The 50 Worst Terrorist Attacks (42 page)

From Brentwood, mail bound for Capitol Hill went through the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research mailroom and the Capitol Police, a screening facility. A Daschle aide opened an anthrax-laced letter in his sixth floor office in the Hart Senate Office Building on October 15, 2001. Some 22 Congressional staffers and 6 Capitol Police tested positive for
exposure; another 2,000 Congressional employees were tested and treated with antibiotics. Spores were found in mail-processing machinery at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on October 20, 2001. Traces were also found in the Ford House Office Building that day and in the Longworth House Office Building on October 26, 2001. Authorities also checked the Southwest Post Office on 45 L Street, SW, where spores were found, and the Congressional Mail Processing Center on P and Half Streets, SW.

On October 19, 2001, a letter sent to the
New York Times
office in Rio de Janeiro and a travel brochure sent to a family in Buenos Aires—both from the United States—tested positive for anthrax. Letters sent to Kenyan addresses were initially reported as testing positive but later negative. There were numerous anthrax hoaxes worldwide, including in the United Kingdom, Peru, Fiji, Germany, Pakistan, France, and the Netherlands.

From October 15 to 20, 2001, more than 130 clinics and doctor's offices that provide abortion services in 15 states on the East Coast, D.C., and the Midwest received letters threatening death by anthrax. The letters said, “Army of God. You've been exposed to anthrax. You're dead.” The group is a collection of antiabortion advocates who have bombed clinics and assassinated doctors. Their letters had return addresses from the U.S. Secret Service in Atlanta, Georgia, and the U.S. Marshals Service in Cleveland, Ohio, and contained white or brown powder. They were postmarked from Atlanta, Cleveland, Columbus, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Washington, D.C. None of them tested positive for anthrax. More than 80 letters threatening anthrax exposure were mailed to clinics between October 1998 and January 2000—all were hoaxes. Some 280 letters were sent during October 2001; another 270 letters went out in the first week of November 2001.

On November 29, 2001, the FBI named Clayton Lee Waagner, 45, an antiabortion militant from Kennerdell, about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh, the primary suspect in sending the hoax letters. He had escaped from the DeWitt County Jail in Clinton, Illinois, in February 2001 while awaiting sentencing on firearms and stolen car charges that could have put him in prison for life. Since his escape, the married father of eight was believed to have committed several bank robberies. He was wanted for bank robbery, unlawful possession of an unregistered bomb device, carjacking, and felony possession of firearms. FBI investigators matched a fingerprint in his family home in Pennsylvania to a fingerprint on one of the mailings. He had also told a fellow antiabortionist that he was responsible for the mailings. He posted a message on an antiabortion website in June 2001 crediting God for his escape and saying that he was a “terrorist to abortionists.” He made the FBI's Top Ten Fugitives list in September 2001.

Neal Horsley claimed that Waagner held him hostage in his home in Carrollton, Georgia. Horsley runs the Internet's Nuremberg Files of abortion providers. Waagner traveled more than 100,000 miles, visiting
Washington, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, and the East and South several times.

Waagner was arrested on December 5, 2001, in a Kinko's copy shop in Springdale, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, after an employee recognized him from a wanted poster and called the U.S. Marshals Service. Waagner had driven expensive cars, stayed at nice hotels, and bought rounds at bars with his stolen money. He was driving a stolen Mercedes Benz and had $9,000 in his pocket, along with a loaded .40 caliber handgun, and several fake IDs. He had been visiting copy centers to use the stores' computers to read about himself on the Internet. He was initially charged with a firearms violation and later charged in two bank robberies in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Morgantown, West Virginia, and suspected of several others. After an initial arrest in September 1999 in Illinois, he told the court that he had staked out 100 clinics in 19 states.

On September 19, 2002, Waagner was indicted in Philadelphia on charges of mailing anthrax hoax letters to women's clinics around the country. He was also charged with posting a message on an antiabortion website saying he had been following clinic employees home and planned to “kill as many of them as I can.” While on the run, he mailed at least 550 letters to women's clinics in 24 states. Scores of clinic workers underwent decontamination procedures. On October 17, 2002, he pleaded not guilty. During his trial on November 22, 2003, Denise Orlowski, of the antiabortion Pregnancy Resource Clinic of North Penn, testified that she opened a hoax letter with white powder on October 15, 2001. An ophthalmologist and psychologist also received the letters, apparently because their names were incorrectly listed in the
Yellow Pages
under “abortion providers.” On December 3, 2003, Waagner was found guilty of 51 out of 53 counts, including the most serious charge of threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction. On August 23, 2004, U.S. district judge Anita Brody delayed his sentencing, saying the Supreme Court must first clarify the legality of federal sentencing rules.

Anthrax contamination was reported on October 23, 2001, at the White House mail security center at Bolling Air Force Base. One employee was hospitalized with inhalation anthrax on October 24, 2001, after apparently contracting it at the State Department's mail sorting facility in Sterling, Virginia. Trace amounts of anthrax were found on October 25, 2001, at the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) Materials Inspection Facility in northern Virginia; no one (including the author) tested positive. On October 25 and 26, 2001, positive tests were announced at mailrooms of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and its research institute. Contamination was announced on October 26, 2001, at the U.S. Supreme Court's off-site mail facility—the court was shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that it would check 300 mail distribution centers and 76,000 Washington area postal workers linked to Brentwood.

By November 9, 2001, three Washington area mail workers hospitalized for inhalation anthrax on October 19, 2001, were in improved condition. Leroy Richmond, 57, of Stafford County, was in fair condition. An unidentified worker at Brentwood was in good condition. Winchester resident David Hose, 59, an employee of the State Department's mail facility in Sterling, was listed in fair condition at Winchester (Virginia) Medical Center.

The main post office in Princeton, New Jersey, was shut on October 27, 2001, after a single spore of anthrax was detected in a mail bin.

The news media reported on October 27, 2001, that the FBI and CIA were examining the possibility that domestic right-wing terrorists or domestic supporters of Islamic extremists were behind the anthrax attacks. The press also reported that not all of the anthrax spores were identical; some had been milled and chemically treated so that they would more easily make it to a victim's lungs. The Office of Homeland Security reported that the spores in Florida, New York, and Washington came from the Ames strain, which is commonly used in universities around the world. The strain was first isolated in Ames, Iowa. The
Washington Post
reported on October 25, 2001, that the Daschle letter spores were treated with a chemical additive that could have been developed in the United States, Russia, or Iraq. However, on October 29, 2001, federal officials said that the spores were not mixed with bentonite, a mineral compound used by Iraq's biological weapons program, although silica was evident. Investigators also tested the rental cars of 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Waleed M. Alshehri; no anthrax was found.

Investigators were troubled by the death of Kathy T. Nguyen, 61, a hospital worker who checked into a hospital on October 28, 2001, and subsequently died on October 31, 2001, from pulmonary anthrax. She may have received a letter that crossed paths with the Daschle letter; otherwise, the reason for her contracting anthrax was unexplained. She worked the late shift in the basement stockroom of the Eye, Ear, and Throat Hospital on Manhattan's East Side. A letter mailed to Art Auto Body at 1207 Whitlock Avenue, around the corner from her Bronx apartment, passed through the same New Jersey sorting machine within seconds of the Leahy letter. It was postmarked October 9, 2001.

Spores were found at a post office in Kansas City, Missouri, in early November 2001.

On November 2, 2001, the Karachi Urdu-language
Daily Jang
, Pakistan's largest daily newspaper, closed the newsroom after white powder received in an envelope by a reporter the previous week tested positive for anthrax. It was the third confirmed case of anthrax being sent to a Karachi business in the previous two weeks. The envelope was handdelivered to the paper's front counter on October 23, 2001. The envelope was supposed to contain a press release from a social welfare organization. There was no accompanying note. Senior executives at Habib Bank
and a Dell Computer distributor also received anthrax'd mail around October 19, 2001.

The Trenton, New Jersey, post office might have been the source of the anthrax letters. The
New York Post
letter of September 18, 2001; the Tom Brokaw letter of the same date; and the October 9, 2001, Daschle letter originated there. Mail going to the Carteret, New Jersey, facility went on to New York, where there were four cutaneous cases and one death of nonpostal employees. In Trenton, a male postal worker contracted cutaneous anthrax on September 26, 2001, as did another on October 14, 2001. A Trenton female postal worker contracted inhalation anthrax on October 14, 2001; another Trenton female postal worker contracted inhalation anthrax on October 15, 2001. There was a suspected case of a male postal worker at the Bellmawr Regional Post Office who might have contracted cutaneous anthrax on October 13, 2001. Yet, another woman contracted cutaneous anthrax on October 17, 2001, in Trenton. Mail trucked from Trenton via Carteret to Brentwood led to several cases of anthrax. A male postal worker contracted inhalation anthrax on October 19, 2001; another male postal worker died on October 21, 2001, as did another male postal worker on October 22, 2001. Yet, another male Brentwood postal worker contracted inhalation anthrax on October 22, 2001, as did a male State Department mail facility worker on October 25, 2001. Contamination of D.C. federal and postal facilities served by Brentwood included the Walter Reed Army Institutes of Research mailroom, a CIA mail facility, a Justice mail facility, a White House remote mail facility, a Supreme Court mail facility, a Veterans Administration hospital mailroom, Southwest Station, Friendship Station, Dulles Finance Station, and Pentagon Station mailrooms. Anthrax spores were found on November 9, 2001, in four more branch post offices in central New Jersey that feed into the Hamilton Township facility, where the three tainted letters were processed. An unnamed 56-year-old woman was hospitalized with inhalation anthrax on October 28, 2001. New Jersey had seven contaminated post offices. A nonpostal worker who works near Trenton, New Jersey, had skin anthrax on October 29, 2001; she was released from the hospital. Another unnamed worker left the hospital after contracting inhalation anthrax on October 30, 2001, at the Hamilton Township mail center. Traces were found on October 29, 2001, at mailrooms of an Agriculture Department agency, a federal building in Southwest where the Department of Health and Human Services and Voice of America have offices, and a nearby building used by the Food and Drug Administration.

Spores were found in the mailroom of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in D.C. on November 3, 2001.

On November 10, 2001, a small amount of anthrax spores was found in the Hart Senate Office Building and the Longworth House Office Building offices of Senators Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), Dianne Feinstein
(D-California), and Bob Graham (D-Florida) and Representative Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland).

Cross-contamination from the Daschle and New York letters led to anthrax discoveries at a central New Jersey sorting facility; to the diplomatic pouch at the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania; to a diplomatic pouch going to the U.S. Embassy in Lima, Peru (the latter arrived on October 31, 2001); and to a diplomatic pouch at the U.S. Consulate in Yekaterinburg, Russia. A suspect letter to the U.S. Consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, turned out to be harmless when tested on November 7, 2001. Pakistan said there were three cases of anthrax contamination before the Lahore letter, including an October 23, 2001, letter to the Karachi newsroom of the Urdu-language
Daily Jang
newspaper.

By November 11, 2001, 32,000 people were on antibiotics and 300 buildings had been checked.

FBI profilers suggested that the anthrax came from a male loner with a scientific background.

Anthrax traces were found at Howard University's main mailroom on November 11, 2001. The
Washington Post
reported that spores had also been found at the offices of at least 11 senators in the Hart Senate Office Building: Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana), Barbara Boxer (D-California), Jon S. Corzine (D-New Jersey), Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho), Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin), Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Bob Graham (D-Florida), Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Connecticut), Richard G. Lugar (R-Indiana), Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Maryland), and Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania). Traces were also found in the Longworth House Office Building offices of Representative Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland).

More spores were found on three sorting machines in a State Department mail-processing facility in Sterling, Virginia, on November 13, 2001. The building was closed on October 24, 2001, when an employee there was hospitalized with inhalation anthrax. The victim was released from a Virginia hospital on November 9, 2001. Eight of 55 environmental samples tested positive.

Thirty FBI SWAT team members, some in biohazard suits, raided the homes of three Chester, Pennsylvania, city officials of Pakistani descent. They set up decontamination tents, but did not find any equipment used to grow or process anthrax. Chester health commissioner Irshad Shaikh, 39, shared a home with his brother, Masood Shaikh, who works in the city's lead abatement program. Neighbors said the FBI took away green garbage bags of possessions. A few blocks away, accountant Asif Kazi, 39, lived in a brick row house, which FBI agents swabbed.