Anthrax Nation
There are few things as universal as the mail. And that's why we worry now when the postman rings. Should we?
The difference is that nobody is trying to murder us with the flu, and those mailing out anthrax, especially the altered, highly deadly form sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, are. But who are these death-by-mail terrorists? The identities of the September 11 hijackers were known within hours, but the anthrax mailers remain a mystery, even though theories abound. A U.S. official told U.S. News that it is "the FBI's hunch that a single, homegrown terrorist--maybe foreign born--may have been sending out all these letters." Bioterrorism expert Gary Eifried says the sophistication of the anthrax sent to Daschle does not, as some first speculated, necessarily point to a foreign country. "He had to be a biochemist or microbiologist," Eifried says, "not just some guy off the street," but the anthrax could have been developed in a laboratory located at a local college in the United States.
Germ doctors. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters Friday that the high-powered anthrax sent to Daschle had to have been "produced by a Ph.D. microbiologist, and it would have to have been done in a small, well-equipped microbiology lab," but that it could be foreign or domestic. U.S. intelligence has yet to make a determination on the origin. "We have not ruled out it being a biological Unabomber or some fringe domestic group," says one U.S. official. "We are also not ruling out the possibility of overseas involvement." But Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA official, says that some officials are leaning toward a domestic source for the terrorism. "I don't think there is anything that says this can't be done in the United States by someone with some expertise and access to a research lab," he says.
President Bush said that he didn't yet know who the anthrax mailers are but seemed to indicate that anyone that evil could not be American. "We don't know yet," he told business, trade, and agricultural leaders meeting in the East Room of the White House. "But we do know the evil one who thinks in ways that we can't possibly think in America--so destructive, such a low regard for human life. And anybody who puts anthrax, trying to kill American citizens, shares the same set of values." One official close to the case says, "They're operating on the theory that this was a second wave of attacks." Among the leads being pursued: Arab-Americans with backgrounds in biotech, medicine, and pharmacology in the New Jersey area (the Daschle letter and a letter sent to NBC anchor Tom Brokaw were postmarked Trenton, N.J.); people who obtained large prescriptions of Cipro before September 11; and associates of the hijackers and other extremists. Last August, Gregg Chatterton, a pharmacist at Huber Healthmart Drugs in Delray Beach, Fla., says two men he later identified as Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, two of the September 11 suicide hijackers, wandered into his pharmacy. Chatterton approached the men to see if they needed any help and noticed Atta's hands were flaming red. "Both hands were red from the wrist down," recalls Chatterton. "If you filled your sink with bleach and stuck your hands in there for six hours, they would come out red," he says, "and that is what they looked like." Chatterton thought the two men might have been construction workers, who often get red, irritated hands, or perhaps Atta had been gardening and had an allergic reaction. "I asked [Atta] if he had done any gardening," says Chatterton, "and he was very rude and just pooh-poohed me. He said: `I don't garden.' " Chatterton finally sold Atta a 1-ounce tube of "acid mantle," a medication that helps replenish your skin, says Chatterton. Shehhi also bought a bottle of Robitussin for what Chatterton described as a hacking cough. Chatterton believes Atta's red hands were a result of frequent washing with bleach, perhaps, or some other chemical. Chatterton had seen many photographs of cutaneous anthrax when he served on the infectious control committee of several local hospitals. "It did not look like cutaneous anthrax," he says. Chatterton described the two men as "well dressed and well groomed" but very rude. "It was like meeting Hitler," he says of Atta. A Czech cabinet minister Friday became the first official to publicly acknowledge that Atta also met with an Iraqi intelligence agent during a trip to the Czech Republic several weeks before the agent was expelled on April 22. Government officials told the Associated Press that the agent, Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, had been under surveillance by Czech intelligence, who believe he might have been involved in plotting an attack on the headquarters of Radio Free Europe.
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