The Demon in the Freezer

by Richard Preston

  One of the many samples was a little bit of anthrax from the letter that had arrived at the New York Post. The Post anthrax was almost pure spores, like the Daschle powder, but the spores had somehow gotten glued together into glassy chunks. It looked like a glued-together version of the Daschle anthrax.

  White House

  OCTOBER 24, 2001

  EARLY IN THE MORNING, nine days after the Daschle letter was opened, Major General John Parker got a call from Tommy Thompson at Health and Human Services. Thompson had been hearing rumors that the Daschle anthrax was really bad stuff, but he still hadn’t heard much about it from the FBI Laboratory. Thompson felt out of the loop, and he wanted Parker to fill him in. Parker agreed to come to Washington and brief Thompson personally. He called Peter Jahrling and asked him to come along.

  Parker and Jahrling traveled to Washington in a green Ford Explorer driven by a sergeant wearing fatigues—this was the general’s staff car. They went to the sixth floor of HHS headquarters and met with Thompson, D. A. Henderson, and other senior members of the HHS staff in a large meeting room overlooking the Mall. They were surprised to find FBI officials there, including the director, Robert S. Mueller III. Also in the room were a number of obviously powerful dark-suited officials who introduced themselves in mumbling voices. They had names like John Roberts, and they said they were from some institute or other. That is, they were top management from the CIA. Their real names were classified.

  Jahrling had brought Geisbert’s photographs of the anthrax particles, and he laid them out. Then he produced another something interesting for people to look at: a plastic bag containing six tubes of different orange-tan powders from the Al Hakm anthrax facility in Iraq. A friend of Jahrling’s had collected them there. The powders were anthrax surrogate—fake bioweapons. A surrogate is used for testing and development of a real bioweapon. Iraqi biowarfare scientists had been making anthrax surrogate out of Bacillus thuringensis (BT), which is closely related to anthrax but is harmless to people. (It is anthrax for insects, and it is used by gardeners to kill grubs. The Iraqis had claimed for a while that the Al Hakm facility had been built to deal with grubs in Iraq.)

  He passed the bag around the room, assuring people that the vials weren’t dangerous. Everyone could see how different the Iraqi “anthrax” looked from the Daschle powder. It was heavy and crude, and contained large amounts of bentonite (a type of clay commonly used in the oil industry), and looked like lumps of dirt. It didn’t look like the Daschle powder at all. At least at the time Al Hakm was running, the Iraqi bioweaponeers had been using a different formula than what was used for the Daschle powder.

  Afterward, Parker suggested to Jahrling that they brief the Pentagon on the anthrax, so they spent the rest of the day circling among the offices of assistant secretaries of defense. Toward the end of the day, they headed back up Interstate 270 to Fort Detrick. It was rush hour, and the traffic was moving like glue. Jahrling was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver, and the general was sitting in the back. On Wednesdays, Jahrling always picked up his daughter Bria at a dance class, and he was looking forward to a little bit of special time with her.

  Just as the Explorer arrived at the entrance to Fort Detrick, the general’s cell phone rang. The person on the other end of the line issued some rapid instructions and added, “Where’s this guy Jahrling?”

  “He’s in the car with me.” The general leaned forward to Jahrling. “We’re wanted at the White House. Right now.”

  “Hey, General Parker—do we have time to stop and take a leak?”

  “No.”

  The sergeant whipped a U-turn around the Abrams tank at the entrance to Fort Detrick, and they sped back onto the interstate. The sergeant started popping the lights and sirens, weaving through traffic. This wasn’t helping Jahrling’s state of mind. Eventually, he remembered about Bria. He called Daria and said, “I’m not getting Bria.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “What do you mean you can’t tell me? Where are you, Peter?”

  “I can’t say where I am.”

  The car was pulling onto Constitution Avenue, and he said he’d talk to her later.

  “Peter, do you still have that stuff from Iraq in your pocket?” General Parker asked. “You might not want to bring it into the White House”—the Secret Service might not react well.

  They were in the White House driveway, and Jahrling didn’t know what to do with his Iraqi “anthrax.” He rammed it down into the crack of the car seat.

  In the foyer, cabinet officials, White House staff, members of the National Security Council, senior FBI, and top-level spooks were milling around. “Where’s the bathroom?” Jahrling muttered to the crowd. Someone directed him.

  The meeting took place in the Roosevelt Room, which has ornate, high ceilings and oak doors decorated with brass fittings. There was a long table in the center of the room, with leather-upholstered armchairs placed around it. Many more chairs were placed around the walls.

  A security official informed everyone that the meeting was secret. (The next morning, the meeting’s events were described in a front-page story in The New York Times. White House officials later concluded that the leak had come from a source in the FBI.) Attorney General John Ashcroft sat at the table, and Robert Mueller sat close to the center, accompanied by a cluster of FBI officials, including Allyson Simons. Tommy Thompson also sat near the center of the table. The meeting was chaired by Tom Ridge, who had recently been named director of homeland security.

  Jahrling started to sit on one of the chairs against the wall, but someone took him by the arm, and he was shown to a chair at the center of the table, where he faced cabinet members wearing dark charcoal suits. Jahrling was wearing his gray suit with a candy-striped shirt and a snappy necktie. The doors were closed by the Secret Service.

  TOM GEISBERT had been looking for Jahrling around the Institute and couldn’t find him. He got worried and called Jahrling’s home, and got Daria. “Where is Peter?” she asked him. “He didn’t pick up Bria!” She let Geisbert have it.

  “She was as mad as a hornet,” Geisbert recalled. He tried to reassure her, but he didn’t know where Jahrling was either.

  Daria loved Peter. It was a strong marriage, but she thought that, national crisis or not, her husband owed it to the family to at least tell them where he was.

  JOHN ASHCROFT led off the meeting. He did not mince words. There was an obvious lack of communication between the Army, the FBI, and the CDC, he said, and the purpose of this meeting was to determine why the CDC hadn’t realized that the anthrax was weapons-grade material and hadn’t taken action faster on the Brentwood mail facility. There was a feeling that whoever had released the anthrax could do it again, perhaps with a massive release inside a landmark building or into the air of a city. This was an urgent national threat. Where did the communication break down? Had the Army given the information to the FBI? Had the FBI informed the CDC about the highly dangerous nature of the anthrax?

  Ashcroft was Robert Mueller’s boss, and he looked straight at the FBI director. Mueller turned his gaze to General Parker. Mueller thanked the Army for bringing the nature of the anthrax to the FBI’s attention. He said that the FBI had received conflicting data on the anthrax. The FBI had been trying to sort this issue through, but Mueller now acknowledged that the Army had been right: the Daschle anthrax was a weapon.

  Then twenty people around the table started arguing: what is a biological weapon?

  John Ashcroft cut everyone off. “Okay, okay! All this discussion about what’s a biological weapon is angels dancing on the head of a pin. I want to hear what the professor has to say.” He pointed with his finger to someone seated behind Jahrling.

  Jahrling, who is not a professor, turned around and looked. Then he realized the attorney general meant him. Jahrling cleared his throat and directed everyone’s attention to Geisbert’s pictures of the anthrax skulls. (St
affers had passed them around.) He pointed out the fried-egg goop flowing off the spores in some photographs. This, he said, was probably an additive.

  Someone asked, Does the professor think this anthrax could be a product of Iraq?

  The best Jahrling could say was that it could be Iraqi anthrax, but all the samples they’d seen from Iraq, so far, were entirely different. The Iraqi anthrax had been mixed with bentonite, and these spores didn’t have clay in them. He said that by tomorrow the Army would have a better idea of what the additive was.

  The meeting raced off on the question of whether a “state actor” could have been behind the anthrax attacks. The atmosphere in the room started to feel like a war council deciding whether or not to attack Iraq.

  Jahrling got scared. “Whoa!” he blurted. “This anthrax isn’t a compelling reason to go to war. It isn’t necessarily the product of a state actor.” He flushed and stopped talking: saying “Whoa!” to the Cabinet seemed flippant. Then he went on. He said that a few grams of highly pure anthrax could have been made in a little laboratory with some small pieces of equipment. “This anthrax could have come from a hospital lab or from any reasonably equipped college microbiology lab.” The FBI officials posed the question: how would investigators look for “signatures” of a small terrorist bioweapons lab? Jahrling answered that a small lab for making anthrax might go virtually unnoticed, and in any case would be hard to recognize.

  Ashcroft closed the meeting by taking the FBI, the Army, and the HHS to the woodshed. He gave them a stern warning to get their acts together and start communicating with one another more effectively. He made it perfectly clear that those who serve at the pleasure of the president can cease to serve in an instant.

  “Well, professor, you did okay,” Parker said to Jahrling on the way back to the Institute. Jahrling leaned back on the seat, and the night rushed by. He began to wonder more deeply about what he had said at the meeting—that the anthrax could have come from a small lab, a few pieces of tabletop equipment. What would it take to do the Anthrax Trick? It could be done by an individual, perhaps, or by two or three people. He started thinking about labs. There was a lab in the west. . . . There was also USAMRIID. Could that be possible? Could this be an inside job? Could it be terror coming from within the Institute? Peter Jahrling had the dizzying thought that the terror might just be coming from someone he knew or knew of.

  HE GOT HOME after midnight. Daria had retrieved Bria at the dance class and had put Kira to bed. She was sitting in the kitchen grading a pile of English papers. “Where have you been? I’m sure it was somewhere important.”

  “I was at the White House.”

  “Okayyy.”

  “No, really.”

  “And you couldn’t tell me.”

  “No, really, I couldn’t.”

  Some days later, the general’s driver stopped by Jahrling’s office with the bag of Iraqi “anthrax.” He said he had found it stuck in his car seat.

  Tricks

  KEN ALIBEK is a quiet man, in early middle age, with youthful looks. He dresses elegantly, in fine wool jackets and subdued ties. He comes from an old Kazakh family in Central Asia. Alibek arrived in the United States in 1992, through a chain of events that involved the CIA. Before then, he was Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, the first deputy chief of research and production for the Soviet biological-weapons program, Biopreparat. Dr. Alibekov had thirty-two thousand scientists and staff working under him. When he arrived in the United States, he was overweight and depressed, and he spoke no English.

  Ken Alibek has a doctor of sciences degree in anthrax. It is a kind of super-degree, which he received in 1988, at the age of thirty-seven, for directing the research team that developed the Soviet Union’s most powerful weapons-grade anthrax. He did this work when he was head of the Stepnagorsk bioweapons facility, in what is now Kazakhstan; it was at one time the largest biowarfare production facility in the world. The Alibekov anthrax became “fully operational” in 1989, which means that it was loaded into bombs and missiles.

  The Alibekov anthrax, as Alibek described it to me, is an amber-gray powder, finer than bath talc, with smooth, creamy, fluffy particles that tend to fly apart and vanish in the air, becoming invisible and drifting for miles. The particles have a tendency to stick in human lungs like glue. Alibekov anthrax can be manufactured by the ton, and it is believed to be extremely potent.

  One day, Alibek and I were sitting in a conference room in his office in Alexandria, Virginia, and I asked him how he felt about having developed a powerful biological weapon. “It’s very difficult to say if I felt a sense of excitement over this,” he said. His English is perfect, though he speaks it with a Russian accent. “It wouldn’t be true to say that I thought I was doing something wrong. I thought I had done something very important. The anthrax was my scientific result. My personal result.”

  I asked him if he’d tell me the formula for his anthrax.

  “I can’t say this,” he answered.

  “I won’t publish it. I’m just curious,” I said.

  “You must understand, this is unbelievably serious.”

  Alibek gave me the formula for his anthrax in sketchy terms. The formula appears to be quite simple and is not exactly what you might expect. Two unrelated materials are mixed with pure powdered anthrax spores. If you walk into a Home Depot and look around, you may find at least one of the materials and possibly both of them. To have perfected this trick, though, must have taken plenty of research and testing, and Alibek must have driven his group with skill and determination.

  “That was my contribution,” he said.

  WHEN KEN ALIBEK defected, his CIA debriefers discovered that they did not understand what he was talking about. Since the end of the American bioweapons program in 1969, the CIA had lost most of its expertise in biology. The Agency called in William C. Patrick III to help with the debriefings. Patrick, who is a tall, courtly, genial, balding man, now in his seventies, had been the chief of product development for the Army’s biowarfare program before it was shut down in 1969. Bill Patrick holds a number of classified patents—so-called black patents—on the ways and means of making a biopowder that vanishes in the air and can drift for many miles.

  Patrick and Alibek had long conversations in motel rooms, always observed and managed by handlers. The two bioweaponeers were among the very top scientists in their respective programs, and they discovered that they talked the same scientific language. As they became acquainted with each other, they found that they and their research teams had independently discovered the tricks that make biopowders fly into the air and vanish. Patrick and Alibek became friends. Patrick and his wife, Virginia, began having Alibek over for Thanksgiving and Christmas, because they felt he was lonely.

  ONE DAY a few years ago, I drove up the slopes of Catoctin Mountain on a winding country road. It was a cold, raw day, and winter clouds over the mountain formed lenses that let in loose splashes of sunshine. The Patricks live in a comfortable house that resembles a Swiss chalet. It sits at the high point of a small meadow on the mountain, looking down on Fort Detrick. From the house, you can see the roof and vent stacks of USAMRIID, nestled among trees in the distance.

  “Come in, come in, young man,” Patrick said. He squinted up at the sky. He is exquisitely sensitive to weather.

  We sat in the living room and chatted. “There’s a hell of a disconnect between us fossils who know about biological weapons and the younger generation,” he said. After the offensive program was closed down, Patrick joined USAMRIID for a while, doing peaceful work, but he became quite certain that one day some knowledgeable person was going to use a germ weapon in a terrorist attack, and he began a personal campaign to warn the government of the danger. He was a consultant to various agencies and governments, including the city of New York, and he gave presentations in which he described what small amounts of different powdered bioweapons would do in the air. He also gave estimates of casualties. His projections for a bioterror attack
in New York City would appear to be classified.

  A few minutes after I arrived, Ken Alibek showed up, driving a silver BMW. After lunch, we settled around the kitchen table. Patrick brought out a bottle of Glenmorangie single-malt whisky, and we poured ourselves drams. The whisky was golden and warm, and it moved the talk forward.

  “There seems to be a belief among many scientists that biological weapons don’t work,” I said. “You hear these views quoted a lot.”

  The two ex-bioweaponeers looked at each other, and Bill Patrick let out a belly laugh, put his head down, and kept on laughing. Ken Alibek looked annoyed. “This is so stupid,” Alibek said. “I can’t even find a word to describe this. You test the weapons to find out what works. I can say I don’t believe that nuclear weapons work. Nuclear weapons destroy everything. Biological weapons are more . . . beneficial. They don’t destroy buildings, they only destroy vital activity.”

  “Vital activity?”

  “People,” he said.

  Patrick invited us into his basement office. We followed him down a spiral staircase to a room that had sliding glass doors. He took a paper bag out of a filing cabinet, and he pulled out a little brown glass bottle. The bottle had a black plastic cap that was screwed on tightly, and it was half full of a cream-colored, ultrafine powder. “That’s a simulant anthrax weapon,” he said. “It’s BG”—Bacillus globigii, a harmless organism related to anthrax. “Take a look at that, Ken.”

  Alibek held the bottle up and shook it. The powder turned into a cloud of smoke inside the bottle. The smoke swirled around, and the bottle went opaque.

  “Now, that is a beautiful product,” Patrick remarked.

  Alibek nodded. “It has the characteristics of a weapon.”

  Patrick removed an insecticide sprayer from the paper bag. It was an old-fashioned hand-pump flit gun. He pumped the handle, and a cloud of white smoky powder boiled out of the nozzle. “Isn’t that a beautiful particle size?”