Homeland Insecurity

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The prestamped envelopes were of an unusual size, which led investigators to hope they might be able to quickly narrow down where they were sold. Investigators said they had found the mail-sorting box where one letter had been dropped, and more than 100 federal agents were combing the surrounding West Trenton neighborhood.

Still, there were federal officials more inclined to suspect a homegrown freelance terrorist than a sophisticated network that had already displayed a taste for mass mayhem. They are analyzing the letters carefully; some veteran agents are convinced they were written by an American. "It's starting to fit in more with the loner who has a Ph.D. in microbiology," says an investigator. "It doesn't look like someone who has been educated in the Middle East." The writing, adds another agent, "looks like what I learned with a nun beating my hand." But the hijackers had worked hard to blend in and hide in plain sight too. And no one was eager to underestimate their cunning again.

Wednesday was just a bad day all around, a day almost perfectly orchestrated to shove us back into a crouch. Congress, which is incapable of speaking with one voice in tranquil times, could not have mixed its messages more thoroughly if it had tried. The letter to Daschle, mailed on Oct. 8 and, like the NBC envelope, postmarked Trenton, had been opened Monday morning in a suite full of people. By Tuesday evening, even as 1,400 Senate staff members stood in long lines to get their noses swabbed, scientists at Fort Detrick, Md., the army's bioterror research base, warned Daschle that their tests suggested they were dealing with something particularly dangerous: the anthrax was milled into a powder so fine it could have slipped into the Hart Senate Office Building's ventilation system and infected other areas. Fortunately, by this time, someone had realized it made no sense to bring people back into Hart to be swabbed, and so moved everyone to the Russell Caucus room, scene of the Watergate hearings, the Iran-contra hearings and the Army-McCarthy hearings.

The anxiety level was already plenty high. Anthrax exposure was appearing at all the networks, in the midtown Manhattan office of New York Governor George Pataki and among lab and postal workers who had handled suspicious letters. The Capitol had been on edge for weeks; even the undersides of cars carrying House and Senate leaders were being checked with big dentist's mirrors, sniffed by dogs and searched for bombs. The vague but ominous FBI warnings had left even the leaders spooked. "I worry in the Capitol," Senate minority leader Trent Lott admitted. "We minimize the threat, perhaps irresponsibly. We have not been secure. We are not secure now."

On Wednesday morning, as President Bush was preparing to leave town for the Asian economic summit, he had breakfast with Lott, Daschle, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and House minority leader Dick Gephardt. The five men have got chummier these past weeks. They had conspired to isolate the hotheads and slowpokes in both parties and move legislation for the war on terrorism with what for Washington was record speed. Daschle recounted what he had learned, including the possibility of spores spreading through the mail system to the House side of the Capitol, three blocks away. The men discussed the merits of shutting down the entire Capitol complex so that technicians could do a thorough sweep and see how far the anthrax had spread. Lott and Daschle say they thought it was just a precaution to consider; Hastert and Gephardt thought they had a deal that everyone would depart the scene.

Later that morning, when Hastert told his fellow G.O.P. members of the evacuation plan, the room erupted. There was no evidence the House was in danger, the Representatives complained. "There were a lot of unhappy members who thought we were giving in to the terrorists," said a source in the room. And over on the Senate side, events were moving in the opposite direction. The earlier reports of weapons-grade anthrax were evaporating. It was more a "garden variety" brand, Major General John Parker, the commanding general of the Army's Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, told Daschle, and there was no evidence that anthrax particles had wafted into the ventilation system. Senators who heard Hastert announce that the House would be adjourning that day were appalled. By 1 p.m., Daschle was out in front of the cameras declaring that "we will not let this stop the work of the Senate." A total of 28 people would eventually test positive for exposure, but they were being treated with antibiotics, and no one had got sick so far. The Senators would continue to go about their work, in hideaway offices and off campus as need be.