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American Pravda: The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks

BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • OCTOBER 17, 2023

The Immense Historical Importance of the Anthrax Attacks

We just recently passed the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, the greatest terrorist strike in human history and an event whose political reverberations dominated world politics for most of the two decades that followed. Our Iraq War was soon triggered as a consequence, a disastrous decision that dramatically transformed the political map of the Middle East and eventually led to the death or displacement of many millions, while our failing twenty-year retaliatory occupation of Afghanistan only finally came to a humiliating end in 2021.

American society also underwent enormous changes, with a considerable erosion of our traditional civil liberties. On the fiscal side, by 2008 Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his collaborators had conservatively estimated that the total accrued cost of our military response had exceeded $3 trillion, a figure that later studies raised to $6.4 trillion by 2019, or more than $50,000 per American household.

In the days after those dramatic events, the images of the burning World Trade Center towers and their sudden collapse were endlessly replayed on our television screens, accompanied by the near-universal verdict that American life would forever be changed by the massive terrorist assault that had taken place. But a tiny handful of skeptics argued otherwise.

The Internet was then in its childhood, with the initial dot-com bubble already deflating, while Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and social media did not yet exist. But one of the earliest pioneers of web-based journalism was Mickey Kaus, a former writer at The New Republic, who had recently begun publishing short, informal bits of punditry one or more times each day on what he called his “web log,” a term soon contracted to “blog.” Along with his fellow TNR alumnus Andrew Sullivan, Kaus became one of our first bloggers, and was inclined to take contrarian positions on major issues.

Thus, even as a stunned world gaped at the smoking ruins of the WTC towers and the talking heads on cable declared that American life would never be the same again, Kaus took a very different position. I remember that not long after the attacks, he argued that our cable-driven 24-hour news cycle had so drastically shrunk the popular attention-span that coverage of the massive terrorist attacks would soon begin to bore most Americans. As a result, he boldly predicted that by Thanksgiving, the 9/11 Attacks would have become a rapidly-fading memory, probably displaced by the latest celebrity-scandal or high-profile crime, and that the long-term impact upon American public life would be minimal.

Obviously, Kaus’ forecast was wrong, but I think it never had a fair test. Very soon after he wrote those words, our national attention was suddenly riveted by an entirely new wave of terrorism, as the offices of leading media and political figures in Manhattan, DC, and Florida began receiving envelopes filled with lethal anthrax spores together with short notes praising Allah and promising death to America.

Although nearly all Americans had seen the destruction of the WTC towers on their television screens and become outraged at the blow to our country, probably few had felt personally threatened by those September attacks. But now during October, the dreadful spectre of biological terrorism moved to the forefront of popular concerns, staying there for many months.

Those anthrax mailings had targeted particular high-profile individuals and the letters were tightly sealed, but the media soon revealed that rough handling at postal centers during the automatic sorting process had caused the tiny seeds of death to leak through the pores of the envelope paper, contaminating both the buildings and the other mail being processed. As a result, some of the subsequent fatalities were those of random individuals who had received an accidentally-contaminated letter, seeming to place all Americans at terrible risk.

Moreover, despite all the visual scenes of massive destruction inflicted on 9/11, only about 3,000 Americans had died, but then our political and media figures soon warned that terrorists could use anthrax or smallpox to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of our citizens. Indeed, we were told that just a few months earlier during June 2001, the government’s Dark Winter simulation exercise had suggested that over a million Americans could die in a smallpox attack unleashed by foreign terrorists.

According to early news reports, the anthrax in the letters had been highly weaponized using techniques far beyond the rudimentary capabilities of al-Qaeda terrorists, facts that therefore indicated a state sponsor. Numerous anonymous government sources stated that the deadly spores had been coated in bentonite, a compound long used by the Iraqis to enhance the lethality of their anthrax bombs, thereby directly fingering Saddam Hussein’s regime, and although those claims were later officially denied by the White House, large portions of the American public heard and believed them.

As the weeks went by, the FBI and most of the media declared that the anthrax had apparently come from our own domestic stockpiles, suggesting that the mailer was probably a lone domestic terrorist merely pretending to be an radical Islamicist, but much of the public never accepted this.

Indeed, a year later when Colin Powell made his famous presentation to the UN Security Council, attempting to justify America’s planned invasion of Iraq, he held up a small vial of white powder, explaining that even such a tiny quantity of anthrax spores could kill many tens of thousands of Americans. His public focus demonstrated the continuing resonance of the biological warfare attacks that our country had suffered more than a year earlier, and which many die-hard Americans still stubbornly believed had been a combined effort by al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

The handful of anthrax letters had only killed five Americans and sickened 17 more, a tiny sliver of the 9/11 casualties, and the last envelope sent had been postmarked on October 17, 2001. But I think the impact upon American public opinion during the year or two that followed was fully comparable to that of the massive physical attacks we had suffered a few weeks earlier, or perhaps even greater. For all the death and destruction inflicted on 9/11, without the subsequent anthrax mailings, the Patriot Act would never have passed Congress in anything like its final form, while President Bush might not have gained sufficient public support to launch his disastrous Iraq War.

The anthrax mailings were almost totally forgotten within just a few years and today my suggestion that their impact had matched or even exceeded that of the 9/11 Attacks themselves might seem utterly preposterous to most Americans, but when I recently reviewed the articles of that period, I discovered that I had hardly been alone in that appraisal.

Renowned investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald was just beginning his career, joining Salon in 2007. He soon began publishing a number of columns on the anthrax case, with one of the first including this paragraph near the beginning:

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters — with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 — that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax — sent directly into the heart of the country’s elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets — that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

So I think it’s perfectly possible that without those now long-forgotten anthrax mailings, Kaus might have been proven correct in his predictions and the 9/11 Attacks would have become a fading memory by the end of 2001. Without a handful of small envelopes filled with anthrax, there might never have been an Iraq war nor a Patriot Act nor all the other momentous political and social changes in America during the years after September 11, 2001.

There were also some very direct consequences. American government support for biodefense had been strong under Clinton, then sharply reduced once Bush came into office. But those few deadly envelopes changed everything, and during the years 2002-2011, our government spent an estimated $70 billion on biowarfare and biodefense, vastly more than ever before. These days our total biowarfare outlays have far surpassed the hundred billion dollar mark, but almost all of that gusher of funding was triggered by a handful of envelopes bearing $0.23 stamps. During September 2001, a biological defense contractor named BioPort was on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy, but once the mailings reached the headlines, the company was saved by a flood of anthrax-vaccine government contracts; later renamed Emergent BioSolutions, it played a controversial role in the production of our Covid vaccines nearly twenty years later.

If Americans were asked to name the half-dozen most consequential global events of our young 21st century, I doubt whether even one in a thousand would include the forgotten anthrax attacks of 2001 on that list; but without those mailings our entire history and that of the world might have followed a very different trajectory.

The Assaad Letter as the Crucial Evidence

Although the anthrax letters have never attracted more than a small fraction of the public debate surrounding the associated 9/11 Attacks, they were also shrouded in considerable controversy, with the true perpetrators and circumstances hotly debated from the very beginning. Back then and for many years afterward, I had never seriously questioned the official 9/11 narrative nor even closely investigated its details. But the glaring omissions in the news coverage of the anthrax mailings had always seemed very strange and suspicious to me, and thus had played an important role in my growing doubts about the reliability of our mainstream media. When I published my original American Pravda article a decade ago, I’d given pride of place to the anthrax story and included several paragraphs summarizing my own contrary analysis, which had remained unchanged during the dozen years since 2001:

Consider the almost forgotten anthrax mailing attacks in the weeks after 9/11, which terrified our dominant East Coast elites and spurred passage of the unprecedented Patriot Act, thereby eliminating many traditional civil-libertarian protections. Every morning during that period the New York Times and other leading newspapers carried articles describing the mysterious nature of the deadly attacks and the complete bafflement of the FBI investigators. But evenings on the Internet I would read stories by perfectly respectable journalists such as Salon’s Laura Rozen or the staff of the Hartford Courant providing a wealth of additional detail and pointing to a likely suspect and motive.

Although the letters carrying the anthrax were purportedly written by an Arab terrorist, the FBI quickly determined that the language and style indicated a non-Arab author, while tests pointed to the bioweapons research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., as the probable source of the material. But just prior to the arrival of those deadly mailings, military police at Quantico, Va., had also received an anonymous letter warning that a former Ft. Detrick employee, Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad, might be planning to launch a national campaign of bioterrorism. Investigators quickly cleared Dr. Assaad, but the very detailed nature of the accusations revealed inside knowledge of his employment history and the Ft. Detrick facilities. Given the near-simultaneous posting of anthrax envelopes and false bioterrorism accusations, the mailings almost certainly came from the same source, and solving the latter case would be the easiest means of catching the anthrax killer.

Who would have attempted to frame Dr. Assaad for bioterrorism? A few years earlier he had been involved in a bitter personal feud with a couple of his Ft. Detrick coworkers, including charges of racism, official reprimands, and angry recriminations all around. When an FBI official shared a copy of the accusatory letter with a noted language-forensics expert and allowed him to compare the text with the writings of 40 biowarfare lab employees, he found a perfect match with one of those individuals. For years I told my friends that anyone who spent 30 minutes with Google could probably determine the name and motive of the likely anthrax killer, and most of them successfully met my challenge.

This powerful evidence received almost no attention in the major national media, nor is there any indication that the FBI ever followed up on any of these clues or interrogated the named suspects. Instead, investigators attempted to pin the attacks on a Dr. Steven Hatfill based on negligible evidence, after which he was completely exonerated and won a $5.6 million settlement from the government for its years of severe harassment. Later, similar hounding of researcher Bruce Ivins and his family led to his suicide, after which the FBI declared the case closed, even though former colleagues of Dr. Ivins demonstrated that he had had no motive, means, or opportunity. In 2008, I commissioned a major 3,000-word cover story in my magazine summarizing all of this crucial evidence, and once again almost no one in the mainstream media paid the slightest attention.

  • Our American Pravda
    Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words

When I recently decided to revisit the story of the anthrax attacks and reexamine all the accumulated information from the last couple of decades, I felt that a good starting point might be that TAC cover story by Christ0pher Ketchum that I’d published back in 2008, which effectively summarized what I’d always considered the most crucial information:

As early as November 2001, the New York Times was reporting that the bureau’s “missteps” were “hampering the inquiry.” Indeed, from the beginning, the FBI has been in possession of a key piece of evidence that it apparently ignored.

Among the first suspects to come into the FBI’s sights was an Egyptian-born ex-USAMRIID biologist named Ayaad Assaad. He appeared on the radar because of an anonymous letter sent to the bureau identifying him as part of a terrorist cell possibly linked to the anthrax attacks. Yet, according to the Hartford Courant, the FBI did not attempt to track down the author of the letter, “despite its curious timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known.”

Assaad was quickly exonerated by FBI investigators, and the matter swiftly dropped—though the letter may have provided the best piece of evidence in the case. It was sent prior to the arrival of the anthrax letters, suggesting foreknowledge of the attacks, and its language was similar to that of the deadly mail. Moreover, it displayed an intimate knowledge of USAMRIID operations, suggesting that it came from within the limited ranks of Fort Detrick researchers—a relatively small group with access to and expertise in weaponized anthrax.

The FBI has refused to make a copy of the letter publicly available—or even to give one to Assaad himself. It did, however, share the contents with a Vassar College professor and language forensics expert named Don Foster, who famously fingered Joe Klein as the anonymous author behind Primary Colors and helped to catch the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber. After reading news reports, he requested a copy of the letter, and, following his review of documents written by “some 40 USAMRIID employees,” Foster “found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match,” according to an article he authored in the October 2003 Vanity Fair. When he brought this seemingly crucial clue to the attention of the FBI’s anthrax task force, however, the bureau declined to follow up. According to Foster, the senior FBI agent on the case had never even heard of the Assaad letter. (For the record, Foster isn’t an unimpeachable source. He strayed from his area of professional expertise and published unrelated circumstantial evidence in his Vanity Fair piece that wrongly fingered Hatfill, who sued the magazine, which settled on undisclosed terms.)

“The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor I work on, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live,” Assaad told reporter Laura Rozen. Since he was almost immediately cleared, attempting to frame him served no purpose, except to indulge a personal enmity. To that end, Assaad suggested that the FBI question the pair of USAMRIID colleagues most likely to carry a grudge against him, Marian Rippy and Philip Zack, who years earlier had been reprimanded for sending Assad a racist poem. Though the Courant reported video evidence of Zack making after-hours trips to labs where pathogens were stored, there is no record of the FBI ever investigating him or Rippy, a colleague with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

  • The Anthrax Files
    Christopher Ketchum • The American Conservative • August 25, 2008 • 3,000 Words

The lengthy and detailed Assaad letter demonstrated foreknowledge of the anthrax mailings and very likely had been sent by someone fully aware of those attacks, so it had always seemed the obvious means of cracking the case. Yet it was completely ignored by the New York Times and the rest of the elite media, and only reported in relatively small outlets such as the Hartford Courant and Salon, whose extensive coverage had played an important role in the case.

Media Coverage of the Anthrax Attacks

During the first year or two following the anthrax attacks, I’d tried to keep up with the flood of media coverage, much of it regularly highlighted for me on a daily basis by news-aggregator websites such as Antiwar.com. Under normal circumstances, now locating all those same stories two decades after they originally ran would have been an impossible undertaking given that many of those publications had long since purged their archives or even completely vanished from the Internet.

Fortunately, Edward Lake, a writer with neoconservative leanings, became deeply interested in the anthrax case, and aggregated together most of those early news stories on a website that he created, which served as a uniquely useful resource. Although that website also vanished from the Internet many years ago, its contents remain accessible at Archive.org, and here are links to several of the main sections:

Possibly for reasons of copyright, Lake’s website had excluded pieces originally published in the largest national newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Among these, a half-dozen Times columns published in 2002 by Nicholas Kristof had played an especially important role and provoked enormous attention. Kristof had repeatedly charged that the FBI was refusing to arrest an obvious suspect in the case and he ultimately fingered Dr. Steven Hatfill, who turned out to have been wrongly accused and successfully sued:

The important article by Don Foster mentioned above had originally run in Vanity Fair, but was later republished by the UCLA Department of Epidemiology, which also provided a very helpful annotated timeline of the outbreak:

Beginning in 2007, Glenn Greenwald published a lengthy series of columns in Salon, totaling well over 30,000 words, with most of his pieces sharply challenging the official FBI narrative that blamed the attacks on Ft. Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins and then declared the case closed:

In 2009 attorney Barry Kissin published a long and influential memo also challenging those FBI conclusions on numerous technical grounds, which he later updated and expanded in 2011:

Kissin heavily referenced a couple of columns that had run the previous year in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times by Edward Jay Epstein and Richard Bernstein respectively. These had pointed out the enormous holes in the case against Ivins, whom they argued could not possibly have created the anthrax in his Ft. Detrick facilities as claimed by the FBI:

Finally, Wikipedia also provides a lengthy establishmentarian account of the anthrax attacks, as does the more conspiratorial wikispooks website, which also provides a helpful timeline

How the Media and the FBI Ignored the Obvious Suspect

I recently spent a few days carefully rereading those two hundred-odd news stories, most of them for the first time in nearly twenty years. Across the more than 250,000 words of text, I found very little to change my original analysis of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

In his numerous columns, Greenwald had described the FBI case presented against Ivins as extremely thin, while Epstein, Bernstein, and Kissin persuasively argued that Ivins could not possibly have produced the anthrax used in the mailings.

Meanwhile, just as I remembered, it seemed very likely that the long Assaad letter had been sent by someone fully aware of the anthrax being sent, and was therefore the most important lead to the culprit. Both the FBI and its strongest critics agreed that the anthrax used had originated at Ft. Detrick and Assaad’s false accuser was clearly a present or former Ft. Detrick staffer. The letter had been mailed just a couple of days after the first wave of anthrax envelopes went out but long before their deadly contents came to public attention and began inspiring any copycats, and just like those anthrax mailings, accusations of Islamic bioterrorism had been the main theme. Such close correspondences seemed far too numerous to have been simply coincidental.

Just as in early 2002, I still found it extremely strange that while the Hartford Courant and Salon had run numerous stories on the Assaad letter, almost none of the 200 other news articles in mainstream outlets had ever mentioned a word about such a central clue to the mystery, perhaps reflecting the influence of their powerful establishmentarian sources, including those near the top of the FBI.

However, in properly assessing the implications of the Assaad letter, we must sharply distinguish between the solid and the speculative. When Assaad had originally been interviewed by the FBI prior to the anthrax outbreak, he had suggested Zack and Rippy as two of the most likely culprits since they had been among his chief personal antagonists at Ft. Detrick, but that was merely speculation on his part. Zack had been an anthrax biowarfare developer and reporters later found that he’d been given improper access to the Ft. Detrick facilities by Rippy, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Furthermore, around the same time, there was evidence that unauthorized anthrax experiments had secretly been conducted in those labs. Obviously, these facts seemed highly suspicious and the total lack of any coverage in the major news media or apparent FBI investigation was a serious omission.

But as Lake had noted in his sharp rebuttal, all of these events had occurred nearly a decade before the anthrax mailings, and also long before the particular anthrax sent in the letters had been produced at the facility. Both Zack and Rippy had left Ft. Detrick years before the attacks took place and Lake suggested that they were probably no longer living on the East Coast at the time, perhaps giving them strong alibis. Finally, Zack’s apparent deep hostility towards Arabs and Muslims had led to the widespread assumption that he was Jewish, and Lake effectively debunked that mistaken claim.

But none of those points diminishes the importance of the Assaad letter nor clears Zack. As a Ft. Detrick anthrax researcher who had previously been involved in suspicious activity, Zack was certainly an obvious suspect for the FBI to consider, although hardly an exclusive one. Determining the author of the Assaad letter was the crucial path to pursue, and according to Prof. Foster, after reviewing documents written by “some 40 USAMRIID employees,” he had “found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match.” It hardly mattered whether or not that individual happened to be Rippy, Zack’s former confederate. Properly interrogating the author of the Assaad letter would probably have cracked the anthrax case, but the FBI refused to do so, or even make a copy of the letter publicly available to Assaad or anyone else, which raises all sorts of troubling issues.

Aside from the Hartford Courant and Salon, one of the very few publications to mention the Assaad letter was the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, whose news editor wrote an article around the first anniversary of the attacks, summarizing the facts and suggesting that the likely culprit was Zack, whom she misidentified as Jewish. Aside from outlining the evidence, her piece also included several puzzling paragraphs based upon her questions to Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a key figure in the anthrax case:

When the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs asked Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Ph.D., a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York, if the allegations regarding Dr. David Hatfill now took the heat off Lt. Col. Philip Zack, she replied, “Zack has NEVER been under suspicion as perpetrator of the anthrax attack.”

It is hard to believe that, with his connection to Fort Detrick, Dr. Zack is not one of the 20 to 50 scientists under intense investigation.

When asked if Hatfill was part of the group that ganged up on Dr. Ayaad Assaad, Dr. Rosenberg answered, “Hatfill was NOT one of the persecutors of Assaad.”

She is convinced that the FBI knows who sent the anthrax letters but isn’t arresting him because he knows too much about U.S. secret biological weapons research and production. But she isn’t naming names. Neither is Dr. Assaad, who did not return calls from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Reading this exchange more than twenty years later, it’s unclear to me whether Rosenberg was arguing that Zack had never been considered a suspect because he had an ironclad alibi or whether the FBI was simply unwilling to investigate him for some other reason, with the latter possibility obviously being very suspicious if true.

Nine Books on the Anthrax Attacks

Having first established a solid foundation by rereading so much of the original anthrax media coverage, I decided to see what books had been published on the subject. Over the years, I’d read two short works on the anthrax attacks and I now reread those, along with eight others that I managed to locate, together constituting nearly all the available literature. With one very notable exception, I didn’t find the material particularly useful and indeed much of it blurred together in my mind.

First out of the gate in late 2002 was Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer, a non-fiction work by a highly-successful writer of thrillers, which became a national bestseller. The book had obviously been in the works for some time, mostly focused upon deadly pathogens such as smallpox and also discussing bioweapons and Ft. Detrick’s research in that field. The sudden events of October 2001 were then incorporated into the last one-third of the narrative, with the timeliness of those recent headlines boosting sales.

According to the Ft. Detrick researchers, the second group of letters had contained highly weaponized anthrax, something far beyond what could have been produced in a simple lab, and Kissin extensively quoted some of author’s descriptions in his analysis memo. However, researchers from Battelle, a different government-affiliated bioweapons facility, had stubbornly—and rather suspiciously—disputed that conclusion. Given Preston’s focus, it’s hardly surprising that there was no mention anywhere of the Assaad letter, and although the other elements of the book were interesting from a broader perspective, they provided little useful additional information on the anthrax mailings, which constituted only a small portion of the text.

The cover jacket on Marilyn W. Thompson’s 2003 book The Killer Strain identified the author as the award-winning Assistant Managing Editor for Investigations at the Washington Post, while noting that her team had won two Pulitzer Prizes for public service, and also included favorable blurbs from such notable journalistic figures as Benjamin Bradlee, Jimmy Breslin, Michael Isikoff, and David Maraniss.

The text did a perfectly adequate job of telling the basic story of the attacks, and to its credit devoted three paragraphs of its 250 pages to the Assaad letter, though providing no indication of its potential importance and not even bothering to include the term in the lengthy index. One important fact that I did learn was that prior to the anthrax attacks, the new Bush Administration had planned deep cuts in biodefense preparedness.

Although I had hardly regarded Thompson’s scanty coverage of the Assaad letter as adequate, it was far more than I found in The Anthrax Letters, published that same year by Prof. Leonard A. Cole of Rutgers University, described as an expert on bioterrorism, who entirely excluded the Assaad letter from his 280 pages of text.

Like the Thompson book, his work provided a useful account of the basic narrative, attracting favorable blurbs from several major news outlets and Sen. Daschle, but seemed much less useful for someone primarily interested in solving the case.

The book had originally appeared in 2003, but was reissued in 2009 following the FBI’s declaration that the case had been closed with Ivins’ suicide, though the author emphasized the extreme skepticism of so many prominent figures, including members of Congress, on that verdict.

Also originally published in 2003 was Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer by Robert Graysmith, a bestselling author of books on crime and terrorism, whose past works had become the basis for several major motion pictures. This background was apparent in the long text, which seemed to have the strongly fictional feel of an prospective screenplay rather than an analytical work, and also included extensive descriptions of the 9/11 Attacks and the broader history of American, Soviet, and Iraqi biowarfare programs.

On the positive side, the author did devote a couple of pages to the Assaad letter, which he described as obviously connected to the anthrax mailings, even claiming that it had been a crucial factor convincing government investigators that the attacks were domestic in origin, but he never emphasized that it could have been used to crack the case.

The book was later reissued with an Afterword in 2008, pointing to the deceased Ivins as the apparent culprit and even suggesting that he had written the Assaad letter. That latter notion seemed very unlikely to me since if there had been the slightest evidence for that possibility it would have been promoted as a centerpiece of the FBI case against Ivins.

Edward Lake, whose website usefully aggregated so much of the early media coverage, self-published Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks in 2005. Lake was strongly critical of many of the arguments made by both Rosenberg and Foster, and very briefly mentioned the Assaad letter, arguing that it probably had no connection to the actual anthrax mailings and he therefore dismissed its significance.

Although I obviously disagreed with this analysis, the author deserved considerable credit for explicitly arguing this point rather than just ignoring the issue.

Lake also provided some interesting speculation that the anthrax killer probably lived and worked in central New Jersey and even suggested that the letters might have been written by a young child acting under adult supervision.

The following year, Harvard University Press released Anthrax: Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy, a short book by Phillip Sarasin, a professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich.

His entire approach to the subject was cultural and ideological, including a focus upon popular literature and even videogames, while tying the discussion of biological terrorism to the 9/11 attacks and even broader themes such as globalization.

Although I didn’t find the work very useful for my own purposes, others interested in the particular cultural framework under which our society experienced the attacks might react differently.

Subject to severe pressure and facing indictment, Bruce Ivins committed suicide in 2008, allowing the FBI to declare the case closed, though many senior members of Congress and journalists remained extremely skeptical that Ivins had been responsible or had acted alone.

With the anthrax mailings temporarily back in the media headlines, new book contracts soon went out, and American Anthrax by Jeanne Guillemin, an academic affiliated with MIT, appeared in 2011.

The author devoted a couple of paragraphs to the Assaad letter, and Zack was even mentioned as a subject with a reference to one of the Salon articles, but the author stated that the lead never “panned out,” without providing any source for that supposed fact, so it probably represented her own interpretation of the puzzling later silence.

She did mention that under severe FBI pressure an additional suspect besides Hatfill and Ivins apparently drank himself to death, perhaps further indicating that Ivins’ suicide was not necessarily proof of his own guilt.

I was especially disappointed by the most recent book in the collection, Recounting the Anthrax Attacks, published in 2018 by R. Scott Decker, one of the top FBI agents running the investigation. His coverage of the story was overwhelmingly procedural and quite dull, providing little broader perspective despite winning a non-fiction prize from the Public Safety Writers Association.

Given his background and role, I was hardly surprised that he fully accepted Ivins’ guilt, minimizing or excluding any contrary evidence, and he never mentioned the Assaad letter, perhaps even being unaware of it. If the enormous FBI investigation did ultimately prove unsuccessful, this book may help to explain that failure.

Considerably superior to most of these other texts was The Mirage Man published in 2011 by David Willman, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times, which ran a hefty 450 pages and heavily focused upon Bruce Ivins, the suspect whose suicide had allowed the FBI to declare the case closed.

Willman himself had been given the original Ivins scoop in 2008, so he naturally expressed few doubts about the guilt of the dead vaccine researcher, but he did do his best to refute the extreme skepticism of Greenwald and numerous others, not entirely successfully but more than I had expected. Nearly a decade had passed since the attacks themselves and Willman was portraying the case as fully resolved with Ivins’ guilt, so I couldn’t really fault the author for making no mention of the Assaad letter.

Relative to its apparent purpose, the book seemed a very solid work of investigative journalism, including a lengthy personal and family history of its central subject, and it carried a strongly favorable endorsement from Seymour Hersh, a towering figure in the author’s own field.

I personally made some effort to weigh Willman’s arguments against those of Greenwald, Epstein, Bernstein, and Kissin on the other side, but much of the dispute revolved around technical claims made by different experts that were difficult for me to judge.

One critical question was whether or not the anthrax sent in the second set of envelopes had actually been “weaponized” with a silicon coating to enhance its effectiveness, with some experts sharply disputing that claim, though I thought that the weight of evidence favored that conclusion. Ivins’ himself had no expertise nor equipment for such weaponization, so such a verdict would probably have cleared him.

When the FBI had originally declared Ivins’ guilty, Greenwald noted that the timeline provided of the suspect’s movements was completely impossible based upon the postmarked date of the letters sent and his own lab time-card. As a result, the Bureau had quickly modified its story to claim that Ivins had actually driven all night on an eight-hour round-trip in order to drop the letter in a Princeton mailbox, a suggestion that Greenwald ridiculed. But Willman strongly defended that theory, noting that Ivins had admitted sometimes taking long drives at night.

Although Willman hardly convinced me on this and other issues, I came away from his long book at least admitting the possibility of Ivins’ guilt, something that I had previously dismissed as almost totally absurd.

Graeme MacQueen and The 2001 Anthrax Deception

These nine books totaled more than a million words and spending a couple of weeks reading them greatly refreshed my memory of those important events of two decades ago. But although they highlighted interesting elements here and there, taken together they added very little to my framework, nor shifted any of my original conclusions. If I hadn’t bothered reading any of them, none of my views about the 2001 anthrax attacks would be any different today.

However, the impact of the tenth book was completely different. Although the shortest of them all, The 2001 Anthrax Deception published in 2014 by the late Prof. Graeme MacQueen drastically transformed my understanding of those events, making a case in its 80,000 words that was entirely different from anything that I had previously read on the subject. MacQueen persuasively argued that first impressions had actually been correct and that the anthrax mailings were directly connected with the 9/11 Attacks of a week or two earlier. This had been the original assumption but was then very soon dismissed as a possibility and afterward completely ignored by almost everyone else analyzing the case during all the years that followed.

MacQueen’s own background allowed him to boldly go where others did not. The authors of the previous nine books I have discussed were mainstream journalists or academics, therefore being quite reluctant to stray too far outside the safe confines of the standard narrative endorsed by establishmentarian sources, and none of them appear to have ever questioned the official story of 9/11. MacQueen himself had very respectable credentials, including a Ph.D. from Harvard and thirty years on the faculty of McMaster University in Canada, being the founder and director of its Centre for Peace Studies. But in the years after 2001, he had become an important figure in the 9/11 Truth movement, serving as co-editor of The Journal of 9/11 Studies. So unlike those other writers, he was willing to explore controversial possibilities and highlight obvious connections that they had carefully ignored.

As I have already emphasized, without the anthrax mailings, the political impact of the 9/11 Attacks themselves might have quickly faded, perhaps being insufficient to reorient our country towards the many years of warfare that followed, including our invasion of Iraq, an invasion justified by Saddam’s alleged stockpile of anthrax and other WMDs. So if we accept that the 9/11 Attacks were orchestrated by a conspiracy for that purpose, it becomes natural to ask whether the accompanying anthrax mailings were an entirely unexpected, fortuitous coincidence benefiting those plotters or whether they were instead an intrinsic element of the original plan. Without those anthrax deaths, Colin Powell’s later UN presentation and the vial of white powder he employed as a stage prop would not have been possible, nor President Bush’s public speeches on the deadly danger we faced from Iraqi WMDs.

MacQueen notes that although the 9/11 Attacks had involved entirely different types of terrorism—large-scale airplane hijackings—our East Coast media and political elites almost immediately began to focus upon the deadly risks of biowarfare attacks by Islamic radicals, especially involving anthrax, and they did so before the first anthrax letter had even been postmarked. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen later revealed that he’d been warned by a high-ranking Bush Administration official to get a prescription for Cipro, the recommended antibiotic treatment for anthrax, and according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, well-connected NYC residents also began carrying Cipro in the days immediately after 9/11. Not only was there a great deal of such apparent foreknowledge in the weeks before the first reported anthrax case, but fears of a looming anthrax attack by state-sponsored terrorists had actually long predated 9/11 itself. Perhaps this was all purely coincidental, but we should naturally be suspicious when such fearful concerns quietly promoted in elite media circles were immediately followed by actual anthrax mailings to very high-profile members of the same media establishment.

MacQueen and other members of the 9/11 Truth movement have long argued that the very public activities of Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers were intended to lay down a false narrative trail for their supposed plot, and he noted that important elements of that trail seemingly revolved around biological warfare, including the terrorist ringleader’s audacious talk of acquiring a crop-dusting plane that could release clouds of deadly anthrax over a major American city. Indeed, before the first anthrax case was even reported, there were frantic government investigations of all crop-dusters nationwide.

From very early on I had always regarded the Assaad letter as the key to unraveling the anthrax plot, but MacQueen focused my attention upon several other threatening hoax letters that had been sent out almost simultaneously with the first wave of anthrax mailings, letters that were also addressed to leading media figures but filled with harmless white powder instead of anthrax, together with strangely-formulated notes somewhat similar to those of their deadly counterparts. These envelopes had been postmarked St. Petersburg, Florida, and MacQueen argues that they were probably intended to provide an apparent link to the 9/11 Attacks, since most of the hijackers had been living in that state.

An additional connection has been regularly dismissed as merely an astonishing coincidence, but may have been more than that. The first anthrax death was that of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the American Media offices in Florida, and Mike Irish was the top editor of his publication. Irish’s own wife was a real estate agent, and she had personally arranged the rental home for a couple of the 9/11 hijackers, with whom she’d become friendly, while most of the other hijackers were also living in the close vicinity. As MacQueen notes, in a country of 285 million people, we are forced to believe that mere chance had caused the 9/11 hijackers to have such a direct personal connection to the first anthrax victim. But under his own very different reconstruction, the anthrax mailing to Irish’s publication was meant to falsely suggest that the Islamic terrorists responsible for 9/11 had been directly involved in the biowarfare attacks.

Soon after the 9/11 Attacks, Neocon pundits and media outlets began promoting spurious links between the al-Qaeda Islamicists allegedly responsible and Saddam’s secular, anti-Islamicist Iraqi regime. The anthrax mailings became a central element of their case given that the purity of the deadly spores could only have been produced by a regime possessing sophisticated biowarfare facilities. As Greenwald later noted with outrage, four separate official government sources also soon falsely informed ABC News that the anthrax had been weaponized with bentonite, regarded as proof that it was Iraqi in origin. So the weaponized anthrax represented the crucial evidence connecting the 9/11 Attacks with Saddam.

Unfortunately for those plotters, the FBI quickly determined that the anthrax was of the Ames strain rather than the type used by Iraq, and this pointed to the ultimate source being one of our own bioweapons facilities. MacQueen argues that the conspirators may have assumed that Ames was much more widely distributed internationally than it proved to be. So once their intended narrative of a foreign plot linked to Iraq had collapsed, they quickly shifted gears and began promoting the fallback theory of a lone wolf domestic terrorist, thereby deflecting attention away from any consideration of the sort of organized domestic conspiracy that might have eventually implicated them.

Based upon the facts presented by MacQueen, I would add one important caveat with which the author might or might not have agreed. He opens Chapter 6 by declaring his hypothesis that members of our own executive branch had carried out the anthrax attacks in accordance with their plan, and I support that theory. However, I think that this plot only involved certain elements of our government rather than its leadership as a whole. Later lawsuits revealed that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and other top White House officials had secretly begun taking Cipro immediately after September 11th, indicating that they believed they faced the personal threat of a large-scale anthrax attack rather than the tiny handful of false-flag letters that were actually sent out. I think this suggests that none of them were involved in the conspiracy and they were instead being manipulated by a few of their aides and advisors, just as I believe was the case with regard to the 9/11 Attacks themselves. This framework also helps to explain the contradictory claims and conflicting arguments that soon developed within the executive branch.

MacQueen had spent many years as a leading 9/11 researcher and his deep understanding of those issues allowed him to make this important case in merely a hundred-odd pages of text, perhaps lacking solid proof but in reasonably convincing fashion. His analysis successfully tied together many loose ends that would otherwise remain mysterious, while he also devoted a portion of his short book to sketching out some of the overwhelming evidence that the conventional 9/11 story itself was completely false. And in all fairness, I should mention that MacQueen sometimes drew upon the material in several of the other nine anthrax books that I had personally found much less useful.

Proposing this elegant solution required an author of MacQueen’s own background. There is an official story of the 9/11 Attacks and also an official story of the anthrax mailings, and only someone who completely rejected both of those accounts could have argued that the two events were directly connected. A former UN Assistant Secretary-General urged all thinking Americans to read MacQueen’s book, and I would strongly second that recommendation, given the importance of those events in shaping the history of the decades that followed.

Judith Miller and Germs

My own decision to finally revisit the anthrax attacks after so many years was prompted by a particular book I noticed a couple of months ago at the local Palo Alto library sale.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, Judith Miller, a longtime reporter at the New York Times, had published numerous front-page stories on Saddam’s non-existent WMDs based upon information fed to her by her Neocon sources. Her falsehoods had played a hugely influential role in setting the political stage for our disastrous invasion, and she was forced to resign from the Times in 2005.

In a remarkably fortuitous example of timing, she had earlier been the lead author of Germs, published with her Times colleagues Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, a book that was released on the very same day that the first anthrax victim was admitted to a hospital. Subtitled “Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War” it purportedly represented a comprehensive history of biological warfare and the dangers America faced, with a major focus on the Iraqi program and its anthrax capabilities. Given such perfect timing, Germs quickly rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax mailings, further propelled when Miller herself received one of the anthrax hoax letters, containing harmless white powder. I’d always been aware of the major role her book had played in shaping the events of that period, so I purchased it for $0.50 and eventually read it, leading me to reexamine the anthrax story. Although the book obviously lacked any discussion of the anthrax letters themselves, I found it revealed much about the ideological biases of Miller and her co-authors.

Over the years I’ve noticed that respectable journalists writing books are reluctant to destroy their credibility by lying outright to their readers; instead, they prefer to mislead by selective omissions, carefully avoiding those items that would force them either to knowingly promote falsehoods or to present facts damaging to the intended sweep of their narrative. And this certainly seemed to be the case in Miller’s very influential book.

Its account of America’s own biological warfare programs and the Ft. Detrick facility correctly began with their establishment during World War II, and discussed America’s plans for the possible use of anthrax against Germany and Japan as well as Japan’s own biowarfare efforts during its invasion and occupation of China. But although the subsequent Korean War was mentioned, the narrative almost entirely skipped over that period, which I found extremely odd.

Surely the authors must have been aware of the very high-profile accusations of illegal “germ warfare” that were made against American forces during that conflict by Russia, China, and their international Communist bloc allies? These were the most serious biowarfare claims made anywhere in the world during the last eighty years, and prompted the establishment of an international commission of distinguished scientists, including Joseph Needham, one of Britain’s most eminent scholars, which eventually published a long report declaring that the accusations were probably true. Admittedly, the American government and its allied media outlets always denied those claims and especially after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, most American academics came to regard them as false. But as I pointed out in an article two years ago, more recent evidence seems to show that the Communist charges had been correct:

If Miller and her co-authors had mentioned those accusations only to dismiss them as debunked wartime propaganda, I would not have faulted them since that was a widely-held belief at the time the book was published in 2001. But to completely ignore the greatest international biowarfare controversy of the last three generations in a book focused on exactly that topic was inexcusable. Such total silence seems very suspicious to me and I wonder if the authors’ extensive research had led them to conclude that the accusations had probably been true and the entire subject best avoided.

Similarly, the Middle East was a leading focus of the book’s overall coverage and it repeatedly mentioned the possible development of ethnically-targeted bioweapons, a particularly alarming technological project. But just a couple of years earlier, the London Sunday Times, Wired News, and other international publications had broken the story of Israel’s extensive research in exactly that area, with the Israelis working to develop ethnic bioweapons that would selectively target Arab populations. Yet the authors strangely chose to omit the only such real-life example that had reached the global headlines. Obviously, a book meant to concentrate American public fears upon the terrible threat of Iraq’s biological warfare programs—which actually no longer existed at that point—would have lost much of its effectiveness if it had also included any mention of Israel’s far more advanced capabilities in exactly that same area. Indeed, Israel was almost never mentioned anywhere in the text, a very strange omission given the heavy focus on the alleged biowarfare efforts of its regional adversaries such as Iraq and Iran.

While I have absolutely no reason to believe that Miller’s book had been commissioned and funded by the Israeli Defense Ministry, I don’t think the contents would have been all that different if such had actually been the case.

Timothy Weiner and Enemies: A History of the FBI

Another book I read a month or two ago also contained certain extremely glaring omissions, including some that were directly relevant to the anthrax attacks.

In 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Timothy Weiner had published Legacy of Ashes, a widely-acclaimed history of the CIA, and in 2012, he followed it up with Enemies: A History of the FBI, running more than 500 pages and described as the first definitive history of that organization’s intelligence operations. But although he provided a great deal of interesting material, I was less than impressed by the work, which struck me as something of an authorized account, showing signs of the careful trimming of a project produced along such lines.

Some of his early mistakes jumped out at me. He characterized FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau as a “sophisticated economist,” when the latter was actually just a wealthy dilettante and gentleman-farmer, who had never graduated either high school or college and knew little of economics, obtaining his position primarily because he was FDR’s friend and neighbor. Indeed, Morgenthau’s total ignorance had left his powerful department in the hands of his subordinate, Harry Dexter White, a notorious Communist spy.

A page later, the author described famed aviator Charles Lindbergh as “a potential Republican candidate for president in 1940,” a claim I’ve never seen made anywhere else, including in A. Scott Berg’s exhaustive biography. I suspect Weiner may have gotten the idea from Philip Roth’s alarmist 2004 novel The Plot Against America, which had similarly portrayed our greatest national hero as a secret Nazi.

Obviously, such errors were hardly central to Weiner’s subject, but they left me skeptical in accepting some of his far more important assertions. For example, these days it is very widely accepted that founding FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his entire life as a deeply-closeted homosexual, with his long-time partner being Clyde Tolson, who also served as the FBI’s second-ranking official during Hoover’s half-century reign. Such factors would obviously have been very relevant to the Bureau’s operations, not least because syndicate boss Meyer Lansky had allegedly obtained hard proof of those secrets and used them for blackmail purposes; perhaps this explains why Hoover spent decades denying the existence of American organized crime and refusing to allow his FBI to combat it. Weiner attempts to casually debunk this established history in just a few paragraphs, suggesting it was mostly based upon malicious rumors spread by bureaucratic rivals and then emphasizing the statement of one of Hoover’s most loyal lieutenants that the accusations could not possibly have been true. Hoover ran the FBI in autocratic fashion for five decades and he was Weiner’s central figure, so the author hardly gave proper treatment to such a potentially explosive hidden factor influencing FBI policy during that entire period.

In his Afterword, Weiner explained that he heavily relied upon the copyrighted oral histories of the Society of Former Special Agents, which he cited with their permission, so perhaps use of that important resource had imposed constraints upon his treatment of certain delicate FBI topics.

Hoover died in 1972 but my doubts about the author’s candor obviously extended across the last one-third of the text, covering the three decades that followed, and I noticed certain absolutely glaring omissions during those years.

In 1996, TWA Flight 800 suddenly exploded in mid-air soon after taking off from JFK Airport in New York City, leading to widespread suspicions of a terrorist attack and prompting the largest, most comprehensive investigation in FBI history, an effort that involved 500 field agents. But as I explained in a 2016 article, the ultimate result was a notorious FBI cover-up. Weiner completely omitted all mention of that massive case from his lengthy FBI history.

A few years later, the FBI began its six-year investigation of the anthrax attacks, deploying resources completely eclipsing even that previous project. A 2010 WSJ column characterized that new FBI effort as “the largest inquest in its history, involving 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and the examination of tens of thousands of photocopiers, typewriters, computers and mailboxes,” finally ending in 2008 when the Bureau declared Bruce Ivins to be the sole perpetrator and the case closed. Yet not a single word about these events appeared in Weiner’s supposedly comprehensive history published several years later, with no mention of anthrax in his index.

So largest FBI investigation ever conducted was taking place exactly during the period that Weiner was producing his exhaustive volume on the history of that organization but he chose to completely exclude it from his coverage. The likely explanation is that he knew perfectly well that the FBI effort had ended in total failure with Ivins merely being an innocent scapegoat, but he was too heavily dependent upon the goodwill of his FBI sources to mention that fact. I think this example of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark” strongly supports Ivins’ innocence.

Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks themselves, the FBI had rounded up and arrested some 200 Mossad agents, many of them in the New York City area, including five who had been caught red-handed apparently celebrating the destruction of the WTC towers and taking souvenir photos of the burning buildings. Thus, the FBI had successfully broken the largest foreign spy ring ever found on American soil, yet not a word appeared anywhere in Weiner’s FBI history, nor was Mossad even listed in his index. Once again, the reason for such strange silence is not too difficult to guess.

Launching a Hundred Billion Dollar Biowarfare Industry

The story of our forgotten anthrax attacks of 2001 is really a quite remarkable one, possessing more strange twists and ironies than we would expect to find in any work of fiction.

Merely the first of these is that an event that had the greatest possible impact upon our society and world history has almost completely vanished from our national memory.

During the decades after World War II, our government had created the world’s largest and most powerful biodefense infrastructure to protect our citizens from such deadly attack. Yet the only documented cases of American bioweapon deaths came in 2001 and resulted from the deadly anthrax spores produced in our own national laboratories, whether these had been deployed by Dr. Bruce Ivins or more likely someone else.

We soon discovered that the bioterrorism responsible for those American deaths and the resulting wave of national panic had actually been the home-grown product of our own biodefense industry, but our political response was to increase the funding for those same government biowarfare labs by ten- or twenty-fold, so that American spending on bioweapons eventually crossed the hundred-billion-dollar mark.

All of those facts are completely indisputable, but I think there may also be an additional twist.

It is obvious that the existence of a massive American bioweapons capability might produce dangerous temptations in the minds of some of our more reckless political leaders, and such temptations may have had disastrous consequences in 2019.

Over the last several years, I have published a long series of articles arguing that there is strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid outbreak was probably the unintended blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).

More than a million Americans died as a consequence, along with perhaps 26 million other deaths worldwide, and the lives of many billions were greatly disrupted, including those of our own entire population. So all of this massive death and devastation may have been the ultimate consequence of a handful of letters bearing $0.23 stamps that were mailed out in 2001.

Last year I’d pointed to the analogy of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster that played a major role in bringing down the old Soviet Union.

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October 19, 2023 - Posted by | Book Review, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Timeless or most popular | , ,

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