The Demon in the Freezer

by Richard Preston

  He told her that if there was a smallpox emergency, their children would get a jab of something in their arms; it might not be the licensed stuff, but it would work. He would make the vaccine himself in his lab if he had to. Yet he couldn’t get his mind off the experiment by the Australians, when they had made a vaccine-resistant superpox of mice. What if the vaccine didn’t work? He felt the pressure ratcheting up.

  WHILE GENERAL PARKER was telling the Senate that the anthrax was pure and the HHS people were asking for money for a smallpox-vaccine stockpile, the FBI decided, sensibly, to get a second opinion on the Daschle anthrax. The HMRU dispatched a Huey to Fort Detrick. Not a few of the FBI’s Hueys have bullet holes in them. The holes, which are covered with patches, are left over from combat in the Vietnam War. The FBI had gotten its Hueys used and cheap from the military.

  The Huey touched down on a helipad across the street from USAMRIID. An agent went into the building and collected a cylindrical biohazard container called a hatbox. Inside the hatbox, inside multiple containers, was a small test tube of live, unsterilized Daschle anthrax.

  The helicopter took off with the sample and thupped westward over Maryland. It touched down in West Jefferson, Ohio, near Columbus, at the Hazardous Materials Research Center of the Batelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit scientific research and consulting organization. Batelle scientists took the hatbox into a lab. They heated the anthrax powder in an autoclave to sterilize it, and they began looking at it under microscopes.

  The spores were stuck together in lumps. They did not appear to be very dangerous in the air—the lumps were too large to float easily or go deep into human lungs. The Batelle analysts conveyed their findings to the head of the FBI Laboratory, Allyson Simons. Their tests showed that the anthrax was not nearly as refined or powerful as the Army people believed.

  OCTOBER 18

  AT TEN o’clock on Thursday morning, three days after the Daschle letter was opened, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty of the National Security Council conducted an interagency conference call. Such calls were made every morning in the first weeks of the anthrax crisis, and were intended to keep federal officials up to speed. Gordon-Hagerty had her hands full. There were about thirty people listening or speaking on the calls, a cloud of voices. That morning she went around to the various agencies: “FBI, what do you have to report?”

  FBI executives in the Strategic Information Operations Center—the SIOC command room—spoke for the FBI. They included Allyson Simons and the head of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Unit, James F. Jarboe. They reported that they were gathering evidence and intelligence on the attacks, and were working closely with the Army to gain a better understanding of the material in the letter that had arrived at the Senate building.

  “Army, what are you reporting?” Gordon-Hagerty said.

  Jahrling, who was sitting in the commander’s office at USAMRIID with Colonel Ed Eitzen, spoke. Choosing his words carefully, because practically the entire executive branch of the federal government was listening to him, he said that USAMRIID had found that the anthrax powder in the letter mailed to Senator Daschle was “professionally done” and “energetic.” By “energetic” he meant that the particles had a tendency to fly up into the air if they were disturbed. A key element in the design of a military bioweapon is the weapon’s intrinsic energy—the capacity of the particles to fly into the air and form an invisible and essentially undetectable cloud, which can travel long distances and fill a building like a gas.

  There were several CDC officials on the call. They were sitting around a conference table in the office of the agency’s number two person, Dr. James M. Hughes. Jahrling’s voice came out of the box on the table in a tinny way, and it’s not at all clear that they understood what he meant by the “energy” of a biopowder. They had not experienced the sight of the anthrax particles floating straight into the air off a spatula—the sight that had prompted John Ezzell to exclaim, “Oh, my God.” Furthermore, they did not know much, if anything, about how weapons-grade anthrax is made. Those methods were classified. Perhaps no one had briefed CDC officials on the methods for weaponizing anthrax spores. The CDC officials were public health doctors, and up until then, they had had no reason to learn the secrets of making a biological weapon. To the CDC officials, Jahrling’s remarks may have sounded like technical jargon, which it was.

  A team of epidemiologists from the CDC was in Washington, working frantically to test five thousand workers on Capitol Hill for exposure to anthrax. They were swabbing the insides of people’s noses, concentrating on the people who had been in the Hart Senate Office Building when the Daschle letter was opened. Several buildings on Capitol Hill had been closed down for testing for anthrax spores. The CDC was stretched paper-thin. Many people had essentially stopped sleeping several days earlier, and they were making decisions in a fog of enormous political pressure and exhaustion. The CDC officials did not think that what Peter Jahrling called the “energetic” or “professional” nature of the anthrax suggested that postal workers in the facilities where the letters had been processed might be in danger.

  “The significance of the words energetic and professional were lost on the CDC people,” Jahrling said to me. “In my view, at the CDC you have a culture of public health professionals who think of biological warfare as such a perversion of science that they find it simply unimaginable.”

  The CDC officials on the call asked Jahrling if he could characterize the particle size. This was an important question, because if the anthrax particles were very small, they could get into people’s lungs, and the powder would be much more deadly.

  Peter Jahrling replied that USAMRIID’s data indicated that the Daschle anthrax was ten times more concentrated and potent than any form of anthrax that had been made by the old American biowarfare program at Fort Detrick in the nineteen sixties. He said that the anthrax consisted of almost pure spores, and that it was “highly aerogenic.”

  Jahrling now says that he was trying to get the attention of the CDC people, trying to warn them that more people could have been exposed than they realized, but it was like waving to someone across a crowded room. “The CDC people were not reacting much,” he said. “I was exasperated. I wasn’t getting any response from them when I said the anthrax was highly aerogenic. I was thinking, ‘When is this thing going to blow up and get everybody’s attention?’”

  Jeffrey Koplan, the director of the CDC, was listening on the call but didn’t speak much. Months later, Koplan said to me, “If we had known that the anthrax would behave like a gas when it got into the air and that it would leak through the pores of the letters, it might have been useful. But would we have done things differently? You can’t say what you would have done differently in the heat and turmoil of an investigation, if only you had known.”

  The spores of anthrax went straight through the paper of the Daschle envelope and other anthrax envelopes full of ultrafine powder that were mailed, though they had been sealed tightly with tape. It seemed that the anthrax terrorist or terrorists had not planned on having the letters kill postal workers. “They weren’t part of the target,” as Koplan put it.

  Paper has microscopic holes in it that are up to fifty times larger than an anthrax spore. If a pore in the envelope paper was a window in a house, then an anthrax spore would be a tangerine sitting on the sill. If you take a sheet of paper (a page of this book, for example) and seal it against your mouth and then blow against the paper, you will feel the warmth of your breath coming through the paper. This suggests what the anthrax spores did when the envelopes were squeezed through the mail-sorting machines.

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK that evening at the Brentwood mail-sorting facility, technicians wearing protective suits and breathing masks began to walk around the machines, testing them with swabs for anthrax spores. The Brentwood facility was up and running, and there were postal workers all around, working at their places by the machines. One of the workers asked the testers, “How come you aren’t testing the
people?”

  Skulls and Bones

  OCTOBER 19, 2001

  THE UNITED STATES had been conducting air strikes in Afghanistan for nearly two weeks, and American special forces were operating inside the country. President George W. Bush and his advisers had indicated that the United States considered Iraq to be a sponsor of terrorism, and that Saddam Hussein led “a hostile regime” that the United States would likely target for destruction when it was finished with the Taliban. In the White House, there was extraordinary concern that the anthrax attacks might have been a clandestine operation sponsored by al-Qaeda or Iraq.

  BEFORE DAWN on Friday morning, four days after the Daschle letter was opened, Peter Jahrling put on a space suit and went into the Submarine and got a tiny sample of live, dry Daschle anthrax. He brought it out inside double tubes, for safety, and put the tubes in a radiation pile—a cobalt irradiator—which fried the DNA in the spores, rendering them sterile. He gave the sample to Tom Geisbert, so that Geisbert could look at the dry anthrax in a scanning electron microscope.

  Geisbert carried the tube of dry anthrax into his microscope lab, set the tube in a tray, and turned his attention elsewhere. A minute later, he happened to glance at the tube. The anthrax was gone.

  Yet the cap of the tube was closed.

  “What the heck?” he said out loud.

  He picked up the tube and stared at it. Empty. He tapped the cap with his finger, and the particles appeared and fell down to the bottom of the tube—they had gotten stuck underneath the cap, somehow.

  He went back to work. A minute later, he glanced over at the tube. The anthrax was gone again. He tapped the cap, and the anthrax fell to the bottom. He stared at the bone-colored particles. Now he saw them climbing the walls of the tube, dancing along the plastic, heading upward.

  His assistant, Denise Braun, was working nearby. “Denise, you’ll never believe this.”

  The anthrax was like jumping beans; it seemed to have a life of its own.

  He began preparing a sample for the scope. He opened the tube and tapped a little bit of the anthrax onto a piece of sticky black tape that would hold the powder in place. But the anthrax bounced off the tape. The particles wouldn’t stick. Eighty percent of the Daschle particles flittered away in air currents up into the hood. That was when he understood that the Hart Building was utterly contaminated.

  He somehow managed to get some of the particles to stick to the tape. He hurried the sample into the scope room, put it under a scanning scope, and zoomed in. What he saw shocked him.

  The spores were stuck together into chunks that looked like moon rocks. They reminded him of grinning jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, hip sockets, and Halloween goblin faces. The anthrax particles had an eroded, pitted look, like meteorites fallen to earth. Most chunks were very tiny, sometimes just one or two spores, but there were also boulders. One boulder looked to him like a human skull, with eye sockets and a jaw hanging open and screaming. It was an anthrax skull.

  The skulls were falling apart. He could see them crumbling into tiny clumps and individual spores, smaller and smaller as he watched. This was anthrax designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions. He had a national-security clearance, and he knew something about anthrax, but he could not imagine how this weapon had been made. It looked extremely sinister. He started feeling shaky.

  He called Jahrling. “Pete, I’m in the scope room. Can you come up here, like right now?”

  Jahrling ran upstairs, closed the door, and stared at the skull anthrax for a long time. He didn’t say much. Geisbert’s security clearance was rated secret, and the details of how this material could have been made might be more highly classified.

  A reference sample of pure anthrax spores, similar in character to the weapons-grade “skull anthrax” in the Daschle letter. The spores are about one micron (one millionth of a meter) across; roughly two hundred spores lined up in a row would span the thickness of a human hair. (Courtesy of Tom Geisbert, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.)

  Not long afterward, Jahrling apparently went to the Secure Room and had the classified safe opened. He studied a document or documents with red-slashed borders that would appear to contain exact technical formulas for various kinds of weapons-grade anthrax. In the papers, there were almost certainly secrets for making skull anthrax of the type he had just seen in the scope.

  Jahrling refers to the secret of skull anthrax as the Anthrax Trick, although he won’t discuss it. Could this stuff have been made in Iraq? Could this be an American trick? Who knew the Anthrax Trick?

  TOM GEISBERT arrived home in Shepherdstown very late. He had been going on maybe three hours of sleep a night for days, but now he had insomnia. He was afraid that his findings about the skull quality of the anthrax meant that it had come from a military biowarfare lab. Finally, he woke up Joan. “I could start a war with Iraq,” he said to her. He seemed on the edge of tears. Joan reminded him that he was a scientist and that all he could do was find the truth and report it, wherever it led. “We just have to let the data play out however it plays out,” she said. “Other people are working on the anthrax, too.”

  He did not sleep that night.

  LATE ON SUNDAY, October 21st to 22nd, Joseph P. Curseen, Jr., the Brentwood postal worker who thought he had the flu, felt really bad. He had not been to work since Tuesday night. He went to the emergency room at Southern Maryland Hospital Center, where doctors looked at him and sent him home. He was dying, but they didn’t see it. That same day, another Brentwood worker, Leroy Richmond, who had called in sick to work earlier in the week, was admitted to the Inova Fairfax Hospital with a presumptive diagnosis of inhalation anthrax, which had been made by an alert emergency room doctor named Thom Mayer. Richmond would eventually survive under the care of doctors at the Fairfax Hospital. That night, at about 11:00 P.M., Brentwood worker Thomas L. Morris, Jr., who had first begun to feel sick during a bowling league event some days before, called 911. He was feeling as if he was about to die, and he told the dispatcher he thought he had anthrax. An ambulance took him to the Greater Southeast Community Hospital, where before nine o’clock the next morning he was pronounced dead. Shortly after Morris died, the Brentwood mail-sorting facility was closed down by order of the postmaster general, and two thousand postal workers were told to start taking antibiotics. Joseph Curseen returned to the emergency room at Southern Maryland Hospital Center on Monday morning and died in the hospital in the early afternoon.

  At the mail-sorting facility in Hamilton, New Jersey, a suburb of Trenton, postal workers had been exposed to anthrax, too, because the letters had all been mailed somewhere near Trenton. The Daschle letter had gone through the Hamilton facility en route to Brentwood. A tiny quantity of spores had ended up in the air at the Hamilton mail-sorting facility, and now three postal workers had become infected, as well, two with skin anthrax and one with the inhalation kind.

  MEANWHILE IN WASHINGTON, the FBI Laboratory was trying to evaluate the anthrax. On the same day that the two Brentwood workers died, a meeting was held at FBI headquarters involving the Laboratory, scientists from the Batelle Memorial Institute, and scientists from the Army. Batelle and the Army people were doing what scientists do best: disagreeing totally with one another. The Army scientists were telling the FBI that the powder was extremely refined and dangerous, while a Batelle scientist named Michael Kuhlman was allegedly saying that the anthrax was ten to fifty times less potent than the Army was claiming. Allyson Simons, the head of the Laboratory, was having trouble sorting through the disagreement, and she was apparently not telling the CDC leadership much about the powder, while waiting for more data to come in. One Army official is said to have blown up at Simons and Kuhlman at the meeting, saying to the Batelle man, “Goddamn it, you stuck your anthrax in an autoclave, and you turned it into hockey pucks.” He told Simons that she should “call the CDC and at least tell them there is a disagreemen
t over this anthrax.” She apparently did not.

  The Department of Health and Human Services was not get-ting briefed about the anthrax to its satisfaction by the FBI. An HHS official who was close to the situation but who did not want her name used had this to say about the Batelle analysis of the Daschle anthrax: “It was one of the most screwed-up situations I’ve ever heard of. The people at Batelle took the anthrax and heated it in an autoclave, and this caused the material to clump up, and then they told the FBI it looked like puppy chow. It was like a used-car dealer offering a car for sale that’s been in an accident and is covered with dents, and the dealer is trying to claim this is the way the car looked when it was new.”

  THE FBI BEGAN delivering about two hundred forensic samples a day to USAMRIID, frequently in Hueys. Choppers were coming in day and night on a pad near the building. HMRU agents and other FBI Laboratory people began to work inside suite AA3, which ended up being dedicated entirely to forensic analysis and processing samples. The work was done by USAMRIID’s Diagnostic Systems Division, headed by an Army microbiologist, Lieutenant Colonel Erik Henchal. The samples were largely environmental swabs—from the Brentwood postal facility, from Capitol Hill, from postal facilities in New Jersey, and from New York City. Each sample was a piece of federal criminal evidence and had to be documented with green chain-of-custody forms. Institute scientists ran ten separate tests on each sample, and every sample ended up matched to an evidence-tracking folder with more than one hundred sheets of paper in it. The hallways of the Institute were jammed with filing boxes full of these folders. In the end, USAMRIID scientists would analyze more than thirty thousand samples related to the anthrax terrorism—far more than any other lab, including the CDC.