The White House uses the anthrax attacks to justify the invasion of Iraq, while the FBI shifts its focus to a new prime suspect. Under surveillance and interrogation, he reveals something no one sees coming.
Chapter 1: How did Colin Powell use the anthrax attacks to justify the Iraq invasion?
It's early 2003 in the Oval Office of the White House, and Colin Powell, the U.S. Army General and now Secretary of State, is in a bind. After almost 18 months, the FBI still hasn't been able to point to the person behind the anthrax attacks. So in the absence of a clear answer, Powell's boss, President George W. Bush, has come up with his own.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime... has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade.
President Bush has a personal history with Iraq. His own dad had launched a war there when he'd been president. And that war is where Colin Powell had made a name for himself. He turned into a decorated war hero, a trusted military veteran. So now the younger Bush is coming to Powell, his secretary of state, wanting to use that trust.
He said, what should we do? I said, well, we should first and foremost take it to the United Nations. And we then had a meeting a week or so later, and every member of the national security team agreed with the judgment that we take it to the U.N.
By taking it to the U.N., Powell means standing in front of the United Nations and asking them to go to war. So he's got to make that case. But there's something he wants to do before he goes out on that limb. His reputation is on the line.
So... I spent four days and nights out at the CIA going over it and asking every way I could, are you sure of this? You have multiple sources on this. And I got those assurances. They're the same assurances that the intelligence community gave to the president, the same assurances the intelligence community gave to the Congress four months earlier.
Then, on February 5th, 2003, with those assurances in hand and a special prop in his pocket, Powell makes his case to the UN Security Council.
Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, distinguished colleagues, I would like to begin by expressing my thanks for the special effort that each of you made to be here today. This is an important day for us all as we review the situation with respect to Iraq and its disarmament obligations under UN Security Council Resolution 1441.
He sits at a large desk in a dark suit and a red tie. Serious-looking men sit behind him.
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Chapter 2: Who was initially suspected in the FBI's anthrax investigation?
That's important. And there was someone in their midst who, looking back, struck Decker as odd. A scientist who'd been consulting with the FBI since the beginning of the case. The guy who strangely ended up volunteering to hand out coffee for the Red Cross during the search of the lake. The vaccine whiz, Dr. Bruce Ivins. He'd been there. He'd made sure to have been there every step of the way.
He leaned forward, real proactive, on trying to get the FBI to look at coworkers to the point where that was suspicious. Why is he trying so hard to help us? This is not his job. He's too old to be a wannabe detective. Why is he doing this?
Ivins is the same guy who had told officials back in 2001 that the anthrax powder used in the attacks was light, high quality, and in his words, not garage spores. Now, Decker and the other agents who think Hatfield is innocent want to check Ivins out.
Thinking back to the beginning of the investigation, Decker now remembers an odd experience he'd had talking to Ivins after the Capitol Hill attacks. Ivins was telling him about an experiment he'd done on a monkey with aerosolized anthrax.
And I naively said, well, that's exactly the same as using it as a weapon. That's biological warfare. You've just described it to me. And he immediately changed and went irate. His eyes widened. He said something like, no, it's not. And he stared at me. He was pretty pissed off. And we were about three or four feet apart. So I actually shifted my balance a little bit in case things got rough.
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Chapter 3: Why did Agent Scott Decker begin doubting Stephen Hatfield as the anthrax culprit?
I apologized. I said, that's really stupid of me. I can see now where the two things are different. You know, please accept my apology, et cetera, et cetera.
And he calmed down. It had felt a little odd at the time. But sometimes scientists are a little odd. Now, though, Decker's wondering if there was more to it. On the other hand, Bruce Ivins and many of his colleagues at the US military's bioweapons lab, USAMRID, had already been on the FBI's watch list for months. They'd been checked out. Ivins himself had passed a polygraph.
In fact, Ivins was an altogether unlikely suspect. He was one of the most respected anthrax scientists in the country, who regularly lectured at conferences and had published over 40 scientific papers. He was active in his Catholic church, playing the keyboard in the band. He was well-liked by his colleagues.
On top of that, the FBI had just publicly accused someone who, so far, despite all of their efforts, wasn't panning out.
I needed a little more hard evidence before we actually turned Ivan's life upside down.
While Decker turns his attention away from Stephen Hatfield and toward new suspects, the highest offices in America had come up with their own culprit.
Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world. We must not fail in our duty and our responsibility to the citizens of the countries that are represented by this body. Thank you, Mr. President.
The White House really thought Iraq was behind the anthrax letters. We repeatedly told the boss, the director, there is absolutely no connection that we can see to Iraq. We have no evidence at all to point in that direction.
And yet that direction, going after Iraq, evidence be damned, is exactly where they're headed. On March 19th, 2003, five days after Colin Powell's speech at the UN, President Bush makes an announcement that will change the geopolitical landscape forever.
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Chapter 4: Who is Dr. Bruce Ivins and why did he become a suspect?
Well, this is a landmark occasion. Here in the very month of the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA's double helix, I am pleased and honored, perhaps I should say exhilarated, to declare the goals of the Human Genome Project to be completed.
Dr. Francis Collins announces a major breakthrough in human DNA. The essentially complete set of genes in a human cell called a genome have been decoded for the first time. And it gives real hope to the idea that anthrax, too, could be mapped genetically. One of the most striking revelations of the Human Genome Project was that a tiny amount, just 0.1% of our genes, make each of us unique.
So Decker and the FBI want scientists to explore the genetic map of anthrax to decode the figurative 0.1% that made this particular sample unique.
It revealed to us, to the entire scientific community, how little biology we truly understood, even for the simplest forms of life.
Claire Frazier and her team at Tiger had been pursuing this genetic fingerprint for more than a year now.
Where we felt a tremendous amount of tension was the urgency we were feeling from the FBI to get this information as quickly as possible, but us also knowing that going quickly could lead to inadvertent errors.
So the process wasn't going quickly. But the payoff, if they can get it right, is huge. If Tiger can identify the unique microscopic differences, the genetic fingerprint of the anthrax from the letters, they could trace it back to its mother batch somewhere in a lab, which could point them to the workplace of their killer scientist.
And when you start to think that, you know, this isn't just information that's going to be out there to enable science. This is information that ultimately could be entered as evidence in a criminal trial. That's a pretty chilling thought.
They're doing this critical work at a lab in USAMRID, the same place Bruce Ivins and Stephen Hatfield have worked. And it's here in the lab where the first major genetic breakthrough happens, entirely by accident.
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Chapter 5: How did the FBI and scientists use genetic research to track the anthrax sample?
So Decker's monumental challenge now is to figure out which of those 45 million envelopes became the four that ended up with anthrax in them.
It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we weren't even sure there was a needle to look for. We weren't sure we were going to get an answer. We couldn't say for sure it was going to work.
Nevertheless, they put those doubts aside and start looking for their needle.
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In the winter months of late 2004, Decker and another investigator drive out to the factory where the pre-stamped envelopes had been made. It's in central Pennsylvania, a state known for its legendary paper-making mills. And Decker feels right at home.
To me, that was interesting because I grew up in the paper mills. I shouldn't say grew up. I spent my 18, 19, 20 years working at the paper mills in Jersey. So I kind of understood what they were doing.
He'd driven a lot of forklifts in his time there. But Decker also worked in quality control there, monitoring paper chemistry. Talk about the perfect person for the job. The man knows how to look at paper. And he knows that paper companies keep records. But when he goes to look at the paper mill's records, he hits a snag.
All of the records starting right before October 2001, the exact weeks Decker needs, had been retired. And now, in 2004, are nowhere to be found. So he turns to the printer of the ink stamp on those same envelopes. The printer does have records, and those records show that the ink for the 34-cent stamp was reformulated in January of 2001, almost a year before the attacks. That is great intel.
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Chapter 6: What forensic challenges did the FBI face analyzing the anthrax letters and envelopes?
Chapter 7: How did the political focus on Iraq affect the anthrax investigation?
Basically, she'd left some anthrax test samples in the oven too long. Typically, this would ruin the sample, and she thought she'd have to start over. But...
And this is where the breakthrough happened. So when she pulled these plates out of the incubator to get rid of them, she looked at them. That's when we first saw the differences in the DNA sequence between these morphotypes and the reference.
Claire and her team had found a faint microscopic variant between the original strain of Ames found in Texas and the Ames strain that had been mailed. Just one tiny difference in a genetic map of over 5 million cells. That alone doesn't tell them much, but the fact that they've found that difference means it's possible to find more differences.
It finally seems they might be able to get that full DNA fingerprint, which would point them to the lab of the killer. While Claire's team's doing that, Decker has another idea. This one, a little more old school.
I thought there was maybe more we could do with the forensics of these envelopes, because I knew nothing about them, but we had crazy ideas about what we could do.
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Chapter 8: What breakthroughs did the Human Genome Project contribute to the anthrax case?
One of these crazy ideas is to hunt for clues not in fancy genetics, but in the manufacturing process of the envelopes themselves. They hadn't been lucky enough to get any obvious forensic clues.
Pretty much the only source of DNA would have been from licking the stamp or licking the envelope. And in this case, the people that had made the envelopes had inked a stamp onto it. So you didn't have to put your own stamp on it. No licking. And the envelopes were taped shut, not licked. So we didn't have a licked envelope. We didn't have licked stamps.
There was no reason to think there was any place we were going to get human DNA.
But Decker's wondering if a microscope could reveal anything else about these envelopes. Could there be something distinct about them that would differentiate them from the countless others with the same design? Each of the envelopes has a 34-cent ink stamp pre-printed on it by the United States Postal Service. So these are official envelopes created and printed by the USPS.
That means they would likely have been purchased at a post office. So if Decker and the FBI can figure out which post office sold these envelopes, they might be able to pinpoint the anthrax killer's neighborhood. The bad news? They discover the Postal Service had printed 45 million of these envelopes in 57 different production runs over the last several years.
So Decker's monumental challenge now is to figure out which of those 45 million envelopes became the four that ended up with anthrax in them.
It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we weren't even sure there was a needle to look for. We weren't sure we were going to get an answer. We couldn't say for sure it was going to work.
Nevertheless, they put those doubts aside and start looking for their needle.
Did you know that tuberculosis actually led to the invention of the cowboy hat? I didn't until I talked to John Green about his new book, Everything is Tuberculosis. It's a deep dive into the wild history of the disease. Every week on my podcast, Bookends, we sit down with today's best authors for candid conversations about their writing, their inspirations, and their lives.
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