Anthrax War. Bob Coen

1994 on assignment for Rolling Stone.

      “Pakistan!” the Customs officer hissed before hurling questions: “Why were you in Pakistan? What is your business? How long were you there? When were you last there? Where are you going now? Is Denmark your final destination? Where are you staying in Copenhagen? Please step to the side, sir.”

      In the end, Nadler was allowed to board. He thought it all a bit odd, ordered a drink with dinner and slept until Scandinavia. As he settled into his hotel the next morning, his traveling companion screamed from the next room: “Dude, check this out!” Nadler ran in. For the next twenty-four hours, when not phoning home to make sure all loved ones were okay, he watched the TV. From that moment on, you couldn’t mention 9/11 to him without his certainty that the true story had yet to be told.

      And then came anthrax.

      The death-by-mail anthrax episode three weeks later un-hitched itself quite quickly from the September 11 consciousness. After the period in which Cipro, the powerful antibiotic used against anthrax, became a household name invoked by Tom Brokaw signing off the nightly news, the whole affair seemed to go into hiding, under the cover of a federal probe. It was the disappearing act that surprised Nadler. He was intrigued by the discrepancies between events that, on the one hand, suggested a bioterror link to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and on the other hand, directly benefited drug companies like Bayer, which haggled with the Feds over the price of Cipro as its stock price soared immediately after the attacks. He wondered if the apparent discrepancy was no more than a cynical pretext: if someone within the world’s burgeoning biodefense establishments that clearly had the means and profit motive to carry out the attacks, had also seized the opportunity. Nadler, after all, had come of age during the revelations of Woodward and Bernstein; he had spent his career working towards an inexorable conclusion that as a journalist, you can’t go wrong if you “follow the money.” He thought the twenty-first century’s mainstream media was ignoring this maxim too readily.

      Nadler had been exploring the international networks behind the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for years. When the anthrax attacks happened, he was spending hours each day in a fifteenth-floor editing suite a mile north of the smoldering pit of Ground Zero, at work on the final edit of a documentary about the black market spread of nuclear weapon components. The ultimate villains in this film, Stealing the Fire, were Germans. Germans with roots in the Third Reich. The Degussa Corporation, a multinational company that had once manufactured Zyklon B—the preferred gas of Auschwitz—had made a good profit helping Pakistan and Iraq with their uranium enrichment program in the 1980s and 1990s. Five years of work had granted Nadler unprecedented access to a German engineer, Karl-Heinz Schaab, the first man convicted of atomic espionage since the 1950s, who sold classified centrifuge blueprints to Saddam Hussein. The spy was convicted of treason in a German court, sentenced just to five years probation and fined $32,000. That spelled Western government complicity to Nadler and his partner John S. Friedman. Nadler remained finely tuned to suspect an untold story behind any news of rogue weapons of mass destruction, especially where corporate interests were involved.

      It was during a screening of his documentary on the underground trade of nuclear weapon widgets that Nadler ran into Coen, who literally stepped out of the shadows of a Greenwich Village theater to greet his old colleague. It had been more than a dozen years since they had worked together on South Africa Now. The two headed up the investigative unit, and had produced stories about American diamond merchants violating apartheid-era sanctions and American companies dumping their toxic waste in Zulu villages.

      Nadler recalled how Coen was arrested outside the gates of the New Jersey corporate headquarters of American Cyanamid, the chemical giant which shipped its mercury waste to South Africa, and how his shots of New Jersey state cops’ boots kicking at his camera landed on the front page of the Village Voice three days later. Coen, Nadler knew, was the best kind of troublemaker. He was thrilled to hear he was back in town.

      The two went for coffee. By morning, they had a new shared beat. Coen wanted to investigate how and why anthrax had been allowed to rear its head so dramatically, only to slink offstage. Nadler wanted to examine the role of public and private biodefense developers to see what they stood to gain from a germ war panic. They knew that the place to start was with the federal response to October 2001, when someone or some group went postal on America. They started with Amerithrax.

      AMERITHRAX

      The federal investigation into the anthrax attacks began with an implicit promise that the Feds would leave no stone unturned, no mailbox unswabbed in their effort to find a perpetrator. In early November 2001, about a week after Ottilie Lundgren died in Connecticut, the newly appointed Director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, held a news conference at which he alluded to an expansive plan to incorporate expertise and tips from all sectors. There was a $250 million bounty on the head of the anthrax killer to encourage just such help.

      “You’d be amazed at the number of, they’re not solicitations, but inquiries . . . about the potential application of this or that technology,” he said. “Clearly, not only will we look to the private sector to help us identify some of the problems, but also to come up with some solutions . . . We want to explore all potential ideas and suggestions, particularly when they seem to be further along in terms of research and development.” As if to emphasize the inclusiveness of the effort to safeguard America, Ridge also noted that the Office of Homeland Security had just welcomed a contingent from the National Organization on Disability to a talk about homeland security—the same talk he gave to the good folks at NASCAR.

      But later in the briefing, Ridge told reporters that he was unable, as of yet, to project a hypothesis on whether the anthrax letters were the act of an individual or a group, domestic or foreign. What he could tell reporters was that the spores found in the letters had been identified as the “Ames strain” of anthrax—the “gold standard” for weaponized anthrax because of its virulence. The strain, which was originally from a dead Texan cow, had passed through the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa where it got its moniker, and then on to the Unites States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick in 1980. But from there, it is anyone’s guess where the Ames strain wandered. Fort Detrick specialists had classified it as one of the most toxic anthrax strains they had seen, and had given some of it to germ researchers in at least three other countries including the United Kingdom and France. And who knows where it went from there?

      One of the frightening truths that the Amerithrax probe illuminated over the course of its long life was that for years deadly bacteria and toxins have been shared. Biomaterials were passed between labs and researchers with little documentation, less surveillance and no effective regulation whatsoever. This surprising lack of oversight applied to both content and recipient: in the 1980s the US Centers for Disease Control shipped deadly viruses abroad via express mail. The addressees included the country’s foremost ideological foes: Iraq, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union and China. A Senate committee chaired by John McCain and the General Accounting Office opened an investigation into the shipments in the early 1990s but failed to establish whether they represented honest scientific collaboration gone awry or something darker. Nonetheless, with its interest, Congress was signaling the scientific community that the all too routine trading of deadly pathogens was something that would not be tolerated in the new era of preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction—an era ushered in by the fall of the Soviet Union and the rising threat of Saddam Hussein. And even then, one could not really be certain what the scientific community was doing with its viruses and plagues in the name of “research.”

      When Ames, Iowa was mentioned in context of the anthrax attacks, it was a jolt to the city. Concerned that it might have provided a terrorist with deadly material, on October 12, 2001, the Iowa State University’s College of Veterinary Science incinerated its collection of anthrax samples under armed guard. Ironically, none of the samples in Ames were, in fact, the Ames strain (which originated in Texas but was identified by the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, hence the name), but some dated back to 1928 and were rather regretfully destroyed by the dean, who had hoped to hold a centennial experiment to test their longevity. The USDA ran a laboratory not far from the university but had to retrieve its anthrax collection from a storage