Posted on 08/09/2002 8:17:40 AM PDT by dead
Herald Correspondent Caroline Overington reports from Washington on a key strand of America's anthrax investigation.
It is not easy to kill people with anthrax. Not, at least, without killing yourself in the process. The stuff is so lethal that the FBI thinks only 20 people in the United States would know how to handle it.
Martin Hugh-Jones is one of those people. As a professor of veterinary medicine at Louisiana State University, he is an expert on the disease and, ever since somebody sent it through the mail last October and killed five people, he has been wondering how it was done.
"I think I know a way," Professor Hugh-Jones said.
"Let's speak hypothetically. It's 6am on a cool day, with no wind. You could go into your garden and, provided there was only a slight breeze, running from left to right, but not from behind, because that would create turbulence, I think you could open the jar.
"Once you'd done that I think you could stick one of those wooden spatulas you get in coffee shops into the jar, scoop some out and tip it off, into an envelope. Then you'd have to seal the envelope, using a wet cotton ball; you wouldn't want to put your face near the envelope. Some of it would get airborne, for sure, but provided you hosed everything down, provided you really knew what you were doing, I think you'd be OK."
It sounds simple, but it's really complicated enough to be deadly.
"Handling anthrax is very difficult," Professor Hugh-Jones said. "And whoever killed those people had access to good quality, fine anthrax in powder form, and there would be only six to a dozen people in the United States with access to that."
Professor Hugh-Jones says he is not one of them. He nevertheless suspects the FBI is keeping an eye on him while it continues a year-long investigation into the letters laced with anthrax. "They record my calls," he said, and he is also sure that the FBI is reading his email. "I don't mind. They don't think I did it. They are just interested in what I think."
And what is that?
"Well, basically, I agree with the FBI. I think it must be somebody with scientific knowledge."
And would one of those people be his colleague, Steven Hatfill? Professor Hugh-Jones will not say.
"I have never met the man. If you have questions about that, you will have to ask him."
That, unfortunately, is impossible. Dr Hatfill does not speak to journalists. Not any more, anyway. He used to talk about anthrax all the time, but that was before he became a "person of interest" in the FBI's investigation into the letters that were sent to reporters and politicians in the tense months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The dust escaped from the envelopes, infecting 18 people. Five of them, including two postal workers, died.
The FBI's investigation into the case, and into Dr Hatfill, appeared until recently to have stalled. Then, in a flurry of activity that coincided with the looming first anniversary of the first death, the bureau suddenly took bloodhounds into his flat to try to find evidence to link him to the crime.
The bureau's interest in Dr Hatfill was prompted early in the case, by his interesting resume, which shows he was born in St Louis but that he got his medical degree at a university in Zimbabwe, then called Rhodesia, in the 1970s. Dr Hatfill claims to have fought black rebels during the civil war there. (Curiously, the world's largest outbreak of human anthrax occurred from 1978 to 1980 in rural Southern Rhodesia, where 10,738 cases were recorded and 182 people died. There is evidence that this outbreak was the result of covert action by Rhodesian security forces.)
Dr Hatfill also has access to anthrax, and is vaccinated against it. About two years ago he took a job at the US Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID. The lab does research on deadly biological agents, and grows them to make vaccines. After leaving USAMRIID, he went to work for Science Applications International, and while he was there he commissioned a report about what would happen if anthrax was sent through the mail.
The FBI has also noted that when Dr Hatfill was studying in Zimbabwe he lived in Greendale, which is a suburb of Harare. The return address on the anthrax letters was "Greendale School, New Jersey", which does not exist. The FBI has also suggested that he is loose with the truth. (Dr Hatfill has reportedly told colleagues that he once flew fighter jets for the US military, but his record shows he never progressed above the rank of private).
Dr Hatfill denies he is the anthrax terrorist. He has taken a lie detector test and agreed to let the FBI search his home and car.
In one of his last public comments, which he left on a newspaper editor's answering machine, Dr Hatfill expressed dismay that, after a lifetime "of working until 3am to combat this weapon of mass destruction ... sir, my career is over at this time".
Dr Hatfill's supporters are similarly dismayed, not least because they think the FBI's focus on him distracts them from the theory that the outbreak was linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks. There is some evidence for this, too. In March last year, just six months before those attacks, one of the hijackers, Ahmed al-Haznawi, was treated at a Florida hospital for a severe black lesion on his leg. He told nurses he had bumped into a suitcase, and was treated with antibiotics.
However, the doctor who treated him is now convinced that al-Haznawi had anthrax. In the tense weeks after September 11 the doctor asked an anthrax expert, Dr Tara O'Toole, director of the Centre for Civilian Biodefence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, to look at al-Haznawi's file. She did, then passed it on to a colleague, who is also a germ expert. Both concluded that the "most probable and coherent" diagnosis was anthrax.
If that could be proven, then the outbreak would almost certainly be linked to events on that day. But it cannot be proven: al-Haznawi died on one of the hijacked aircraft.
For his part, Professor Hugh-Jones does not buy the "international terrorism theory. I think it was domestic."
Dr Hatfill is right in thinking that his career is probably over. He lost his last job, at Science Applications International, after he failed a lie detector test unrelated to this case. Shortly after, the publicity about his possible involvement reached a peak, and he found himself unemployed for almost a year. Then, on July 1, he was finally hired for a new, $US150,000-a-year job as associate director at, of all places, Louisiana State University's National Centre for Biomedical Research and Training. The centre gets $US11 million
($20 million) a year to teach FBI agents and other law enforcement officials to deal with things like, say, an anthrax outbreak.
But how could a "person of interest" in the anthrax case get a job funded by the Justice Department to teach FBI agents about anthrax?
A university spokesman said he could not really explain it, but he denied reports that Dr Hatfill had FBI agents in his class, even though most of those reports quoted the head of the centre saying exactly that.
"Dr Hatfill conducted one really short course before being put on leave with pay, and now we're checking out various things about him and then we'll decide what to do," the spokesman said.
The university had known Dr Hatfill was a person of interest to the case when they employed him, "but that's not unusual. His background is in anthrax, that's his area of expertise, and they are interviewing a number of people in that situation, so that wouldn't unduly concern us."
So why put him on leave? "I can't really say much, except we're reviewing a number of issues."
The letters weren't attacks, but rather exactly what they appear to be: threats designed to intimidate the United States (THIS IS NEXT WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX YOU CAN NOT STOP US). Whoever made the anthrax has the capability to kill millions of Americans at, almost literally, the drop of a hat: the anthrax in those letters is far more dangerous than a nuclear bomb, as a recent RAND corp study noted (Study: 3 million would die in worst-case Calif. terror scenario ). Bush, Cheney et al understood that immediately: the concept of Iraq using its anthrax to blackmail the United States after a terrorist attack is not new to the US military, but has been mooted by Pentagon planners ever since the end of the Gulf War. It's kind of an obvious one-two play.
You'll note that there is one thing Iraq hasn't "crawfished" away from, and that is 9-11. Alone among nations in the world, Iraq endorsed the attacks and bin Laden; it did so again, today. And yet, Saddam occupies a fixed and exposed position. Superficially, he is total vulnerable. But he's acting as if he isn't. Where does he get that moxie? I think I can guess.
The notion that Iraq would cast itself as a bit player in the destruction of the WTC and the Capitol does not pass muster. That would be suicidal, and Saddam is not suicidal. If Saddam was involved, he was the prime mover, and his back-end security was something really special. Which is what we observe.
On the Hatfill question, the behaviour of the government is curious, to say the least. On my theory of the case, I see a spectrum of possibilities, which might be divided into three major scanarios:
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.