October 2, 2001, Robert Stevens, a photojournalist for the Sun, returned home from a visit to North Carolina. He was exhibiting symptoms of the flu, but when he went to the hospital, doctors admitted him, believing he had developed meningitis. Further testing proved that he had developed pulmonary anthrax, confirmed by the CDC. Robert Stevens died on October 5, 2001, making him the first victim of the 2001 anthrax attack, and the first death from anthrax in 25 years.
Anthrax is an infection caused by the bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, and is spread by contact with the spores of the bacteria, often from infectious animal products, and not spread from person to person. Symptoms begin anywhere from between one day, and two months after the infection is contracted. Pulmonary anthrax is relatively rare. It infects the lymph nodes in the chest, causing a bloody fluid to accumulate in the chest cavity, causing shortness of breath. It appears as though the infected has the flu, complete with fever, shortness of breath, cough, fatigue, and chills. This can continue for hours or even days.
The second stage of pulmonary anthrax occurs when the infection spreads from the lymph nodes to the lungs. Symptoms can present suddenly, hours or even days after the first stage, and include high fever, extreme shortness of breath, shock, and rapid death, usually within 48 hours. Seeking treatment as soon as possible helps, but mortality rates are still high.
So how did a photojournalist, contract pulmonary anthrax?
September 18, 2001, exactly one week after the September 11 attacks, which destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City, damaged the Pentagon, and killed so many on United Flight 91, five letters containing anthrax were mailed. All letters were postmarked September 18, in Trenton, New Jersey, and were sent to ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. Robert Stevens worked for the Sun, published at American Media, Inc in Boca Raton, Florida, the same location as the National Enquirer.
Scientists were only able to get their hands on the NBC News and New York Post letters. Inside, the anthrax appeared as a clumped, coarse, brown granular material, similar to Purina Dog Chow.
October 9, 2001, two more anthrax letters, with the same Trenton postmark, were sent to Democratic Senators, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and Patrick Leahy, of Vermont. Daschle was the Senate Majority leader, and Leahy was the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Daschle letter was opened by an aide, Grant Leslie, on October 15, and the government mail service was shutdown. The Leahy letter was found in an impounded mailbag on November 16.
These letters were more potent than the original anthrax letters. This anthrax was a highly refined, dry powder, with about one gram of nearly pure spores.
In all, at least 22 people developed anthrax infections, 11 of which were inhalational. Only 5 died.
- Robert Stevens, the Sun in Boca Raton, Florida
- Thomas Morris Jr., Brentwood mail facility in Washington DC
- Joseph Curseen, Brentwood mail facility in Washington DC
- Kathy Nguyen, Vietnamese immigrant, working in New York City
- Ottilie Lundgren, 94 year old widow of a prominent judge from Oxford, Connecticut.
Initially, the blame was on Al-Qaeda, and considered a second-wave assault after the 9/11 attacks. White House officials even pressured the FBI Director at the time, Robert Mueller, to prove that this was the handiwork of terrorist mastermind, Osama Bin Laden. However, the FBI believed this couldn’t be the case – the anthrax used could not have been created in the environments available to Al-Qaeda.
President George W. Bush and VP Cheney both speculated publicly about a possible link between the anthrax and Al-Qaeda. Even The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, reported in early October that American scientists had implicated Iraq as the source of the anthrax. The following day, the Wall St. Journal claimed that Al-Qaeda perpetrated the mailings, again, placing Iraq as the source of the anthrax. Even Senator John McCain suggested that the anthrax may have come from Iraq during an interview on the Late Show with David Letterman.
In the following weeks, ABC News began airing a series of reports stating that three or four sources had identified bentonite as an ingredient in the anthrax preparations, further implicating Iraq. The White House and other public officials quickly stated that there was no bentonite in the anthrax used in the letters, yet journalists continued repeating this claim for several years, even after Iraq was invaded, as they continued to bolster their claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and had used them in attacks against the United States.
As tensions continued to rise, the focus on Al-Qaeda continued. Experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) concluded that one of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, Ahmed al-Haznawi, had been exposed to anthrax. Prior to the 9/11 attacks, al-Haznawi and another man went to a Fort Lauderdale, Florida emergency room. He had an ugly, dark lesion on his leg, which he claimed he had received after bumping into a suitcase two months earlier. Christos Tsonas, the treating physician, cleaned the wound and prescribed an antibiotic. He later came to believe that the lesion was “consistent with cutaneous anthrax,” a disease that causes skin lesions.
Experts at Johns Hopkins CCBS interviewed Tsonas and prepared a memorandum that was circulated among top government officials. It stated that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax was “the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available,” and that “such a conclusion of course raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks.”
To further backup this conclusion, several 9/11 hijackers were traced back to living quarters in Boca Raton, Florida, near the workplace of Robert Stevens – the first victim of the anthrax attacks. Their apartments were rented from a real estate agent, who just happened to be the wife of an editor of The Sun, again, where Robert Stevens worked. They attended flight school there, and even a pharmacist in Delray Beach, Florida told the FBI that two of the 9/11 hijackers had entered the pharmacy to treat irritations on their hands, which could have been related to anthrax.
If the 9/11 hijackers were behind the anthrax attacks, then they had to have had an accomplice who stayed behind to mail the letters.
Ultimately, the blame fell on an American scientist. The strain of the anthrax was traced back to a lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland. Bruce Edwards Ivins worked at the government’s biodefense lab, and on April 11, 2007, he was put under periodic surveillance.
But Ivins killed himself on July 29, 2008, overdosing on acetaminophen. August 6, 2008, federal prosecutors declared Ivins to be the sole culprit of the crime.
What really happened, and who was really behind the anthrax attacks? Was Ivins an easy target for the blame? Was it really Al-Qaeda? We may never know.
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