Read other letters about this article

• Tuesday, August 5, 2008 03:00 PM

  Let's also recall the exact series of events:

  Sept 18th: Five attacks were sent - the Brokaw-NBC and New York Post letters were recovered, but CBS, ABC and American Media were not.

  Oct 5th: Death of Robert Stevens in Florida.

  Oct 9th: After this minimal public response, two more anthrax letters were sent - these ones clearly labeled with "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX" - to Daschle and Leahy. ( www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/detect/antdetect_letters_a.htm - see bottom of page)

  Oct 15th: Daschle's office opened the letter, saw the note, and called the FBI.

  Oct 16th: The USAMRIID, Detrick MD begins analysis of the anthrax powder that had been delivered by the FBI Hazmat team. The first concern was to rule out the presence of smallpox or other deadly viruses. The analysis was carried out by Tom Geisbert and Peter Jahrling:

  An anthrax spore is five times larger than a smallpox particle. He was looking for bricks of pox, so he was looking for little objects, searing spore by spore.... he noticed some sort of goop clinging to the spores. It made the spores look like fried eggs - the spores were the yolks, and the goop was the white. It was a kind of splatty stuff...[silica]

  General Parker and Peter Jahling went by the office of the USAMRIID commander, Colonel Ed Eitzen, and then the three menwent upstairs to the scope room, where Tom Geisbert was staring at the anthrax... Parker sat down at the scope and looked. Pure spores.

  No way do you get pure spores by lyophilizing wet anthrax spore slurry as the FBI claims Ivins did.

  Oct 17th:

  At ten-thirty that morning, the House of Representatives was closed down... Major General John Parker went to the U.S. Senate, where he met with a caucus of the Senate leadership... He told them that he'd looked at the anthrax himself in the microscope and that it was essentially pure spores.

  Pay attention, now - that same day:

  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... in West Jefferson, Ohio, near Columbus, at the Hazardous Materials Research Center of the Battelle Memorial Institute, a nonprofit scientific research and consulting organization. Battelle scientists took the hatbox into a lab... Their tests showed that the anthrax was not nearly as refined or powerful as the Army people believed.

  That is the very same Battelle who operated the Dugway Utah biowarfare center, and who had previously contracted with both the CIA and the DIA on anthrax projects known as Jefferson and Clear Vision...

  Oct 18th: The National Security Council, led by Lisa Gordon-Haggerty, discusses the anthrax attacks.

  Jahrling, who was sitting in the commander's office at USAMRIID with Colonel Ed Eitzen, spoke...he said that USAMRIID had found that the anthrax powder in the letter mailed to Senator Daschle was "professionally done" and "energetic."

  Oct 19th: Continued analysis of the Daschle spores at Detrick:

  ...The particles wouldn't stick. Eighty percent of the Daschle particles flittered away in air currents up 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...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 called Jahrling. "Peter, 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."

  Oct 22nd

  Death of Joseph P. Curseen, Jr. and Thomas L. Morris, Jr. - employees in the Brentwood mail-sorting facility.

  Now, Battelle (in a panic?) steps in again:

  On the same day that two Brentwood workers died, a meeting was held at FBI headquarters involving the Laboratory, scientists from the Battelle Memorial Insitute, and scientists from the Army... The Army scientists were telling the FBI that the powder was extremely rarified and dangerous, while a Battelle 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 Battelle man, "Goddamn it, you stuck your anthrax in an autoclave, and you turned it into hockey pucks."

  There you are. Soon after, a massive FBI investigation leads them to Dugway Utah, as reported in multiple press outlets on Dec 21, 2001. Within weeks, the entire lead FBI team is sacked, and all attention is refocused on Hatfill and Detrick, and the press goes silent for a few years, while Battelle pulls in $1 billion in biowarfare contracts.

  Quotes taken from Richard Preston, The Demon in the Freezer (2002).

  —CargoCult Read CargoCult's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel