Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@
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SMOKED-EM
A mummified human body was found in the chimney of a Finnish industrial building as it was being demolished in 2010. The corpse still had clothes on, and had a wallet with identification in one of the pockets. It identified the body as that of a man born in 1953 who had gone missing in 1991. Exactly how and why the man ended up in a chimney is still under investigation.
TOWED-EM
In March 2010, police in New York City towed a mini-van that was illegally parked in front of a funeral home. Funeral director Paul DeNigris had illegally parked the van in front of the building for a few minutes while he picked up some paperwork and took a call. When he came out and found it gone, he was aghast: There was a corpse in the van. He raced to the police impound yard and spent the next hour-and-a-half trying to get it back. He finally did, and raced to the airport: The corpse was bound for Miami, Florida, where it was scheduled to be cremated. The impound lot waived its usual $185 towing fee because of the “special circumstances” involved in the incident. (But he still had to pay $115 for the parking violation.)
What do Steve Jobs, Faith Hill, and Rev. Jesse Jackson have in common? All were adopted.
THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS,
PART IV
Here’s the final installment of our story on the 2001 anthrax scare. (Part III is on page 424.)
IGNORE THE EVIDENCE
The first suspect in the anthrax attacks of 2001 was Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. It seemed plausible: The letters at least seemed to come from a Muslim source (they all said “Allah is great”). Hussein once had large stores of anthrax-based weaponry and he’d had a beef with the United States since the Persian Gulf War. But the evidence being presented in the media didn’t add up.
The first stories linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks appeared in October 2001 in several newspapers, including the New York Times and the London Times. They reported that an Iraqi intelligence agent had met with al-Qaeda member and 9-11 ringleader Mohammad Atta in Prague in April 2001. There, according to the reports, they discussed the attacks of 9-11—and the Iraqi gave Atta a vial of anthrax spores. The story had the effect of linking Iraq to both the anthrax attacks and the 9-11 attacks, and it increased the panic already felt by Americans. The only problem: Both the FBI and the CIA said there was no evidence such a meeting ever took place.
BAD PRESS
The next bit of “evidence” that Iraq was involved was reported by ABC News’ Brian Ross on October 26, 2001. Citing “three well-placed but separate sources,” Ross said that government tests on the anthrax powder used in the attacks showed that it contained a chemical called bentonite, and that the only country in the world known to use bentonite in its biological weapons…was Iraq. The problem with this story: There was no bentonite in the anthrax. Both the White House and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge immediately said it wasn’t true. (And Ross never revealed who had given him the bogus information.)
While stories like these were making headlines, the FBI had a real investigation to carry out. That turned into about as much of a fiasco as the sketchy news stories.
Iraq war fact: Water-soaked (unused) disposable diapers are good for sponge baths.
THE WRONG SUSPECTS
The investigation of the FBI’s “Amerithrax” case was the biggest (and the most expensive) in the agency’s history. According to the FBI:
Efforts involved more than 10,000 witness interviews on six different continents, the execution of 80 searches, and the recovery of more than 6,000 items of potential evidence during the course of the investigation. The case involved the issuance of more than 5,750 grand jury subpoenas and the collection of 5,730 environmental samples from 60 site locations.
Over the course of the investigation more than 1,000 people were viewed as possible suspects. Here are the most significant:
Dr. Ayaad Assaad. The Egyptian-born microbiologist worked at USAMRIID at Fort Detrick from 1989 to 1997. On October 2, 2001—two days before the first confirmed case of inhalation anthrax—the FBI received an anonymous letter saying Assaad was planning a bioterror attack. “The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor where I work now, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live,” said Assaad. The FBI later cleared him of any connection to the attacks. The letter writer was never identified. Assaad believes it was a coworker, and quite possibly the attacker.
Dr. Philip M. Zack. In December 2001, Connecticut’s Hartford Courant newspaper reported that although Zack, a retired army lieutenant colonel and a microbiologist, had been fired from the Fort Detrick lab in 1991, video surveillance tapes showed him being let in by a coworker, Dr. Marian Rippy, months later—when he should not have had access to the site. (Zack had been fired for harassing Dr. Assaad, the story said.) This was right around the time that anthrax bacteria samples were reported missing from the lab. The FBI said little publicly about Zack, and despite the fact that the Courant ran this story just a few months after the attacks, he was almost completely ignored by the press over the entire course of the investigation.
It takes about 6 hours to play a perfect game of Pac-Man.
Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. The one person who was not ignored by the press was Hatfill, a medical doctor, virologist, and bioterror expert who worked at Fort Detrick from 1997 until 1999. He was first implicated in early 2002 by Don Foster, a linguistics professor hired by the FBI to study the letters and other classified documents connected to the case. According to Foster, there were too many odd clues pointing to Hatfill to ignore.
• Hatfill had studied medicine in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1970s, when one of the largest anthrax outbreaks among humans in modern history occurred.
• The Rhodesian medical school Hatfill attended was near a suburb named “Greendale”—the name of the fictitious school listed as the return address on the letters sent to the Senate.
• Hatfill had authored an unpublished novel years earlier. The subject: a bioterror attack on Washington, D.C.
• He’d taken Cipro in the days before the attacks.
The FBI initially told Foster he was wrong—no matter what the evidence said, Hatfill had a solid alibi. But under intense pressure to solve the case, in August 2002, the agency named him as a “person of interest” anyway. And for the next three years, Hatfill’s life unraveled as the FBI trailed him 24 hours a day, questioned his friends, family, and co-workers, and repeatedly searched his home, all the while leaking seemingly incriminating information about him to the press. Hatfill was in the news constantly, sometimes being named outright as the attacker. He ended up losing his job, many of his friends, and nearly his mind. “You might as well have hooked me up to a battery,” he told The Atlantic magazine in May 2010. “It was sanctioned torture.” During the investigation Hatfill sued the Justice Department for ruining his reputation. In 2008 they quietly settled for $5.82 million, and soon afterwards the department fully exonerated him of any wrongdoing.
THE FINAL SUSPECT
On August 6, 2008, the FBI announced for the first time that they believed that just one person was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks, and that they knew who that person was: Dr. Bruce Ivins, one of the leading researchers at Fort Detrick—and someone who had actively helped them in the investigation into the attacks.
Homer Simpson, John Cleese, and Mr. T have each been the voices of GPS systems.
One big problem for anyone looking for true closure in the case: Ivins had committed suicide a month earlier. He would never face the trial that might have answered at least some of the many questions that remained. There was, however, a lot of compelling, if circumstantial, evidence against him:
• Ivins worked in the lab at Fort Detrick from 1990 until his death in 2008, and had easy access to the Ames strain of anthrax bacteria.
• In the weeks before both the September and October attacks, he worked several late nights alone in the lab.
• Ivins had twice—once in December 2001 and again in April 2002—performed unauthorized cleanups of anthrax spills at Fort Detrick. He did not report the events to authorities at the time.
• While working on developing an anthrax vaccine, Ivins not only had access to the RMR-1029 batch of the Ames strain—he had been its sole custodian since it was first cultured in 1979. (Hatfill did not have access to RMR-1029.)
• Just days after being informed by the FBI that he was going to be indicted in the anthrax attacks, Ivins committed suicide.
CASE CLOSED?
In February 2010, a year and a half after first naming Ivins as their sole suspect, the Justice Department and the FBI officially closed the case of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Many people believe there are still far too many mysteries to justify ending the investigation. Among them: The government never showed any evidence that Ivins had been to the New Jersey post office box used to mail the letters—seven hours from his Maryland home; Jeffrey Adamovicz, Ivins’s onetime supervisor at Fort Detrick, said Ivins didn’t have the skill necessary to process anthrax liquid into concentrated powder form; and no traces of anthrax were ever found at Ivins’s home or on any of his belongings.
Questions not involving Bruce Ivins also remain unanswered: How did Kathy Nguyen, 61, the New York City hospital worker, and Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of rural Connecticut, come into contact with anthrax spores? (The only explanation ever given was that their mail must have been cross-contaminated while in the postal system, but no contaminated letters were ever found at their homes or at Nguyen’s workplace.) Why did the FBI focus on Hatfill for so long when evidence pointed to Ivins at least as early as 2002? And, going back to the start of this story—who was the “high government official” who warned columnist Richard Cohen to take Cipro before the attacks even occurred?
Those questions will likely remain unanswered for years to come.
Two of the 14 actors who played the “Marlboro Man” died of lung cancer.
A FEW SPORE FACTS
• The anthrax spores in the letter sent to Chile were not from the Ames strain. Whether it was related to the attacks in the U.S. is still unknown.
• The name “Ames strain” was based on an error: The strain was grown from a bacteria sample taken from a cow that died of anthrax in Texas in 1980. The Army lab at Fort Detrick acquired the strain in 1981, and a researcher there dubbed it “Ames” because he thought it came from the National Veterinary Services Laboratories, a government lab where cattle diseases are studied, in Ames, Iowa. He was wrong—but the name stuck.
• According to the American Medical Association, at least 2,500 anthrax spores have to be inhaled to cause an infection.
• Cats, dogs, pigs, and birds can contract anthrax, but rarely do. Cold-blooded creatures such as frogs and snakes cannot contract the disease.
• Seven people in Scotland and one in Germany died of anthrax after injecting contaminated heroin in late 2009 and early 2010.
• It’s believed that only the United States and Russia have developed the technology to convert anthrax spores to powder form.
• The bacteria used in the anthrax-based weapons that Iraq developed in the late 1980s were created from strains Iraq bought from the American Type Culture Collection, a private, not-for-profit company based in Manassas, Virginia, that sells cell cultures.
• No letter was ever found at American Media, workplace of the first victims, but several employees said they remembered a letter that had come to the company in early September that contained a “soapy, bluish powder.” They said all three victims had handled the letter, and that it was a “weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez.”
That’s a lot of dropped calls: About 125 million cellular phones are discarded each year.
BASEBALL CONTRACTS
Uncle John’s contract grants him use of the BRI’s toilet-shaped car (the Pot Rod). Here are some weird contract stipulations from the world of baseball.
Charlie Kerfeld. In his rookie season with the Houston Astros in 1986, pitcher Kerfeld amassed an impressive 11-2 record and 2.69 earned-run average. That meant when it came time to negotiate his 1987 contract, Kerfeld could make some strange requests. So he asked for a salary of $110,037.37 (because 37 was his jersey number) and 37 boxes of orange Jell-O (because orange was the main color in the Astros uniform).
• Mark Teixeira. His 2007 contract with the Atlanta Braves included a $100,000 bonus should he be named that year’s American League Most Valuable Player. What’s so odd about that? The Braves play in the National League. (The contract had been negotiated when Teixeira played for the Texas Rangers, of the American League.)
• Bobby Bonilla. Bonilla signed with the New York Mets in 1999. After a subpar season, the team released him, but still owed him $5.9 million. The team had to get him off their books so they could sign another player, so they worked out a deal: If Bonilla would defer payment for a decade, they’d pay him an annuity worth far more than the $5.9 million. Offer accepted. Result: From 2011 until 2035 Bonilla will receive a yearly check for $1.19 million.
• George Brett. In renewing the All-Star third baseman’s contact in 1984, the Kansas City Royals gave him a strange perk: partial ownership of a Tennessee apartment complex. Team co-owner Avron Fogelman owned several in Memphis, and offered Brett a 10 percent stake in a 1,100-unit complex, which guaranteed him $1 million a year for however long he owned it.
• Rollie Fingers. Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley conceived a bizarre promotional gimmick in 1972: He promised $300 cash to any player who grew a mustache. Fingers took Finley’s offer and grew a curvy handlebar one—perhaps the most famous in baseball history. The next year, Fingers’ contract included a $300 “mustache bonus,” plus another $100 to buy mustache wax.
In a year, the Disneyland train will travel 20,000 miles…just circling the park.
NUMBERS ON THE RADIO
A mechanical voice cuts through the shortwave static, repeating sets of numbers endlessly into the night: “8, 6, 7, 5, 3… 4, 5, 7, 8, 9.” You’ve tuned in to a “numbers station,” one of the great mysteries of the airwaves.
STRANGENESS IN THE NIGHT
If you’ve ever spent time turning the dial of a shortwave radio, you may have found a station on which a voice—usually a woman’s—slowly enunciates long strings of numbers, five at a time. It may go on for only a few minutes, or for many hours. And the voices, sometimes punctuated by tones or music, might recite their numeric codes in English, but they might use German, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, or a Slavic language. It’s almost hypnotic to listen to, but it’s also disquieting, even downright creepy. What’s it all about? You’ve stumbled upon what shortwave listeners call a “numbers station.”
Aficionados have recorded the signals, looked for clues and patterns, and tried to decode what the numbers mean. Their websites keep logs of times, languages, transcripts, and frequencies of transmissions, but all their efforts have yielded only a little bit of solid data…and a lot of conjecture. Their conclusion: The numbers stations are being used to communicate with spies and covert operatives. Even though no country has officially admitted to using numbers stations for espionage, enough tantalizing information has leaked out to support that theory.
OLD-FASHIONED
Numbers stations on the shortwave channels have been broadcasting for decades, at least as far back as World War II. (One expert claims to have evidence that the first one began during World War I.) But if they are being used as spycraft, why? Shortwave may seem like a remnant of the time when secret radio transmission was state-of-the-art for spies. After all, we’ve got encrypted telephones and e-mail, secure Internet sites, and miniature storage media that are easily hidden and can store millions of images and documents. Yet despite all these high-tech options and the fact that the Cold War has ended, there may be more shortwave numbers stations now than ever before.
In 2005 German scientists succeeded in creating a material harder than diamond.
HANDLE WITH CARE
Intelligence agents in deep cover can’t risk making regular contact with their handlers. And even when mail, phone, and computer messages can’t be decoded, they can be detected. In fact, many agents have been caught by what’s called a “traffic analysis” of their outgoing and incoming messages, with spy-hunters looking for patterns, phone numbers, and addresses that suggest something suspicious. That’s what makes shortwave transmissions so useful.
Unlike AM or FM, shortwaves bounce off outer layers of the atmosphere. Result: Any modest transmitter can cover the entire world and obscure the broadcaster’s origin. Not that obscurity matters much: Even if the transmitter’s location is known, the receiver’s location isn’t. Anybody with an inexpensive shortwave radio can pick up the signals without anybody else being the wiser. If they know the code, they can get a secret message anonymously using just an everyday radio, a pad of paper, and a pencil. It’s simple and effective, and it saves the agent from being caught with an incriminating array of sophisticated communication devices.
But what about security? If everybody can receive these messages, aren’t the senders worried that somebody out there will figure out the code? The answer, it turns out, is that a few simple codes are, for all practical purposes, unbreakable if you use what’s called a “one-time pad.” (We’ll explain this later.)
QUIRKY FORMATS
How can spies be sure they’re tuning in to the right station? The broadcasters add distinctive trademarks to their transmissions. Hobbyist monitors have given informal names to the stations, based on some peculiar eccentricities. For example: