All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Noah Shockman.
He is contributing editor at Wired Magazine and editor of its national security blog, The Danger Room.
He's reported from all over the Middle East, the Pentagon, Los Alamos, and of course writes about military and national security affairs there.
The new article, maybe not the very newest, but the most important, perhaps so far the most important investigative news piece of the year, is Anthrax Redux.
Did the feds nab the wrong guy?
I have to tell you, Noah, this is an impressive piece of journalism that you've got here, extremely comprehensive.
Do you have off the top of your head the number of different first-person sources quoted and referred to in this?
Well, actually, there's many more sources that I interviewed than actually appear in the story, and, you know, several dozen.
I mean, it's one of these pieces, like, just to get started, I had to read 3,500 pages of declassified FBI documents.
Yeah, well, it's a hell of a thing.
I highly recommend that everybody go and take a look at this.
And let's not make it sound scary.
It should be fun to read, too.
Yeah, no, it's a great read.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's not an encyclopedia entry of danger and boredom.
Well, it's dangerous, but it's not boring.
Anthrax Redux.
Did the feds nab the wrong guy?
Well, what do you think?
I'm not sure.
You know, I think the deeper question is kind of like, this is the biggest case in FBI history, right?
And they spent tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, 1,000 different suspects, 600,000 investigator hours.
And at the end, the main suspect they had, he killed himself before they could arrest him, number one.
And number two, they put together a case that even the lead agents admit is kind of shaky.
And so, you know, this is not the kind of case that I could really ever see getting won in court.
And so, you're left with this big question mark at the end of both the biggest bioterror event in US history and the biggest investigation in FBI history.
All right.
Well, has anybody put forward a positive case where, well, maybe this entire other storyline took place?
Maybe, you know, this intelligence agency from whatever country, this group of people working at this secret corporation or whatever.
Has anybody put forward any alternative theories that you think are, you know, actually really interesting enough to, worthy of pursuit?
Or is it just a total dead end other than this narrative here?
I've found the other theories, like the total conspiracy theories, to be pretty unconvincing.
The scary part is that, you know, it just may have been another lone guy, right?
And that, who wasn't caught.
And therefore, you know, that guy's still out there.
That's, you know, that's the really scary idea.
And we may now never know.
And there may never really be closure on this, which is, you know, kind of tough to take.
All right.
Well, if you could, could you illustrate for people the most convincing case against Ivins from the FBI's point of view, what it is they have at this guy that perhaps make him really look like he is the one we're looking for?
So the FBI, you know, after eight years, basically, closed in on this guy, Bruce Ivins.
He was an Army biodefense researcher.
And he was the guy that they initially brought the anthrax to after the 2001 attacks.
So it's a real kind of like a circular story in that way.
Ivins was in possession of a vial of super concentrated, deadlier than deadly, liquid anthrax spores called RMR-1029.
And the most convincing evidence that Ivins was the guy that sent the anthrax letters is that that RMR-1029 and the anthrax that was mailed around in 2001 are genetically very, very similar.
And so it's kind of like in a conventional murder case, if Ivins was the one that owned the gun that killed the people.
Doesn't necessarily mean he fired it, but it means he owned the gun.
And that's really the best that they could have presented to the jury, basically.
That's the strongest piece of concrete, direct scientific evidence.
The rest of it is kind of a circumstantial case.
For example, the envelopes that the anthrax letters were mailed in came from the general neighborhood where Ivins lived and worked.
Ivins had a pretty crappy alibi for the time that the anthrax letters were mailed.
He had occasions, especially later on, where he made some violent fantasies in public.
And so you sort of build all those up, and you get a circumstantial case.
But on the other hand, the FBI could never really figure out what Ivins' motive would be for pulling off these attacks.
They never figured out exactly how he would have brewed this stuff up, and they never really figured out where or when he could have brewed this stuff up.
And so, like me as a journalist, those who, what, where, when, why questions are kind of like the key questions that I try to get answered in every story.
And in this story, those questions remain unanswered.
Well, it seems like you found a lot of people who were acting within the investigation in one degree or another who seemed to share that same belief.
I don't know.
Yeah.
The other scientists, for example.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I got, I was fortunate in that and, you know, persistent and annoying enough to talk to most of the key people in the later half of the investigation.
And, you know, they were pretty candid about where they thought their case was strong and where they thought it was weak.
I also talked to the scientists who sort of developed the genetic tests that ultimately led the investigation to Ivins.
And a lot of them were deeply, deeply critical about how the investigation turned out.
I was pretty surprised because this was, you know, the work that kind of made their career, made them famous.
And they were kind of, they weren't too pleased with what happened.
Well, you know, there's this kind of, there's this narrative in your article that sort of comes out, which I'm not sure if you really meant for this to be kind of drawn out in there, but it does sort of seem to me like perhaps once the FBI started looking at this guy, he started kind of acting a fool out of his own quirkiness and paranoia about them looking at him and they just continued driving him nuts from there.
He ended up killing himself.
And so it's sort of, you know, he and the investigators kind of fulfilled this role for each other just right.
You know what I mean?
And this guy's kookiness and their interest in why is this guy acting so crazy, but it seemed like they were kind of the ones that were making him crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's a real sort of circular logic to the whole thing.
You know, look, I don't know how I would have felt if for seven years straight, someone was looking into my life, looking into my family, looking into my work, you know, sort of following me at every turn.
I think that drove me pretty nuts too.
Also Ivan's really, you know, the people who's closest to me were these work friends of his, his coworkers.
And by the end, the FBI had sort of turned these coworkers against one another.
And so they, even though they would have to work on projects together in the lab, they actually really couldn't communicate.
And, you know, they stopped going to football games together and they stopped going to office parties together.
They just, you know, stop communicating.
All right.
Well, we're going to try to get to a little bit more of the truth of this.
If we can with Noah Shockman from wire.com, the danger room blog.
Again, the article is anthrax redux.
Did the feds nab the wrong guy?
And we'll be right back.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking with Noah Shockman from wire.com.
He wrote this piece anthrax redux.
Did the feds nab the wrong guy?
Now I was wondering if you could talk to me, know a little bit about how all of a sudden there's 22 vials of anthrax.
It seemed to fit the bill at the gun shop where this guy worked.
I'm not so sure if he owned the gun, but he worked at the gun shop where all of a sudden there was 22 vials that either the FBI had missed before or somebody planted there to frame this cat.
The FBI's case really centers around the fact that this vial of super concentrated anthrax that Bruce Ivins had in his possession genetically matched up with the spores that killed five people and made six, 17 others.
But it turns out that that vial had a lot of kind of clones around the lab where Ivins worked and around the country.
And so one of Ivins' friends and coworkers, a guy named Hank Hiney, kept lots of little sort of subsamples of this stuff around.
And those subsamples weren't grabbed until a couple, three years after the initial attacks.
And if Hank Hiney had these extra samples lying around, it kind of makes you wonder how many more there were.
And any one of those subsamples could have been the source for the anthrax that ultimately killed those people.
Well, now the anthrax that was actually sent came in at least two different varieties, maybe more than that, and in at least two different, quote unquote, waves of attacks, maybe.
Is that right?
And so I wonder if that, if you can extrapolate from that about these strains here, you know what that means?
Does that mean different sources of the attack?
Maybe one's just copying the other, something like that.
I don't know.
Yeah.
The thing is that while the two sets of anthrax letters, the anthrax inside looked different and was of a slightly different quality, genetically it was identical.
So you can conclude that it was the same stuff that was a source.
So maybe somebody mailed one set of letters, didn't like the results, and so mailed a second set.
All right.
Now, you know what I wonder?
Did Bruce Ivins have a lawyer?
Because these guys were looking at him forever.
And maybe you can recount a little bit of the pressure that was applied to his adopted children as well.
Seems like they were put through hell.
That was part of what cracked him at the end.
Yeah.
So Ivins spent years under FBI scrutiny without getting a lawyer.
You know, was interrogated several dozen times without a lawyer present, and even testified before a grand jury at least once, and I think maybe twice without a lawyer present.
Then he finally got a lawyer, that lawyer, and they didn't work out.
He got a second one.
So yeah, he went a long time without legal representation, which is a little bit surprising, definitely a little surprising.
As far as pressure applied, different people say different things.
Some people say that his children were shown sort of gruesome autopsy photos of the anthrax victims and told that, you know, their dad did this.
Others say that actually those photos were just of the victims' families, and the photos were of people that were very much alive but missing their loved ones.
In either case, there's definitely a pressure applied to Ivins' children and to his wife.
Well, and now I wonder about the suicide.
They say he just overdosed on Tylenol, or mostly Tylenol, right?
But then I read at least somewhere that it takes sometimes two or three days to die of a Tylenol overdose, and if they were watching this guy so closely, how did he just sit there and die in his bathroom for three days?
Yeah, well, okay, so let me break this down for you.
It does take a couple of days to die of a Tylenol overdose, and there is an antidote, but that antidote basically has to be applied, it has to be given fairly quickly, or else the Tylenol poisoning takes place.
He took the Tylenol a couple hours later.
His wife found him.
Medics came right away, took him to the hospital, and then there's some delay in giving him the antidote, maybe a 12-hour delay or so, and by then it was too late.
Then Ivins woke up and had all these tubes in him.
The nurses asked if he tried to kill himself.
He nodded yes and then tried to pull the tubes out in a really sad scene, so I don't think there's any doubt that Ivins meant to kill himself.
I guess just the worst part of me suspects that that's what the FBI was trying to do, was get him to kill himself rather than have to try to put him on trial with this flimsy case.
I don't believe that's the case.
I don't believe that's the case.
I think these guys spent many years of their lives getting ready to indict and prosecute Bruce Ivins, and I think they were looking for a shot to do so, but there's definitely a certain keystone cop element to this whole thing.
They were keeping him under close, close, close watch and yet didn't notice that he made a couple of trips to the pharmacy to pick up these pretty big bottles of Tylenol.
They knew that he was a suicide risk.
They'd known for a long time he was a suicide risk, but weren't keeping close enough watch to prevent that.
Once Ivins died, the FBI didn't insist on an autopsy, and so he was cremated without an autopsy ever being done.
All right, now I wonder, I must have missed some really good questions about the science of this.
Noah, I was wondering if you could point to anything important that's cooperating or seems like a discrepancy in this that I may have missed.
The science is hard, and I'm not a science guy, but I did spend a long time trying to learn this stuff.
Basically, the way they identified Ivins' flask to the killer spores was they basically sequenced the genome of both.
They basically took apart all the building blocks of DNA within both, and they kind of matched up.
But it turns out that that matching process is less precise than people were originally led to believe.
Sometimes the tests match the two up, and sometimes they didn't.
It's a science, but it's not a perfect science.
Okay, well, so I guess that's no wonder then that you have so many people who used to work with this guy saying that they're not convinced by it.
Even the process for figuring it out and narrowing it down is basically not available.
Is that what you're saying?
Right.
So, almost to a man, his co-workers, Bruce Ivins' co-workers, don't believe he did it.
Really?
They don't believe he had the expertise.
They don't believe he had the attitude.
They don't believe he had the equipment necessary to do it.
It's not a universally held belief at the Army Biodefense Center where I worked, but it's a pretty widely held belief, so much so that as you walk into the center, to your left is a glass cabinet where they keep a number of awards.
And at the bottom right of that cabinet is a medal that was given to Bruce Ivins in 2003 for his work in cleaning up after the anthrax attacks.
And even though the guy is now branded as public enemy number one, that medal remains in that cabinet.
Yeah.
But, you know, it really does just seem like a TV show to me where these cops are interviewing this anthrax expert for all these years, trying to find out as much as they can and make their case.
And then one of them says to the other, well, you know, this guy's a little weird.
I wonder what would happen if we pushed him a little bit.
And all of a sudden they make the case about him.
And of course, then he flips out.
That's what seems like what went on here to me.
And then they go, well, look how bad he's flipping out.
This guy's a lunatic.
Of course, he's the one.
I think it was a little bit more of a slow motion process than that.
And, you know, I think there were guys on the case that for a long time thought Ivins was fishy.
And there was a lot of folks on the case for a long time that actually had this whole other suspect, this fellow named Stephen Hadsall, which is probably for another radio show.
But basically, they had no evidence, but they kept going after him.
And ended up paying him millions and millions of dollars for smearing him as a person of interest.
Yeah.
And it should be noted, Condé Nast, which owns Wired, also came to a settlement with Dr. Hadsall after a lawsuit, after some articles were published in sister magazines about him.
Well, that's good of you to note in this case, especially.
All right.
Now, I wanted to ask you real quickly about, I guess, what amounts to a sidebar piece here.
Did the anthrax attacks kickstart the Iraq war?
And I think you really make the case about, you know, the September 11th hysteria was kind of subsiding there for a little while.
And then it was the anthrax attack that not only made that hysteria last much longer, I guess we could argue when it finally fell off, but it seemed to connect Iraq to this terrorism war.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
You know, look, 9-11, you know, terrified a lot of people, right?
But to be a victim of 9-11, you had to be in a particular place at a particular time.
You had to be on a particular plane or you had to, you know, be in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon.
The thing that was really kind of totally terrifying about the anthrax attacks was that you could just be an old lady sitting in your home, you could get a letter that brushed up against another one that had some spores in it, and it could knock you dead.
So it was like, you didn't have to be anywhere at a particular time if terrorists could reach out and kill you without you ever leaving your home.
That was a pretty terrifying proposition.
So terrifying that the Bush administration used it as a justification for going into Iraq.
And in his famous presentation before the United Nations, then Secretary of State Colin Powell mentioned the anthrax attacks, mentioned that just a small teaspoonful of anthrax had been responsible for so many deaths, and then said that Saddam Hussein had many thousands of teaspoonfuls and therefore was a menace to the world and therefore we had to go get them.
So that's how the two were linked.
And who was it that, because I think it's important that you tell the story of the scientists who first said, no, this is Ames Strain, this is our anthrax, not Iraqi.
Yeah, yeah.
Because the first story out of Washington, D.C. was, oh yeah, this must be Saddam Hussein's doing.
Yeah, exactly.
So the first story out of D.C. was that there's a lot of talk about Saddam somehow being behind the anthrax attacks.
There's also a lot of talk about al-Qaeda being behind the anthrax attacks.
There's a lot of loose talk that a couple of the 9-11 hijackers had some black lesions on their legs that looked like anthrax lesions.
There's no way to prove it and it's pretty unlikely.
Anyway, Paul Keim, who was at the time probably the leading anthrax expert in the world, was sent a vial of anthrax from the first victim's spine and was able to tell what strain it was.
And it was a strain very popular in domestic biodefense research places, so it made it seem that the attacks were domestic in nature, not from a foreign source.
By then, the narrative had been sown, though.
Well, actually, the funny part is the narrative started even after...
He found out about that basically the first day the guy died, but the narrative that it came from Iraq or al-Qaeda persisted for weeks and months, even after he made that call.
So finally, a person from an other government agency delivered to him a sample of Iraq's anthrax, a sample from Saddam Hussein's program.
And he tested it and the strain didn't match the domestic strain that he had before, and so he definitively ruled out that Iraq had any involvement.
And so he likes to joke that he didn't stop the Iraq war, he just delayed it for two years.
Right.
All right.
Well, I think with that, we'll have to leave it there.
We're already over time, but I really appreciate your time, and I urge everybody to go and read Anthrax Redux.
Did the feds nab the wrong guy?
This is the most exhaustive work on the anthrax attacks by a journalist in many years, I think, and it's really good stuff.
Thank you again for your time on the show, Noah.
Thank you.
