The Hunt For The Anthrax Killers

By Amanda Ripley

The awful truth about hunting for a serial killer is that the most important clues usually come at the expense of more lives. Last week the odious spores managed to kill the messengers before they even knew what ailed them. But postal workers Joseph Curseen Jr., 47, and Thomas Morris Jr., 53, still delivered the message. Think bigger, Curseen and Morris told us. The only thing more elusive than the terrorists are the microscopic weapons they have unleashed. The baby-powder- like substance in the letter opened on Capitol Hill on Oct. 15 does not respect laws and traditions such as gravity and envelopes. So authorities must not continue to abide by the old rules that put public calm before caution, process before speed.

Up until last week, the patchwork of government agencies scrambling to hold hands and surround the bad guys did what it has always done. The FBI has been keeping secrets. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been waiting for someone to get sick before intervening. And the U.S. Postal Service has been delivering the mail and enraging its employees. Just like old times. A close look at the sequence of events leading up to Curseen's and Morris's deaths reveals several points at which authorities could have recognized the risk to postal workers and taken action. But due to a tragic combination of overconfidence, stoicism, genuine confusion and fear of causing panic, those opportunities were missed. Immediately after Sept. 11, which was not as long ago as it seems, the Federal Government was roundly criticized for its failure to imagine the worst. That seems to be precisely what happened again this time.

So far, the biggest leads have come from the crime-scene evidence: the tiny spores of anthrax and the letters that accompanied them. Scientists have started to decipher the story behind the spores and found that they are deadlier than we had thought. The way they were processed tells us volumes about the sophistication behind them and warns us that we need to expand the list of those at risk and the possibilities for what's next. An amateur working in his garage could not craft spores like these, but a microbiologist with a Ph.D. could, working out of a decent lab. Or a novice could buy the spores from a pro or someone with access to stocks in the U.S., Russia, Iraq and possibly elsewhere.

By the end of a harrowing week, as many as 20,000 Americans were on antibiotics at the government's urging. The treatment perimeter in Washington, New York and New Jersey had expanded like a forest fire. Trace amounts of the bacterium (considered insufficient to cause infection) had been detected in 11 places in Washington, including the Supreme Court's off-site mail center. But it was not until a State Department employee developed inhalation anthrax that health officials began speculating that one or more undiscovered letters had yet to be found. The single letter to Senator Tom Daschle, while surprisingly potent, could not have left so many tracks, they presumed. In one week Washington officials had come a long way from calling this anthrax "garden variety."

The race is on for scientists to determine whether chemicals were added to the spores to make them float so freely in air currents. Simultaneously, there is a continuing frenzy to find the outer edge of the contamination, a line that officials have so far miscalculated daily--and sometimes hourly. With the two deaths from inhalation anthrax last week, the investigation has become immeasurably more urgent; with each casualty, the public's faith in government slips a little more. If order and the economy are to be preserved, not to mention support for military action, then that faith must be shored up.

Oct. 14 marked a turning point for the investigation, even if not all the investigators realized it. That day an aide to Daschle opened a letter with a return address of a fictitious New Jersey school. With that, investigators got their first look at the most potent anthrax spores in the case to date. Three days later, 31 people tested positive for exposure (that number was later reduced to 28), confirming what Army scientists studying the spores had already concluded. This is an extremely dangerous version of the bacterium. "What happened in Daschle's office was a dramatic milestone," says Dr. Alan Zelicoff, senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories for National Security and Arms Control.

With this news, the roughly 1,000 FBI agents working on the case moved to zero in on people with access to milling equipment that could grind anthrax to such a fine powder. They intensified efforts already under way to survey emergency rooms and coroners to see whether any patients had recently died from shock or severe flulike symptoms and to check with pharmaceutical and chemical companies and university labs.

Last week officials went public with a more detailed profile of the bacterium being studied at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. It is highly concentrated and pure. The material's light, fine texture and a brown ring around each spore suggest an additive had been introduced to prevent clumping. "All these things tell me that whoever is doing this has a knowledge base that's pretty damn good," says William Patrick III, who spent 20 years designing biological weapons for the U.S. before President Richard Nixon halted the program in 1969. Patrick, now a consultant in Maryland, has not examined the anthrax himself. But a Fort Detrick scientist he trusts, who is involved in the investigation, has given him a detailed description.

"When you shake it up, it's fluffy," Patrick says. "It forms a little aerosol in whatever container it's in." That's unnerving because it means the spores will float on even imperceptible air currents--those caused, for example, by air whooshing out of envelopes as they churn through mail sorters. One of the many daunting questions is how much more stock the culprit possesses. The experts are not reassuring on that point. "I think it's prudent to prepare for a mass-casualty event," says Raymond Zilinskas, a former U.N. bioweapons inspector in Iraq.

If an additive was indeed used on the spores, it may tell us more. Then again, it may not. "It's not going to be a smoking gun," warns Richard Spertzel, who also got a firsthand look at the Iraqi stockpile as a U.N. inspector. Even if we can trace a spore to a particular country's stock, it doesn't mean that country sponsored the attack. And anyway, most additives are not specific to a country these days; recipes for their use are available on the Internet.

Meanwhile, behaviorists and handwriting experts have been scrutinizing the letters for clues. They have come as close to consensus as a roomful of psychics would. Some experts say the lettering and word choice suggest a domestic terrorist who is trying to mislead investigators by threatening "Death to America." FBI officials lean in this direction, though they have not yet had any luck comparing the letters with archived threats sent to American abortion clinics and other targets.

Others say the opposite. "The syntax and vocabulary suggests someone who is not proficient in English," says Don Foster, the professor who outed author Joe Klein by analyzing the text of his anonymous Primary Colors. "For example: 'This is next/take penacilin [sic] now,' instead of something more idiomatic like, 'We're only getting started; time to take your penicillin.'"

Every expert has a pet theory about whether the anthrax could be related to Sept. 11 events. There are wisps of clues that suggest a connection. A Turkish man with a radical past arrested in a German airport on Oct. 17 had a biohazard suit in his luggage. Mohamed Atta, a suspected ringleader of the hijackings, had inquired about crop dusters in Florida. He also met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague last spring. But another school of thought holds that the anthrax notes do not fit the al-Qaeda profile: simply put, not enough people have died. "I wouldn't call this an attack," says Jason Pate, manager of the Monterey Institute of International Studies' weapons of mass destruction terrorism project. "I'd call it harassment."

Together, Ken Alibek, who was a key figure in the Soviet bioweapons program until he defected in 1992, and Patrick, his U.S. counterpart, probably know more about weaponized anthrax than most scientists in the nation. But neither has been consulted to help with the investigation. Both criticize the government for holding back so much information and issuing many contradictory statements. "We're the only ones who have worked with this stuff and made it, milled it, aerosolized it and measured its properties," says Patrick. "Who the hell in the FBI has ever seen weapons-grade anthrax powder? They, as well as the doctors at the CDC, know nothing about the behavior of the spore in aerosol, and this is the secret to the whole shooting match. I can see where the public would be thoroughly confused."

Often the hardest part about managing crises is the problems that existed before. They persist and usually get worse. Before Sept. 11, the FBI's notorious lineup of recent blunders--involving espionage suspect Wen Ho Lee, Russian spy Robert Hanssen, Waco and Ruby Ridge--bespoke an agency culture that was seriously troubled. The 17 years it took the bureau to catch the Unabomber didn't inspire confidence either.

Meanwhile, in the population at large, the vengeful and neurotic have not magically been reformed. Law-enforcement agents have turned into butlers for a public that, unlike its leaders, has no shortage of imagination. Samples of dirt, detergent and sugar are clogging Fort Detrick and the few other labs that can test for anthrax. An oozing Albuquerque package is found to contain homemade tamales. White powder that brings to a halt a Little Rock, Ark., rally for drug-free schools turns out to be powdered sugar from a funnel cake.

Likewise, before and after the anthrax scares, 800,000 U.S. postal employees worked at a place infamous for turning people into maniacs. And the African-American citizens of the Washington area still live and sort mail in the shadow of the largely white U.S. Capitol, which has long inhabited a cleaner and safer parallel universe.

It was in this context that mail clerk Curseen collapsed early on Monday morning, Oct. 22, and died hours later. Looking back on the confusing days prior, it's clear that his death didn't occur in a vacuum. A full week before Curseen died, just after the Daschle aide opened the letter, postal officials were aware that it had gone through the Brentwood distribution center in northeast Washington--where all congressional mail is shipped. That very evening, Oct. 15, in a series of conference calls, officials from all federal agencies involved in the investigation--including the FBI, the Secret Service, U.S. Capitol Police, the Postal Inspection Service and the CDC--learned from Fort Detrick scientists what turned out to be the key facts: the Daschle letter contained "highly virulent" anthrax with a high "spore concentration," according to a participant in the briefings. And it was "aerosolized." The word "weaponized" was not used, but it didn't need to be, this official says. It was understood that these anthrax spores would hang in the air.

No one moved to close the Brentwood office or warn employees that they might be at risk. "We were dealing with a sealed letter that arrived in the Daschle office," says CDC director Dr. Jeffrey Koplan. "People say, 'Why couldn't you have guessed that sealed envelopes could have leaked this material?' Our experience had been that sealed envelopes don't leak." Koplan also says the CDC was not informed of the spores' small size, a claim that was disputed by a source involved in the briefings.

The next day, Tuesday, Oct. 16, Curseen came down with flulike symptoms. Thinking it was indeed the flu, he kept working. On Wednesday, more than two dozen workers on Capitol Hill tested positive for exposure, and members of Congress began to fret. The bacteria is "very potent and clearly produced by someone who knows what he or she is doing," said Senate leader Daschle. Those alarm bells were prematurely silenced, though, by Tom Ridge, the country's new Director of Homeland Security. "There's no results that would suggest that it has been quote, weaponized, unquote." But 40 members of Daschle's office were treated, as was everyone on the surrounding two floors.

The Postal Service did not push for the same proactive treatment because, officials say, they were taking their cue from the CDC. "We're not medical experts," says spokesman Gerry Kreienkamp. "We do what the CDC tells us to do. And they give us advice based on the risks that are known at the time."

By this time, New Jersey doctors had warned state health officials, who in turn told the CDC and the FBI that two of their patients--including one who worked in the post office that processed the Daschle letter--appeared to have skin anthrax. This should have been a red flag that sealed envelopes might put postal workers at risk. Still no changes at Brentwood. On Thursday, Oct. 18, it was announced that one of the New Jersey workers, Teresa Heller, had tested positive for skin anthrax. Both the Trenton and Hamilton facilities were immediately closed for testing.

But at this point the CDC still had not advised Brentwood postal officials to test or shut down that station. In their defense, CDC officials say that early tests of another Washington facility that gets congressional mail from Brentwood were negative. Only later did the results flip to positive.

On its own initiative, the post office asked an outside firm to take samples from Brentwood. Tragically, it would be four days before that firm came back with results--too late to save Morris and Curseen. Even though the Postal Service was concerned enough to test the facility, that same day Postmaster General John Potter held a press conference inside the Brentwood center to quell anxieties. "There's only a minute chance anthrax spores escaped from [the letter] and into this facility," he declared. The next day, a third New Jersey postal worker, also from the Hamilton facility that postmarked the Daschle letter, as well as contaminated letters sent to NBC and the New York Post, was diagnosed with skin anthrax--more evidence that a sealed envelope is not protection enough.

On Friday the 19th, a Brentwood employee with flu symptoms showed up at a Virginia hospital. Suspecting inhalation anthrax, doctors put him on antibiotics. The hospital informed the post office. Local health officials, led by Dr. Ivan Walks, head of Washington's department of health, reacted far more aggressively than the feds. They began setting up the infrastructure to dole out antibiotics, and Mayor Anthony Williams held a press conference to warn of the dangers. The next day, postal officials, on the CDC's advice, closed the Brentwood facility. Workers were urged to seek treatment.

But few employees learned of this development because, incredibly, the center has no emergency phone numbers. The postal union, fearful of managers harassing sick employees at home, had negotiated a contract in which employees do not have to reveal home phone numbers or addresses.

Morris died on Sunday. The same day Curseen went to Southern Maryland Hospital Center complaining of severe flu symptoms. He did not reveal that he was a postal employee, and he was apparently not asked. Despite an earlier CDC alert to look for anthrax infections, the hospital released Curseen, who died the next day. It was only after both deaths that the CDC conducted its own tests of Brentwood, the results of which still have not been released.

Clearly, none of these agencies intended to neglect the Brentwood workers. Many of them, including the FBI, put their own senior officials at risk by sending them to the facility without protective gear. If officials knew the danger intellectually, they had no experience to back it up. The country has scant knowledge about the effects of weaponized anthrax. And Washington bureaucrats are creatures of caution.

In a conference call with workers last Wednesday, the day Manhattan employees started taking Cipro, William Burrus, incoming head of the American Postal Workers Union, tried to introduce his colleagues to their new job descriptions. "In a war, there are casualties," he told some 15,000 postal workers listening around the country. "In the past, we've viewed wars on television, and they've been sanitized and far away. But we are the battlefront now."

As those newly drafted civil soldiers returned to work, investigators raced to protect them from more enemies they can't see. Late last week a fragile consensus was emerging among intelligence sources that the culprit is likely a lone scientist in our midst, someone who has no connection to Osama bin Laden--except for a shared talent for terrifying Americans.

--Reported by Anne Berryman/Atlanta, Andrea Dorfman and Alice Park/New York, Andrew Goldstein and Elaine Shannon/Washington and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, with other bureaus

With reporting by Anne Berryman/Atlanta, Andrea Dorfman and Alice Park/New York, Andrew Goldstein and Elaine Shannon/Washington and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, with other bureaus