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DEATH IN THE MAIL

Bob Coen arrived in New York just two months after hijacked jets slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. It was a hell of a welcome back for a man who had fled the violence of Zimbabwe for the sake of his newborn son. Like many New Yorkers, Coen experienced a certain atmospheric anxiety throughout that extraordinary autumn; some moments of mild panic as he tucked his son in at night, making sure his bedroom window was closed against the choking cloud that still hung over lower Manhattan and draped the river between his Brooklyn apartment and the still-burning pit of Ground Zero.

But it was the anthrax in the letters that made Bob Coen stop sleeping at night.

The first batch of anonymous missives was mailed via regular US Mail the week after 9/11, postmarked September 18 in Trenton, New Jersey. One of the envelopes was addressed to Tom Brokaw at NBC News. Inside was a note that read 09-11-01 this is next / take penacilin now / death to america / death to israel / allah is great. Also inside was a powdered substance. Brokaw never opened the letter, but his assistant did and broke out in a nasty rash. The opened letter, turned over to authorities, tested positive for anthrax spores.

Bacillus anthracis is a bacterium that occurs naturally throughout the world. Just not usually in Rockefeller Center or in Boca Raton, Florida, where the first fatal anthrax infection took its victim. Rather, anthrax is generally found in the blood of grazing animals—cows, goats and sheep. When an animal dies and decomposes in the environment, the bacterium is released as spores that can resist almost any force in nature and linger dormant in the soil for years or decades. The majority of anthrax victims (and there are up to 200,000 a year according to the World Health Organization) are therefore generally farmers, veterinarians and meat-workers. They are usually infected through the skin. Cutaneous anthrax causes blisters and ulcers. It is easily treatable and rarely fatal. But the second wave of letters to find a human target, letters that were sent to the offices of Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle, contained a fine powder, created to cause pulmonary anthrax, in which the pathogen enters the respiratory system, spreads to the lymph nodes, and from there chases through the blood stream releasing the deadly bacteria throughout the body. Pulmonary anthrax causes lesions, hemorrhaging and in ninety-nine cases out of one hundred, death within a week. Until the deaths that came by mail, there had been only eighteen recorded cases of pulmonary anthrax in the United States in the twentieth century. The last one was in 1978, when a knitter became too enamored with the smell of his imported yarn.

Anthrax was a microbiological breakthrough. It was anthrax that demonstrated, in 1876 to a German biologist named Robert Koch, how bacteria cause disease. One hundred years later it was widely considered the ideal biological weapon—cheap to make, convenient to stockpile and easily modified with modern genetic engineering techniques. Most major nations have experimented, tested or stockpiled the stuff for ostensibly defensive purposes in case of a biological war. Some have actually used it, deliberately or unintentionally. In these state-sponsored labs, each country has developed its strand of anthrax, varying in natural regional mutation or genetically engineered makeup, and therefore, in virulence. But even with these national anthrax “trademarks,” it is difficult to track the source of any one strain because transfers from lab to lab and even country to country have gone almost entirely undocumented since the international community outlawed weaponized anthrax thirty years ago. FBI agents hunting the source of the anthrax in the October letters would have almost as tough a time as the Hazmat crews rifling through millions of envelopes in post offices up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

Within ten days of the first mailing, many people were infected, but none of them was diagnosed. Only when Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the tabloid Sun in Boca Raton, was confirmed to have died on October 5 from inhalation anthrax did the story grow legs. By then, a second batch of anthrax-tainted letters had been mailed—among them were envelopes addressed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, postmarked October 9. Daschle’s letter appeared to be from a precocious youngster with a social studies assignment—the return address said 4th grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park, New Jersey. The town exists. The school does not. Inside this envelope was a note like those sent to newsrooms in September with a few more helpful lines reading: We Have This Anthrax. / You Die Now. Once they arrived, the country was well primed for another panic. Congress shut down for the first time in modern history, newsrooms began plying employees with the antibiotic ciprofloxacin (Cipro), and Senator John McCain told David Letterman that the anthrax might have come from Iraq. Within a week, there were two dead postal workers in Washington, DC.

By the end of October, there were twenty-two anthrax victims. Four of them were dead: They were Robert Stevens, Kathy Nguyen, Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen. Their names, like those of collateral damage throughout history, have since returned to near obscurity, despite the fact that their deaths sparked a national panic, revived a booming biodefense industry and birthed a federal probe that stretched across six continents, interviewing more than 9,000 people and issuing 6,000 subpoenas.

The fatalities ended in an inexplicable coda one month later, when a ninety-four-year-old woman in Connecticut with no link to the media or to politics died of inhalation anthrax. Her name was Ottilie Lundgren and for a time after her death, many in Oxford, Connecticut wore facemasks. The era of death in the mail was over for now, but the hoaxes had only just begun.

In the aftermath of the anthrax mail scare, there were dead people and sick people, but there was also all of Capitol Hill needing Hazmat cleaning, and four post offices closed indefinitely pending decontamination. Other post offices, government offices and schools would close periodically on bio hoaxes. There was also a rumor mill working overtime to establish a connection between the fictional Greendale School, Al Qaeda and the leg lesion that appeared on one of the 9/11 hijackers while he was taking flying lessons in Florida. And by the way, if somehow these attacks could be linked to Saddam Hussein, so much the better.

Meanwhile, on no budget, Bob Coen had started doing his own investigation from his computer in Brooklyn. Coen knew more about anthrax than most laymen, and what he knew made him less worried about innocent Americans being killed by spore-wielding terrorists, and more worried about the number of significant arsenals that included deadly anthrax. It wasn’t fear for his safety or the security of his home and his family that kept him awake . . . it was the reemergence of anthrax as a weapon of choice.

Coen’s first encounter with anthrax dated back to his childhood. Growing up in what was then called Rhodesia, Coen had heard of the terrible effects of the bacterium when hundreds died and more than ten thousand were sickened by anthrax in the course of that country’s independence war. True, the Rhodesian anthrax outbreak in 1978, the largest in recorded history, killed more cattle than humans, but many have long suspected that it was the result of Rhodesian Special Forces applying biological warfare in the last stages of a lost war. In the case of Rhodesia’s civil war, anthrax did not prove to be the ultimate weapon—only a nadir in the code of war and a poor legacy for humanity. But it also served as a very real precedent, and for some scruple-less scientists, a working basis. Rhodesia, in Coen’s youth, was a pioneering bioweapons locus.

Now, nearly a quarter century later, Coen felt a familiar sense of distrust and disbelief. Once again, he was living in a society under siege by a shadowy enemy. He recalled his younger self—son of the privileged class, served by a black population with whom he had very little interaction. Only when he went off to high school in the requisite wool blazer and straw boater did Coen become aware that his people were at war. At war against the house “boy,” the garden “boy,” and the friendly men and women who humored his quiet, curious presence outside their shacks, smelling of wood smoke, ganja and bodies.

“Our headmaster gave speeches at assembly about the evil communists conspiring with black terrorists and about how Rhodesia was on the front line of the battle for Western civilization,” he recounted to Nadler during one of their many conversations on the creeping ascendancy of the Bush administration’s “Us against Them” mentality. “It was funny how overnight, the racist characterization shifted from treating blacks as backward baboons to branding them subversive and dangerous terrorists.”

By the time Coen neared his eighteenth birthday, he was convinced that he was living in a “twisted and schizoid country based on lies and fear.” Resolved not to serve in its conscripted army against black insurgents in an increasingly brutal bush war, Coen entered university a year early. His peers took up guns, and he took up political consciousness and the music of cynical disenchantment.

In 1978, after a couple of years of college during which he spent less time attending lectures than he did immersing himself in the lexicon of Frank Zappa and the growing student counter-culture that was questioning the status-quo of white power in southern Africa, Coen emigrated with his family to the United States. For someone arriving from the repressed right-wing society that was Rhodesia, New York at the height of the punk era of sex, drugs and rock and roll was like landing on another planet. Abandoning all academic pursuits, he got a job off-loading books from trucks and devoted the next several years to catching up on everything that had been out of bounds—and to attending as many Frank Zappa concerts as he could (even meeting his hero backstage after one show). Zappa’s music began responding to the politics of the times—the growing right-wing religious fanaticism of the Reagan administration. Those policies also became the focus of another major musical influence for Coen—The Clash, with their radical songs calling attention to the proxy wars in Central America, Nicaragua, El Salvador and . . . South Africa and Zimbabwe. He began to understand how these conflicts, separated by oceans, were all connected.

After taking a guerrilla video activist course, Coen returned to the independent Zimbabwe in 1985 determined to make a film about a civil war that was raging in neighboring Mozambique. It was baptism by fire—not only did he have no idea how to make a film but nothing could have prepared him for the brutality he would document over the next eighteen months. In a desperate attempt to hold on to power and halt black liberation, the apartheid regime in South Africa had unleashed a campaign of destabilization across the whole of southern Africa, including supporting the insurgency in Mozambique that specialized in terrorizing civilians by cutting off their lips and noses. The film Mozambique: The Struggle for Survival was broadcast by PBS exactly at the time right-wing Republicans were pushing for Washington to cut ties with the socialist government and recognize the rebels—but Coen’s camera had documented the war, exposed the South African hand and helped to influence policy.

After a film on the civil war in Angola, Coen turned to television news, becoming the roaming Africa reporter for CNN. For the next decade and a half, he honed his war reporting skills covering dozens of conflicts across the continent: from the Rwandan genocide to religious riots in Nigeria, from Islamic terrorism in Algeria to child soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone, interviewing “Blood Diamond” merchants, dictators, warlords and mercenaries along the way and also winning the Bayeux Prize for best television war correspondent in 1997. He became hooked on “the jazz” of pushing the limits as far as he could and together with a strange tribe of war junkies, some of whom eventually caught bullets with their names on them, would move from conflict to conflict.

In 2000, after he was nearly killed by angry war veterans in Zimbabwe, Coen’s reporter days came to a crashing halt. The years of violence, bloodshed and suffering had taken their toll and it was time to start afresh. In a new relationship and with a baby on the way he said good-bye to Africa and returned to New York, soon after the Twin Towers came down. Frank Zappa’s words were always with him.

This was a devotion of Coen’s that Nadler, after years of conspiracy chasing together, had become very aware of. More than once, over breakfast or coffee or a midday stroll along the industrial edge of the East River, they would be talking about facets of their investigation—some troubling revelation of the underbelly of science, progress and innovation, whether it be germ proliferation, pharma profits or targeted genetics, when Coen would stop and smile to himself. “You know Zappa had it right,” he would say, and Nadler would wait for the proof. “The government is just a cardboard cutout hiding the real workings of the machine.” Nadler would nod.

Nadler, like most Americans, spent the months after September 11 eyeing the skies warily and avoiding the dreadful evening news. For New Yorkers it was a particularly strange moment—a time when the sickest of questions popped into the head: Is that a jet overhead or a missile? Is it flying correctly? What are we breathing? Are we all caught in some death match between Jesus, Allah and the god of Abraham? Now in his early fifties, Nadler was not exempt from this acute weirdness that afflicted New Yorkers.

A city kid from a working class family, Nadler graduated from Brooklyn’s public schools and the State University of New York at Binghamton and passed straight into the ranks of Gotham reporters. He covered the police blotters, suburban town corruption, arson fires and the “Son of Sam” for the Gannett Newspapers in Westchester and then signed on as a political writer for the SoHo Weekly News, a pretty hip weekly in downtown NYC. In the early 1980s, Nadler worked out of a small apartment he shared with his wife and another couple with an infant son—a communal experiment on the Upper West Side. For a decade, Nadler’s work on the more awful maneuvers of the Reagan Revolution could also be found in a host of magazines—The Nation, The New Republic, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone. He was also on staff with Bob Guccione’s Penthouse, and co-authored “The United States of America vs. Sex,” a lively critique of the Meese Commission on Pornography, which Nadler found to be a scandalous political payoff to Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right. He and his co-author Philip Nobile lampooned the Commission as the “F-Troop of the Erogenous Zone.” He went on to earn heftier field stripes when he joined Danny Schechter and Rory O’Connor’s award-winning PBS weekly newsmagazine South Africa Now as investigative editor. In the 1990s, he produced several Frontline investigations for PBS dealing with the political influence of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the BCCI banking scandal and the “hidden history” of US and Saudi Arabian relations.

In the fall of 2000, Nadler, living in Jackson Heights, Queens with his wife Elisa Rivlin, the general counsel of Simon and Schuster, and their two kids, sold Court TV on his original documentary series Confessions, which aired videotaped confessions of murders supplied to Nadler by the Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. It was a very controversial effort at the time. For some reason Nadler has never understood, these real life interrogations—introduced as evidence in murder trials—were greeted hysterically by the media. Even before airing, Confessions prompted the New York Times to urge in an editorial that the network kill the reality show. Despite an avalanche of publicity and a doubling of Court TV’s anemic prime time ratings, the program was yanked after just two episodes. So when a museum in Denmark proposed that Nadler and his co-producer Richard Kroehling bring the Confessions tapes to a “censored television” festival in Copenhagen, all expenses paid, he readily agreed. He and Richard were booked on the 12:10 AM flight from Newark International Airport to Copenhagen—the first flight out of Newark slated on September 11, 2001—eight hours before United Airlines Flight 93 was hijacked into infamy from that same terminal.

On the television set at the gate, the New York Giants were in the final moments of a 31–20 loss to the Denver Broncos. Nadler cursed, regretting a bet he had made earlier. When boarding began, he presented his ticket to the attendants and ambled into the jetway with a yawn. But halfway to the door of the plane, a uniformed US Customs official and a fellow in plain clothes were stopping passengers asking to see passports. Nadler produced his and the agent stopped at the Pakistan visa—a stamp from a trip to Islamabad he took in 1994 on assignment for Rolling Stone.

“Pakistan!” the Customs officer hissed before hurling questions: “Why were you in Pakistan? What is your business? How long were you there? When were you last there? Where are you going now? Is Denmark your final destination? Where are you staying in Copenhagen? Please step to the side, sir.”

In the end, Nadler was allowed to board. He thought it all a bit odd, ordered a drink with dinner and slept until Scandinavia. As he settled into his hotel the next morning, his traveling companion screamed from the next room: “Dude, check this out!” Nadler ran in. For the next twenty-four hours, when not phoning home to make sure all loved ones were okay, he watched the TV. From that moment on, you couldn’t mention 9/11 to him without his certainty that the true story had yet to be told.

And then came anthrax.

The death-by-mail anthrax episode three weeks later un-hitched itself quite quickly from the September 11 consciousness. After the period in which Cipro, the powerful antibiotic used against anthrax, became a household name invoked by Tom Brokaw signing off the nightly news, the whole affair seemed to go into hiding, under the cover of a federal probe. It was the disappearing act that surprised Nadler. He was intrigued by the discrepancies between events that, on the one hand, suggested a bioterror link to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and on the other hand, directly benefited drug companies like Bayer, which haggled with the Feds over the price of Cipro as its stock price soared immediately after the attacks. He wondered if the apparent discrepancy was no more than a cynical pretext: if someone within the world’s burgeoning biodefense establishments that clearly had the means and profit motive to carry out the attacks, had also seized the opportunity. Nadler, after all, had come of age during the revelations of Woodward and Bernstein; he had spent his career working towards an inexorable conclusion that as a journalist, you can’t go wrong if you “follow the money.” He thought the twenty-first century’s mainstream media was ignoring this maxim too readily.

Nadler had been exploring the international networks behind the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction for years. When the anthrax attacks happened, he was spending hours each day in a fifteenth-floor editing suite a mile north of the smoldering pit of Ground Zero, at work on the final edit of a documentary about the black market spread of nuclear weapon components. The ultimate villains in this film, Stealing the Fire, were Germans. Germans with roots in the Third Reich. The Degussa Corporation, a multinational company that had once manufactured Zyklon B—the preferred gas of Auschwitz—had made a good profit helping Pakistan and Iraq with their uranium enrichment program in the 1980s and 1990s. Five years of work had granted Nadler unprecedented access to a German engineer, Karl-Heinz Schaab, the first man convicted of atomic espionage since the 1950s, who sold classified centrifuge blueprints to Saddam Hussein. The spy was convicted of treason in a German court, sentenced just to five years probation and fined $32,000. That spelled Western government complicity to Nadler and his partner John S. Friedman. Nadler remained finely tuned to suspect an untold story behind any news of rogue weapons of mass destruction, especially where corporate interests were involved.

It was during a screening of his documentary on the underground trade of nuclear weapon widgets that Nadler ran into Coen, who literally stepped out of the shadows of a Greenwich Village theater to greet his old colleague. It had been more than a dozen years since they had worked together on South Africa Now. The two headed up the investigative unit, and had produced stories about American diamond merchants violating apartheid-era sanctions and American companies dumping their toxic waste in Zulu villages.

Nadler recalled how Coen was arrested outside the gates of the New Jersey corporate headquarters of American Cyanamid, the chemical giant which shipped its mercury waste to South Africa, and how his shots of New Jersey state cops’ boots kicking at his camera landed on the front page of the Village Voice three days later. Coen, Nadler knew, was the best kind of troublemaker. He was thrilled to hear he was back in town.

The two went for coffee. By morning, they had a new shared beat. Coen wanted to investigate how and why anthrax had been allowed to rear its head so dramatically, only to slink offstage. Nadler wanted to examine the role of public and private biodefense developers to see what they stood to gain from a germ war panic. They knew that the place to start was with the federal response to October 2001, when someone or some group went postal on America. They started with Amerithrax.