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THE SCOURGE OF BIOPORT

Coen and Nadler would not be where they were in the autumn of 2008—knee-deep in declassified documents, forensic reports, scribbled notes and interview transcripts; on deadline with a dark film and book about the international biowarfare underworld that encompassed years of globe-trotting, lab-sniffing, interview-begging and dirty-tricks witnessing; on edge about every new underreported anthrax-related revelation; and far more comfortable with bacterial bombshells than they would perhaps care to be—without the work of Stephen Dresch.

Dresch was an independent investigator—a sleuth-for-hire whose constant quarry were corruption, incompetence, professional negligence and government turpitude. He was an intellectual—a former college dean with an Ivy League doctorate in economics who never rid his speech of academe, even when lowering the boom on mobsters or reading the riot act to high-ranked public servants. A Republican-leaning Libertarian from the notoriously independent-minded Upper Peninsula of Michigan—which he represented in the state legislature for two years in the ’90s before being ousted, he always claimed, by Karl Rove’s operatives—Dresch wore the physical trappings of an iconoclast. By the time he entered Coen and Nadler’s realm, age had bleached his full beard and long hair; years of chain smoking had stained his fingers and teeth. He looked, many would comment, more like the Unabomber than a tireless crime buster who harried the FBI to catch America’s most wanted. But even in the last years of his life there was an unquenchable youthful light in his eyes—a ray of determination to somehow lessen the badness caused by the overwhelming abundance of malefactors.

After receiving a doctorate in economics from Yale in 1975, Dresch went to work at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City and then to a think tank in Vienna where he would take frequent research trips behind the Iron Curtain and in the US. His unorthodox career next landed him at Michigan Tech University’s Business and Engineering School in 1985. His five-year tenure as dean of the school culminated in the ouster of several senior officials who, at Dresch’s instigation, were convicted on criminal charges of corruption. From that point, Dresch’s life became one long search for veracity, progressing from easy-game embezzlement into arenas where the truth, if it ever existed, had gone to die. His final investigative obsession, on which he literally expended his last breath, was anthrax.

It would be easy to write off Stephen Dresch, at first blush, as a conspiracy nut. Bob Coen almost did. Any man who knew as much as Dresch did about the comings and goings of Clinton Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols and 1991 World Trade Center terrorist Ramzi Yusuf must be looking for detours between dead ends, he figured. Dresch, Coen would be the first to admit, gave off an aura of mild wackiness. What, after all, is a “high-level forensic economist?” he wondered. And how do you explain the peculiar alter ego Dresch had apparently invented to hang on his website shingle at “Jhêön & Associates”—one Asphasia Quermut Jhêön, who, in addition to being a truth-seeking sidekick, was also, apparently, a bohemian spirit with deep sources in the Bulgarian and Turkish undergrounds. Together, promised the homepage, Dresch and Asphasia represented “an informal association of individuals dedicated to the principles of liberty and devoted to the exposure and extirpation of corruption.” Informal indeed—it was Dresch who answered all of Jhêön’s e-mails.

But that did not change the fact that Dresch had helped support his wife and four kids by completing assignments for clients spanning from Lloyd’s of London to New York wise guys waging war against the Feds’ tough RICO-racketeering statutes. He had proven his chops on more than one occasion, and earned a few headlines. It was his legwork, for example, that helped the Brooklyn District Attorney indict FBI Special Agent Lindley DeVecchio for allegedly assisting a 1992 mob hit in Bensonhurst. The sensational charges were later dismissed under unusual circumstances, but not before Dresch’s partner Angela Clemente was badly beaten in a parking lot by unknown assailants. And it was his tip that led the FBI to a cache of explosives left by the Oklahoma City bombers, presumably to execute a tenth anniversary attack in 2005. The bureau first denied finding anything, then quickly buried details about the cache, which Terry Nichols, serving time for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, had revealed to a fellow inmate (and Dresch client), along with the news that the explosives were originally provided to Timothy McVeigh’s gang during an FBI-sting gone horribly wrong. Dresch pursued proof of the cover-up with nearly as much vigor as he had applied towards preventing a second act of terrorism.

Throughout his gumshoe voyages, Dresch balanced his oddball behavior with a very strict work ethic. For all his talk of “extirpation” and discoveries of “serious mal-, mis- and nonfeasance within the system of criminal justice,” Dresch was a factfinder, not a brainstormer. He cast a wide net for the dots he would connect, but once he did, Dresch was more intent on drawing subpoenas than conclusions. “I resist becoming an inveterate ‘conspiracy theorist,’” he once wrote to Coen, discouraging him from attributing specific motives to one or more players in their anthrax drama. “The answer may be as simple as . . . sloth, indifference, narrow self-interest.”

It was a convoluted path that led Dresch from Oklahoma City to Fort Detrick and secret germ labs abroad. But he wasn’t surprised when it passed close to his own home. Because what he labeled “the international bioweapons mafia”—a mob he considered the biggest threat to humanity in the twenty-first century—had first come to his attention in the Upper Peninsula Michigan landscape. For Stephen Dresch, the case began with a company called BioPort.

BioPort came into being in 1998, when the state-owned Michigan Biological Products Institute (MBPI) was sold at auction for $24 million. The primary investors and new owners were the Lebanese financier Ibrahim El-Hibri and his son Fuad, an international telecom magnate with German and eventually US citizenship. The El-Hibris were reported to be known as “friendly to American interests” but also, according to dicey websites, “close to the bin-Laden family.” It would be a couple more years before Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 hammered home the truth that those weren’t mutually exclusive, but already, the El-Hibris were raising many red flags.

What excited the blood of the conspiracy-mongers was the fact that this little-known facility—MBPI—held the exclusive contract to provide the US government with the anthrax vaccine, and that in addition to the physical plant, the Michigan sale included $130 million in contracts with the Department of Defense. That compelled Dresch, among others, to do some due diligence. He learned that the El-Hibris had participated in the privatization of portions of the United Kingdom’s leading biodefense facility, Porton Down, a decade earlier. As part owners of the spun-off private holdings Porton International and Porton Products, the family was a key player in the sale and distribution of all UK manufactured anthrax vaccine. This included doses sold to Saudi Arabia in a series of deals approved by the British Ministry of Defense in 1990 at a time when the US refused to sell doses to the Saudis. With the acquisition of the Michigan plant, the family had planted stakes in the only two leading anthrax vaccine producers in the West.

The El-Hibris did not have science backgrounds or biotech business experience before the Porton takeover—but were clearly canny investors. What alarmed Dresch—and he was not alone—was the troubling fact that the sale of MBPI to BioPort had transferred control of a sensitive government program to a network of companies, one of which was headquartered offshore in the Dutch Caribbean. Fuad El-Hibri himself informed Congress in 1999 that the controlling shareholder in BioPort—Intervac LLC—was partly owned by I and F Holdings NV, a Netherlands Antilles investment company owned by his father. No one on the House Committee on Government Reform asked him if El-Hibri senior had any partners in I and F Holdings. So a legitimate question was raised: Who actually owned the largest anthrax vaccine manufacturing plant in the West, if not the world? Who really knew?

Dresch began studying just how Ibrahim and Fuad El-Hibri had managed such a sweet arrangement. His attentions focused on the third key player in the BioPort deal, Admiral William J. Crowe, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a 13 percent stakeholder in Intervac, which the El-Hibris used to purchase MBPI and transform it into BioPort. A guy, Dresch surmised, who would have better luck talking the Pentagon into spending money in Michigan than even the most amenable, pro-American Lebanese or German businessmen.

Admiral Crowe, like a disproportionate number of the characters that Dresch collected files on in the 1990s, was born in Oklahoma City. He was a self-styled Anglophile who, after serving as senior military commander under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, endorsed the “draft-dodging” Bill Clinton for president. Crowe landed the British ambassador’s post from the victorious Clinton, which he held for three years before he left government to join the biotech revolution.

The anthrax vaccine peddled by Crowe’s new business partners was made mandatory for most soldiers deployed overseas by the Clinton Defense Department in 1998. This new world order earned him and BioPort the tight scrutiny of a vocal and organized lot of veterans convinced that the maladies suffered by soldiers under the catch-all diagnosis of Gulf War Syndrome were directly linked to the Michigan plant’s anthrax vaccine, which had been administered to about 150,000 troops (members of the US military) during the 1990 war.

Dr. Meryl Nass, a practitioner based in Maine, emerged as an outspoken advocate for the vets. She reported that the vaccine was linked to multiple sclerosis and lupus as well as illnesses symptomatic of Gulf War Syndrome, like memory loss, muscle and joint pain, severe fatigue and gastrointestinal disorders.

Soon after Crowe testified to Congress in 1999 that he had “never, repeat never, solicited any official of this administration” to install or promote a mandatory inoculation program, a spokesman told ABC News that the admiral hadn’t “invested a penny” in BioPort. Dresch could not resist shooting Crowe a note asking “what services have you provided to your partners . . . which warranted their granting to you” a 13 percent interest? He chided the admiral for BioPort’s tripling the cost of its vaccine in its latest military contract (from $3.50 to over $10 a dose). The challenge, typed on Jhêön & Associates letterhead, was copied to the Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform. It was Stephen Dresch’s opening thrust in what would become a prolonged battle for transparency in the corporate universe of biodefense. And throughout his later travels and investigations, BioPort remained in his thoughts: especially when Fuad El-Hibri admitted to Congress in 1999 that he jacked the price of a single dose of the vaccine to $40 when he sold 30,000 doses to the Canadian government for its soldiers destined for the Coalition of the Willing.

Dresch already had an anthrax ax to grind. He had been hired to investigate the sudden death of an Oklahoma City associate of US Commerce Secretary Ron Brown (who, thanks to a suspicious airline crash over Croatia, was also dead). Mr. Ron Miller, 53, was up to his eyeballs in an oil and gas scandal involving an associate of President Bill Clinton, an affair that could have reached the Oval Office, when he dropped dead one morning in 1997 due to “natural causes,” according to the Oklahoma City medical examiner. But Dresch had determined that the postmortems were consistent with inhalation anthrax poisoning’s unique killing mode. On his persistence, the medical examiner officially changed his verdict to “unknown.”

With these two anthrax beachfronts taken, Dresch lit an unfiltered Pall Mall and unstrapped his battle helmet for a moment. But just as soon as he stashed his Bacillus anthracis files in the back end of his cabinet, did the microbe raise its virulent head once more—in post offices along the eastern seaboard. He joined the fray almost immediately, writing congressional investigators and the FBI about leads he thought they should follow and bulking up his own Internet operations.

Dresch was not prepared to point a finger at a single suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. His goal was to get as many fingers pointing into as many secret corners as possible. Dresch was fast concluding that the diabolical powder was the key to a number of as yet unexplained alliances and secret motives. Germ warfare, like politics, he supposed, had made some very strange bedfellows. Every time the news referred to the anthrax letters as an “unprecedented attack on US soil,” Dresch sighed. Already, he warned investigators, it may have been used by assassins aligned with a sitting US president. And there were other precedents, he pointed out, less close to home—enough to warrant a broader search by the FBI—broader than US borders, and far beyond Fort Detrick.

When investigators began focusing on a lone domestic culprit, Dresch quickly sent a corrective missive: “In fact, whether of domestic or foreign origin, these anthrax incidents emerge within the rich context of current and historical, foreign and domestic activity involving lethal biological and chemical agents, and the elements comprising this context are interrelated across time and geography.” The phrases “rich context,” “lethal biological and chemical agents” and “interrelated across time and geography” were all in bold text. The letter was sent to Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Committee on International Relations.

Dresch, of course, suggested that BioPort should be a corporation of interest. In point of fact, Bruce Ivins, working at Fort Detrick, was helping the company out with some technical problems it was having with the vaccine around the time of the attacks. And even the FBI leaked suggestions that one possible motive Ivins had for mailing killer anthrax was to cause a panic, making his vaccine work more valuable. It took the FBI seven years to concede the corporate connection, when it released Ivins’ e-mails detailing some of his frustrations with the vaccine program. It was a rare moment indeed when Stephen Dresch and the FBI were in agreement.