Читать книгу Anthrax War - Bob Coen - Страница 11

A PERSON OF INTEREST

Steven Hatfill is broad-shouldered in the way that makes his suit coat sit funny unless his arms are crossed in front of him like a bouncer. He walks with a slight limp that he sometimes attributes to a combat wound. He has a deep cowlick and a grim set to his mouth. He looks like a mashup of a Soviet apparatchik and used car salesman, but he’s also gifted with natural charm. Not to mention expertise on scuba and submarine medicine. He could save you if you got the bends. Or got sucked out of a depressurized plane. He can do a skin graft or a C-section and he’s worked with monkeys infected with the Ebola and Marburg viruses. When the FBI named Hatfill a “person of interest,” a bioweapons specialist who trained CIA agents and commandos in counter-terrorism and germ-warfare preparedness, he fought back.

In October 2001, Steven Hatfill was developing a mobile germ unit similar in schemata to the units the Bush administration would shortly be accusing Iraq of building. The unit would be used for training, it was posited, since it would be “real in all its non-functioning parts,” including a mill that would grind anthrax into inhalable powder. The project, contracted out to Hatfill’s then-employer Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), was considered “highly classified,” perhaps because it skirted the 1972 ban on biological weapons. Whatever its covert nature, the secret Pentagon project was nothing but suspicious to FBI agents on the hunt for an anthrax assassin. Investigators were also struck by an earlier Hatfill endeavor—a paper outlining bioterrorism scenarios, and detailing, in particular, the most effective method of staging an anthrax attack, using fine powder, delivered in the mail. Hatfill did not author the paper; he only commissioned it from an anthrax specialist who held multiple patents for the weaponization of the bacteria. But soon after its publication someone appeared to follow its blueprint, which, along with the mobile germ unit, had Hatfill’s name on it, and so Hatfill became, in August 2002, a target in the Amerithrax investigation. This formal interest-taking by the government happened in a press conference, not in a court of law. Hatfill was never charged with a crime, but he was dogged by the Feds 24/7 for the next five years.

Hatfill made good TV, so camera crews would frequently tag after the agents in their slow-moving pursuit. There were the raids on his apartment and a search of his rented storage facility in Florida, carried out by bloodhounds and men in Hazmat suits. There was heavy machinery for dredging of the pond in the hills of the nature reserves overlooking Fort Detrick with implications that Hatfill himself had dumped his toys in the isolated spot—federal agents helpfully provided a helicopter to the media to film the $250,000 operation from on high. There was the near comic confrontation between Hatfill and his handlers on a Georgetown street, ending in the FBI car running over the suspect’s foot and a policeman handing the offended party a ticket for “walking to create a hazard.” Everything this guy did, it seemed, was malice aforethought.

Hatfill’s resume was curious to be sure. And it was not without its incriminating moments. For starters, much of it was made up. Hatfill’s lawyer Tom Connolly admitted as much on the television newsmagazine 60 Minutes when he said in reference to his client’s “forged” PhD diploma: “Listen, if puffing on your resume made you the anthrax killer, then half this town should be suspect.”

But Hatfill was bolder. He huffed and he puffed and lambasted the FBI with two back-to-back press conferences in which he accused the bureau of launching a smear campaign. “A person of interest,” he told journalists sarcastically, “is someone who comes into being when the government is under intense political pressure to solve a crime but can’t do so, either because the crime is too difficult to solve or because the authorities are proceeding in what can mildly be called a wrongheaded manner.” He spoke for twenty minutes and declined to take questions. Some reporters said he was close to tears. Other observers saw a man capable of extreme measures of self-defense. Don’t mess with Hatfill. He might give you a case of the bends. Or Marburg.

What he did do was sue.

It wasn’t Hatfill’s germ unit or his ties to “spooky contractors” like SAIC, a well-connected Beltway outfit with military and intelligence contracts (whose acronym, it was frequently pointed out, should be played backwards like a Beatles record), that made him a person of interest to Coen. It was the fact that long before he had become a “rising star in the world of biological defense,” an expert tapped by both the Pentagon and by the UN weapons inspectors program, Hatfill was messing around in Africa.

Doing his own research, Coen traced Hatfill’s resume: a biology degree from a Kansas college and a short stint at the Army’s Fort Bragg installation, followed by a year in Zaire to work with a Methodist missionary doctor. Coen took note. He found that he could never rid his voice of quotation marks when he spoke of Hatfill’s unorthodox medical background, since from his time in Rhodesia he knew that one of the favorite covers for CIA operatives based in Zaire supporting the US-backed faction in the civil war next door in Angola, was, in fact, the guise of missionaries.

Africa apparently appealed to Hatfill, as did the nineteen-year-old daughter of the Methodist doctor. Hatfill and Caroline Eschtruth were married in 1976, but less than a year later, Angolan rebels backed by Cubans seized Hatfill’s father-in-law, Glenn Eschtruth, during a cross-border incursion into Zaire. His body was found a few weeks later.

In 1978, Hatfill left his wife and moved on to medical school. This is where Coen’s interest really picked up. Because the school Hatfill enrolled in was the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, Rhodesia.

“What a curious place for an American to do his residency. Curious time too. At the height of one of Africa’s bloodiest race wars,” Coen noted to Nadler. “It looks like he had quite a temper. When he failed a course, he got pissed off and smashed an office window. But here’s the crucial thing. You know who taught at Godfrey Huggins? Bob Symington, that’s who.”

Robert Symington was the head of anatomy at Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine and considered the father of Rhodesia’s biological and chemical weapons program. According to reports, he recruited like-minded students to work on his secret experiments that included crude weaponization of anthrax, ricin, and thallium. Coen took note that around that same time Hatfill has claimed that he was working with Rhodesia’s Special Air Service (SAS), an Army special forces unit some say was involved in the deployment of chemical and biological agents.

Later, at the end of the Rhodesian war, Symington joined tens of thousands of other white Rhodesians fleeing south ahead of the transfer of power to a democratically elected black government. Symington reportedly assisted South Africa, the last bastion of white rule on the continent, with its sinister covert germ warfare programs: the apartheid regime’s Project Coast.

Steven Hatfill, after completing his medical degree, also moved to South Africa. He was attached at various hospitals as well as a mission to Antarctica. After his adventures in Africa, Hatfill returned to America—not to the heartland, but to the biological weapons orbit around Washington, DC where he worked at the National Institutes of Health, then at Fort Detrick, and then at SAIC where he worked on the mock-up of a “bioterrorist laboratory” for training exercises. Hatfill was apparently connected with well-wired operators on two continents. “This is a guy who’s been around some very interesting places,” said Nadler.

“And now someone is making him the fall guy,” added Coen.

Neither journalist was surprised when in July 2008, Hatfill was awarded $5.8 million for damages in his case against the US government. “He’s a rugged man who fought back hard. They’re paying him to just go away. I haven’t even heard a hint of a book deal—which is par for the course in DC scandals,” Nadler summed up. A month later, the FBI officially exonerated the man they had dogged, saying Hatfill “was not involved in the anthrax mailings.” But the admission came only after the Ivins death. The contrast between the swaggering virologist punching his way out of his jam, and the brooding tormented dead man who took his place was stark. The FBI had been burned and learned its lesson: Don’t tangle with the tough guy.

But Hatfill didn’t go too far away. He continued to pound at other parties he held responsible for his lost reputation and career, suing the New York Times and Vanity Fair for libel and defamation. And when the bureau that had dogged him for years was put on the hotseat and grilled by Specter and Grassley over the Ivins affair in September 2008, Hatfill was sitting in the gallery. Making an entrance not unlike a tomcat fat with canary, the maligned man turned millionaire basked in the flash of cameras before taking his seat next to a brigade of so-called Pink Ladies—ubiquitous protesters who feel at home when denouncing authority. Hatfill glanced down at his neighbor’s sign: “We Don’t Trust the FBI,” but made no response.

Only when Senator Leahy rebuked Director Mueller for wasting time and money in the Hatfill affair and asked him, “Isn’t he owed an apology?” did Hatfill’s tough-guy demeanor crack—and he smiled.

The next day Coen and Nadler drove out of the capital and headed for Frederick, Maryland. They drove past Fort Detrick, where both Hatfill and Ivins had risen to prominence in the USAMRIID labs. “A giant germ factory,” mused Coen. Then they drove past the homes of both scientists—Ivins’ modest bungalow, Hatfill’s empty unit in the Detrick Plaza Apartments—just minutes apart and with views of the top-secret facility’s security fence. Finally, they cruised past the funeral home where Bruce Ivins’ remains awaited their final disbursement. The journalists drove some moments contemplating this latest anthrax grave. “Dead men tell no tales . . .” noted Nadler. “Unless he left e-mails.” Coen nodded. He was thinking that Ivins was just the latest in a procession of germ war scientists who knew some awful truths about secret knowledge and died under mysterious circumstances. “The body count is rising,” said Coen.