How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

What this episode is about

This episode examines the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, which killed five people and caused nationwide panic in the wake of 9/11. It explores how the FBI and media misidentified suspects, focusing on one particularly wrongfully accused individual, and discusses the systemic failures that contributed to these injustices.

Key takeaways

• In the whirlwind post-9/11, fear led to scapegoating—wrong suspect, right panic: a true American paradox.
• Steve Hatfield’s tangled life story reveals how media narratives can create monstrous realities—truth takes a backseat.
• Anthrax attacks: media frenzy fueled accusations, making innocent lives collateral damage in a quest for scapegoats.
• Rejecting nuance, the FBI and media cast shadows on the innocent, turning lives upside down in a moral panic.
• A vision test sidetracked Hatfield's fighter pilot dreams—did America’s heightened terror response also fail its sanity check?

Who speaks in this episode?

• Robert Evans (Host) · 41 min speaking
• Courtney Kosak (Guest) · 18 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: anthrax, Steve Hatfield, Courtney Kosak, Southwestern College
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Courtney Kosak, Glenn and Lena Truth
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Rhodesia
4. 15:00 – 20:00: Rhodesia, Steve Hatfield
5. 20:00 – 25:00: anthrax, biological weapons
6. 25:00 – 30:00: anthrax, Rhodesia, biological weapons, Steve Hatfield
7. 30:00 – 35:00: anthrax, Rhodesia, biological weapons, University of Cape Town
8. 35:00 – 40:00: biological weapons, US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
9. 40:00 – 45:00: anthrax, Steve Hatfield, biological weapons
10. 45:00 – 50:00: anthrax, biological weapons, bioterrorism, Bill Patrick
11. 50:00 – 55:00: Bill Patrick, anthrax
12. 55:00 – 58:45: anthrax, biological weapons

Notable quotes from "How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"

• Juul and the Olympic Park bombing. And in these next two episodes, we're going to be talking about the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States that killed like five people…

  about anthrax · at 0:21

• He graduates Matune Senior High and is admitted to Southwestern College in Kansas where he majors in biology and joins an ROC like summer leadership program hosted by the Marine Corps. And.

  about Southwestern College · at 4:06

• Maybe is the answer I'll give you because Rhdesia had a massive chemical and biological weapons program and they used chemical and biological weapons on insurgents. Right. So there's there and there's there's good reasons to think.

  about biological weapons · at 24:14

• Barrel of like what kind of weapon systems can we put together? so as their chances of victory declined, Dr.

  about University of Rhodesia · at 25:18

• Now, in late 1997, he starts a 2-year fellowship with Usamid to study Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers. USMR is the acronym it's and it's USAM RIID.

  about US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases · at 38:11

• Doesn't seem like a fun job to me. Over the next couple of years, Hatfield makes himself into one of the nation's top experts on germ warfare. He's a virus guy. He's not into…

  about Steve Hatfield · at 44:30

• I don't mean that in a an unethical sense, just in a he makes a good career move. He starts giving lectures at conventions and talking to reporters about America's unreiness to…

  about bioterrorism · at 45:56

• From us and became a bowarfare consultant. He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax. Bill Patrick. So Bill is like the top guy in the terrifying murder weapons business, right?

  about Bill Patrick · at 48:56

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Steve Hatfield — Person · Primary subject (wrongly accused suspect / bioweapons expert) · 5 mentions · first at 2:47
  Central figure of the episode: his background, résumé inconsistencies, and biodefense work explain why FBI/media focused on him after the 2001 anthrax letters.
• Bill Patrick — Person · Referenced mentor / anthrax weaponization expert · 6 mentions · first at 49:00
  Key relationship: portrayed as Hatfill’s mentor and a top anthrax-weaponization expert with secret patents, helping explain why Hatfill could be perceived as capable of producing weaponized anthrax.
• Courtney Kosak — Person · Guest / co-discussant · 2 mentions · first at 0:15
  Guest who reacts, asks clarifying questions, and helps frame the narrative continuity from the prior episode (Richard Jewell) to the anthrax case.
  Monster by repeatedly accusing the wrong people of terrorism. and we're talking, we talked last episode with our guest Courtney Kosak about Richard Juul and the Olympic Park…
• Richard Juul — Person · Referenced prior-case subject (wrongly accused bombing suspect) · 2 mentions · first at 0:17
  Used as a parallel example of FBI/media misidentification; the episode explicitly links the pattern of scapegoating to the Hatfill/anthrax story.
  Monster by repeatedly accusing the wrong people of terrorism. and we're talking, we talked last episode with our guest Courtney Kosak about Richard Juul and the Olympic Park…
• Glenn and Lena Truth — Person · Referenced missionaries / mission hospital operators · 1 mention · first at 6:38
  They are described as running the Congo mission hospital where Hatfill volunteered at 19, a formative episode used to characterize his risk-taking and early medical exposure.
  Like medical work. It's like a missionary hospital type deal. And it's Hey, can I help? And the people running this mission are Glenn and Lena Truth. Lena describes the…
• Robert Simington — Person · Referenced academic tied to Rhodesian CBW program (alleged) · 1 mention · first at 25:26
  Presented as a professor at the Rhodesian medical school who urged/led chemical & biological weapons efforts—contextualizing Rhodesia’s CBW environment during Hatfill’s time there.
  Barrel of like what kind of weapon systems can we put together? so as their chances of victory declined, Dr.
• Eugene Tablanch — Person · Referenced white separatist figure (alleged association) · 1 mention · first at 34:09
  Mentioned to illustrate Hatfill’s alleged far-right/apartheid-era associations (claim of training bodyguards), contributing to the portrait of his politics and self-mythologizing.
  Into South African medical laboratories and boasted to colleagues that he'd trained bodyguards for white separatist Eugene Tblanch and just carrying a gun into the lab. It very South African stuff. And the fact.

Companies & orgs

• US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases — Company · Employer · 1 mention · first at 38:11
  Where Steve Hatfill worked and studied Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers.
• University of Rhodesia — Company · Educational institution · 1 mention · first at 25:46
  Where Steve Hatfill studied medicine during the Rhodesian Bush War.
• Southwestern College — Company · Educational institution · 1 mention · first at 4:08
  Where Steve Hatfill initially studied before his military aspirations.
• University of Cape Town — Company · Educational institution · 1 mention · first at 33:28
  Where Steve Hatfill pursued further studies and master's degrees.
  University of Cape Town. through the 1980s he gets three master's degrees in different sciences there and he tries to get a PhD. He almost finishes it but his doctoral thesis…

Concepts & topics

• anthrax — Concept · Core topic · 29 mentions · first at 0:25
  Central to the discussion about the 2001 anthrax attacks and bioterrorism.
• biological weapons — Concept · Core topic · 10 mentions · first at 24:20
  Discussed in the context of Rhodesia's use and the potential for bioterrorism.
• bioterrorism — Concept · Core topic · 1 mention · first at 45:52
  Central to the discussion about the anthrax attacks and national security concerns.

Places & events

• Rhodesia — Place · Setting · 10 mentions · first at 14:45
  Where Steve Hatfill studied and allegedly worked with the Rhodesian military during a time of anthrax outbreaks.
  Maybe is the answer I'll give you because Rhdesia had a massive chemical and biological weapons program and they used chemical and biological weapons on insurgents. Right. So there's there and there's there's good reasons to think.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Hey everyone, it's Still Behind the Bastards. Part two of our episodes on how the FBI and the media created a monster uh by repeatedly accusing the wrong people of terrorism. Uh and we're talking, we talked last episode with our guest Courtney Kosak uh about uh Richard Juul and the Olympic Park bombing. And in these next two episodes, we're going to be talking about the 2001 uh anthrax attacks in the United States that killed like five people and freaked the whole country the [ __ ] out. You know, these happened right in the wake of 9/11, if you're on the younger side of things, I don't think this is as famous, but basically right after 9/11, uh a bunch of people, including guys like Tom Dashel, some like people in government, started receiving letters that had white powder in them. Several people got sick and died. Mostly folks who were just happened to be in and around like the mail rooms and stuff where the letters

0:58 were being opened. And they never found who did it. Uh but they had a suspect for several years. And that suspect is a guy who is a bastard, I think, by my standards, but is also again not the bad guy of this story. And we're going to spend this episode talking about his life and times because again he's a he's a fascinating person. Um and I think there's a lot like on his own we probably could do a bastards episode but the thing he's best known for is being wrongly accused of being the anthrax male guy. And it just felt like I don't know. It seems weird to do an episode about how much this guy sucks. But also he's fine here. Like this wasn't his fault. He he he was done dirty. Um, so we're just talking about like how both of these in both of these terrorist attacks, the same [ __ ] up thing happened thanks to the FBI and the media uh being the kinds of organs that they are. Um,

1:57 is Steve our protagonist this time? Steve is. And this is going to be more of a traditional Bastards episode, this one. And then in part three, whenever we record that, we'll get to the actual anthrax attack and what happened to him. But we have to talk about Steve Hatville because who he is and the kind of life he leads are what makes him into the the suspect for this terrorist attack, right? And like is why people are is why people in the FBI and in the media become so convinced that it was him. Um and he is a f he's a perfect candidate for bastards. Like his backstory is insane. He's told a bunch of different versions of his life, many of which can't be true. uh independent reporting has repeatedly shown that like different things he said about his resume and his CV could not have happened that way. So there's a lot of really fun untangling and record correcting to do. Um so anyway, let's let's talk about Steve J.

2:50 Hatfield. Um he was born on October 24th, 1953 in St. Louis, Missouri like me. Uh he was raised in Matun, Illinois. Uh he was the oldest of two kids and the only boy in his family. His mother was a homemaker and part-time interior decorator and his father was an electrical engineer and salesman. Now the details I've come across don't make it look like his childhood was particularly noteworthy. Uh there's no major trauma or antidote, at least anecdotes that we have that foreshadow the man he would become. He describes himself as a bad student and told one reporter, "I never took a book home from school. He did better when it came to electives." Yeah, he's And he's another one of these like autodidacts, right?

3:35 Like he reads obsessively, at least according to him. He just can't study anything he's not interested in, right? It's I I maybe it's ADHD brain, you know? Um but he's primarily interested in like medical science and military history and he can't make himself care about anything else. Um, he does better when it comes to electives. He wrestles for the varsity team in high school. He flies glider planes and is allowed to solo pilot a glider at age 14. Uh, which seems early, but you know, go off kid. Um, he graduates Matune Senior High and is admitted to Southwestern College in Kansas where he majors in biology and joins an ROC like summer leadership program hosted by the Marine Corps. And his goal at this point, and this has been his life goal for at least his latter adolescent period to the start of his adulthood, is to become a fighter pilot for the Marine Corps, right? He wants to fly jet fighters. You know,

4:29 it's the coolest job you can do in the military. That's what he wants. And so he goes in and the Marine Corps tests his vision and it's not perfect. And you know what you can't do if you don't have naturally perfect vision is fly a [ __ ] jet. You know, like,

4:42 sorry kid, you're screwed. Um, anyway, so this this [ __ ] his life. Uh, it seems to have broken something inside of him because the Marines are like, "Well, you can be a navigator." And he's like, "I don't want to be a [ __ ] navigator. I want to be a [ __ ] Top Gun jet pilot." Like, nobody wants to be a navigator. Come on. That's just such a bummer job. Navigators are the bike cops of the piloting world where it's like, "This isn't what you signed up to do, and I know it." Like, I know you don't want to be sitting back there.

5:13 Um, who needs a navigator anyway? Just bomb wherever is what I'm saying. What? I would be too scared to I would be a navigator. I hate to say it.

5:22 Well, I mean, then I get to be the pilot, I guess. So, that's a win for me. I just want you to know

5:29 I do not trust you to fly a plane. I think I'd be a great fighter pilot pilot. I mean, Sophie, look at how many F-35s and F-22s they're crashing these days. F-18s, you know, I could do at least that. Well, I could crash one of those things.

5:43 The bar is low. Yeah, I could crash that son of a [ __ ] into whatever, you know, a house. I don't care.

5:50 You're allowed to do anything in the Marine Corps, I assume. So, uh, he doesn't join the Marine Corps, though, because again, he doesn't get to be a pilot. And this kind of I get the feeling reading his backstory that this kind of like shatters him. So he he kind he partially drops out of it's it's less accurate to say he drops out of college because he will go back but he like suspends his college education and just flies to Africa. Now he's got no formal medical training but he finds a mission hospital in the Congo. This is not a safe place. This is not an easy place to get to. So he travels and he doesn't reach out to them beforehand. He travels to the Congo, finds this mission doing like medical work. It's like a a missionary hospital type deal. And it's like, "Hey, can I help?" And the people running this mission are Glenn and Lena Truth. Uh Lena describes the 19-year-old Steve as being something of a mystery

6:45 when he showed up. Quote, "Nobody sent him. I don't even know how he knew about us." But they're like, "Well, he's he's he's volunteering and we don't have enough people, so let's take him in. I mean, if nothing else, he's just like a lone white kid in the Congo,

6:59 so we should probably not just let him wander off. So, they take him in and he works there and they they taught him. He learns, you know, the basics of hematology and paracettology, right? Like he's not enough that he could be a practitioner, but enough that he knows that he's interested in getting a real medical education, right? He gets some hands-on experience and he's like, "Oh, this is almost as good as killing people in a plane." Um, so he what I mean not quite as good. Every doctor would rather be dropping a J dam, you know, we all know that. Um, but

7:33 he does have balls though. That part is consistent. Like that part is consistent. Yeah.

7:38 Yes. Yeah. I don't know. Straight to the Congo. I think we should I I don't think Doc our friend Dr. Hod would agree.

7:46 You don't think that? I I think I think he would agree that it takes the balls to just at 19 go straight to the Congo to see if you can find a place to work.

7:54 Fair enough. As like an American who grew up in the suburbs. Um so he returns to the US uh after this like year. He spends like I think it's about a year in the Congo and he goes back to Southwestern and he finishes and he gets his degree. He gets his undergraduate degree uh in 1975 at which point he joins the army. Now, every version of the story that Hatfill tells, uh, and quite a few of the articles about Hatfill that are written by reporters who talk to him will repeat this next part because he claims that as soon as he joins the army, he gets into the Green Beretss. Do you know what the Green Berets are, Courtney?

8:31 They're special. They're special. It's uh Yeah, they're very special boys. Some of the specialist boys in the whole army. That's right, guys. Um, it's a special forces unit. They're more focused on like the Green Breeze are the guys you send in if you've got if you if you have a bunch of like local militia types that you want to train up into a fighting force to [ __ ] with whatever country that you're having a great power conflict with. You send in the Green Beretss and they spend long periods of time, you know, in the wilderness basically training uh people how to be insurgents. That's kind of their gig, right? That's that's what the Green Berets do.

9:13 Is it like Navy Seal adjacent or Yeah, it's a it's it's at that level of special forces, right? Like

9:20 they come in before or they're trainers. They just do different things. They do like the N the Navy Seals are more the guys carrying out assassinations. The Green Berets are more the guys who are trying to teach, you know, indigenous allies how to set up trip wires in the jungle or whatever or carry out ambushes on NVA caravans if we're talking about like Vietnam or whatever.

9:41 Um, so Hatfill claims to have joined the Green Beretss and most of the news articles about him say that he joined the Green Berets. The standard version of that story, uh, I'm going to quote, uh, from an Atlantic article by David Frerieded here. He took a direct enlistment option to join the Green Beretss. Attended parachute school, trained as a radio operator, and was assigned to the Army's seventh special forces group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an operational a team, Hatfell re-entered civilian life. He joined the National Guard, married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon he had worked with in Africa, and returned to Matune to work the night shift as a security guard at a radiator factory. Now, there's some issues with this version of events.

10:21 First off, he was not in the Green Beretss, at least not according to reporting by Marilyn Thompson that was published in the Washington Post. Quote, "Military records show he did enlist in the army in 1975 and entered the rigorous special forces qualification course at Fort Bragg in 1976, but he didn't last long there. After a few weeks, he was discharged from active duty and wound up in the Army National Guard." So, that's a really different version of events, right?

10:48 That's like not making it through boot camp. Is that what happened? He made it through boot camp. He doesn't make it through special forces qualifying school. And then he changes from being enlisted in active duty to being in the National Guard. So something happened.

11:01 We don't really I don't know that we'll ever know what, but something happened to where like he not only make is it made clear that he's not going to be in special forces, but he's not going to be active duty, right?

11:11 Okay. Like so this is a a fairly rapid shift for him and it suggests that something went really wrong during his special forces qualification course. It may just have been that he was he he couldn't make the cut. But for whatever reason, this is not something he does. But he will spend a lot of his life a lot of articles about this guy say that he was a Green Beret, right?

11:31 In his mind. Yeah. In his mind, he was sure. Um, so that's a very different version of events. And that Atlantic article also describes Hatfield's first marriage in a way that leaves out some details present in other accounts. It sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song there. Like, oh, he got injured so he couldn't deploy and he had to, you know, he married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon and he went on to be a security guard in a radiator factory, you know. Um, that's not not true, but when you kind of describe it that way, you lose some important context because Steve fell in love when he was in Africa with the truth's teenage daughter, Carolyn. Um, now they're close to the same age. She's like 19. I think she's 17 and turns 18.

12:19 Right. So, the age thing is not a big deal. I say teenage, but he's teenage, too. I don't want it to make it out like I'm saying he was being creepy. I don't think it's weird for a 17-year-old and 19year-old to uh get interested in each other or whatever. Um, they get married in 1976. Uh, and in April of 1977, uh, her dad Gwyn is captured by mercenaries who invaded Zire from Angola. And he's executed. He's found dead several weeks later. And the Washington Post reports, quote, "Hatfill's marriage soured quickly after his father-in-law's death. He accompanied Carolyn to a funeral service in Michigan, and that was the last time Lena S. Truth saw him. He and Carolyn divorced in 1978. He had no contact with his only child, a daughter named Cayman, who was born shortly before the divorce until several years ago." Carolyn Estruth says. So,

13:08 why was his dad the glue? I don't know that it was, but it's just after he dies, the marriage falls. It may just have not been They meet when they're teenagers.

13:18 Maybe they were just never gonna I Yeah, I don't know what happened here, but he leaves and he has nothing to do with his kid, right? I don't know if I'd say he abandoned them cuz I'm unaware of like is he paying any form of alimony? Is there is he sending child support? None of that.

13:34 He's not a father of the year. Yeah. But he's gone, right? like he bounces, you know. Now, part of why Steve is not around for his daughter's life is that right after he gets out, like right after this divorce happens, uh, and after he graduates, he returns to Africa. Now, like the rest of Steve's life, there are conflicting stories here. But what we can what's definitely solved, what we know is that in 1978, as soon as he divorces his wife and leaves his kid and wife and ex-wife behind, he moves to Rhdesia. That's his first stop.

14:09 Now, Rhdesia does not exist today, but it was at the time a white supremacist pariah state. This is a British colony where a tiny number of white people ruled over a larger number of black people who had a very different set of rights uh under the laws of that country. Rhdesia uh basically becomes a pariah state because they refuse to give up or transition like away from this system of government effectively and they get wind up being blacklisted by everyone, right? Like the British government who they're supposed to they were supposed to be a colony of refuses to recognize them.

14:44 you're not supposed to trade with Rhodesia. You're not certainly not supposed to sell them guns. South Africa is basically their big economic lifeline. Um, in addition to like the Portuguese colonies, but it's a really sketchy situation. And by the time he moves there in 1978, Rhdesia is like an international pariah. They are the white separatist state, right? Uh, the white supremacist pariah state, right?

15:07 Yeah. You just made so many references to Rhdesia that I've heard and not understood. finally makes sense.

15:14 Oh, yeah. Yeah. I I love Rod uh one of my favorite stories. Um so again, Rhdesia doesn't exist anymore because about 2 years after he moves there, they lose their war to these in the the these Marxist insurgents uh and become Zimbabwe. Um but for the last 2 years that Rhdesia exists, uh that's where Steve Hatfield lives and he attends the Godfrey Huggin School of Medicine in Salisbury, um which I think was the capital. So choosing to move to Rhodesia in 1978 is at minimum morally questionable, right? Nobody just travels there because you're like, Rhodesia, the name sounds nice. You're aware in the news that the whole world considers them a pariah for the racism and the brutal bush war that they're persecuting, which is killing huge numbers of civilians.

16:05 Um, which means that Steve probably didn't have an issue with that, right? Uh the white supremacist government was clinging to power however it could and the state security forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon. Hatfill would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia he volunteered as a medic for the Rhdesian army and was attached to the Celus scouts which was Rhdesia's answer to the Navy Seals right this is Rhodesia's special premier special forces organization. Um, and again, you see this repeated constantly in articles about him that yeah, he and he he a lot of times they'll just say he was one of the Salu scouts. He was a member of this elite unit. The Atlantic reports that yeah, he was a medic attached to the unit. I've seen both ways. Neither seem to be true. So the CI scouts and the Rhodesian military occupy a place of honor within the modern farright's conception of military history because

16:58 of the way this Bush conflict between these insurgents that represent a much larger portion of the country and the military which is a mixed race military but exists to support the white supremacist state. Um Rhdesia kind of invents modern counterinsurgent warfare tactics. A lot of stuff that you see that you've seen the US in the global war on terror using an Afghanistan and Iraq. These like huge route clearance vehicles, they're like up arored to survive IEDs. The way in which like patrols are done, the way in which like you attempt to like isolate problem villages or like all of these different tactics for how you're supposed to deal with an to smoke out insurgents. The modern like insurgent warfare handbook gets written by Rhdesia right now.

17:46 Fascinating. This is arguably accurate, but it's not anything to be proud of because yeah, Rhdesia does pioneer a lot of modern counterinsurgent warfare tactics. They don't win. They lose. And by the way, every country who copied their tactics, including the US, also loses a lot of the wars that they use those tactics in. These aren't successful tactics.

18:10 They're just tactics. Like and so there's this whole like well the Rhodesians they were the ones who really before anyone else knew what the future of warfare was going to be. And so you get a lot of like people nerding out over the Rhodesian army over that. You get a lot of people obsessing over the Saloo scouts in particular because after Rhodesia fell in 1980 a bunch of former scouts wrote articles and memoirs about their combat experiences that massively exaggerated how good they had been. Again they lose the war. And this all feeds into starting in the 80s there's this growing worship of like special forces that's almost like a cult right it reaches its height during the global war on terror but this is we start like it becomes in the media there's more and more movies about special forces units and so especially for people on the far right the cell scouts are like this uh they're idolized right and so the like

19:03 the fact that Hatfield really wants people to believe he was in this unit makes a lot of sense given his again guy today is in the Trump administration. Given his politics, um, and just given socially what's what's going on, I'm not surprised he wanted to be affiliated with this unit.

19:19 Racist special forces. What could be the most racist special forces? Yes. Like the Saloo Scouts and the SS both use the same acronym. So that's that's that's easy. Um, now that said, there's good reason to doubt that he had anything to do with the Scouts. per the Washington Post. Hatfield's resume also claimed that he'd served as a Cell Scout, though his time in the Rhodesian military overlapped with his time in the US Army. Rhodesian military records have been hard to find, but Celis Scout's veterans told reporters they'd never heard of Hatville. The true circumstances of his connection with the unit, if any, remain unclear. So, I can't say he did he didn't have any connection with them. I don't know.

19:56 Maybe he was sent somewhere as a scout, but we don't have like evidence really other than his word that I've seen. Um, so given the other discrepancies in his background, I would need to see some actual evidence that he served with his unit to believe stories like the one he told the Atlantic. Quote, while he was in Rhdesia, Hatfield says a truck he was riding in was ambushed by Marxist insurgents, leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose. This, he claims gives him like a lifelong breathing injury that uh will be relevant a little bit later. But again, did that happen? Did he just break his nose some other way? Did he have any exciting encounters with insurgents at all? Unclear to me. Um, now there is some evidence to suggest that his habit of exaggerating the truth dates back at least as far as his time in college. One of his former classmates told Simon Cooper from the Observer,

20:48 quote, "He was an extraordinary guy and very, very bright. But he was also a real Walter Mitti kind of character and he would tell these enormous awful lies. He once told me his wife died in the Congo." And again, he just left. He They divorced. He left her with the kid.

21:04 Her dad her dad died in the Congo. And that gives you something, too. We're like, and that's why I think, yeah, may he may have been embedded with some chunk of the Rhodesian military as a medic or maybe back at base he treated some Cellu scouts or something. There's usually a degree of like truth that we're then exaggerating. Right. Right.

21:26 He went to Fort Bragg. He got did the special forces like tests, but he didn't quite become a Green Beret, right? Like he's kind of making ends meet in his stories a lot of the time. Um, but you know who always tells the truth?

21:43 Me. Sponsors. That's right. That's right. They would never pretend to have been a member of the Rhodesian military cuz they were they served in the Rhodesian military. All of our sponsors, former Rhdesian special forces.

21:55 I It's just We didn't try to make it that way. It's weird. Your first instinct is to slander.

22:06 They love it. It's the It's like negging, you know? Like I That doesn't actually work for dating. The the the pickup artist guys were wrong about that, but it's incredible for advertising.

22:15 Corporate people. Yeah. No. No. Sometimes I'll just walk I just walked into Ford's offices the other day and I was like, "Oh, you guys, is this an F-150? Call it like an F75." You know, that's like half a truck maybe. And they just walked out and they they just mailed us a check.

22:31 Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's how you do it, people. Negging. Here's ads. And we're back. Uh, so yeah. Um, it's worth noting because of what comes later that Hatfield's time in Rhdesia did directly overlap with something that's going to be very relevant to the thing that's going to come to define his adult life, which is the anthrax attacks in the United States. Because while he is in Rhdesia, Rhdesia suffers the largest, one of the largest anthrax epidemics ever seen in history. Right. From 1978 to 1980, the years that he's there, thousands and thousands of cattle and several hundred human beings are killed by anthrax exposure in Rhdesia.

23:14 Now, we don't fully know why this happened. And I I want to state up top, anthrax, we don't people when you hear anthrax, you think it's like a weapon, right? Anthrax is a natural thing. Like it occurs. There are places, Rhdesia is one of them. And there are places in the world where livestock just get anthrax like it's an outbreak. It's a bacteria you know like and livestock if you are not taking proper care of them if you're not and in an area where anthrax is endemic they can get anthrax and they can spread anthrax to people. Right now the kind of exposure human beings tend to get when exposed to like livestock that have anthrax is different from say inhaling anthrax that has been like weaponized and turned into this like fine powder. That's much deadlier.

24:00 You're less likely to die. But anthrax can just happen and does just happen and has nothing to do with anybody using a weapon. Right.

24:08 Was this targeted like the version that you're talking about? We don't know. Maybe is the answer I'll give you because Rhdesia had a massive chemical and biological weapons program and they used chemical and biological weapons on insurgents. Right. So there's there and there's there's good reasons to think that this massive pandemic may have been started by the the Rhodesian military using biological weapons. Um there's a couple of good reasons to suspect this. Yeah.

24:41 The um the pandemic almost exclusively affected cattle on what were called tribal trust lands, which are subsistent farms operated by the majority black population. And it tended to skip over the herds of white-owned commercial farms. Right. Um, the people who died were all black Rhdesians and nearly all of the human beings who got exposed to anthrax in Rhodesia were black. Um,

25:03 that is some racist bacteria. It's a racist bacteria. Yeah. Uh, Rhdesia had for years used chemical weapons and disease to try and murder Marxist guerrilla fighters in part because they couldn't buy traditional weapons from most other countries. So, they were really kind of scraping the barrel of like what kind of weapon systems can we put together? Um, so as their chances of victory declined, Dr. Robert Simington, who is a professor at the Unity of Rhodesia's medical school, where Steve Hatfield studied, urged the country to adopt a new counterinsurgency program based on chemical and biological weapons. The government agreed. To summarize how this worked out, I want to quote now from an article in the journal Curious by Matthew Turner. Drawing from a number of medical and veterinary students from the University of Rhodesia, Simington allegedly began human experimentation as early as 1975,

25:52 the CBW program experimented with a number of compounds, including warfarin, paratheon, thallium, and vibbroeri. Dr. Simington was said by one officer to have killed more terrorists than the Rosesian light infantry during certain months of the war. The CBW program saw its greatest successes with the use of paratheon, an organo phosphate used in pesticides. In isolated locations, CBW employees soaked hundreds of articles of clothing and paratheon solutions, afterwards drying them to eliminate the smell. The poisoned clothing was then distributed to guerilla forces through local contacts who had directly donated it to guerilla recruits by contaminating discovered caches of guerilla supplies or by stocking stores that were in gerillaheavy areas and expected to be ransacked. Other uses of CBW included the deliberate poisoning of food stuffs with thallium and warfaren as well as deployment of chalera to contaminate

26:43 water sources known to be frequented by gorillas. The use of chalera in warfare made Rhodesia the first nation to intentionally deploy biological weapons after the 1975 passage of the biological weapons convention. Again, great guys, great country, really, really good people. cry.

27:02 And again, this is where he chooses to go to medical school. It says a lot about you that yeah, this is where you wanted to be at this point in your life. Um, now we do know the Rhodesian military absolutely did and is confirmed to have weaponized and used anthrax on human beings on multiple occasions. the elite Salu scouts actually used like were one of the groups that deployed anthrax against like targeted groups of gerillas, right? Um we don't know how many people died from Rhodesian CBW use, but it's at least in the hundreds and probably in the thousands and it may account for as many as 15% of all casualties in the Bush War. So this is [ __ ] up and important. But I also need to end this digression on a counterintuitive note, which is that that all makes it really seem like, okay, well, they definitely caused that anthrax outbreak in 1978 to 1980, right? Obviously, they did, right?

27:56 Yeah. And this is kind of I I brought it up this way because it's it's a good example of why Richard Juul got suspected in the first episode and why Hatfield is going to get suspected in this one is if you just look at a narrow chunk of the facts you can make a case that well this is the only possible thing right if you just read out the facts I just read you obviously Rhdesia caused this massive pandemic right there's the it's the only explanation they were using anthrax as a weapon why wouldn't they have done this Right.

28:27 However, as Matthew Turner points out in this study, which is not at all sympathetic to the Rhodesian military and talks an extent about their horrible war crimes with chemical and biological weapons, there's a lot of good reason to believe that this was a natural anthrax outbreak. And there's there's some scientific reasons just because of the type of anthrax that these animals are sick with and how it spreads that looks more like a natural pandemic than one that was used by weaponized anthrax. But there's other reasons. For one thing, this is late in the war. The Rhodesian government is collapsing. They have suspended all of their largescale veterinary programs to improve livestock health. They had been vaccinating like dipping and whatnot all cattle in the country and that has stopped by 1978.

29:11 Anthrax is naturally endemic to the region and the outbreak occurred alongside other outbreaks that infected cattle populations. The anthrax outbreak is one of a number of outbreaks that's wiping out cattle in Rhdesia because the state programs to like treat cattle have gone away because of the war, right? Um, now there's also some again we talked about how it it primarily hit cattle in like these black subsistent farms as opposed to like the corp because those farms had money and were able to continue medicating their cattle,

29:44 right? And again, why is it more black? Well, number one, the vast majority of the country is black. And number two, the white people are eating and spending their time farming animals that have access to good medical care, right?

29:58 Yes. Yes. Like, so when you and again, this is going to be the case with when Steve Hatville gets suspected of if you look at one subset of the facts, obviously the guy did it. And then if you look peel back and look at more of the facts, it's like, well, no, maybe I was looking at too narrow a subset of information. Now, I should say it's so possible Rhodesia did this that like the the the the anthrax pandemic was uh was was uh or epidemic was a purposeful one that they like like were trying to wipe out the foods because we know that they were. Um it's just we have a lot of data on other times they used these weapons and this really doesn't look like that. It does look a lot more like a natural outbreak.

30:41 Like they wouldn't have been successful if they did. No, no, no. like this would it would have gone worse cuz they were they were bad at this. Um, now I should also note again the because Steve is going to be accused of being the Anthrax bomber. The fact that he is in Rhodesia and allegedly had worked with the Cellu scouts who used anthrax and is in Rhdesia at the same time as an anthrax outbreak. Again, in 2001, people are going to read about this and go obviously it's this guy, right? It has to be him. Now, more diligent reporting, and there was not nearly enough of that when Steve was being accused, would point out, among other things, like, "Okay, but the Rodesian military, this guy's like an American without any real experience who's in med school. Why would they have looped him in on their secret, incredibly illegal plans to use deadly chemical and biologic?" He's like [ __ ] 20. Like, why why would they do

31:35 that? Like, he's not who you pick. You don't need him. Um, and there's no evidence whatsoever that he had anything to do with the chemical and biological weapons campaign carried out by Rhdesia. Um, it's possible that this is why he starts to get interested in chemical and biological weapons, which he does, and he's going to become an expert on them later, but that's speculation on my part. Um, so he graduates. I think he has to go from Rhdesia to South Africa, but he eventually does graduate and he gets the equivalent of an MD in 1984. Uh but they're like actually Eurisian med school's not good.

32:12 South Africa takes it though. They're fine. Um so this is a near thing. In 1983 he failed and he had to repeat a year of med school. Uh one British newspaper reported that when he found this out he had a tantrum in the hallway. Uh the Post interviewed one of his former classmates who stole told a story about Hatville punching out a peer. Quote, "He is not someone I would ever want to cross," wrote another classmate. Um, so maybe not, you know, the nicest guy. Although all of these quotes do come from when he was suspected of carrying out a terrorist attack that killed five people. So part of me is like, should I even trust these quotes cuz they're from people who like were deliberately being solicited. That said,

32:53 there's enough in his background to be like, yeah, maybe he just was kind of a dick with a short temper, you know. Um, two things could be true at once. So he becomes a doctor. He does a one-year internship in a rural South African hospital, after which point he is recruited to do a 14-month tour with South Africa's natur uh national Antarctic expedition

33:13 through the 1980s. Yeah. So, he does that. Cool. Career's going well. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds a lot better than what he's going to wind up doing for a living.

33:22 Where what school is he attending here? Uh it's Cape Town. Okay. University of Cape Town. uh through the 1980s he gets three master's degrees in different sciences there and he tries to get a PhD. He almost finishes it but his doctoral thesis isn't accepted. Um we'll come back to that later because this is going to be another case like with the Green Berets where he almost had a PhD but he didn't and some of the things some of the the se the resumes he writes out are sure going to say PhD, right? Um, so during his years as a student in South Africa, Hatfield is alleged to have run into more conflicts with his peers. Per the Washington Post reporting, a Johannesburg newspaper reported that Hatfield had carried a gun into South African medical laboratories and boasted to colleagues that he'd trained bodyguards for white separatist Eugene Tblanch and just carrying a gun into the lab. It very South African stuff. And the fact

34:20 that South Africans are being like, "No, but he did it in a weird way." He was talking about being racist in a weird way to us in a parttheid South Africa. Um,

34:31 wow. Yeah. Uh, yeah. The just the brat. And again, I don't I don't see any evidence that he trained bodyguards for this white separatist, but it gives you an idea of like where his politics are, right? If that's true, you know, can't say for certain that uh that newspaper's reporting is accurate, but that's what was reported. Uh Hatfield would later fill his resume with claims that he'd also gotten a medical degree in the UK. Uh and in in fact there are there's at least some evidence that he pretended his degree was from the UK as opposed to from you know these African colleges he went to. Uh he would claim to have been a me member of the Royal Society of Medicine. Neither of these seem to be accurate. per the observer. Quote, one professional resume claimed he had a medical degree from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, Edinburgh, a body which doesn't exist. Another said his medical degree was gained in

35:20 Edinburgh at 1984 when he in fact qualified as a doctor that year in Zimbabwe. The Royal Society of Medicine has no record of him and he is not a fellow of the society as his resume claims.

35:31 Bold pre- internet lying, right? You could so get away with this [ __ ] before the That's what bums me out, man. I could be so many things. I could be doing surgery today. I could be cutting into a [ __ ] and taking an organ out today if it was the 1980s. My god.

35:49 I don't think I want you to do that either. I think I'd be great at it. But no one's going to let me try. They're scared that I'd show them up.

35:57 That'd be better. Oh, yeah. Cool. Maybe I'll be too good. Maybe I'm too good. If you're the kind of guy who would just like take off the and go to the Congo like without an invitation, you are also the kind of guy who would like just blatantly lie on your

36:11 res. Absolutely. Wild. Um, now Hatfield uh is, you know, he he did he does some stuff in in England. Uh, he he's at Oxford briefly. He works as like a cancer specialist in uh the Nfield department of pathology and bacteriology in Oxford in 1994. Um but he also I mean he's at least accused of having faked a reference uh again per the observers reporting uh he faked a reference quote from the distinguished Oxford professor James OD McGee to apply for his next job back in the United States that he didn't have. and you know, a little bit of resume fakery. Who amongst us hasn't done that?

36:52 Although maybe not if you're trying to be a doctor. Uh, and he is a real doctor. I would be clear, but he does have a real MD. It's a PhD he didn't get. Um, and yeah, that's the last really big question mark on his resume is that he he would periodically claim to have a PhD from Roads University in South Africa in addition to his MD. And he makes this claim after he returns to the US when he's trying to get a federal research GL grant. However, back in Roads University, his dissertation on treating leukemia had been denied by the review commit committee. They decided his methodology was flawed and they declined to give him a PhD in 1995. Now, he will say that like when I applied for this grant, basically I thought I was going to get the PhD, so I wrote it down. It was before, you know, they they turned me down. I don't know. Maybe it was the case of him just, you know, thinking he was going to pass and it was

37:41 fine because he'd done everything else. That said, it's pretty consistent with the other I don't know uh uh this the the tenuous relationship with the truth that we've seen previously here, right?

37:53 Um so yeah, he he spends the mid90s he goes back to the US for a bit. He does that that fellowship at Oxford and the job at Oxford gets him a job studying not just cancer but HIV and Lyme disease for the National Institutes of Health in the United States. And his interest in infectious diseases starts to guide him. Now, in late 1997, he starts a 2-year fellowship with uh Usamid to study Ebola and other hemorrhagic uh fevers. USMR is the acronym uh it's and it's USAM RIID. Uh USMRD is the acronym for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases Diseases. This is the top biodefense laboratory in the country with a message uh with a mission to study both biological weapons and diseases like Ebola that are seen to have a high potential for weaponization.

38:43 Their primary client is the US Army and they do a lot of work in Fort Detric which is where the US used to host its germ weapons R&D department until we stopped admitting that we had a germ weapon R&D department in 1969. officially we stopped making germ biological weapons in 1969. Do I think we totally stopped? I don't know. I don't know if I think we did. Uh but officially we did. Um now is an extremely serious organization and they are doing some of the most dangerous work imaginable, right? Like this is a thing you would need in any country even if it was an ethical defense department, right? is a branch of the government whose job is to figure out what kind of diseases or illnesses may be weaponized or invented and how would we fight against them right like that's an important thing to do you know just the world being what it is uh in his book the demon in the pre the freezer Richard

39:43 Preston gives a useful description and by useful I mean terrifying description of usam headquarters that is just kind of chilling the main building of USM is a duncoled two-story monolith that looks like a warehouse. It has virtually no windows and tubular chimneys sprout from its roof. The building covers 7 acres of ground. There are bioontainment suites near the center of the building, groups of laboratory rooms that are sealed off and kept under negative air pressure so that nothing contagious will leak out. The suites are classified at diff differing levels of biocurity from biosafety level two to level three and finally to level four which is the highest and where scientists wearing biosafety space suits work with hot agents, lethal incurable viruses. A bioprotective space suit is a pressurized plastic suit that covers the entire body. It has a soft plastic head bubble with a clear face plate and it is

40:31 fed by sterile air coming through a hose and a and an air regulator. The chimneys of the buildings are always exhausting super filtered and superheated sterilized air which is drawn out of the bioontainment zones. USM was now surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent a truck bomb from cracking open a bio a biosafety level four suite and releasing a hot agent into the air. So just going through the list of security that gives you an idea of how deadly the [ __ ] in here is, right?

40:56 Okay. Can I catch up? These are these are your planet killers. Okay. So we're in the UK and these guys are actually Right. And we're and these guys are actually

41:06 back in the US. He's moved to the US. Oh, we're in the US. Sam is the is a US like it's it's the US bio bowar like biological weapons research

41:14 until we said we shut it down and these guys are actually doing good stuff. No, we we shut down the R&D department at Fort Dietrich, right? So, USM is based out of Fort Dietrich, too. Fort Dietrich is where all of our scary chemical and biological weapon stuff is. So, we stopped making new weapons in ' 69,

41:32 but we still research what kind of weapons people might make and research like ways to defend them, right? That's what USMR is doing is they are trying to know

41:43 and it's not just weapons but like you know when you have an Ebola outbreak in Africa right Samrid starts you know you're going to increase the amount of people who are working on okay like well if it spreads over here if it gets here if we have an outbreak what might that look like how would we treat it right what if someone weaponized Ebola is that possible let's look into whether or not you could weaponize it what would the defense against that be right they're doing stuff like that you know if somebody started to wanted to carry at an anthrax attack. How theoretically would an anthrax attack look? Uh how deadly would it be? What would be the procedures we need to establish? You know, what do we need to have ready so that if that happens at a moment's notice, we can get guys into an area in order to deal with an anthrax outbreak, right? That's the kind of [ __ ] you trying to figure out.

42:28 I totally get that this is important and necessary, but it does seem like the line of like are you doing more harm than good gets a little bit dicey when you talk about this stuff. And it's also the line between like what counts as R&D for new new

42:42 Yes. new [ __ ] like as opposed to R&D on how to fight it. Yeah. And it's there's always a again the the degree of security in this facility is proof of the danger cuz you have had like in Russia there was a horrible anthrax outbreak because one a like a Russian equivalent to this facility had a [ __ ] breach and a bunch of people got sick, right? like these are scary places and the consequences of things going wrong in a place like Fort Dietrich and the US Samrid facility there is is very high.

43:13 Um Stephen King's the stand for like focuses on I I think it's basically a base that's meant to stand in for Fort Dietrich. I forget exactly what it's called in that, but that's that's how the virus that kills the whole world gets out is it's something where that's part of like a research it and there's a a breach and it gets out and it kills everybody and you know I don't know if any of the diseases that they have access to could wipe out the whole planet but they could kill a shitload of people like they have a lot of scary stuff at the USD facility and so if you are working there you are working with very scary stuff. Steve Hatfield is doing very serious work at this point, right? And he is qualified to do it. Not as qualified as his resumes and CV makeup sound, but he does have the MD.

43:57 He did do like he he went to Oxford and he did that year there. Like he's got qualifications. He just I think he just can't help judge it up a little bit. It's he's not as cool as he wants to be. That's my interpretation. Um, so he's uh one of his first jobs there is he's carrying out experiments on macock monkeys, infecting them with deadly viruses and watching them die. Uh,

44:19 this [ __ ] him up to some extent. He'd sneak the animals Reese's pieces out of sheer guilt to try to like maybe if I give them candy, I won't feel as bad about killing these monkeys. Um, it doesn't seem like a fun job to me. Over the next couple of years, Hatfield makes himself into one of the nation's top experts on germ warfare. He's a virus guy. He's not into anthrax. Anthrax is a bacteria. So he doesn't really work d he never works directly with anthrax although he is aware of it. He studies it somewhat but he's more into the viruses. He's very charismatic and he's good at teaching. So he soon starts getting contracts to instruct special forces teams on defensive techniques.

44:55 Right? So in addition to this job with us Samrred, he's getting like he's giving seminars, he's giving speeches, and he's also conducting training classes on like, okay, if you encounter a biological weapons factory in the field, right? Um here's what you would do. Here's what the things to look out for that could be dangerous. Here's how to make the scene safe. Um here are the different prophylactics you could use in different kind of situ like he's training them on that kind of stuff, right? Um, and this is all, you know, right around the late '9s is like the the millennium's coming to an end.

45:27 There's a couple of hoax anthrax attacks in the US where letters that are filled with white powder that isn't anthrax, but the letter claims that they're anthrax are sent to varying places, right? And so there's panics in the media, in the public over anthrax attacks, and this corresponds to a growing public and official awareness that bioteterrorism is a real threat. and Hatfield, he he kind of picks his moment well. Right as Americans are starting to freak out about bioteterrorism, he cashes in on it, and I don't mean that in a an unethical sense, just in a he makes a good career move. He starts giving lectures at conventions and talking to reporters about America's unreiness to face a weaponized pathogen. In 1998, he's interviewed by Insight magazine and he makes the in retrospect poor choice to let them photograph him dressed in biohazard gear cooking up diseases in a kitchen. Right. Um

46:19 I saw that photo. Yeah, those photos are going to be found when he's accused of doing the anthrax attacks and they will not make him look good. Um he warned the interviewer in that article that these fake anthrax attacks could quote be a form of testing for a future terrorist attack. M now I haven't run into any evidence that Hatfield's colleagues questioned his expertise or skill at his job during this period but some of them did question his judgment in other areas. Per the Washington Post at a seminar in New York he demonstrated one of his favorite biotterrorism scenarios a terrorist using a wheelchair to sneak past White House security with a biological agent says Jerome Hower then New York City's emergency preparedness director. Hower was appalled after the presentation. He says he called Hatful aside and told him he had gone too far.

47:05 It was too detailed, too specific to go into a public forum. Hatfield listened How said, but he shrugged it off. And so he's like he's like laying out he's not just saying, "Oh, it'd be cool like you could maybe do this." He's like walking through here are all the different levels of security in the White House and here's how you would get past each one with a weaponized pathogen in a wheelchair. Like he's really making a very easy to follow guide for poisoning the White House.

47:28 Here's the blueprint. Yeah. Mhm. And that is his job to an extent, but maybe you don't have to do that at like a public presentation. That might not be

47:37 hot mic. That might not be the most most responsible thing to do. You know who would never poison anyone with a wheelchair filled with anthrax?

47:47 The sponsors, those goodies. Yeah, they they they don't even have access to anthrax. Weaponized Ebola. Absolutely. Oh my god. The Blue Apron guys actually have enough weaponized Ebola to wipe out the whole planet. But that's just a part of their uh their Salisbury steak Friday package.

48:09 Yeah, the taste of Ebola. And we're back. I don't think we're going to get any more Blue Apron money, Sophie.

48:16 That's okay. That's okay. I don't think they ever gave us any money. It was that other company that I forget.

48:22 HelloFresh. HelloFresh. Yeah, they don't have any Ebola. Yeah, Ebola free dinners.

48:29 Ebola free. That's right. HelloFresh. Say goodbye to Ebola. Um, so a lot of Hatville's success within the field of bioteterrorism warfare research came down to the fact that he picked a good mentor. He got very lucky that he like he hits it off with this guy who had worked at us. been one of the scientists back in like the 50s who'd helped create our US bioweapons arsenal back when we still officially had one and then he retired from us and became a bowarfare consultant. He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax. Bill Patrick. So Bill is like the top guy in the terrifying murder weapons business, right?

49:09 How do you get a secret patent? It's a patent for something that's like you did it and you you you're you get the patent on it in case anyone ever like makes it and makes money off it, but you can't publish the patent because then people would know how to weaponize anthrax and we don't want that. We don't want people just like looking up the patent for weaponized anthrax and following that. Right.

49:32 Fair enough. So maybe you want to keep certain things a secret. Yeah. Yeah. Probably keep that sealed.

49:37 In this case, I am in alignment with the government policy. Yeah. probably shouldn't have the weaponized anthrax plans online.

49:44 Nope. Uh, also, this brings me to a special ad from our sponsor, Audible, and their new book this week.

49:52 How to weaponize anthrax in five easy steps. You don't even have to read it. You can just listen to it and you could be weaponizing anthrax in under 48 hours.

50:00 Listen to on tyranny or something. Yeah, listen to tyranny or something. Yeah. Uh, maybe listen to the anthrax book when you're trying to get

50:07 You're disappointing me today. Well, I won't be disappointing you when I weaponize some anthrax, Sophie. Then I'll have anthrax. Nope. Probably shouldn't talk about that online. Um, so Patrick wants a protege. You know, this guy, he's he's in his 70s now. He's getting older and he wants someone to follow in his footsteps. And he meets Hatfill and considers him just gung-ho enough for the job. And per the Washington Post, quote, "The two struck up a friendship like father and son," says one bioteterror expert who watched the ties develop. "When Patrick's schedule was too full to attend a program or contribute to a study, he recommended Hatfield, who often did the work for free. Hatfield drove Patrick to consulting jobs at SIC and traveled with him to professional conferences and classified briefings on the weaponization process. Hatville was often a dinner guest at Patrick's home where Patrick says he keeps the basic

50:57 lab equipment needed to make bacteria into a finely ground powder. Normal thing to keep in your house.

51:04 Oh, no. Normal thing to keep in your house, Patrick. Um, I too keep the No. Okay. In 1999, Patrick helps Hatfield get a job at the Science Applications International Corporation or SIC. This is a private contractor. They do a bunch of [ __ ] One of the things they do is they help the DoD as consultants with bioweapons defense. So by this point, Steve is a recognized expert and he he's hit in just a couple of years, he's gotten to the point anyone in a field like this wants to where you can he's still employed at USMid, but you can start taking private sector money as a consultant cuz that's where the real cash is, baby. Um, and he he he is an expert, but he often does still make claims about his knowledge that go beyond at least what his official resume should have made possible. For example, he claimed to have knowledge of both wet and dry biological agents and how to produce them.

52:00 The number of Americans who can do who can actually claim that to have extensive knowledge of wet and dry biological agents and how to produce them was at this point maybe 50 to 100 people. Right? This is the number of people who could take anthrax and turn it into a dry powdered uh biological agent. Right? Maybe a hundred people tops in the whole country could have done that. Right?

52:21 And we're saying he's not good enough, but he's he's like he's saying he is but he does not have he doesn't have the professional background to have done that.

52:29 He's like Patrick showed me over dinner, right? Well, that's kind of that's kind of the situation where when when he'll make claims like this, his colleagues will be like, well, Patrick probably showed him, right? like because they they are close and Patrick knows how to do it and maybe he did know how to do it because of Patrick. I'm not I'm not saying he's lying here. I'm just saying that like his

52:47 we don't know he's only been doing the job a couple of years. He shouldn't be at that level but because of his connection to Patrick a lot of stuff is possible that might not otherwise be right.

52:57 Um and it's the kind of thing where maybe he was exaggerating a bit again to get jobs. If so, this is going to bite him in the ass because come 2001 when there's an anthrax attack, you don't want to be one of the 50 to 100 Americans who could credibly make the claim to know how to weaponize anthrax, right? That becomes less of a positive thing once someone's done it.

53:18 So funny. Yeah. In 2001, Steven applied for a top secret security clearance that he could work at the CIA. He had to take a polygraph test, too, and that apparently did not go well. We don't know why. It's the CIA. They don't just tell you stuff like that. It may have been that they uncovered some of the same discrepancies that journalists latched on to in his background. Maybe it's just that the CIA looked into him and they found out, oh, he's he's he's fibbed about a bunch of stuff and that just doesn't work for us.

53:46 We're the CIA. You know, you lie about certain things at the CIA, but not that, right? Um, we don't really know what happened, but they deny him. They turn him down. They won't give him a top secret security clearance. And in fact, their denial, they don't just say no, they say no and a bunch of other really mean [ __ ] And it's such a serious denial that like this could [ __ ] up his whole career cuz he's still working with sensitive information, right? Um and it could [ __ ] up his career.

54:13 They say they say basically this guy can't be trusted. He can't be trusted with a top secret clearance and maybe he shouldn't even have a security clearance at all. And in fact, soon after cuz he appeals the CIA's decision and they turn him down again. And right after that, the Department of Defense suspends his security clearance. So whatever the CIA found, whether it's that they just found out that he had exaggerated or in their if if they decided he had lied about his uh background, maybe that's why they did it. Maybe there's something else we don't know that they find. But whatever it is they find, they are like, not only can this guy not work with us, but the DoD shouldn't be giving him any kind of security clearance. And this endangers his job at SIC. It endangers his job at his work with us. It endangers his whole career. Right. And this is all happening in 2001, right? Right in the run-up to

55:05 9/11. So, one of the last projects that he would start at SIC before 9/11 was an attempt to design a fake mobile biowarfare production laboratory. Now, this is one of those things where so 911 hasn't happened yet, but George W. Bush is president, right? And George W. Bush's dad invaded Iraq and didn't go all the way. And there's a lot of argument that George W. Bush, was he always going to invade Iraq? Would he have tried to do it if 9/11 hasn't happened? Well, this is kind of a little this is like a little beat in the he always wanted to do that thing because

55:41 they're starting to plan before 911's happened. They're starting to train soldiers with the expectation that we will have troops in the Middle East again in a country where the leader is suspected of having chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Iraq, right? And so the military is like, we need someone to build a fake mobile bioweapons lab that we can train troops on so that they can see what one would look like and know how to recognize it and know like what to do when they find one cuz definitely Saddam has a bunch of mobile bioweapons labs for sure, right? He's for sure got the same kind of bioweapons capability that we do. We just haven't found it yet, right? And there's a there's a dark humor in the fact that the US government pays Steve Hatwell to design a mobile WMD production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have in order to train US soldiers so that they could recognize

56:35 a facility if they wound out in Iraq, even though their government was the only one with the resources to build one. Right. Oops. And Hatfield dutifully builds a lab into an 18-wheeler trailer and he fills it with old lab equipment. Now, it was never operational, nor was it meant to be. But again, when the anthrax attacks hit, and it becomes clear very soon after the anthrax attacks, that the anthrax either came directly from a military stockpile or was made by somebody who utilized the same techniques that we did to make weaponized anthrax. This is also going to look really Wait, you built like a mobile lab? You know how to just like build a lab and stick it in a truck and make anthrax with it? Okay, maybe you're on the list, right?

57:20 The CIA totally knew. Yeah. So 911 happens and that's where the episode's going to end with 911 uh you know because after 911, not long after we're going to get the uh the anthrax attacks and Steve's life is going to change dramatically for the worse. But I think we've set up the dominoes of like why this guy is going to wind up in the crosshairs of the media and federal law enforcement over this. Like,

57:47 well, [ __ ] I'm going to be chomping at the bit to figure out what happened to Stephen, how he got into the Trump administration.

57:54 Yeah. All of these things were like, yes, love that resume point. Part three. Uh, but first, want to plug your pluggables? Uh, you guys, I wrote a book. It's a coming of age memoir. It's called Girl Gone Wild.

58:11 I alternate between thinking it's uh totally embarrassing that I did it and that it's awesome. And so, you decide. You order it and decide.

58:21 Yeah, you decide. We report something or other like that. Anyway, everybody, this has been Behind the Bastards. Uh, until next week or wherever. Until the next episode, I don't know. Go away.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

Robert Evans (Host), Courtney Kosak (Guest).

What is "How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS" about?

This episode examines the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, which killed five people and caused nationwide panic in the wake of 9/11. It explores how the FBI and media misidentified suspects, focusing on one particularly wrongfully accused individual, and discusses the systemic failures that contributed to these injustices.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

15 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Steve Hatfield, anthrax, biological weapons, bioterrorism, Rhodesia, Bill Patrick. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

The episode runs 59 min; the transcript is about 11,208 words in 128 timestamped sections.

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