Homeland Insecurity

By Nancy Gibbs Reported By John F. Dickerson, Andrew Goldstein, Viveca Novak, Elaine Shannon, Karen Tumulty And Douglas Waller/Washington, With Other Bureaus

The standards by which we judge public servants changed on Sept. 11, and maybe the guys in the Congress just never got the word. When buildings in New York City were targeted and ablaze, the fire fighters ran into them. Last week, when buildings in Washington were targeted, the House members left town. While Senators camped in cubby holes and went about their business, Congressmen called it a day and adjourned. They forgot that in wartime, symbols have substance: no war--not World War II, not World War I, not the Civil War, not even the War of 1812, when British forces burned the White House--has forced the U.S. Congress to evacuate. But that has happened twice in the past five weeks: after the Sept. 11 attack and then again last Thursday, after Senate majority leader Tom Daschle's office joined the newspapers and networks as an anthrax hot zone. Is it possible our enemies may have tried to do with an envelope what they failed to do with a 757?

For leaving, of course, House members came under fire. WIMPS, shouted the New York Post. "Another chapter in Profiles in Courage," snarked Senator John McCain--proud that his chamber hadn't closed up shop--who had headed to New York to do Letterman. All the House did, embattled legislators insisted, was adjourn a day early to get out of the way of the guys in the haz-mat suits who would be sweeping for spores in the halls of power. It would have been irresponsible and dumb to do otherwise, they said. And they could claim some vindication on Saturday when investigators found anthrax in the mail area of the Ford Office Building, on the House side of the Capitol.

But the Senate had managed to find somewhere to stay in session and keep working, and it would have helped if the House had done the same, instead of sending members home. In a week when events were conspiring to make people wonder what we were getting into and whether we were up to the job, the timing of the House hiatus could not have been worse. The very idea of Congress adjourning at all was breathtaking, when everything from airline security to the stimulus package to smallpox vaccine demanded immediate attention, and the new Director of Homeland Security barely had a job description, much less a budget to fulfill it.

Nor did it help that the President, stopping over in California on his way to an economic summit in Shanghai when Congress evacuated, had virtually nothing to say about the matter. "We cannot put him out at each new development," a senior Administration official told TIME. "And there were a lot of developments this week." Bush doesn't want to be announcing the results of each nasal swab; that's what Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge are meant to do. But Wednesday they were saying little and nothing, respectively, so Bush's silence just compounded the concern about who knew what and who was in charge and where this all was heading. The anthrax incidents presented both a health threat and a crime scene, and the airwaves were dense with fear but short on facts. There was no domestic Don Rumsfeld, whose Pentagon briefings are reassuring even when they aren't especially revealing. Was the anthrax strain detected last week in the Congress "weapons grade" or not, easily spread or not, related to the other attacks or not? Are we ready or not? And when public officials offer answers like "I'd rather not comment about any of the specifics," as Daschle said one day last week, it can make people wonder how long our institutions and our psyches can withstand the strain.

In some sense the House was especially representative last week, because the fear in the Capitol was reflected far and wide. Northwest Airlines had to remove all the Sweet'N Low from its planes because so many flights were being delayed by powdery fears. Emergency rooms all over the country were swamped with people with flulike symptoms: Was it anthrax, or anxiety, or just October? Mail handlers were wearing rubber gloves, office workers were refusing to open their mail; and there were so many hoaxes that frustrated cops are threatening to put the wise guys in jail for life if they catch them. Local police departments were deluged with reports of suspicious substances. "The green stuff on the street is guacamole!" said an exasperated Chicago police department spokesman. "The white powder on the stairs is baking soda. These are not reasons to call 911. People have got to start using some common sense."

The FBI admitted that with only 11,143 agents, the hunt for the anthrax perpetrators meant the bureau had to reduce its effort to track the Sept. 11 clues--and, in the process, perhaps reducing its chances of uncovering and preventing the next attack. "Every day is Groundhog Day," sighed an overtaxed investigator whose morning begins before dawn. "By 9 a.m. I'm brain dead and we're just starting." On Friday Ridge disclosed that the strains of anthrax bacteria sent to Florida, New York and Washington were "indistinguishable," which suggested a concerted attack by a disciplined network. So did the origin of the envelopes: Trenton, N.J., in the same state where several hijackers lived before boarding their plane in Newark; and Palm Beach County, Fla., where Mohamed Atta learned to fly, investigated crop dusters and appeared one day at a pharmacy in search of something to soothe the bright red rash on his hands.

The prestamped envelopes were of an unusual size, which led investigators to hope they might be able to quickly narrow down where they were sold. Investigators said they had found the mail-sorting box where one letter had been dropped, and more than 100 federal agents were combing the surrounding West Trenton neighborhood.

Still, there were federal officials more inclined to suspect a homegrown freelance terrorist than a sophisticated network that had already displayed a taste for mass mayhem. They are analyzing the letters carefully; some veteran agents are convinced they were written by an American. "It's starting to fit in more with the loner who has a Ph.D. in microbiology," says an investigator. "It doesn't look like someone who has been educated in the Middle East." The writing, adds another agent, "looks like what I learned with a nun beating my hand." But the hijackers had worked hard to blend in and hide in plain sight too. And no one was eager to underestimate their cunning again.

Wednesday was just a bad day all around, a day almost perfectly orchestrated to shove us back into a crouch. Congress, which is incapable of speaking with one voice in tranquil times, could not have mixed its messages more thoroughly if it had tried. The letter to Daschle, mailed on Oct. 8 and, like the NBC envelope, postmarked Trenton, had been opened Monday morning in a suite full of people. By Tuesday evening, even as 1,400 Senate staff members stood in long lines to get their noses swabbed, scientists at Fort Detrick, Md., the army's bioterror research base, warned Daschle that their tests suggested they were dealing with something particularly dangerous: the anthrax was milled into a powder so fine it could have slipped into the Hart Senate Office Building's ventilation system and infected other areas. Fortunately, by this time, someone had realized it made no sense to bring people back into Hart to be swabbed, and so moved everyone to the Russell Caucus room, scene of the Watergate hearings, the Iran-contra hearings and the Army-McCarthy hearings.

The anxiety level was already plenty high. Anthrax exposure was appearing at all the networks, in the midtown Manhattan office of New York Governor George Pataki and among lab and postal workers who had handled suspicious letters. The Capitol had been on edge for weeks; even the undersides of cars carrying House and Senate leaders were being checked with big dentist's mirrors, sniffed by dogs and searched for bombs. The vague but ominous FBI warnings had left even the leaders spooked. "I worry in the Capitol," Senate minority leader Trent Lott admitted. "We minimize the threat, perhaps irresponsibly. We have not been secure. We are not secure now."

On Wednesday morning, as President Bush was preparing to leave town for the Asian economic summit, he had breakfast with Lott, Daschle, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House minority leader Dick Gephardt. The five men have got chummier these past weeks. They had conspired to isolate the hotheads and slowpokes in both parties and move legislation for the war on terrorism with what for Washington was record speed. Daschle recounted what he had learned, including the possibility of spores spreading through the mail system to the House side of the Capitol, three blocks away. The men discussed the merits of shutting down the entire Capitol complex so that technicians could do a thorough sweep and see how far the anthrax had spread. Lott and Daschle say they thought it was just a precaution to consider; Hastert and Gephardt thought they had a deal that everyone would depart the scene.

Later that morning, when Hastert told his fellow G.O.P. members of the evacuation plan, the room erupted. There was no evidence the House was in danger, the Representatives complained. "There were a lot of unhappy members who thought we were giving in to the terrorists," said a source in the room. And over on the Senate side, events were moving in the opposite direction. The earlier reports of weapons-grade anthrax were evaporating. It was more a "garden variety" brand, Major General John Parker, the commanding general of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, told Daschle, and there was no evidence that anthrax particles had wafted into the ventilation system. Senators who heard Hastert announce that the House would be adjourning that day were appalled. By 1 p.m., Daschle was out in front of the cameras declaring that "we will not let this stop the work of the Senate." A total of 28 people would eventually test positive for exposure, but they were being treated with antibiotics, and no one had got sick so far. The Senators would continue to go about their work, in hideaway offices and off campus as need be.

You could practically hear the House members choke on the news. "All these Senators were out there implying that we were lily-livered," a senior House Democratic aide griped. "We made the right decision," Gephardt insisted. "What message would it send to the terrorists if we stupidly put people back in harm's way, to be infected by anthrax? That hardly, to me, is an intelligent response." After a briefing Thursday afternoon by Capitol police, Gephardt told his staff the situation in Daschle's office was even worse than earlier thought. One aide said that decontaminating it would require fumigating that entire section of the Hart Building with gas and leaving it closed for two to three weeks. "It's a good thing we left," Gephardt reportedly told his staff, "and we probably should have left earlier." Senate leaders doubted the Hart Building would be closed that long, but it was no wonder Gephardt kept spinning: the decision was clearly toxic even if the air was not. By the time the report of the contaminated mailroom came Saturday, it was too late to do much more than damage control.

But this was just the Legislative Branch; it's not Congress's job to manage the crisis. That belongs to the Executive Branch, where it remained far from clear which executive, if any, was in charge. Ridge, who had been all but invisible since his swearing-in as Homeland chief the week before, joked with reporters that "I thought it was the appropriate time to come out." While he was quick to insist yet again that he had all the firepower he needed and could walk into the Oval Office any time he wanted--"I have the President's ear," he said--he also said flat out that he didn't have "technical operational authority" to do much of anything. In his private briefings with lawmakers from both parties, "nobody was swept off their feet," a Democratic lawmaker told TIME. "He was asked what his first priority was, and there was a 60-second silence."

When Ridge's office was created, its architects assumed that the weight of the Sept. 11 attacks would give him all the leverage he needed. The collective sense of mission generated by the attacks would help him cut through the sludge among the 46 agencies he was assigned to coordinate. But last week, even as Ridge briefed the President at least three times on the anthrax investigation, the FBI and the CIA were doing briefings as well. In fact, the very scope of the threat may work against Ridge's assuming central control, even if he could. Other agencies are too busy responding to those attacks to hand over authority, because either they don't have the time or they don't want to let go or both. An Administration official has seen the first draft of the yet-to-be-signed Executive Order setting up Ridge's job, and says it is "just a laundry list of 'coordinate this, coordinate that,' with no authority to do anything. Everybody likes Ridge, so everybody's going to be slow to start criticizing, but what I hear over and over is, 'I bet he regrets taking the job.'"

Some on the Hill found Ridge's performance practically stirring compared with that of Thompson. The Health Secretary tried to assure people that the government was prepared to respond to a mass bioterrorism event but ended up signaling that it was nowhere near ready. He asked Congress for money to increase the amount of antibiotics in U.S. stockpiles 600% and acquire 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine--which will take at least one year. So just how prepared should we consider ourselves between now and then? Thompson maintains the public-health system can cope, but just in case, the FDA rushed through a formal approval for antibiotics like penicillin and doxycycline to treat anthrax. Those drugs are much cheaper and more widely available, and the move allowed Thompson to say it probably wouldn't be necessary to break Bayer's patent on Cipro in order to buy up generic forms of the drug for U.S. stockpiles. Although the pill reportedly costs less than 25[cents] to make, Bayer charges the government $1.83, and the frightened public is shelling out about $5 a pill. Generic companies have told the government they would charge it no more than 50[cents]. Thompson is negotiating with Bayer for a similarly cheap deal.

While he praised the nimbleness and skill of the public-health network, the system had been through a tense fire drill. It had taken a week and a half to nail down the diagnosis of anthrax at NBC. At first the baby believed to have been infected at ABC News was thought to have a spider bite. Testing at the CDC lab in Atlanta was delayed for 14 hours after a 1-hr. power failure. Most health-care workers have never seen a case of anthrax, though they are learning what it looks like fast. Many of the national Emergency Response Network's 100-odd public-health labs, flooded with suspicious samples to test, had to learn to do triage: the disease detectives at the CDC were reportedly coaching other labs on how to assess the risks and decide which substances to test first. They also alerted health officials to watch for the signs of other diseases, like plague (fever, cough, chest pain), smallpox (flulike symptoms and rash) and botulism (drooping eyelids, difficulty swallowing, blurred vision). While there was "no evidence" of the threat of any such diseases, says acting deputy director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases Julie Gerberding, "we do live in an era when those threats can become a reality."

At CDC headquarters, cots were set up and meals were brought in to make researchers more comfortable as they worked around the clock. Eighty people arrived at a Staten Island, N.Y., hospital fearing they had been exposed on a ferry. "It was a mob mentality," a doctor said. Clinicians tried to reason with people, explaining that their odds of being hit by a car while running to the ER are far greater than their chances of contracting anthrax. "We've been testing a lot of Sweet'N Low, drywall dust, sugar and talcum powder," said Kathy Barton, chief of public affairs for Houston's department of health and human services. "When we think we get the public calmed down, something else cracks down in Washington or New York and it heats up again."

In Washington the consensus was that public-health officials were equipped to handle a couple of dozen cases of anthrax spread by envelope but not a couple of million spread by a crop duster. A 1993 report by the now-defunct Congressional Office of Technology Assessment showed that a broad dispersal of anthrax spores over a major city could cause 3 million casualties. Another report estimated that a smallpox release could kill 40 million. But Bush's budget this year allocated just $345 million for bioterrorism preparedness. Congress had passed legislation asking for $1.4 billion, and now that number is considered too low. Last week Thompson publicly asked for an extra $1.5 billion, and the final number could be more than three times that. The money would be used to boost drug stockpiles, train local health workers to respond to an emergency and improve the testing facilities at labs. Many today have no fax machine, let alone a computer link to the CDC.

It's the nature of terror that by the time we have fixed our defenses and pulled up the drawbridge, our adversaries may have tunneled in elsewhere. Some officials last week who watched the frenzied response to the anthrax assault wondered privately whether it was really the second wave that the FBI warned of or a clever diversion from something far worse to come. In this view we were lucky to be tested by anthrax: it isn't contagious, it dissipates in air, it is easily treated, and it even leaves fingerprints for you to trace. If its appearance has made us more conscious and cautious about bioterrorism, it came not a moment too soon.

--Reported by John F. Dickerson, Andrew Goldstein, Viveca Novak, Elaine Shannon, Karen Tumulty and Douglas Waller/Washington, with other bureaus

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