged, saying Hatfill “was not involved in the anthrax mailings.” But the admission came only after the Ivins death. The contrast between the swaggering virologist punching his way out of his jam, and the brooding tormented dead man who took his place was stark. The FBI had been burned and learned its lesson: Don’t tangle with the tough guy.
But Hatfill didn’t go too far away. He continued to pound at other parties he held responsible for his lost reputation and career, suing the New York Times and Vanity Fair for libel and defamation. And when the bureau that had dogged him for years was put on the hotseat and grilled by Specter and Grassley over the Ivins affair in September 2008, Hatfill was sitting in the gallery. Making an entrance not unlike a tomcat fat with canary, the maligned man turned millionaire basked in the flash of cameras before taking his seat next to a brigade of so-called Pink Ladies—ubiquitous protesters who feel at home when denouncing authority. Hatfill glanced down at his neighbor’s sign: “We Don’t Trust the FBI,” but made no response.
Only when Senator Leahy rebuked Director Mueller for wasting time and money in the Hatfill affair and asked him, “Isn’t he owed an apology?” did Hatfill’s tough-guy demeanor crack—and he smiled.
The next day Coen and Nadler drove out of the capital and headed for Frederick, Maryland. They drove past Fort Detrick, where both Hatfill and Ivins had risen to prominence in the USAMRIID labs. “A giant germ factory,” mused Coen. Then they drove past the homes of both scientists—Ivins’ modest bungalow, Hatfill’s empty unit in the Detrick Plaza Apartments—just minutes apart and with views of the top-secret facility’s security fence. Finally, they cruised past the funeral home where Bruce Ivins’ remains awaited their final disbursement. The journalists drove some moments contemplating this latest anthrax grave. “Dead men tell no tales . . .” noted Nadler. “Unless he left e-mails.” Coen nodded. He was thinking that Ivins was just the latest in a procession of germ war scientists who knew some awful truths about secret knowledge and died under mysterious circumstances. “The body count is rising,” said Coen.
CHAPTER TWO
Enter Stephen Dresch
THE SCOURGE OF BIOPORT
Coen and Nadler would not be where they were in the autumn of 2008—knee-deep in declassified documents, forensic reports, scribbled notes and interview transcripts; on deadline with a dark film and book about the international biowarfare underworld that encompassed years of globe-trotting, lab-sniffing, interview-begging and dirty-tricks witnessing; on edge about every new underreported anthrax-related revelation; and far more comfortable with bacterial bombshells than they would perhaps care to be—without the work of Stephen Dresch.
Dresch was an independent investigator—a sleuth-for-hire whose constant quarry were corruption, incompetence, professional negligence and government turpitude. He was an intellectual—a former college dean with an Ivy League doctorate in economics who never rid his speech of academe, even when lowering the boom on mobsters or reading the riot act to high-ranked public servants. A Republican-leaning Libertarian from the notoriously independent-minded Upper Peninsula of Michigan—which he represented in the state legislature for two years in the ’90s before being ousted, he always claimed, by Karl Rove’s operatives—Dresch wore the physical trappings of an iconoclast. By the time he entered Coen and Nadler’s realm, age had bleached his full beard and long hair; years of chain smoking had stained his fingers and teeth. He looked, many would comment, more like the Unabomber than a tireless crime buster who harried the FBI to catch America’s most wanted. But even in the last years of his life there was an unquenchable youthful light in his eyes—a ray of determination to somehow lessen the badness caused by the overwhelming abundance of malefactors.
After receiving a doctorate in economics from Yale in 1975, Dresch went to work at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City and then to a think tank in Vienna where he would take frequent research trips behind the Iron Curtain and in the US. His unorthodox career next landed him at Michigan Tech University’s Business and Engineering School in 1985. His five-year tenure as dean of the school culminated in the ouster of several senior officials who, at Dresch’s instigation, were convicted on criminal charges of corruption. From that point, Dresch’s life became one long search for veracity, progressing from easy-game embezzlement into arenas where the truth, if it ever existed, had gone to die. His final investigative