A new state of fear
Anthrax and warnings of more terror send America into higher anxiety
In a nation most definitely on edge, the news sent icy chills down spines from coast to coast. It tumbled out almost hourly. On Saturday, Nevada officials revealed that the contents of a suspicious letter mailed to a Microsoft office in Reno had tested positive for anthrax, exposing as many as six people to the dreaded disease. Just the day before, in New York, an aide to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw had tested positive for anthrax, apparently after opening another envelope bearing a suspicious powder. Both discoveries came hard on the heels of reports from Florida that three workers at American Media Inc. also had been exposed to and one had died of the bacterium, long favored as a biological weapon. The offices sat only miles away from airports where Osama bin Laden's hijackers had trained and asked about crop-dusters.
In the panic that followed the initial reports, the few patterns that emerged only fed the fears. Mysterious powders were also found last week in letters to the New York Times and the St. Petersburg Times, as well as on a floor at the U.S. State Department. Preliminary tests on those powders have all come up negative for anthrax. But not so with a brown granular substance mailed September 18 from Trenton, N.J., to NBC. That, like the powder mailed to Microsoft, was anthrax and is believed to be the sample that infected Brokaw's aide.
Suspicions. As in a bad sci-fi movie, technicians in hazmat suits and gas masks marched into offices, quarantining rooms and decontaminating employees. At the New York Times, terrorism reporter Judith Miller opened a letter Friday morning to find an angry note threatening an attack on Chicago's Sears Tower--and a white substance that she promptly got on herself. Soon, specialists were taping off the area around her desk and carting away boxes of material. More than 30 Times staffers were tested and appear unaffected. Still, media organizations around the country shut down their mailrooms and passed around an FBI advisory on suspicious packages, warning about strange odors, misspelled words, and oily stains. Magazine editor Geoff Van Dyke, who watched as New York police and the National Guard sealed off his street, remembers thinking: "What is this world coming to? Will this ever end?"
Not anytime soon. That, at least, was the message from America's top officials. Even as Attorney General John Ashcroft stressed there was no apparent connection between the anthrax cases and bin Laden, Vice President Dick Cheney said the country "should proceed on the basis that it could be linked." And the FBI released a rare public alert warning of imminent terrorist assaults, relying, in part, on intercepted orders to bin Laden operatives to launch new attacks. Said Ashcroft, "Every American should be vigilant."
Vigilant they are, but the sudden worries over anthrax have also heightened a wave of paranoia and made it all too clear how quickly the rules have changed. As the nation stood at its highest state of alert since World War II, everyone from presidential bodyguards to small-town cops were on guard. The FBI has shifted agents away from its investigation of the September 11 hijackings to concentrate on new threats. In New York, the National Guard searched the trunks of drivers entering Manhattan. In Washington, D.C., police have banned all trucks from arteries leading to the Capitol. Passengers on the Washington-to-New York shuttle were made to sip from their carry-on coffees before boarding. Alice Gold, a Los Angeles advertising consultant, moved her son's birthday party from Disneyland to a shopping mall, only to decide that even the mall was too risky.
In the air above the nation's biggest cities, meanwhile, armed F-16 fighter jets now patrol the corridors. Twice last week, the jets scrambled to escort U.S. airliners with unruly passengers, including a mentally ill man who rushed an American Airlines cockpit. And back on terra firma, no place, it seemed, was too small to escape the jitters. In Dodge City, Kan., local police ran sweeps every two hours at the town's tiny airport where, just days earlier, concrete barriers had been put up to keep drivers from the terminal.
False alarms are adding to the tension. Police in the nation's capital have seen a fourfold jump in bomb threats. Bogus E-mails have raced through the Internet, warning Americans to avoid malls on Halloween, swamping FBI switchboards with calls from concerned parents. Anxious consumers stocked up on gas masks and antianthrax drugs.
If America seems under siege, the warnings of a major new terror attack appear, at least for now, only precautionary, albeit wisely so. Officials tell U.S. News they have no concrete intelligence of any specific imminent threat. Because they have not located all associates of the September 11 hijackers, and with U.S. military action underway, they have no choice but to prepare for the worst.
The worst may be very bad indeed. For decades, terrorists were menacing figures wielding machine guns and bombs, capable of inflicting damage but not of derailing whole societies. They wanted, in the words of analyst Brian Jenkins, "a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead."
New age of terror. That, clearly, is no longer the case. The roots of change began with the 1995 nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subway by the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult. Since then, terrorism experts have predicted the rise of a kind of superterrorism, fueled not by political creed but by religious and apocalyptic zeal. The tools of this new age in terror, they warn, are weapons of mass destruction--chemical, biological, and nuclear arms--and the goals are mass murder on an unimaginable scale.
Scary stuff, but given the results of the Aum attack, an influential group of analysts argue that the chances of a major chem-bio attack are exaggerated. They point out that all 10 of Aum's biological attacks, using anthrax and botulinus toxin, failed completely. The cult's most devastating attack, with the nerve agent sarin, killed only 12 people. The problem, experts say, is that should terrorists find the resources to create these agents--no easy task--"weaponizing" them would pose daunting challenges, even for countries like Iraq. As bad as the anthrax scares are today, say experts, they remain localized and under control. "To make the huge quantities required to inflict casualties is very tough," says analyst Amy Smithson of the Henry L. Stimson Center. Their best use, in fact, may be in causing chaos--what one expert calls weapons of mass distraction.
Still, the problem facing the public mirrors that faced by counterterrorism officials: gauging the level of threat. Terrorist use of a true weapon of mass destruction poses what analysts call "high consequence, low probability"--an event unlikely to happen, but devastating if it does.
Most security experts agree that the simpler, more conventional threats are the most likely. Machine-gunning shoppers on a crowded street, staging car bombings, even crashing jets, are relatively easy to do and terrifying to the public. The hijackers reportedly also considered attacks on Chicago's Sears Tower, Disney parks, and Minnesota's Mall of America. Of 200 terrorist attacks last year against U.S. targets overseas, all but 21 were bombings, followed by 11 kidnappings and four armed attacks. None involved chemical or biological weapons.
A chemical attack is thought easier to stage than a biological one, and a nuclear attack is believed toughest of all. Easier than constructing a chemical agent is simply attacking an industrial plant or crashing a truckload of toxic material. Attacking a nuclear power plant is another nightmare scenario. Still another worry is that terrorists could hit at other vulnerable points in America's infrastructure--the vast web of computers, communication lines, pipelines, roads, and more that keeps the nation's business humming. And a determined cyberattack could impact key systems ranging from air traffic control to ATM transactions.
Worse, America has never faced an enemy quite like bin Laden's al Qaeda. Its wily operatives have shown an uncanny knack for exploiting America's vulnerabilities while also changing tactics--employing truck bombs in Africa, boat bombs in the Middle East, and kamikaze air attacks in the United States. Equally worrisome, the group has grown skilled at conducting simultaneous operations. Intelligence analysts are now convinced that the September 11 hijackings were part of a larger campaign that included attacks in Europe and the Middle East.
A skilled strategist, bin Laden may well have already plotted his counterattack against America, although targets overseas are easier to hit. "The biggest threat is overseas in Islamic countries, where they've got a presence, a network," says Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official. "They're going to go for soft targets in the least defended places--Kentucky Fried Chickens, McDonald's."
With Americans on their guard, though, it may be tougher than ever for al Qaeda's terrorists to strike here at home. Moreover, officials stress that bin Laden's training camps have been destroyed, his operatives seized, and his finances frozen. Similarly, the anthrax scare also should be put in perspective, they say. Until the hijackings, federal officials had dealt with 171 anthrax cases since 1998--all of them hoaxes. Still, that's small comfort to Americans worried about what might be in the morning mail.
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Chemical plants are an all-too-vulnerable target. (Page 31)
What you CAN do to protect yourself and family. (Page 46)
With Nell Boyce, Angie Cannon, Douglas Pasternak, Chitra Ragavan, Kit R. Roane, Linda Robinson, Christopher H. Schmitt, Stacey Schultz, Betsy Streisand and Lisa Griffin
This story appears in the October 22, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.