How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 2) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS

What this episode is about

The discussion delves into the FBI's mishandling of the 2001 anthrax scare, exploring the investigation's failures and the broader implications of government responses to bioterrorism incidents. Key points include the challenges faced by authorities and the impact of these events on public perception and policy.

Key takeaways

• In a post-9/11 world, panic turned reasonable adults into vengeful hunters overnight, unearthing a tragic collective insanity.
• A lower threshold for fear emerged after 9/11, leading even schoolchildren to worry about imagined terror threats.
• The anthrax attacks revealed just how fragile our post-9/11 psyche was, as paranoia took center stage in American life.
• In the wake of tragedy, the National Enquirer thrived on absurdity, proving that fake news often outlives real horrors.
• Memories fade, but the emotional scars of 9/11 linger, shaping the worldview of those who lived through it.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Robert Evans (Host) · 50 min speaking
• Courtney (Guest) · 22 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Robert Stevens, National Enquirer, CDC, anthrax attacks
2. 10:00 – 20:00: anthrax attacks, Ames strain, Fort Detrick, Steven Hatfill
3. 20:00 – 30:00: anthrax attacks
4. 40:00 – 50:00: anthrax attacks, Federation of American Scientists
5. 50:00 – 1:00:00: anthrax attacks, Steven Hatfill
6. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: Bruce Edwards Ivins, anthrax attacks

Notable quotes from "How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 2) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"

• It was and why it wound up [ __ ] up Steven Hatfield's life the way that it did. You have to understand how everyone was out of their minds, every adult in the United States…

  about Steven Hatfill · at 4:42

• Anthrax, his doctor and doctors who start looking at this immediately suspect terrorism, right? This gets to the CDC very quickly once it's clear anthrax is involved. and part…

  about CDC · at 8:20

• The CDC is contacted immediately and the book the demon in the freezer gives much more detail about the autopsy of Stevens and the protocols that follow after if you're interested in all of that. But.

  about Demon in the Freezer · at 9:40

• Executing an unprecedented biological attack on prominent publications and political leaders. The panic that had settled in after 9/11 dropped into high gear. Now, initially…

  about anthrax attacks · at 11:29

• Point, right? right, because this is the specific strain that you Samrid researchers, it can't like [ __ ] Osama bin Laden's not getting his hands on the AIM strain of anthrax.

  about Ames strain · at 18:31

• Enters the picture. Now unlike most citizen investigators, Barb did have real qualifications. She was a biological arms control expert employed by the Federation of American…

  about Federation of American Scientists · at 40:59

• Ivans is an anthrax expert. Anthrax was his specialty, right? he had actually consulted with the FBI when they started the investigation. and he's not someone that they had looked into.

  about Bruce Edwards Ivins · at 1:06:03

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Steven Hatfill — Person · Primary referenced suspect / victim of investigation · 3 mentions · first at 4:42
  Central figure discussed as the FBI’s early main suspect in the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks and as an example of alleged federal/media overreach that derailed his career and life.
• Robert Stevens — Person · Victim (anthrax attack fatality) · 3 mentions · first at 5:01
  Presented as the first fatality of the 2001 anthrax letters; his illness/death is used to establish the timeline and seriousness of the attacks.
  For the events of this story. So, less than 3 weeks after the towers fell, a photo editor for the National Enquirer named Robert Stevens started to feel ill. Stevens was British by birth.
• Bruce Edwards Ivins — Person · Primary later suspect (per FBI) / referenced scientist · 2 mentions · first at 1:06:00
  Discussed as the FBI’s later main suspect (an anthrax specialist at USAMRIID) who died by suicide; the episode notes ongoing controversy about evidentiary certainty.

Books & papers

• Demon in the Freezer — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 9:43
  Book providing details about the anthrax attacks and their investigation.

Companies & orgs

• National Enquirer — Company · Referenced organization · 3 mentions · first at 4:59
  First target of the anthrax attacks; a tabloid newspaper.
  As a younger man to work and worked for the National Enquirer. He was an image editor, right? And his the gist of his job was he helped to create fake news. Now, the National…
• CDC — Company · Referenced organization · 2 mentions · first at 8:23
  Involved in the investigation of the anthrax attacks.
• Federation of American Scientists — Company · Referenced organization · 1 mention · first at 41:06
  Organization involved in arms control and mentioned in the context of the anthrax investigation.

Concepts & topics

• Ames strain — Concept · Key argument · 2 mentions · first at 14:55
  Specific strain of anthrax used in the attacks, linking it to US research.

Places & events

• anthrax attacks — Event · Core topic · 10 mentions · first at 4:33
  Central theme of the episode, discussing the anthrax attacks post-9/11 and their investigation.
• Fort Detrick — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 12:02
  Location of USAMRIID, where anthrax research was conducted.
  Our last episode. That's where Steven Hatfield worked for years. That this is the primary biological warfare defense organization in the United States located in Fort Detric.…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Oh my gosh. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where your host, Robert Evans, hasn't slept in two days. I mean, I I slept a little bit. I fell asleep last night at like 2:00 a.m. And then around 4:00, I woke bolt upright, like suddenly perfectly awake and with this just feeling in my bones that some news had happened. And for, you know, the record, folks, we're recording this on September 12th, uh, so just a couple of days after Charlie Kirk's assassination. And I I just woke up with the feeling that something had happened.

0:31 So I checked my phone and the authorities announced that they'd taken someone into custody and they announced his name. So from that point, I spend the rest of the night finding this the shooters family on the internet and going through all of their social media and doing the thing that I do because

0:47 this is both what made my career and also something that's permanently damaged my brain. So, like about a dozen friends of mine, whenever there's a weird shooting like this, I wind up digging into some internet poisoned young man's life for several hours. Uh, which I did, and I found some useful news and published it, uh, posted it and stuff, put it out, got it out there. Um, so now I'm I'm The term we used to use when I was a kid was cracked out. Uh, how are you doing, guest today, Courtney?

1:19 Are you all right? Oh my god, that's such an odd relationship to have with this kind of news.

1:25 Yes. Yes. I'm so sorry. It's uh I mean when the [ __ ] when the paw the the synagogue shooting happened, I was flying to Mexico for a vacation and I had to like run into a wine bar in the 90 minutes before my flight and write an article like that. That's just this is just like how my what my life has been like for a while now. Um it's it's weird. Courtney, how are you?

1:47 Weird times. Yeah, I I'm good. I'm just chilling. Well, that's good. Um, are you ready to learn about a different kind of terrorist attack, you know?

1:57 I cannot wait. I honestly I didn't know if I was going to be back for part three, but I am so excited to hear it.

2:03 No, no one else would I tell this story to. So, and we're recording this on September 12th, so it it's, you know, obviously this is all fresh in our minds. You remember, I'm sure, Courtney, that on September 11th, 2001, the CIA used their low Earth orbit ion cannon to destroy the World Trade Center in New York City. The Twin Towers collapsed within minutes. Obviously, that's one explanation. There are some experts who think that the culprit was a group of terrorists who hijacked some commercial flights. Whatever the truth, we'll never know, obviously, but whatever the truth.

2:32 Christ, Robert, Americans went crazy, right? like people lost you you you and I I think we're we we remember like everyone losing their minds everyone here on this show right after 911.

2:43 Oh yeah. Yeah. I know it's always weird to me to talk to people which now you know a decent number of people I I'm social with don't have strong memories of 911. It like

2:54 I don't think Garrison was born. G was not born. G does not remember 911. And I remember being in high school like sitting in the room and watching the

3:05 watching the second one go down. Yeah. Exactly. I I came into health class like right before the second one hit. Like I watched that live on TV and like you know talking to because when I say like my younger friends, these people are like 27 to 30, right? They still don't remember 911. And it's it's important if you because if you were if you were old enough to be like really cognizant then looking back on it like people like there was something that left everyone's souls. Like the light in their eyes was different. People [ __ ] went like my recollection of it is that overnight all of the most stable, reasonable adults in my life became like bloodthirsty. Like it it was like somebody had flipped a switch, you know? Um it it was a very very like odd and unsettling time and people got in the wake of the attack.

3:55 Not only were they begging for blood for whoever was responsible, but they were incredibly paranoid, right? Because it felt like anyone might be at risk. You know, I I I have very strong memories of girls in my suburban North Texas school like worried that al-Qaeda was going to hit like our middle school, which like obviously that was never in the cards, but people were worried about that because everyone was losing their minds.

4:18 I didn't go I I think I was going to go to college in New York and I didn't go because I was like,

4:24 absolutely not. I don't [ __ ] know what's going to happen. No. Yeah. I mean, and that that's totally sensible. Um, and so I I bring this up because obviously the anthrax attacks happened right after 9/11, but it's also before we talk about those attacks to understand why the reaction was the way it was and why it wound up [ __ ] up Steven Hatfield's life the way that it did. You have to understand how everyone was out of their minds, every adult in the United States, or at least a majority of them were completely insane for the events of this story. So, less than 3 weeks after the towers fell, a photo editor for the National Enquirer named Robert Stevens started to feel ill. Uh, Stevens was British by birth.

5:05 He was in his 60s. He'd moved to Florida as a younger man to work uh and worked for the National Enquirer. He was an image editor, right? And his the gist of his job was he helped to create fake news. Now, the National Enquirer, again, if you're young enough that you don't remember these guys, they're not quite like The Onion, like where they would never admit that everything was [ __ ] but everything's [ __ ] in the National Enquirer, you know that picking up a copy that it's nonsense, right?

5:29 Like it's like bat boy [ __ ] articles and [ __ ] like that. Um, and Stevens' highest profile gig for the paper was merging photographs of Freddy Prince and Raquel Welch after Prince uh killed himself to kind of insinuate that the two had been in a relationship together before he he he killed himself, right? Like that was like the kind of work that he did. So, this is a guy like, you know, this is not a guy anyone would target necessarily for terrorism. Like, this is just a dude editing pictures for the National Enquirer. Um, and outside of that seems to have been a pretty normal guy. He was certainly not the kind of person who you'd ever expect to be the target of a sophisticated terrorist attack. But on Saturday, September 30th, 2001, he ca he started feeling ill as his wife was driving him home from a trip to North Carolina. The next day, he just kept getting sicker.

6:17 his fever spiked and he went home and he went from normal ill to barely able to speak in the course of a few hours. So on Tuesday, uh his wife took him to the ER at around 2:00 a.m. in the morning. Doctors initially suspected menitis, but then he started having seizures. They did a spinal tap which finally revealed the culprit. Robert Stevens had been exposed to anthrax. Samples were immediately sent to a dedicated lab which confirmed that his symptoms were consistent with inhalation anthrax. As we noted in the last episodes, there's multiple ways to get anthrax. When it there's natural outbreaks, it's usually not inhalation anthrax, right? That's when someone has made like weaponized dry anthrax is when you inhale it generally.

6:59 Sorry, I'm dumb. Can you just What was the cliffhanger of the last episode? Where do we kind of leave off?

7:07 We had just gotten up to Steven Hatfield's career, right? where the last thing he had done before 911 happens is he built he's built an 18-wheeler trailer into a bioweapons lab model. Like not a real lab, but like a fake one cuz he's training US special forces how to recognize bioweapons labs in the thought that they're going to be invading Iraq and finding all of Saddam's bioweapons labs that he definitely had. Right.

7:30 Yeah. Perfect. Yes. Hatfield Hatfield is Yeah. working for this the the US government, but he also he has just gotten like fired and denied a security clearance from the CIA because he lied about a bunch of stuff in his backstory, right?

7:43 Yes. So, he's he's he's also starting to have career issues. Yeah. And anyway, it's into all of this that Yeah. So, this guy uh Stevens comes ill uh spinal tap and whatnot uh reveals that it's anthrax and inhalation anthrax is about as rare as illnesses get in the United States. When Stevens got sick, he was the 19th case of anthrax inhalation in the US in a hundred years.

8:09 Once it be Yeah. This is does not happen often right? Crazy. Like it's not the kind of thing you accidentally tend to do. And once it became clear that he had inhaled anthrax, his doctor and doctors who start looking at this immediately suspect terrorism, right? This this gets to the CDC very quickly once it's clear anthrax is involved. Um, and part of why people were ready, people were primed to be scared of this because a few days before he got sick, news articles had come out reporting that two of the 911 hijackers had investigated the possibility of renting crop dusters before settling on their ultimate plan.

8:44 And the Fed's assumption was that they'd wanted to rent crop dusters so that they could deploy anthrax, right? Because if you had a sufficient quantity of dry anthrax, you could deploy it via a crop duster. That was the assumption at the time. I actually don't know. They may have just wanted to fly the crop dusters into buildings like knowing what they actually did, but this is what people were talking about at the time, right? That's what matters. So, Americans not only are flipping out because of 9/11, but we're primed to be expect that like al-Qaeda's looking for ways to use anthrax and then suddenly this [ __ ] 60-year-old image editor gets sick with anthrax.

9:16 Um, Steven slips into a coma a couple of days after getting to the hospital and he stops breathing in the late afternoon on Friday, October 5th. He was the first of what would be five deaths from a series of of anthrax letters that were sent to a bunch of different locations. Um now

9:34 yes uh this and sickens a number a significant number of more people right a bunch of people get sick five of them die.

9:40 The CDC is contacted immediately and the book the demon in the freezer gives much more detail about the autopsy of Stevens and the protocols that follow after if you're interested in all of that. But what's important is that they ultimately tracked the cause of infection, like where he got sick, down to the mail room for the American media building where he worked. Another employee, Ernesto Blanco, had gone to the hospital soon after Stevens did, suffering respiratory distress, and he also tested positive for anthrax. I think he survives, but the FBI gets involved. Right now, you've got two people who have gotten anthrax from a mail room. Something is happening. Something intentional, right?

10:17 Yeah. On October 15th, 10 days after Stevens died, an employee at the mail room for the Hart Senate building office opened a letter addressed to a Senate Majority Leader Tom Dashel with its return address set as the fourth grade class for the Greenale School in New Jersey. She saw powder inside and immediately called the police. The building had to be evacuated for 6 months because anthrax spores had circulated through the HVAC system. Cleanup alone cost like $26 million, right?

10:45 Oh my god. Do you remember all of this? Like were you like cuz I I this is when I when the letter to Dashel got found is when I remember becoming aware of the anthrax attack.

10:53 I remember the vague like hysteria over anthrax. I was not following beat by beat the news stories but right people were scared.

11:03 They're scared. And this is scary by the way. Anthrax is [ __ ] scary. Right. It's not unreasonable when anthrax is showing up in the mail and random people are getting sick to be like oh [ __ ] How much worse is this going to get? Uh, more letters start showing up in the following days. NBC gets a letter addressed to Tom Broka. There's a letter addressed to CBS, to the New York Post, to ABC. And it doesn't take long for news to spread that across the country that someone or someone once was executing an unprecedented biological attack on prominent publications and political leaders. The panic that had settled in after 9/11 dropped into high gear. Now, initially, all we know is that there's letters with anthrax, right? because they can't immediately like read the letters because of all the anthrax right?

11:46 Oh, right. So, you have to you have to get these letters to a secure location, which in this case was we talked about USMRD in our last episode. That's where Steven Hatfield worked for years. That this is the primary biological warfare defense organization in the United States located in Fort Detric. They get involved at this point. The letters are sent to a secure facility and scientists with all of the gear that you need are able to

12:12 read. Yeah. And then see what's written in them right safely. One of the letters read 911 o 2001. You cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great. All in big bold capitalized letters. Very distinctive block lettering. Weird looking. Now, that's a weird message, right?

12:35 Yeah. Obviously, there had just I joked about CIA lasers, but there had been a massive 911 was a massive Islamic terrorist attack against the United States. That's what happened. Um, so the idea that this would be involved with that would be a follow-up attack was not weird. That said, if you know anything about like al-Qaeda or the history of Islamic terrorism, this is a weird letter, right? Like this doesn't actually sound like the kind of things that the these people write when they're carrying out their

13:05 Yeah. I mean there'd be a death to America, death to Israel in there. Sure. But it's not like you die now. Are you afraid? That's weird.

13:11 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like this isn't I could somebody who's professionally studied this is weird.

13:18 Yeah. Yeah. Um, so once professionals got to look at the samples, the actual anthrax, because they're not, you know, they're looking at the letters, but they're actually able to test anthrax. And this is important because anthrax is a biological

13:32 thing, right? It's a bacteria, which means there's like a DNA basically for it, you know, like you can you can figure there's different strains and they all strains are not created equal. Different strains have different levels of, you know, infectiousness and whatnot and deadliness and resistance to antibiotics and the like. Um, there's a bunch of different ways to get in infected with anthrax and you know, you've got your naturally occurring anthraxes and then you've got your anthraxes that are like based off of natural strains, but they've been bred for lethality or whatever, right?

14:03 Because people have weaponized. Sounds like cannabis. It is like pot. Anthrax and marijuana have a lot in common. And one of these days we'll get those clowns in Congress to legalize anthrax and I'll be able to grow marijuana and anthrax together. You know, finally you can get both in the same store. Bad thing to joke about on the episode about all the people who died from anthrax.

14:27 Um no, it's not funny. I'm sorry. So sorry. Um although anthrax would be a good name for a pot strain. Um but I would know I've never smoked the devil's lettuce. So, there are 89 known variants of anthra of the anthrax bacteria, or at least there were at the time. Maybe we've added a few since. I don't know. I'm not an anthrax expert. Uh, but when they tested this anthrax, they were able to identify its exact strain, specifically the anthrax that had been mailed to the American media building. It was the Ames strain of anthrax, amme.

14:59 The as strain of anthrax was initially found, I think, in 1981. Uh, and it was taken from a 14-month-old calf, like a baby cow that perished in Texas in a after a natural outbreak. So, this starts out as a natural outbreak. And the AIM strain is called the AI strain because there's like a mailing error when they're sending samples of the anthrax to use. And so, the researchers there thought that it came from Ames, Iowa, and not from Texas. That's why it's called the Ames strain. It's just a little [ __ ] up in them reading the the mail or whatever.

15:31 What's the point? So, they just kept it. They just kept it off the cow. Yes, they kept it and they cultured it in order to turn it into you've got like the wet anthrax, which is when you get like natural infections. It's wet, you know? So, it's it's because it's inside living wet things.

15:47 And it's very difficult and takes someone who is very skilled to take that and turn it into a dry like agent, a powder that you could spread and people could inhale it and get sick. Right? That's complicated. And that's what they're doing to the that's what they do to the AIM strain, right? You Samrred does. And they are doing it. We're not we're not we don't make biological weapons anymore, right?

16:10 But sort of we do theoretically, but we do for the purpose of studying how to defend ourselves, right? Like against

16:18 okay, whatever you tell yourself. If you're look, this is not the place to litigate that. I will say that their their argument is that well if we're worried that someone might weaponize this stuff then we need to have examples of it that we have weaponized in order to test and build defenses against it. Right? So that's what we're still allowed to do cuz we're not supposed to be making anthrax to stockpile as a weapon for war. Right? But you can have some of it that you're turning into this dry form in order to test different prophylactics and whatnot. Right? And the AIM strain after 81 becomes the strain that is used by usamid when they're doing anthrax research, right? Because it's very deadly. So I mean, and it's super contagious. So basically, because it's one of the more deadly variants, they use it cuz if you're wanting to develop something that can protect people, you want to be using the nastiest version of

17:13 it that you can to develop like a counter right? I mean, this is all we're talking government logic here, right? I'm not defending this. I'm just explaining how they think. Right.

17:24 Totally. I'm not I'm not defending the US bioweapons programs. You can feel about that however you want. But these are the arguments that these guys are making, right? That this stuff will be used against us. It's only a matter of time. And so we need to be making and studying it and devoting a lot of money. And this is important. The fact that a lot of guys in the bioweapons research field think that the US is not putting enough money into bioweapons defense. And Hatfield is one of them. Hatfield has publicly complained about this and a lot of guys in his industry have publicly complained and we could say well if you're a bioweapons scientist of course you think the government should be spending more money researching bioweapons right

18:01 but after 9/11 it starts to seem and especially now that now there's anthrax attacks suddenly everyone's taking bioweapons seriously and suddenly a lot more money starts going to these programs soon as people start dying from anthrax US government starts putting money into anthrax defense wild how that works Right. Um, so once they have identified, once the guys at USM know that this is the AIM strain, that really narrows the field of potential culprits. It really can't be al-Qaeda at this point, right? Like,

18:33 right, because this is the specific strain that you Samrid researchers, it can't like [ __ ] Osama bin Laden's not getting his hands on the AIM strain of anthrax. How would he? Right.

18:43 Yes. Um, so this seriously narrows the field of potential culprits. Per an article by Marilyn Thompson for the Washington Post, quote, "The evidence as compelling as a human fingerprint shifted suspicion away from al-Qaeda and suggested another disturbing possibility that the anthrax attacks were the work of an American bioweapons insider." Now obviously it's possible someone else could have gotten access to the AIM strain of anthrax and weaponized it. But the number of people in the entire country who had the technical knowhow to do this with any degree of safety to take a wet bacteria and turn it into a dry agent that you can use as a weapon in this way. 50 to 100 max in the whole country. And not a lot more than that.

19:24 The guy with that home lab, right? Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. And so this is again and Stephen Hatfield is going to be one of those 50 to 100 people, right? So immediately as soon as they know this, anyone who knows anything about anthrax knows it's got to be somebody at a high level in research in weapons research by weapons research. There's just not many other options

19:47 outside of the weird some other government who has the ability to have stolen a strain of anthrax from us might be doing some sort of weird attack, right? But there's not any evidence that that's the case. Um, but it would have had to have been that's the only other thing it possibly could have been at this point, right? Is like another state level actor doing something crazy or the much more likely thing, one of these scientists has gone rogue. Now, one of the weird things about this case is the FBI does not seem to have wanted to accept this immediately, right? They really drag their feet on on like adopting that piece of information and taking that in uh to their conception of what's happening here. And in order to understand why they're acting the way they are, you have to remember they're still very much in the dark at this point. This is just days after 9/11 really like a couple of not long at all,

20:36 like literally less than a month. And they're still very much in the dark about a lot of the details of how the 9/11 hijackers had done what they did, right? Like that's still getting unraveled. And the writing in the letters makes everyone assume Islamic terrorists. And there's not a lot of encouragement for people in law enforcement to look deeper, especially since most of them don't know [ __ ] about anthrax like the rest of us. And so some of the first people to reach out to the feds about the possibility that one of these bioweapons scientists had done this were co-workers of Steven Hatfield.

21:07 Right? It's bioweapon scientists who start as soon as they hear that it's the AIM strain, they start calling the FBI and being like, "Look, man." And and I love the story. One of the ballsiest of them is this retired researcher James Re Smith. He had worked directly with weaponized anthrax at Fort Detric, right? Which is something that Steven Hatfield never did. Hatfield never worked with anthrax. James Smith is a guy who weapon he made weaponized anthrax, right? And so when he heard that the anthrax that had been sent through the mail was of the AIM strain, he immediately knew the culprit was one of his colleagues. But then days and days go by without the FBI reaching out to him or any of his peers. And he's like, why in the [ __ ] aren't they? You should be you should be searching my house. Do you know what I know how to do? Like that's that's this guy's attitude, right? Like why aren't you

21:51 raiding me? Right. Um now the director of the FBI and it's weird that the FBI [ __ ] up because the director of the FBI at this time is an unimpeachable fellow you might know named Robert Müller.

22:03 Shut the [ __ ] up. Bonnie Moles. That's right, baby. Wow. So he puts the Washington field office in charge of investigating the anthrax attacks, which is weird because the Washington field office is also in charge of investigating the 9/11 attacks. This is means that you've got this 30 35 FBI agents who are investigating both of these things, which is like a lot, maybe too much for 35 people's plates. That's a lot. I feel like 35 people for each of these cases would be reasonable, you know, if not more. Um, now when it came to the anthrax case, these uh the Washington field office of the FBI did gain the help of another 15 USPS inspectors, which and those guys are sharp. Like the postal office feds are scary guys

22:51 because obviously this is a postal crime, you know. Um, so they're all working together on this [ __ ] only. But it's one of those things, you know, the USPS inspectors are good at what they do. FBI agents have a certain competences, but they do not are not in general experts on science or experts on biological and chemical weapons. Only eight of the FBI agents in the Washington office had relevant scientific experience, which means at this point PhD. So there are eight PH science PhDs on the team, but and which sounds like a lot and like would be in any normal situation, but that means you only really have eight people on this team who adequately understand immediately what the early evidence means.

23:34 Yeah. Right. The USPS guys are just like, I can tell you if it's a book or not.

23:40 Yeah. I I can tell you how much they paid for their stamps. I don't know, bro. I work for a post office. You know who else works for the post office?

23:50 Your mama. Oh, sorry. I was going to say the 9/11 hijackers, but that's a that's a theory I have. We'll talk about that when we come back.

23:56 Jesus Christ. We're back. I'm plugging my documentary Loose Mail uh about uh how the post office did 9/11. Um that's surely not going to blow up my career and reputation. Uh it's going to be good. It's going to be good. Everyone can do whatever now. It's fine. I don't know if you've heard the news lately. Yeah, I did. I did.

24:19 People don't get in trouble for things anymore. Um, so the guy leading the FBI investigation at this point in time, uh, was the was an assistant director, an assistant director, obviously there's more than one at the FBI, named Van Hap. And Van Hartp's background was in organized crime. He was very competent at prosecuting like mob cases, right? His skill was in building networks of informants and interrogating people to get informations about organizations, right?

24:48 And that's useful for those things. It's not really useful for this. He has no competence in the bioweapons field. He doesn't know what he's doing here. He has no reason.

24:58 Give me a guy. I'll interrogate the [ __ ] out of him. Yeah, I'll tell you. Well, we don't have a guy. We've got some letters and some poison. You know, um, HARP's main contribution is that he names the investigation Athrax, which is the official name of this the Ameritthrax investigation, the Aiththrax tax. Great work.

25:16 C++. I'm really glad whatever college you went to, you know, you you didn't pay him enough. Um, so and he goes, this this tells you he has he has full-on cop investigator brain because he becomes obsessed immediately rather than being really interested in what the strain of anthrax is and what biologically is going on with the poison and what that tells him. He gets obsessed with the writing on the letters like the handwriting and with the return address of that one letter that was returned to fourth grade that Greenale school right in Colorado or not Colorado that's community I forget what Greenale this was supposed to be different one um now a smarter man than Harp might have said hey whoever did this is clearly very intelligent and the letters are written in a weird blocky style which is probably just the result of someone disguising their handwriting because no one's smart enough.

26:09 Huh? This Greenell Greenell school is in Franklin Park, New Jersey, by the way.

26:12 Jersey. Yes. Thank you, Sophie. You're welcome. Nobody smart enough to weaponize anthrax would use their normal handwriting on the letter, right? They would do something like make a weird block letter.

26:24 Is real. Yeah. But he he's convinced that there's something to learn, which is again he buys into the stuff that a lot of Americans and all cops do. That forensic science works when it often and mostly doesn't. Like, you know, fingerprints are kind of real, but often not the way that the cops say that they are. And stuff like handwriting analysis and gate analysis is [ __ ] I'd say it's voodoo, but like voodoo I have a lot more respect for uh than that kind of [ __ ] you know?

26:55 Totally. Even on the reporting the the cook reporting when they were like we got a elbow indentation. It's like yeah really that

27:05 oh cash Patel you no cuz that you don't know what again and it's it's the the FBI was more competent at this point in time but as the story is going to tell you not that competent still

27:16 sure so Harp or like he is he's gets [ __ ] obsessed van Van Hart gets [ __ ] obsessed with the handwriting and with the the return address on this um and he's certain that they're going to find something there so he appoints another veteran agent to to specifically looking into those aspects of the letter. And this guy again is an agent whose only experience is in busting organized crime and the like. His name is Bob Roth. And so he starts investigating the the letter itself.

27:43 Bob Roth. I love that. Bob Roth. Yeah. A lot of fed names here. He consults a handwriting an analyst per the Washington Post. This analyst quote proposed setting up a computer sting operation in an effort to identify the killer. Smith, the analyst, would try to lure the perpetrator to two websites, handto-mind.com and anthraxhunt.com, by making provocative statements about the killer's handwriting and publicizing the sites in interviews and on TV's America's Most Wanted. Right? So, that's their plan is we'll we'll make a website to to trap this guy. He's going to want to brag or something like that. Right.

28:19 Again, it's all like, well, I watched some movies about serial killers logic. Totally. which is as real as most of this behavioral analysis [ __ ] tends to be. So the FBI spends two months on this sting operation and there's absolutely no result. Nothing that they get nothing. They do get people to go to those websites and two of them are on their list but those guys didn't do anything like on their suspect list but those guys don't. They're like it's useless. It's just a waste. Yeah.

28:47 Just a hobby. Yeah. They're just they're just they're just like just tweaking the FBI's nose. Um, and in fact, as time goes on, it becomes clear to everyone nothing the FBI is doing seems to be bringing them any closer to a culprit. And this is a real problem for the bureau because they missed 9/11, right? They're not the only agency that should have caught 9/11, but stopping 9/11s is one of the FBI's jobs and they did not. And now these anthrax attacks have happened and they can't catch the anthrax attack guys. And it wasn't all that long ago that a federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up and they didn't stop that. And then, you know, if you go back before that, you've got Ruby Ridge and Waco. The FBI doesn't look great at either of those. So, the FBI is really hungry for some good PR. They want this to get solved. They kind of need a win, you know? Um, they're your friend who just got like broken up with

29:38 and fired from their job in the same week, and you're like just taking them out to try to you're like walking up to someone to go to the bathroom. Like, would you just tell him he looks good tonight? Like, he needs it, man. Like,

29:50 totally. That's where the FBI is here. And that's what's going to wind up [ __ ] up Steven Hatfield's life, right? Um, so as this case drags on without any sort of like clear suspects, agents start complaining to their bosses about overtime and about how feudal the investigation is. Bob Roth begs publicly to be removed from the case. And this brings me back to that bioweapons expert, James Smith, that I talked about, right? the guy who gets angry that the FBI hasn't shown up at his house yet. Now, by this point, he's so furious that he decides to take action.

30:20 So, he sends a letter to Tom Ridge, the chief of homeland security, where he says, "Hey, I'm a bio I'm one of the the top handful of bioweapons experts in the United States. I understand anthrax." And he describes the kind of the whoever pulled off this attack. These are this is his work experience and this is his educational background. And then he ends the letter by saying, "This individual is me because this man has balls big enough to crush a Mac truck." Right?

30:48 Like he he is like, "I could have done this easily. Why haven't you come to my house?" And the FBI does go to his house at this point, right?

30:57 Obviously, they don't find anything. He's innocent. But he accomplishes his goal, which is that at the feds after him especially, and not that none of them, some of them had been looking in the direction of bioweapon scientists, but not enough. And he really gets them to turn their focus to Fort Detric and another facility in Utah where weaponized anthrax was stored and scientists who knew how to do that [ __ ] worked, right? Um, so kudos to J like the balls of of sending a letter to the director of homeland security being like, I am one of the only people in the country who could have pulled off this terrorist attack.

31:30 What are you doing? Where are you? Steve Hatfield like he always exaggerated his resume like

31:39 25 to 75%. So it's like they're going to need to account for that. And that that's going to be one of the things that does is part of why he gets in hot water is that it's maybe some people will say he exaggerated his competence at making biological dry biological agents and that may be part of why he got focused on although I don't really want to labor on that because again this is the FBI's fault not Hatville's fault. Okay. Um so uh this does create uh a problem the fact that the like the FBI is now focusing on the actual anthrax itself and on these scientists because once they realize that's the kind of investigation this is they also realize we don't have the equipment in house or the people to analyze anthrax properly like we can't do this on our own. We have to use outside bioweapons laboratories and the people working at them are all our suspects. Like the the only people that we can trust to analyze this stuff are

32:36 also the people who might be weaponizing it, right? You see how this is a problem?

32:41 This is a problem. What about the guy who wrote in, right? Well, they do they do check in on him first. They knock on his door, right? Like they do check him out. Um and he's like and then they they start talking to him and and they start talking to other guys. And as they're interviewing these guys, they start to get like some some some hints, right? Um, and this leads them, you know, because nothing else is working, they they opt for the law enforcement equivalent of homeopathic medicine, which is criminal profiling. Um, and the only things that they have to go on when they're trying to make a profile is the nature of the attack, that it's an anthrax attack, and the targets that were picked, right, as well as the handwriting and the messages left on the letters. Very little. And from this, the feds concluded that the terrorist was a middle-aged white man with a scientific background who was angry at the

33:28 government and picked his targets so they'd make the news. And I think this is a case of after Smith reaches out to them and says, "It's definitely a scientist," they work backwards and are like, "Our analysts have come up with a profile, right, of this guy." Um, per the Washington Post, quote, "It was likely FBI analyst James Fitzgerald said that the criminal had timed the letters to take advantage of the 9/11 panic and hoped to use them to draw attention to his special, as yet unknown cause."

33:55 Now, that's totally unrelated. We don't actually know fully, but we'll get to that.

34:03 Okay. I I will say this is the thing where there's not a 100% answer as to what happened here. We still don't have a We have a probable person who did it, who's dead now, but we don't know a 100% who did it or why.

34:15 Oh, we actually still don't. That's one of the weird things about this. Um, but once investigators start going down this road and once they have this this profile together, increasingly the name Steven Hatfield starts coming up in their interrogations of other scientists, in their interviews because he's a middle-aged white scientist who's just been [ __ ] over by the CIA, right? because they denied him a top secret security clearance and then somebody got his security clearance taken away and that starts costing him work, right?

34:47 He's getting like he's he's already has a cause to be angry is is what people are saying, right? And once the FBI starts whittling their suspect list down, then they're hearing this guy's name over and over again. Hatfield's one of the few people who knows how who could make this and he's pissed off at the government right now, you know. Um, now part of why his name comes up is I think he seems to have been, shall we say, maybe a polarizing guy in the workplace. There are some stories about him doing stuff like eating snacks while in his like wearing his like the the full hazmat suit and like stories that he like made out with a girlfriend at the the biohazard facility and stuff. Um I it's it's hard to tell how much of them are true, which is why I'm not laboring on them a lot cuz like once he becomes the public suspect, people just start saying [ __ ] about Steven Hatfield, right? What I think it's fair and safe

35:37 to say is that he's a polarizing figure and so a number of his colleagues when the feds are like we one of you guys has to have done this. He's the name that comes up to some of his colleagues, right?

35:48 Yeah. This guy's a weird [ __ ] that that's I think what is basically happening is some of his colleagues think that and that's how his name starts coming out right

35:59 now Hatfield's job at sic involved training special forces guys for encountering chemical and biological weapons labs and attacks and as part of that one of his duties was designing theoretical bioweapon dispersal devices in essence he part of his job was to think like a terrorist and to build [ __ ] like like recent like not long before the attack he builds like a backpack device that could quote spray germs in a combat situation. Um, and obviously any country with a large military is going to have guys doing stuff like this, right? Thinking up horrible things so you can figure out how to defend against them. That's the best way to look at it, right? But now that there's an anthrax attack, suddenly this guy who before had been doing a job that was like patriotic seems a lot more suspicious, right?

36:45 Well, this guy knows how to make terrorist weapons for a living and we just had one of these attacks and he seems angry at the government and maybe unstable. Now, once the FBI starts looking into Hatfield, they do uncover some of the same stuff that I brought up last episode, right? Both that this guy's in Rhodesia during that anthrax outbreak that he's got I mean the fact that he goes to Rhdesia at all kind of sketchy like that he's got he's got this kind of weird history. They they find out about the lecture that I talked about last episode in which Steve gave way too much detail on how you could sneak biological weapons into the White House using a wheelchair. Right. Stories like that don't make you seem more innocent to the FBI in this scenario.

37:25 Totally. But his grievance is his grievance is with the government. It's not with like the [ __ ] tabloids, right?

37:35 Yes. And again, when you think about it, it it never made all that much sense that they were so certain it was this guy because there's never that much evidence. But they're desperate. Again, they missed 9/11 and they're really under pressure to not [ __ ] this up. And this is the only lead they've got. And it just seems like it really must be him. And I think part of it is that a lot of these FBI investigators when they start talking to Hatfield's co-workers and reading up on him, they don't like him either. And so they decide the fact that they don't think he's a good person means that he must have done this. And those are two separate things, right? Like you can feel however you want about stuff.

38:12 There's a lot of people I dislike that I don't think could weaponize anthrax or or would, right?

38:18 Um now obviously there's some blame in the fact that Hatfield's resume, he listed himself as having a working knowledge of wet and dry biological agents, which is why he's on that short list of people who could have done this. But you know, that was also his job, right? And even Hatfield has said he expected the FBI to look in on to him. He expected them to search his house. He was waiting for it, right? And so he's not surprised when they they they like get a hold of the fake bioweapons lab that he made for his training gig and they test that to see if he made anthrax in it and it turns up negative, right?

38:50 But he's still their suspect. In November of 2001, a second letter is sent to Tom Dashel's office. Now this one they they had new protocols, so they were irradiating the letters that came in at that point. So the powder is safe. I think it's been like rendered safe via a radiation uh by the time that they open it up. So, it's it's not dangerous when they open it up.

39:11 It'll just give you cancer. No problem. Yeah, maybe it'll just give you cancer. I don't know. But, uh this letter was sent from London. They know that much. And at the same time it's sent, Hatfield is in England training to become a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, right?

39:25 Oh, [ __ ] So, agents are like and agents confirmed that he rented a car during his visit, which no one else in his group did. So that seems really suspicious.

39:33 Yeah. And so that one that does No, no, that is a thing where if if you're if you're a responsible agent working with that info, that's a reason to look into this guy. I think even Steven Hatfield would say like, yeah, that's a thing you want to check up on. Right.

39:46 Now, where things get more reachy is another package arrives a little later uh at a Nevada office for Microsoft with anthrax in it. And this one was mailed from Malaysia. And Steven's girlfriend at the time came from Koala Lumpur. Now, she didn't live in Malaysia still. It's pretty thin stuff to be like, are you thinking he like roped her or a family member into like, "But how did he get the Andrex over there?" Like, what what is the whole chain of custody you imagined for this anthrax attack that he you're thinking he did because his girlfriend comes from like that shows you how thin the FBI's evidence is, right? Like that's like, "Okay, man. I don't know. I think you're reaching now, homie." Um, but the fact that, you know, they've got they there's just enough here. you know, that thing about London is just suspicious enough, right, that he never no one ever overtakes him on their list. And so, by the start of

40:36 2002, Hatfield is not publicly suspect number one, but he's the FBI's only real suspect, and they've talked to enough of his former and current colleagues that a lot of people in his orbit know that he's being investigated very closely, right? He is aware that they're looking at him very closely. And this is where a molecular biologist and citizen investigator named Barbara Rosenberg enters the picture. Now unlike most citizen investigators, Barb did have real qualifications. She was a biological arms control expert employed by the Federation of American Scientists chemical and biological arms control program. Right? So FAS, the Federation of American Scientists has a chemical and biological arms control program.

41:18 She's she's with that and this is a small field as we've talked about and given her position in that field Rosenberg is aware that the FBI is questioning her colleagues and she is hearing the same name over and over again that her colleagues are giving out and that the FBI is hearing. She's hearing Steven Hatfield's name right now. The responsible thing for her to have done would have been to sit back and wait because Barbara knew damn well that Hatfield was being looked at. But she didn't think the feds were looking hard enough. So she starts writing memos which are effectively blog posts and she's publishing them on the FAS website. She publishes the first in January of 2002 per an article in Salon by Anthony York. Rosenberg says her memos began as an effort to pressure the FBI which she has repeatedly accused of dropping the ball in its investigation.

42:02 I began just putting together the data that was available and discussing it on this email list. Then people started sending me information. I sort of became a center for collecting information on the subject. She says so. All right, good on you, Barbara.

42:16 Yeah, you can see where this comes from a good place, but you can also see the the whole citizen investigator thing can end badly a lot of the time, right? As in maybe maybe people are putting together stuff that doesn't need to be put together. Now, now Rosenberg doesn't name Hatfield in any of the memos that she published online, but some of these she's sending directly to the feds, and she does describe him. She describes the likely culprit as someone who quote must be angry at some biodefense agency. And a couple of months later, in early spring 2002, she writes another memo.

42:48 Early in the investigation, a number of inside experts, at least five that I know about, gave the FBI the name of one specific individual as the most likely suspect. That person fits the FBI profile in most respects. Now, she doesn't name Hatfill at this point, but she describes his background, history, and personality in such detail that anyone tangental to their small world would have recognized him. Because it was so obvious who she was talking about, Hatfield opted not to publish this memo openly. She put it on a list serve operated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which Salon describes as a place where bioweapons experts and journalists lurk to share theories on, among other things, the anthrax killer. Some of the theories that have been voiced on the on the list serve have found their way into media reports. Others have not. So she puts it instead of publishing it openly,

43:32 she puts it on basically a forum where she knows it's going to find its way to the media, right? And find its way to to people in government and people in law enforcement. And you can critique her and Hatfield will for basically dropping the speculation in a place where was guaranteed to get press attention while pretending that's not what I'm trying to do. Um, and it does get a lot of attention. The Senate Judiciary Committee invites her to a closed-d dooror meeting with several FBI agents, including Roth. And we don't know precisely what's said in that meeting or if she names Hatville. But that's what Hatfill believes and with some good reason because the day after this meeting, June 25th, 2002, FBI agents visit and search his apartment. Now, Hatfill had consented to allow agents to swab his apartment. He actually goes to the FBI offices to sign a consent form to let them swab for evidence of

44:21 anthrax, right? because he thinks it's of course reasonable that they're looking into me. They should be. They should be looking into everyone at my level and I want to clear up any suspicion immediately. Yes, you can swap my house. Right. And that's what he thinks they're going to do. When he gets back home, he sees that they've torn his apartment apart and that his apartment is surrounded by news vans. There's dozens of cameramen all around cuz the FBI tipped off the press that they were raiding this guy because again, they need good PR. They need to be seen taking action to stop this. They need to be seen to have caught the [ __ ] right? And they don't have enough to charge him yet. And I might say probably shouldn't be ruining people's names if you don't have enough evidence to charge them on anything. But they're kind of desperate. So again, this is like all of the stuff they're never supposed to do.

45:10 The FBI is not supposed to comment on ongoing investigations, let alone tip the press off that they're going to be raiding someone's house that they have no [ __ ] hard evidence on, right? Like they were so sure they were going to find something, I think is why they did it, right? But they don't find anything. Now, that said, the fact that nothing gets found here, the fact that he doesn't get charged, I think if you're a responsible reporter, I hope that if I was looking at this at the time, I'd have go, "Oh, well, maybe it's not. It must not be this guy, right? They searched his house. They didn't find any evidence of it. There's no evidence.

45:41 He does have that girlfriend, but he's his girlfriend's Malaysian, you know. So, the media starts writing about Steven Hatfield at this point. Right now, they don't always name him for liability reasons, but they are aware, too. And there's money to be made in writing about this cuz this is the big case at the time. And one of the major guys who's really focusing on Steven Hatville is Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times, who uh we're all aware of still. this this this [ __ ] He starts publishing columns in which he names Hatfield Mr. Z and cites confidential sources which are FBI agents to make the case that Hatfield had only avoided arrest thus far because he was a white man and not an Arab national. Kristoff also brought up Hatfield's relationship to Rhdesia and without evidence accused him of participating in genocide in a column framed as an open letter to the FBI.

46:33 Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans ever recorded. The one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978 to 80. There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian army fighting against black gorillas. And Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army's much feared celus scouts. Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian army and anthrax and chalera attacks against blacks. And like no, first off, the Rhodesian military used chemical and biolog used kalera, weaponized it. We know they did. They did it and we know how they did it. They wrote about it.

47:09 None of this is a mystery. Call him out. Yeah. And we also Hatfield's in college when he's in Rhodesia. He doesn't know how to weaponize anthrax. He's like 20. Like he's not a doctor yet. He was a if he served in the military he was like he I think he did for a period of time but he's like a private right like he's not heading up their bio he's not a scientist then it's this classic like well he's a bioweapons expert now so clearly when he was a child he must have also been a bioweapons expert like no man he was a college student he didn't know [ __ ] yet

47:44 crazy oh my god that's a hilarious reminder that like sometimes these people don't know [ __ ] about what they're reading about No, no, that is the that not knowing [ __ ] about [ __ ] is the Nicholas Kristoff story in a nutshell. So, Rosenberg insists that none of this none of what happens to Hatfield after this point is her fault and that she took pains not to name him, right? Hatville obviously feels differently. I think he's going to sue her after this. He's very angry about what she did and about Kristoff. Um, and I it it is worth noting that in her memos, Rosenberg engages in similar kinds of conspiratorial thinking to Kristoff. per one that she put out in June of 2002.

48:19 The suspect is part of a clique that includes highle former USMRID scientists and highle former FBI officials. Some of these people may wish to conceal any suspicions they have about the identity of the perpetrator in order to protect programs and sensitive information. This group most likely agreed with David France, former commander of Samrit, when he said, "I think a lot of good has come from it." The anthrax attacks from a biological or medical standpoint. We're now we we've now five people who have died, but we're about to put 6 billion into our budget into defending against bioteterrorism.

48:47 And like that's a [ __ ] up thing for David France to say, but she's alleging that like there's a conspiracy of FBI agents and scientists to carry out anthrax attacks to get money from the government right?

48:57 It's like you're sh you're not supposed to say that part out loud. Yeah. Jesus.

49:02 Well, you you got to have more than seems right to me if you're going to make that claim, right?

49:08 So funny. Yeah. So, I would argue I think that these allegations she's she's out on a limb here, right? Um, now Rosenberg does write that Hatville's career setbacks caused by the CIA might be a motive, but also, and this is where it's incoherent, is like she's both saying that like, well, this guy's got a reason to be angry at the government because the CIA kind of [ __ ] him over, but also he's in with a highle clique of scientists and feds who are going to cover up an anthrax attack together. like he both can't keep his security clearance and he's part of this conspiracy, which isn't because it seems like both can't happen, right? Like um at any rate, all of this has a calamitous impact on Steve Hatfield's life and career. In very short order, SIC lets him go. This may have had roots in the fact that the CIA didn't consider him fit for a security clearance, a ball which had started rolling before the

49:59 anthrax attacks. But that can't be all of it. The DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, considered Hatfield their very best bioweapons expert. He he is very highly regarded by them. And they thought he is so indispensable that when SIC lets him go for like laboratory etiquette violations basically, they beg to have him brought back as a contractor so that he can continue teaching classes to guys about to be deployed to Afghanistan. And SIC agrees. Like that's how much the DIA likes this guy. Now, because he's a qualified professional with in demand skills, Hatfield succeeds in getting another job after he loses his position at SIC very quickly. He's hired to be the associate director of a Louisiana State University program for training first responders and how to deal with terrorist attacks. However, the program is funded by a DOJ grant.

50:45 And once the DOJ finds out Hatfield's gotten the job, they order LSU to cease and desist using him, and the job offer is resented. So now he's lost his job and maybe he did something to justify it at SIC. I've certainly heard that alleged. I don't know. But the second one is the DOJ saying, "Don't hire this guy because we think he's a terrorist." Right.

51:06 And he hasn't been convicted as [ __ ] Yeah. Things only get worse from there. You know what else gets worse?

51:13 Our sponsors. No shade. And we're back and we're talking about Steven Hatfield's life starting to unravel. Per an article in the Atlantic, quote, "Other prospective employment fell through. No one would return his calls. One job vanished after after Hatfield emerged from a meeting with prospective employers to find FBI agents videotaping them. His savings dwindled and he moved in with his girlfriend." So that is the fact that like coming out of a job interview to find FBI agents videotaping you. This is part of a tactic that the FBI uses. This is a tactic that they like this is a known thing. Like they talk about this. They train agents to do this. It's called bumper locking. And it's called bumper locking because the idea here is that you are physically surveilling someone 24/7 whenever they leave their house.

52:03 And you are doing it so obviously that they know the whole time. Right? And the reason you do that is so they'll slip up, right? So that they'll [ __ ] up. They'll screw up when driving and they can get pulled over and searched. You can get them with some sort of petty charges then, right? Like you're just trying to make them [ __ ] up cuz you're sure they're they did whatever it is you suspect them of and you just need to make them slip up, you know? Like that's why you do this. Now, we might call this harassment and abuse and like hideously unethical to do to a citizen who has not committed a crime as far as anyone's aware of, right? But this is what the FBI does. Brad Garrett, an FBI special agent at the time, explained to Frontline, quote, management was convinced he was the right guy. And so, as a result, there were, you know, intense surveillance, bumper lock type surveillance of Dr. Hatfield that went

52:52 on for months. Now, Hatfeld would later allege that local law enforcement, presumably acting at the FBI's behest, harassed him as well. He was pulled over heading back from dinner one night in DC and issued a warning for failing to signal a lane change. And then after he leaves that stop, like several minutes later, he's pulled over again for a turn signal related issue. And the cop asks if he's been drinking and Hatville says, "I had a single drink with dinner." He gets ordered out of the car and immediately arrested. He tries to have like a blood alcohol test performed to prove that he's sober, but they won't let him do that. Uh, and he's forced to attend counseling and he spends the weekend in jail. Now, do I know that Hatfield was definitely sober during that stop? Of course not. And he will admit that as this nightmare went on, he began drinking more heavily. But I guess ultimately, I don't have trouble

53:36 believing that the drag net around him was more to blame for what happened than his personal habits because what's going on here is insane. Now, because the bioteterrorism weapons research world is a small one, Steve's social circle is made up of a lot of his colleagues. And so, he loses that social circle because these people have to detach from him in order to avoid damaging their own careers because he is suspected of terrorism. One of one of the few colleagues who stuck with him is a guy named Jim Klene. And Jim says basically like, I stayed with him because I just thought he was going to kill himself. He told the Atlantic, "You have the world against you and only a few people are willing to look you in the eye and tell you I believe you." I mean, to this day, I really don't know how the guy survived. And

54:16 it's so sad. It's a bummer. So, five weeks after that first June raid where his house gets searched, the FBI searches his house again, this time with a warrant and dogs. And Hatville makes the mistake of petting one of the dogs. And the dog reacts positively to him and the agent handling the dog says, "He's identified you as the anthrax killer."

54:36 Christ, what? As Steven later recalled, "It took every ounce of restraint to stop from laughing. They said, "We know you did it. We know you didn't mean to kill anyone." I said, "Am I under arrest?" They said, "No." I walked out, rented a car, and went to see an attorney about suing the hell out of these people.

54:52 Yes. But the a normal response, right? And he does. He does. And you know, he gets that that's how this all ends. But it goes on for a long time before we get to that point. The raids continue. His storage locker gets raided by the FBI. And then a farm his dad owns gets raided by the FBI. The FBI raids his girlfriend's townhouse because he's living there. She later tells The Atlantic, "They told me your boyfriend murdered five people." as they tore through her home, destroying some of her valued possessions. So, as August of 2002 dawns, the FBI has done all of this to Steven Hatville and found no evidence linking him to the anthrax attacks or, as far as I'm aware, any crime at all. Now, at this point, you might say, "The whole FBI has been going after this one man to try to find a single connection to this crime, and we haven't found one. Maybe he's innocent.

55:44 Maybe this is not the guy, right?" You and I might think that, but that's not how Attorney General John Ashcroft thought. Now, John Ashcroft, being a crafty man, decides to do something that no US Attorney General has ever done. He decides to name the subject of an active investigation. And on August 6th, 2002, he tells America that Steven Hatfield is a person of interest in the anthrax attacks, right? Which is basically saying, "Hey, everybody, get him. This guy did it." You know,

56:15 incredible. I hope he got so much money. I He does. I mean, and again, I I don't like him now. He's in the Trump admin now. I don't think he's a good person, but he is absolutely the victim here.

56:27 Yes. Um, so the harassment continues. Hatfield's phone is tapped. Surveillance cameras are installed outside his girlfriend's condo. When his lawyer offered to have Steven wear a tracking device, the feds said no. Uh they even turned down his lawyer offers I'll let anytime he leaves the house, you can have FBI agents drive with him. And they're like, "No." Uh his attorney later alleged that the FBI was sweating him, quote, trying to get him to go over the edge. Given where Hatville sits today in the Trump administration, it would be easy for me to just question his claims about what they did out of partisan disgust. But this really is one of the worst stories of federal overreach into a civilian's life I've ever read. The FBI is not supposed to comment on at all in matters pertaining to ongoing investigations. But for Hatville, not only do they name him, FBI agents keep leaking info, embarrassing

57:13 [ __ ] that they find about him to the media. A lot of the quotes and stories about him come out initially because the FBI leaks them to people, right? All this stuff about kind of the sketchier parts of his back, like that's how some of that stuff gets out, right? Um, and you know, Hatfield's reputation isn't spotless, and I I'm certainly not trying to like carry water for the guy, but also basically a 100% of people if the whole FBI started trying to uncover ugly things about them would find some ugly things right?

57:43 Yeah. It's why it's [ __ ] up for them to do stuff like that, you know. Um, and the fact that he had a he was a guy who had done some and said some stuff that wasn't great in the past does not justify the harassment that he faced from the [ __ ] FBI. Per the Atlantic, quote, "With Hatfield's face splashed all over the news, strangers on the street stared. Some asked for his autograph. Hatfield was humiliated. Embarrassed to be recognized, he stopped going to the gym. He stopped visiting friends, concerned that the FBI would harass them, too. Soon, he stopped going out in public altogether. Once an energetic and ambitious professional who reveled in the 14-hour workdays, Hatfield now found himself staring at the walls all day. Television became his steady companion. I'd never really watched the news before, Hatfield says.

58:23 And now I'm seeing my name all over the place and all these idiots like Heraldo Rivera saying, "Is this the anthrax animal? Is this the guy who murdered innocent people? You might have as well have hooked me up to a battery. It was sanctioned torture."

58:34 Jim Bro, this goes on for a full year and then a second year. Does this happen during um Bush?

58:43 Yeah. Yeah. This is throughout the whole Bush administration. This goes on for years.

58:47 Wild. He's not like radicalized against a Republican administration. No. I mean, he's I I think he's anti- I don't think he likes the Bush admin very much, but like again, a lot of Trump guys don't, right? And the the whole distrust of the FBI thing. Trump has too. Like it makes a lot of sense why he winds up in Trump's orbit, right? like he's the only one who really has a justified reason to be as angry at the FBI as they all are

59:15 totally and the media too to be fair, you know. Um so Hatfield starts drinking more heavily, right? Uh and his life narrows to obsessively watching the allegations against him in the news and blacking out, right? Eventually in August of 2003, he takes uh offensive action. He sues the federal government. And this process winds on for a while, but it does eventually he's able to get special agent Harp on the stand. And Harp has to admit that the FBI is going so hard after Hatville because it was publicly seen as having [ __ ] up in the face of several major terrorist attacks and they needed something to like in restore public confidence. All of these leaks to the press by the FBI were part of a strategy to rebuild that trust. Harp himself admitted to speaking confidentially to more than a dozen journalists, you know, giving details of Hatville's story.

1:00:03 For their part, the press was happy to have articles. And guilty or not, Hatville was a story. One reporter even called his girlfriend's former in-laws cuz her husband had died like a year or two earlier and they asked if he they thought that Hatfield had murdered her husband, their their their former like their dead relative. Like that's insane. Like that's just crazy [ __ ] from a journalist. Um there's numerous other gotcha moments that fail to pan out in the years that Hatfield spends under investigations. Investigators found that he had been taking cypro while staying in an isolated cabin, which sounds really suspicious. You know, why would he be taking this powerful antibiotic?

1:00:41 UTI. He had like a nasal and sinus infection. Yeah. I only know zipro from UTI.

1:00:49 Yeah. Well, it's good for other stuff, too. And he also this isolated cabin that the news described was like a three-bedroom weekend home in Virginia that his friend owned. Right. Um, perhaps the craziest moment came near the end of 2002. Per the Washington Post, the FBI learned from a Hatfield business associate that he'd once talked hypothetically about how a smart person might dispose of materials contaminated with anthrax by throwing them in a body of water. The tip was specific enough to lead a team to the Frederick Municipal Forest in a network of ponds, then solidly frozen. Agents sealed off Buchalic country roads with kind crime scene tape. Then, expert divers plunged in. Over the course of several frigid weeks, divers pulled up a collection of intriguing items. The most promising was a plastic or plexiglass box that appeared to be fashioned into a crude scientific glove box with holes cut into

1:01:34 the sides to allow for gloved hands to work within it. Now, I found news reports at the time, several of them, that describe it this way as like, oh, it's a scientific plexiglass glove box, you know, for working on on specimens that are dangerous to touch. Do you want to know what it seems like it actually was?

1:01:52 Oh my god, I'm so nervous. It was probably a turtle trap. This is probably a journal.

1:01:59 Why did I think it was a jerkoff machine? I was like, probably. Well, that's we know we know Virginia, Courtney. It's every every lake is filled with jerkoff machines. The FBI found one glove box and a thousand jerkoff machines in these lakes. It was just divers bringing up jerkoff machines all day long. Spent a third of their budget storing them. That was the FBI's real problem in 2003. Too many jerkoff machines from the lakes. So in spring of 2003, Hatfell was being driven by his girlfriend to a paint store when FBI agents bumper locking him ran a red light in a school zone during school hours when there were children out. Hatfield has his girlfriend pull over so he can take a picture of the agents and yell at them for endangering kids. The agents drive off and they drive off and because of how close they are to him, they run over his foot and injure him as they're doing it. And because he has no health

1:02:53 insurance or savings, he turns down an ambulance ride, right, to go to the hospital and then Washington police who show up ticket him for quote walking to create a hazard cuz again

1:03:03 the whole security state is is focused on this one dude, right? Like it it like again I don't want to like [ __ ] apologize for him in the present day, but how could this not blow your head up, right? the whole FBI and a lot of the security state outside of it being focused on just you, right? Like that that would drive you crazy. That's that's a crazy thing to deal with.

1:03:30 Now, by 2004, justified. I I understand a little bit, right? Where he comes from here. By 2004, after 2 years without any leads, the investigation efforts against Hatville started to eb. He began to resume something that resembled a normal life, even flying to Sri Lanka in early 2005 to help provide medical relief aid after a terrible tsunami. Gradually, he got his life back. But what he never got was an apology or an official announcement that he was no longer suspected of having done it, right? You know, by the time we hit like 2005, six, it's been years. I think most people who know him are like, that probably wasn't Steven.

1:04:05 They probably would have arrested him by now if he had done it. Right? But they don't say anything. Huh. How long does the lawsuit take?

1:04:12 I mean, it it the lawsuits are are going on for years after he stops being the suspect, right? Because once it's announced that he's no longer the suspect, it gets a lot easier to sue people, you know? And, you know, this is not a podcast about that kind of stuff. So, we're not going to go into detail about it. But what I will say is that in 2007, the FBI brings in a new team to look at the case because the old one had not done the job, right? And so, after six years, they're like, "We should probably get some new guys looking at this. Maybe we could solve it, you know?" and this new team accept Hatville's protestations of innocence, right? Either they're just smarter than their colleagues or they're legitimately smart and are like, "What the [ __ ] is wrong with you guys?" Like, you know, you didn't find anything and you kept harassing him for 5 years. The [ __ ] is wrong with you?

1:04:54 Um, the most compelling piece of evidence against the idea that Hatfield had done this is that despite his expertise and despite what he did for a living, Steven Hatfield had never in his entire life had direct access to anthrax. He was a virus guy. It's a bacteria. This is not his kind of agent, right? He knows theoretically how to weaponize anthrax, right? I think that's the claim that at least that he makes on his I I don't know how to do it, so I can't say that he could, but I my understanding of his resume is that he he said that he had the ability to, but he had never worked with anthrax, right?

1:05:26 And there were guys who had, and those guys would be the ones that you'd suspect of this, right? Um, so the FBI at this point in time, they they move to focusing. They like, and it it's one of those things there, it's eventually made public that he's no longer being looked at, but they never like to be as to do the thing they should do, which you should make a full court press to be like, "We [ __ ] up. We're sorry." Right? That does not happen. But the FBI does stop looking at him and they do they they eventually find another guy uh a senior microbiologist uh at USMRAD named Bruce Edward Ivans.

1:06:03 Ivans is an anthrax expert. Anthrax was his specialty, right? Um he had actually consulted with the FBI when they started the investigation. Um and he's not someone that they had looked into previously, but now they start doing the same things to him that they did to Hatfield, right? They're bumper locking him. They're following him. They're telling him that he murdered people, right? He loses his job and he doesn't have either, you know, I don't know if it's just his his mental state. He's not as mentally stable as Hatfield or he just doesn't have the support network.

1:06:34 Um, but in July of 2008, uh, he checks himself into a psychiatric clinic for treatment of depression and anxiety. Uh, and then once he gets out, he takes a fatal dose of Tylenol and kills himself. He dies at 62.

1:06:46 [ __ ] right. Uh, now if you ask the FBI today, Ivans did it, right? That's their conclusion. He killed himself because they were getting too close. He must have been the guy, right? Maybe.

1:07:01 That's a lot of [ __ ] Tylenol. Maybe he's the guy. We don't actually know. And this is the kind This is where I have to tell you, we don't know who did the anthrax attacks. Ivans is the most likely name out there, but there's some reason there's significant reason to doubt that it was him. Um,

1:07:24 you're just saying like maybe the mental strain of like being followed and [ __ ] with like that.

1:07:29 Yes. Yeah. And I'm also kind of insinuating maybe that was the FBI's goal with Hatville. Maybe they cared. They didn't care so much did he do it, but like if he kills himself while we're investigating him, we can say we got him. Obviously, he was the guy an innocent man wouldn't kill himself. Case closed. We're heroes.

1:07:48 How do these people sleep at night? What? I think that's kind of what the FBI was thinking with Hatfill. And I think they got their way with Ivans. Maybe he did do it. Again, it there's a good chance he did because it had to have been a guy like him, right? There's not a lot of guys it could have been. However, the National Academy of Science has since determined that it is not possible to because the reason they think it's Ivans is they they basically trace back the the specific type of AIM strain to a a a jar of anthrax that he made. Right? So, the FBI is saying we know the anthrax that killed those people was anthrax that Ivans made. Right? But in the years since they made that claim, the National Academy of Science has come out and with actual serious scientific data said it's impossible to do that. Like it's physically impossible to trace back the origin of an anthrax sample like the one

1:08:41 that was collected from the letters the way that they're claiming they do and tie it to Ivans, which doesn't mean he didn't do it. Right? Again, he did have access to anthrax. There are a number of reasons that he may have done it. I'm I'm very much smoothing out his case. There's a good chance it was him, but the current conclusion of the scientific community is we don't really know. Maybe it was this guy, but the FBI way oversold the the degree of certainty that they had that it was this guy, right?

1:09:06 There were probably other people that had access to it, too. There were some. And again, maybe it was Ivans. I don't know. The theory with Ivans is that again his his program had suffered budget cuts and he wanted there to be an anthrax attack so that they'd get more money which they did right and that you know that maybe why whoever did it did it right like ultimately but we just don't know who it was and the investigation was so [ __ ] botched from the jump that we'll never know. Uh, and you know, one of the things we got out of this whole balance, I don't know where Steven Hatfield would have wound up politically if this hadn't happened, but I have I'll say this. He's not a happier, healthier man because this all happened to him, right?

1:09:48 No, you know, this didn't make him better. It wouldn't make me better. Um anyway

1:09:55 that's the story. How do you feel about the FBI? I feel like I was terrorized by the government a little bit. Jesus Christ.

1:10:05 It's so funny seeing Cash again, this all continues cuz like the FBI under Cash Patel was desperate to like get this guy after Charlie Kirk got shot was desperate to like be the like like solve it, right? To to to have to the point that this suit the second they took a guy into custody, Cash Patel announced the director of the FBI announced we've got the guy, we have the man who killed Charlie Kirk and then like an hour later has to be like no it totally wasn't that guy. Absolutely. their names got out several time several different people they did that

1:10:34 um and when the guy you think they got the right guy Oh yes yes yes because he confessed to his dad who turned

1:10:40 him in right right right like we're pretty sure it's him but it had nothing the FBI didn't do [ __ ] right

1:10:47 his dad was the one who's who did this all this caper I mean I poor guy who's like still analyzing his handwriting

1:10:56 yeah somebody's [ __ ] looking at his [ __ ] handwriting on the bullets. Oh man, Courtney, you got some pluggables to plug?

1:11:05 Hey y'all. I am recording the audio book of my debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, and it's [ __ ] good. I was worried for a second, but as I was reading it, I was like, "This slaps." So anyway, get yourself a copy.

1:11:19 Hell yeah. Get yourself a copy of Courtney's book, Which Slaps, and then slap yourself. I don't know, maybe don't do that, but I don't care what you do. do do anything, you know, not anything. Don't do any of the things that we talked about in this week uh of episodes for sure.

1:11:36 Call your nice relatives if you want. Yeah. Call Call a relative that you care about and talk to them about something that has nothing to do with the internet. You know what? Go everyone go do that right now. And also buy Courtney's book.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 2) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

Robert Evans (Host), Courtney (Guest).

What is "How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 2) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS" about?

The discussion delves into the FBI's mishandling of the 2001 anthrax scare, exploring the investigation's failures and the broader implications of government responses to bioterrorism incidents. Key points include the challenges faced by authorities and the impact of these events on public perception and policy.

What is mentioned in this Behind the Bastards episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including anthrax attacks, Steven Hatfill, Robert Stevens, Ames strain, Bruce Edwards Ivins, Fort Detrick. 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 2) | BEHIND THE BASTARDS"?

The episode runs 1 h 12 min; the transcript is about 14,377 words in 170 timestamped sections.

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