The Hunt For The Anthrax Killers

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But few employees learned of this development because, incredibly, the center has no emergency phone numbers. The postal union, fearful of managers harassing sick employees at home, had negotiated a contract in which employees do not have to reveal home phone numbers or addresses.

Morris died on Sunday. The same day Curseen went to Southern Maryland Hospital Center complaining of severe flu symptoms. He did not reveal that he was a postal employee, and he was apparently not asked. Despite an earlier CDC alert to look for anthrax infections, the hospital released Curseen, who died the next day. It was only after both deaths that the CDC conducted its own tests of Brentwood, the results of which still have not been released.

Clearly, none of these agencies intended to neglect the Brentwood workers. Many of them, including the FBI, put their own senior officials at risk by sending them to the facility without protective gear. If officials knew the danger intellectually, they had no experience to back it up. The country has scant knowledge about the effects of weaponized anthrax. And Washington bureaucrats are creatures of caution.

In a conference call with workers last Wednesday, the day Manhattan employees started taking Cipro, William Burrus, incoming head of the American Postal Workers Union, tried to introduce his colleagues to their new job descriptions. "In a war, there are casualties," he told some 15,000 postal workers listening around the country. "In the past, we've viewed wars on television, and they've been sanitized and far away. But we are the battlefront now."

As those newly drafted civil soldiers returned to work, investigators raced to protect them from more enemies they can't see. Late last week a fragile consensus was emerging among intelligence sources that the culprit is likely a lone scientist in our midst, someone who has no connection to Osama bin Laden--except for a shared talent for terrifying Americans.