Anthrax

In the days following Sept. 11, when most Americans believed the next attack would be chemical or biological, Michael Wermuth disagreed. Wermuth is a Rand analyst and head of a congressional advisory panel on terrorism, and like many experts at the time he thought the U.S. had more to fear from another conventional attack. The one thing he was certain we didn't have to worry about was the U.S. Postal Service. "The idea," he told TIME, "that someone sends a letter through the mail that you open up, and it says, 'Ha-ha, you've just been exposed to anthrax and are going to die'? Not a chance, just not a chance."

We know better now, of course. But the bitter lesson we have learned from the anthrax mailings is that what the experts and government officials did not know--though they assured the public anyway--ended up costing the lives of two Postal Service employees who didn't have to die.

Based on a lot of theory and very little experience, the experts were pretty sure it took a minimum of 8,000 to 10,000 anthrax spores to cause the deadly inhaled version of the infection. They told postal workers that spores inside sealed envelopes were unlikely to harm them. They were convinced that lethal airborne spores would be reasonably safe once they had settled down.

Yet as the anthrax attacks unfolded, it became clear that almost everything the experts believed was wrong. Indeed, when Robert Stevens, a picture editor at American Media, came down with inhalation anthrax in late September--the first in the U.S. in a quarter-century--his disease was so much at odds with what the experts expected that at first it was attributed to natural causes. Anthrax is common in wild animals and livestock; its spores can live in soil for decades. Stevens was an avid outdoorsman, so maybe he picked up a few spores in the wild--perhaps, as Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson famously suggested at a press conference, from drinking water out of a stream.

Thompson's theory never made much sense. It's hard to imagine any scenario by which buried spores could emerge from the ground, mix with drinking water and then lodge in someone's lungs. And sure enough, a sweep of the American Media building quickly made clear that Stevens had come into contact with anthrax at work, not play. Traces of powdery spores were found on his computer keyboard, in the company mailroom and, ultimately, throughout America Media's Boca Raton, Fla., offices. Someone had deliberately sent the microbes into the building.

But that didn't make much sense either. True, some of the 9/11 hijackers lived in Delray Beach, Fla.--only a few miles from Stevens' office. But why would they choose American Media, and why would they launch such a small-scale strike?

Things began to get a little clearer a couple of weeks later, when anthrax-laced letters were discovered at NBC, the New York Post and Senator Tom Daschle's office in Washington. This time, alerted by the Florida case, investigators managed to get their hands on the source: three letters (and ultimately a fourth, addressed to Senator Patrick Leahy) with similar messages and handwriting, all of which had traveled through a major mail-sorting facility in suburban Hamilton Township, N.J. Despite what the experts had so confidently asserted, you could clearly mount an anthrax attack through the mail.