Anthrax

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK.

In the days following Sept. 11, when most Americans believed the next attack would be chemical or biological, Michael Wermuth disagreed. Wermuth is a Rand analyst and head of a congressional advisory panel on terrorism, and like many experts at the time he thought the U.S. had more to fear from another conventional attack. The one thing he was certain we didn't have to worry about was the U.S. Postal Service. "The idea," he told TIME, "that someone sends a letter through the mail that you open up, and it says, 'Ha-ha, you've just been exposed to anthrax and are going to die'? Not a chance, just not a chance."

We know better now, of course. But the bitter lesson we have learned from the anthrax mailings is that what the experts and government officials did not know--though they assured the public anyway--ended up costing the lives of two Postal Service employees who didn't have to die.

Based on a lot of theory and very little experience, the experts were pretty sure it took a minimum of 8,000 to 10,000 anthrax spores to cause the deadly inhaled version of the infection. They told postal workers that spores inside sealed envelopes were unlikely to harm them. They were convinced that lethal airborne spores would be reasonably safe once they had settled down.

Yet as the anthrax attacks unfolded, it became clear that almost everything the experts believed was wrong. Indeed, when Robert Stevens, a picture editor at American Media, came down with inhalation anthrax in late September--the first in the U.S. in a quarter-century--his disease was so much at odds with what the experts expected that at first it was attributed to natural causes. Anthrax is common in wild animals and livestock; its spores can live in soil for decades. Stevens was an avid outdoorsman, so maybe he picked up a few spores in the wild--perhaps, as Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson famously suggested at a press conference, from drinking water out of a stream.

Thompson's theory never made much sense. It's hard to imagine any scenario by which buried spores could emerge from the ground, mix with drinking water and then lodge in someone's lungs. And sure enough, a sweep of the American Media building quickly made clear that Stevens had come into contact with anthrax at work, not play. Traces of powdery spores were found on his computer keyboard, in the company mailroom and, ultimately, throughout America Media's Boca Raton, Fla., offices. Someone had deliberately sent the microbes into the building.

But that didn't make much sense either. True, some of the 9/11 hijackers lived in Delray Beach, Fla.--only a few miles from Stevens' office. But why would they choose American Media, and why would they launch such a small-scale strike?

Things began to get a little clearer a couple of weeks later, when anthrax-laced letters were discovered at NBC, the New York Post and Senator Tom Daschle's office in Washington. This time, alerted by the Florida case, investigators managed to get their hands on the source: three letters (and ultimately a fourth, addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy) with similar messages and handwriting, all of which had traveled through a major mail-sorting facility in suburban Hamilton Township, N.J. Despite what the experts had so confidently asserted, you could clearly mount an anthrax attack through the mail.

What's more, the anthrax that showed up in post offices in New Jersey, New York City, all over the Washington area and in postal facilities in the Midwest and overseas proved that the stuff could--contrary to conventional wisdom--travel with astonishing ease. The original envelopes, passing through high-speed mail-sorting equipment, had puffed spores into the air and sickened eight postal workers. Then the spores settled on other letters that contaminated some 20 mailrooms and perhaps tens of thousands of individual pieces of mail.

One surprise was the remarkable mobility of this batch of anthrax--for tests have all but proved that the powder in all of the sites, in New York, Washington and Florida, came from a single variety, known as the Ames strain. Another was how lethal it could be. It's easy to see how the two dead Postal Service employees could have become infected from breathing the air near those tainted sorting machines. How another postal worker at a State Department mailroom contracted inhalation anthrax is still a mystery. At first he seemed the improbable victim of cross-contamination from one piece of government mail to another. Investigators now prefer to believe that he came in contact with the Leahy letter when a ZIP-code error sent it through the mailroom at the State Department on its way to the Senate.

Equally improbable cross-contamination was, in the end, deemed the most likely reason for the fourth and fifth anthrax deaths: a New York City hospital worker named Kathy Nguyen, 61, and Ottilie Lundgren, 94, a widow from rural Oxford, Conn. While they can't be entirely sure, health officials believe neither woman had set foot in a contaminated post office, yet the strain of anthrax bacteria that killed them was identical to that of all the other cases. It's unlikely that 8,000 or 10,000 spores had made the leap from the original letters onto other mail and then into these two women's lungs. A lethal dose can clearly be a lot smaller than experts thought, particularly for the elderly and those with respiratory problems.

So where did the anthrax come from? Who sent the letters? The FBI still doesn't know, but at least the bureau has a notion of who isn't responsible. An organization like al-Qaeda, which managed to hijack four jets almost simultaneously and fly them to destruction, could easily have put a thousand envelopes into the mail. But a small-scale attack--a handful of letters and five deaths--does not seem to be al-Qaeda's style. Moreover, the writing in the recovered notes bears little resemblance to known al-Qaeda messages.

It's also far from clear where the killer or killers got the anthrax. One set of experts insists that it could have been manufactured in a well-equipped amateur lab--which is why the FBI suggests the killer probably has a room or a garage that's off limits to friends and family. Another maintains that the fine texture of the powder and the presence of additives that keep it from clumping into coarser grains suggest that it had to have been made in a government lab. In that scenario, the killer has either worked in such a lab or obtained it from someone who did.

The disclosure two weeks ago that scientists at the Dugway Proving Ground, an Army facility in Utah, were producing, as recently as 1998, small amounts of weapons-grade anthrax suggests that such a scenario is at least possible. So did last week's revelation that the spores in the mail appear to be genetically identical to those used in Army experiments. But the FBI says it is still investigating dozens of labs--in universities and veterinary schools as well as government bioweapons facilities--and that it is still too early to identify possible suspects.

Given the way the attack was carried out, though, and earlier experiences with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and other mass murderers, psychological profilers at the FBI decided in November that the anthrax attacks were most likely the work of just one anger-filled individual, probably a secretive loner whose rage at his targets--liberal legislators and the media--might point to a radical right-wing bent. For some reason, goes the theory, the Sept. 11 attacks set him off. One idea is that he knew someone who died in the World Trade Center attacks and was enraged at how his targets handled that tragedy.

With only a profile to go on, however, the FBI is counting on a tip from an ordinary citizen who might know or at least have noticed a suspicious character--much as Kaczynski was finally fingered by his brother. The anthrax killer's psychological portrait was broadcast on America's Most Wanted, and in mid- December the FBI and the Postal Service announced they would be sending flyers directly to the mailboxes of New Jersey and Pennsylvania residents served by the Hamilton postal facility.

In a way, the anthrax attack may turn out to be a blessing for Americans. Like a vaccine, which primes the immune system to help it detect and fight off invading microbes, this deadly but relatively contained encounter with a biological weapon has sensitized the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and just about everyone who deals with the mail--at work or at home. From now on, anyone who finds white powder spilling out of an envelope will know that it's not something just to brush off.

--By Michael D. Lemonick. Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Andrea Dorfman and Alice Park/New York, and Andrew Goldstein and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Andrea Dorfman and Alice Park/New York, and Andrew Goldstein and Elaine Shannon/Washington