>> From the library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>> Welcome today's event is sponsored by Science,
Technology and Business Division.
I'm Tomoko Steen, I'm Research Specialist here at the Library
of Congress, and we have technical reports under our division
on Japanese World War Two, biological weapons collections
which is, original documents and also Japanese section
of the Asian Division of Japanese reports in which Japanese
of the same group, Unit 731.
So if you're interested, please contact me after the talk
and I'm happy to actually, you know, show you where the things are.
Today's speaker, Professor Jeanne Guillemin, she's Senior Advisor
to Security Studies Program at MIT.
She -- her undergraduate is from Harvard in Psychology, is it?
And also PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from Brandeis University,
and she served in Advisory Committee to the Folklife Center
and I was surprised to know that she had a connection
to the Library of Congress.
And she is also taught at the Boston University before the
current position.
[Page turning] Jeanne is also a member of the World Economic Forum,
Global Agenda Council in Weapons of Mass Destruction, WMD,
and so she's preparing for the report for next meeting
and also I have to mention that we are joined by distinguished guest,
Professor Matthew Meselson from Harvard.
Professor Meselson is advisor to several Presidents
on the bio-weapons issues and also, husband to Jeanne.
So before further adieu, please join me to welcome Professor Guillemin.
[ Applause ]
>> Well good afternoon, it's such a pleasure to be here
at a wonderful institution, and I offer my special thanks
to Tomoko Steen for arranging this event.
What I'm going to do is begin just to give you the framework
with a brief history of why we care about Anthrax just very quickly,
and them I'm going to go into the Anthrax letter attacks,
by the way which are always within the framework of Nine-11.
If that's not clear, I hope to make that clear.
And then emphasize as I --
I go through this as I've done in my book,
what the American response has been, what the American response was
and in some ways what the American response continues to be.
And it's a very American story.
It's -- it's really our story even thought the repercussions
of the Anthrax letters were felt really around the world.
Here's Fort Detrick, Maryland, 1958.   I present this image to you
because we'll see later how much Fort Detrick has changed but back
in 1958 it was the center,
for the United States Offensive Biological Weapons Program
which means that we -- and it was very covert.
It was not something that was being advertised.
It was not something that people knew about the way they knew
about nuclear weapons, and it was very much here.
And 1958 was a crucial year for the program because it's in 1958
when the Science level of appreciably increases in terms
of expertise about for example, dose response if you wanted
to disperse Anthrax, about the making of bombs for again,
dispersing Anthrax and we must always remember this is
all anti-civilian.
The Biological Weapons Program was to be kind of complement
to the Nuclear Weapons Program.
This is within the Cold War and within the larger strategy
of total war, which meant that civilians were fair game.
So the weapons being developed here were tar -- were to be targeted,
in theory were targeted against the Soviet Union,
particularly against the Soviet Union and its major cities.
Well in 1969 we have the Nixon Decision.
This is a groundbreaking decision, extremely important in the history
of biological weapons and also in the history of the military
because it's the first time in --
in United States history when an entire class
of weapons was just taken off the table.
That is Nixon renounced biological weapons in 1969 saying
that the United States would have no more to do
with offensive development of biology --
the use of the biological sciences in order
to create these awful germ weapons.
And I really should mention here that Matthew Meselson,
was very important in the decision that Nixon made.
He worked to create the position papers.
He worked to define the policy issues and --
and although it was very much behind the scenes,
this was really a major accomplishment.
Why it was a major accomplishment?
Because 1969 is also just at the time when the great advances
in genetics are coming on stream,
and the United States thank goodness, pulled out of the business
of exploiting the biological sciences
for hostile use just at this crucial time.
Now just going very quickly, in 1972, the United States along
with the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom became the three architects
for the biological weapons convention.
Now in 1925, the Geneva Protocol forbad the use of biological
and also chemical weapons.
But in 1972, the biological weapons convention forbids the programmatic
development production research on biological weapons.
So it's an anti-program piece of legislation
and it mandates transparency.   But was there transparency?
Well there was no enforcement that was really given to the treaty
and there were rumors after the treaty was signed
that the Soviet Union had
in fact violated the -- the terms of the treaty.
That is that behind the scenes, illegally, they had been doing work
on biological weapons and particularly
on the development of Anthrax.
So in late 1979, early 1980, there comes a rumor
that there has been a very large Anthrax outbreak in the Soviet city
of Sverdlovsk, known to be a closed city,
a military city with a military base.
And if you look at this particular map [page turning], you'll see right
up here if I can -- here we go, right -- okay.
I'm not sure if I'm getting the whole drift of it, yeah.
Here we go, right here.
If -- if you were to be in this particular area, this is the --
called Compound 19 and right in this particular area,
there was in 1979 a facility for experimenting
with and producing Anthrax.
That is Anthrax spores for -- for delivery as weapons.
So at this particular time, in 1979, 1980, we --
no one knew what was really going on.
There were a lot of suspicions
and the Soviet Union wasn't telling anybody what was going on.
However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it was possible to go
to Russia and it was possible to go into the city of Sverdlovsk,
now called Ekaterinburg, and I was part of the team that went
and Professor Meselson I have to say again, he led the team.
He organized everything.
He got us over there and what was I able to do
with door-to-door interviews with the families of the people
who had died, 66 people as we officially record at that time,
was to determine where they were during the workday.
Now we had information about where these people lived
but we didn't have information about where they were during the day.
So the daytime location was very important.
So if you look at the daytime location,
what you get is a non-random pattern.
Now we also know from autopsies that were done on 41 of the victims
of this particular outbreak, that the cause was Inhalational Anthrax.
So that clinical evidence was there, and I should mention
in our audience today, is Doctor Lev Greenburg, one of the pathologists
who brought us that information and we're very pleased to have him.
He's come all the way from Ekaterinburg to visit Washington.
I'm very, very pleased and we welcome you.
So this just extends the work of the Meselson Team
where going out in the countryside.   Now why is this important?
This is important because our information now is coming
out in 1992, '93, '94, and it's after the end of the Cold War
but it is also, just in the time of -- of the first Gulf War.
It's just in the time when we're beginning
to think more about terrorism.
We have a terrorism framework that is beginning
to become more important.
In 1995, we have the Aum Shinrikyo Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway
and simultaneously we have the Oklahoma City Bombing also, in 1995.
So this particular map if you see how it ever plays out,
shows how animals died in the aftermath of the release
from Compound 19, what we presume to be the release
of spores from Compound 19.
So what it's also telling us is that Anthrax can be lethal
at a particular distance.
In this case, it's about 30 kilometers or 50 miles.
Well in all of our work that the United States
and other countries had done on Anthrax,
they had never reached that conclusion.
They didn't know that in fact it could be lethal
over a long distance given appropriate atmospheric conditions
and the right kind of material.
So this was news and it was news that became very important
as we looked at bio-terr --
potential bio-terrorism scenarios in the late 1990s.
Now we have Iraq as a threat.
We're worried about -- still worried about leftovers of the Soviet Union,
and there became a very strong interest from President Clinton
and then on down, in the possibilities
of Anthrax attacks on the United States.
And so here we have the Secretary --
the then Secretary of Defense William Cohen in a speech
that became very famous, it's the --
called the Sugar Bag Speech in which he points out that this amount
of Anthrax if it were released by --
from a small low-flying plane over Washington,
would kill a lot of people.   And that really rang home.
I mean -- and it was also on national television
so the threat aspect really came home.
It also changed an institution which the U.S. Army Research Institute
for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, which was retained
and kept purely for defensive reasons after the Nixon Decision.
The rest of Fort Detrick, the offensive part was closed down
but the -- the defense work of very good scientists looking particularly
at Anthrax was very important if you go back from 1969,
'70 and then right up to when we're talking here, 1997.
So this becomes a policy issue that is you have to vaccinate solders
and you have to protect the country from -- from Anthrax.
And these become two things and Secretary Cohen, President Clinton,
many people in Washington became very, very concerned
about the Anthrax threat.
So that's our -- that's our context and you want to keep
that as an important context.
Well if you go to post-Nine-11, the week after Nine-11,
you'll see as according to this timeline
that there is a criminal act and the criminal act is the posting
of letters with virulent Anthrax spores in them from the mailbox
at Princeton, right on Nassau Street in Princeton.
And again, I cannot emphasize enough how closely tied the Anthrax letters
are to Nine-11.
In the sense that they become associated with foreign terrorism
but also, in the two cities where the greatest impact was felt,
New York City, Washington.   And you can see it.
It's the World Trade Center.
It's the Pentagon and what you're going to see played out here,
of course with the Anthrax letters, it's targeting mostly New York.
We call them the Media Letters but they're --
they all were New York organizations.
I say that with parenthesis in a way because the first victim was
in Florida but the company that owned American --
that owns America Media still is New York based.
So we're really looking at New York attacks
and then attacks on Washington.   So what's important about this?
Well we have the first diagnosis in Florida.
That's on October 4th.
I think everyone can stop for a minute and say,
"Well was I in October 2001," because this was the big news.
This is the news that took over the airways.
The first diagnosis of Inhalation Anthrax was quite a shock even
though the administration kept very vague about how it had been caused
and they had to keep vague.
They knew very early on that it was probably from a letter
but they didn't have the letter.   The letter had been thrown out.
So on October 5th, very,
very quickly we have two independent sources that verified
that the strain of Anthrax that's in the letter is called Ames,
and that becomes extremely important
and I'll show you a slide a little bit later
about why it becomes important.
But it's amazing now when you look back
on how quickly that work was done.
The -- the basis for good science was already in place in 2001
and as we're going to see, the Science just gets better.
Well October 6 - 8, we have the Daschle letters are being mailed.
October 12, we have a -- New York belatedly realizes
that it has been the recipient of Anthrax letters.
So it's the Tom Brokaw letter.
The revelation on October 12th that one
of his assistants has developed cutaneous Anthrax;
it just wasn't recognized as that.   But then belatedly it was.
This causes a great furor.
Again, panic I think would be a good word for it but,
certainly pervasive fear in the sense that people become nervous
about their mail, that they become nervous about every white powder
that they see, that they call 9-1-1 -- if they see spilled talcum powder
or sugar from donuts, they call 9-1-1 and this was going on in --
down in Florida of course, and was also going on in New York City.
And don't forget New Jersey because New Jersey again,
part of the larger epicenter.
October 15th, the Daschle letter is opened and this is the height
of the calamity and those of you who are from Washington, if you remember
that particular episode, you'll know that the fear
that had been generated by the attack
on the Pentagon resonates again with the opening of the Daschle letter.
So that people are for example being evacuated from -- from buildings.
Congress shuts down the following Wednesday
and it's a very nerve-wracking time.
And also in the opening of the letter --
and I should emphasize this -- in the opening of that letter,
the exposure of people in the building was really underestimated.
There really were many people in the immediate vicinity
who were affected, who were inhaling.
But it turned out that the spores were throughout the building,
as well.
Also down at the American Media Building down in Florida
where the other letter had been opened,
there were at least 600 people,
probably more who were probably exposed, so when we talk about,
you know, who were the victims I think we also have to realize
that we don't know all the victims.
We don't know everyone who was exposed.
But it wasn't just the five people who eventually died
and it wasn't the 17 others who became ill.
But there was a larger population that was exposed.
So I'm going to do timeline with you again just to you know,
talk out of that -- out of the timeline.
On October 16, we have a lot of activity going on up at Fort Detrick
and particularly the U.S. Army Research Institute,
what we called USAMRIID.
Now USAMRIID got the Daschle letter to analyze right away
because they had a special center there
that could do very good analysis, and it was important
that that spore powder in the Daschle letter really get looked
at very closely, that its characteristics be known
and there was a center there at USAMRIID that could do that.
So the Daschle letter went right directly up to USAMRIID
and USAMRIID consequently became the center
for something called Operation Noble Eagle
which is a very general mandate.
It wasn't the only center involved in this way.
But after Nine-11, President Bush made it possible
for military entities to engage in what you might look
at as domestic protection activities.
So USAMRIID and this particular entity inside of it became part
of Operation Noble Eagle and what did that mean?
That meant that all of the samples that were being turned in,
whether they were from Florida or from New York
or wherever they were coming in and certainly from Washington, D.C.,
that they would go to Fort Detrick and they would be analyzed there.
Now that very small center had to expand very quickly.
It had to bring in dozens of other scientists.
It only had a small group of seven people
or so who -- who could do the work.
So they brought in dozens more from --
from other institutes in order to help analyzing all these samples.
And over the course of almost three months,
they analyzed 30,000 powder samples.   Could you imagine what that means?
Well I think nearly all of them were -- were nothing.
I mean it -- they weren't anything but some were and some were the --
were crucial to understand and important to understand.
It's also true that the Center
for Disease Control is involved round the clock
at this point doing the same kinds of analysis,
particularly on the clinical cases,
because now we're getting more reports of the cutaneous.
We're getting more reports beginning to come
in about potential inhalational cases.
So -- so there's a lot of government response here which is
at a very high level, a really fanatic level
and everybody's description of USAMRIID at this particular time is
that it was really chaotic.
It was -- was a very difficult time and again CDC, as well.
So October 18th, very crucial, a postal worker is diagnosed
on October 18th with having cutaneous Anthrax.
Now this is not a woman working in the major facility,
Hamilton facility in New Jersey where we know --
we find out through postal codes the Anthrax letters were processed.
This is a woman who's a mail deliverer who would get mail
out of -- you know, from that facility and just go
around dispersing it in the Trenton area.
This is down in the southern part of the state.
So Hamilton, New Jersey, the news comes back,
this woman has cutaneous Anthrax.
Now you just don't come down with cutaneous in the vicinity
of Hamilton, New Jersey without setting off a kind of alarm
about did she get it from the mail
and what is going on inside that facility?
Now what's interesting here is
that the workers inside the Hamilton Facility were already very nervous
about what was going on in terms of a letter that was dangerous
because they knew what most of the rest of us didn't know is
that to process a letter, it goes through a digital barcode sorter
which actually compresses it, spins it around a spindle
and compresses it and shoots it forward while it's doing all
the printing.
And they were nervous about what that processing meant
if you had a letter with powder in it, and they didn't have the answer
to what that meant but they were very nervous about it.
And also down in Washington,
D.C. in what we call the Brentwood Postal Facility,
they were very nervous too because they had at least the Daschle letter
and then a great suspicion by the way
that there was more than one letter.
They were getting reports of contamination in the Hart Building,
of course, where the Daschle letter had been opened
but the contamination was leading back to the postal room
of the Hart Building indicating that this thing had been leaking,
that this letter had been leaking.
And that information came in very early.
So you have two different groups, one in Hamilton
and you've got another group down in Brentwood
and they're very nervous about these letters.
Now I have to pause here and say that we have two wonderful people
from Brentwood exposed, Dena Brisco, and Helen Lewis
and they're sitting right over there,
and these are two of the three people.
Terrell Worrell is the third person who invented Brentwood Exposed
and that's in February of 2001.
And they're grass roots response was I think the best
of American civilization culture, that the citizens are concerned.
Let's get together, let's talk about it.
Let's have some action points and let's go forward.
And that's exactly what the Brentwood postal workers did
and I'll talk a little bit more about that
when I talk about civic response.   But anyway, here we are [sigh].
You know, October 19th, the Hamilton Facility is shut down.
Why is the Hamilton Facility shut down?
It's shut down not because the postal officials wanted it
shut down.   They didn't.
And not because the Center for Disease Control wanted it shut
down because they were -- they were there too looking things over.
Neither of them felt that the shutdown
of Hamilton was very important.
However, the public health people who were in charge,
particularly George Diferdinando had a lot of training
in occupational health, and he cared about worker safety.
He said this is a worker safety issue.
If the building is shut down and you're going to go in there
and you're going to find out that -- you know, test for Anthrax,
you keep it closed until you really know the results of those tests.
Because the CDC and the postal service people wanted it --
go in, take some swabs, get me -- get a --
look at the dust, send it off somewhere, get it looked at but,
open in up within 12 to 24 hours because the mail has to get going.
Well, George Diferdinando stood
up to the powers that be and said, "No."
He said, "If you open it up, I will not stand with you on the podium.
I will not be there when you go on television and the media
to tell people that I really approve of the reopening of Hamilton."
So they said, "Okay George, its shut."
And a good thing -- and a good thing
because it was fully contaminated, fully contaminated.
It was loaded with Anthrax spores and in fact one of the people
who did the -- the environmental testing said to me later, "If you --
we reached a point where we just stopped doing tests on the walls,
the floors and the machines because we just kept getting positives
and then we just decided to stop testing.
It was -- it was very, very full."
So what had happened of course, that the letters that went through
and I think we can particularly emphasize letters to Senator Daschle
and then to Senator Leahy that those letters really did come right --
really did spew the spores out,
that they really did throw the spores out.
And of course, there are -- for every gram of Anthrax you've got --
what, a trillion spores or something like that
if it's in -- if it's pure.
And the Daschle - Leahy Letter powder was particularly fine
without -- without really much debris.
So here we are.
It's October 21st, and October 21st is an important day
that the CDC hands in to the people at the Brentwood Facility who,
the manager particularly, but also to the CDC in Washington,
the news that one of the Brentwood workers, in fact,
had tested positive for inhalational Anthrax and that was Leroy Richmond.
Now Leroy Richmond did a wonderful job of insisting
to his healthcare providers the previous Friday
that he was sick, really sick.
They were going to send him home with Cipro, not even Cipro.
I think it was Tylenol.   Yes, it was Tylenol.
We know this, right?
You're sick but go home with Tylenol [background chuckle] and you know,
fortunately he persisted.   He said, "No, this is not the flu.
Something's really wrong with me."   So they did the test.
They had actually enough clinical evidence but they waited for CDC
and then they waited for October 21st
when the actual cultures came back and CDC said, "Yes,
this is Inhalational Anthrax."   What's mystifying in all this
by the way is why antibiotics were not distributed earlier
to the postal workers.
By the way I have to mention in here that thanks
to a wonderful public health leader down in Florida,
antibiotics were distributed to -- to postal workers down in Florida.
Isn't that interesting?
But when that -- when the first patient died,
Jean Malecki down in -- in Florida said those postal workers are
in jeopardy, "We've got to do something."
So she went into the local post office
where they knew there was contamination from the letter
that had come in and she made sure that they learned about Anthrax,
that they understood, that they got nasal swabs if they wanted them,
and that they had access to antibiotics.
But that information never made it up to New York,
never made it up to New Jersey,
and certainly never made it to Brentwood.
So what we have on October 21st is the closure of Brentwood finally.
Now a detail emerges later that I'll put in here.
About a month or so after the closure of the Brentwood facility,
experts from the Center for Disease Control and also people from Canada,
from the Canadian Army who were experts on Anthrax dispersal,
went into Brentwood, all shut down.
They went to the digital barcode sorter, Number 17 where the Leahy
and the Daschle letters had been processed.
They had gone through and they --
what they wanted to do was test the air.
Well, why test the air if the machine was not
on so they turned the machine on.   They flipped the machine on.
They're all -- by the way they're all in hazmat suits.
They flip the machine on and then they test the air around
and what they found out was that spores were still circulating,
that the Anthrax spores were still circulating around this machine.
What does that mean?
It means that from the time the Daschle
and Leahy letters were processed, which was October 11th
because it's all in the barcode, from October 11th
until October 21st, people were walking through clouds of Anthrax.
Well it never -- it never should have happened and let's hope
that something like that never happens again.
But it is interesting how the information came in late.
October 22nd -- October 21st is the date of the first death.
The -- October 22nd is the date of the second postal death,
antibiotic distribution and then case surveillance begins.
Well we have more cases to come.
October 25th, this is giving you like the --
the sort of the flashpoints of this.
A State Department contracted worker comes down --
he's also misdiagnosed by the way.
He goes into a physician who tells him he has --
he probably has the flu.
And even though this has all been on the front page,
it was very hard still for clinicians on the local level
to read the symptoms and to make connections.
A mailroom worker comes in, he's feeling awful, flu-like symptoms.
It should have raised an alarm but in this particular case,
it really didn't and so the man in question was sent home.
But then he became more ill and then they actually did do a test
that showed that he was infected and luckily he survived.
November 8th, this is another flashpoint day.
Now we're bringing more of the FBI in here.
What is the FBI doing by the way in all of this time?
Well they have been so focused on Nine-11 that this blindsided them,
this whole issue of Anthrax letters.
They'd never thought about them as serious.
They had so many Anthrax hoaxes.   After the famous 'sugar bag speech'
and after other incidences involving potential bio-terrorism,
Anthrax hoax letters were normal, in terms of,
what the FBI had to encounter.
They were always getting calls from local police.
So you know, yet another Anthrax hoax.
They'd never seen real Anthrax letters.
So they're very blindsided and the first reaction that they have is,
"Let's get the profile out.
Let's try to figure out who would do this."
So they did study the letters.
They had four -- recovered the four letters,
three of the letters actually
because the Leahy letter isn't discovered until November 14.
But they had three letters to look at
and the material has been xeroxed.   The letters are pre-franked.
There's no DNA here.
There's nothing they can get a hold of.
There's no fiber, there's nothing.
You know, they -- they bring it to their experts in Quantico
and in the -- what was then the Washington Lab,
and they look over these --
these letters and trying to figure out what could it be.
So all they can really go by is the nature of the printing, you know,
look -- and also how rational it was.
I mean the -- the printing of the envelopes and then the printing
of the letters, it's very crafty.
I mean there's something -- there's something about it which says,
"This person really planned it out."
And it planned it out to look like Al Qaida because the text
of the letters say, you know, "Death to Israel."
They've got, "Death to the United States."
"Praise to Allah," things like that and done in sort of a crude way
with the -- you know, misspelling of penicillin and things like that.
So their profile people come up with the lone scientist profile.
Now why do they do that?
In one way they did it because of the Unabomber,
if anybody remembers the Unabomber.
The Unabomber was their other big case of someone
who perpetrated terrorism but did it in a way that was rational,
had a sort of scientific base to it and --
and also came from multiple sources.
Wasn't mailed out to different targets and so they didn't --
they did go back to the Unabomber case and they figured,
"Maybe we have somebody like that."
So -- and they also offered a big reward and they --
they tried to advertise around.
When you look back on it now, it -- it's --
it was a very primitive effort you know to garner attention.
They brought in the man from America's Most Wanted and they tried
to get the public involved.   Well the public did get involved
but it was a little bit like the hoax letters.
They get so much you know, information back and so many clue --
and everybody suspected everybody.
You know, like if you didn't like your neighbor, this is --
you know, he looks weird.
He looks like a lone scientist to me and so it --
it wasn't a very effective way of doing things.
November 14th, the Leahy letter and then November 21, I'm sorry --
I'm forgetting the October 31st, the death of the --
the hospital worker in New York City, very mysterious.
No one has ever figured out whether this woman opened a letter,
touched a letter or what.
We don't -- we really don't know but we do know that she died
of Inhalational Anthrax, and because the surveillance
for Anthrax cases had gotten so good
in New York, her case was not missed.
Her case was -- was great relative to her appearing ill.
Her case was relatively quickly diagnosed.
She did not survive.
Another random case -- in November 21st, an elderly woman
up in Connecticut, again -- what is going on here?
But with her it's less of a mystery because one
of her neighbors did have Anthrax in his mailbox
and the local postal facility
up in Connecticut was also tested positive for Anthrax.
So the theory is that some cross-contamination occurred
from the Daschle and Leahy letters and that even a small trace amount
of Anthrax spores was enough actually
to infect this 92-year old woman.   Do let me go to civil actions here.
What did we do?
Well the FBI wasn't solving the case.
Let's just put it that way.   It went on and on.
They had a -- they seemed to go off a track but some person,
they broke down some doors over here,
and they didn't really get any good leads.
The leads just didn't seem to be coming in.
it was -- it was a really difficult case and it wasn't
because they weren't putting money into it and it wasn't
because they weren't investigating for example, an alternative
and even Al Qaida sources.
So for example in 2004, the FBI had gotten involved in doing tests
at a sight in Kandahar, where initially the results looked
as if they had maybe some positive Anthrax bacteria, something going
on without -- but them when they did more intensive
and more comprehensive tests, they came up with negatives.
So they're trying this and they're trying that and they're also trying
to move along with creating a repository of Ames strains.
That is the -- Aims Strain Repository.
We're at -- if you just went out and found every laboratory possible
that have a sample that was in the Aim Strain Category,
could you get that all into a repository?
Could you get people to give you samples in a standard form?
And then could you test them against what was in the Anthrax letters?
Could you find a match of some sort?
And very early on and this is thanks to Rita Caldwell who was that --
then the head of the National Science Foundation.
It was her suggestion.
Let's get the DNA -- can we get the DNA evidence out of this?
Can we do comparative DNA work?
So that was -- that begin very early on in 2001,
2002 but the technology wasn't up for it,
and they had to get together the repository
of all these different strains and samples.
And so that didn't move -- didn't move too quickly.
But what did move was civil actions.
So I mentioned the -- the 2002 creation
of Brentwood Exposed very early on, very dynamic, a real re-uniting
of the Brentwood Community which had been dispersed
to six other facilities.
You know when that -- when that facility shut down,
people had to go someplace else and they had been a community.
They had been workers who knew each other.
They had been workers who were even family relations.
There is -- there are postal families of people who --
who go from generation to generation or cousins and aunts and uncles
and mothers and fathers they work for the post office.
And in this particular case, the community was very dispersed
and they also didn't know what had happened to them.
They didn't know they were they infected, were they not infected?
How long should they take those antibiotics?
The antibiotics were making people ill.
They were -- they were having a very, very rough time and nobody
in particular was paying attention to them.
So they solved their own problem when they came together
as a community of healing and of education.
Now another wonderful response is the case of the widow
of the first victim, Bob Stevens down in Florida who came
up with an idea with her very clever lawyer to phrase the problem
of her husband's death as one of Tort Law,
that is somebody did something wrong in the --
in the civil arena by not protecting the public
against a dangerous thing that it owned.
Now if you think of somebody who owns a bad dog, right?
Okay you're in that realm.
Another case that came out of this kind of Tort Law was somebody
who had a monkey who escaped in a hurricane, it's true.
And was sued because the people were afraid of the monkey,
afraid the monkey was going to bite them.
It was a chimp and so there is --
but the big case that the Stephens case relied on, the precedent was --
had to do with a man who was drilling in the earth
with an electric driller and he hit a line,
a live line that a Florida power company had not advertised
as dangerous.
See, they didn't advertise it was dangerous and so the family
of that man sued and it was -- and sued successfully.
So Maureen Stevens' lawyer says,
"Well where did this stuff come from?
Where did the Ames strain come from?"
And the answer is --
and the consensus was very high, it came from USAMRIID.
That is, if you wanted to trace -- you know, what was the source,
the first source, you would go to the Medical Institute
because they had been using it for years to do their testing
of vaccines and antibiotics.
So the lawyer says, "The U.S. Army has failed."
Who sent the letters?
"The U.S. Army has failed to contain the threat,
the danger that it has posed by that Anthrax material.
Therefore we will sue."
And when she brought the suit originally, her complaint --
people said you'll never --
you sue the Federal Government, it never goes anywhere.
But it did.
It went up -- it was cleared to go to trial at the Federal level
in Florida and I think to the disappointment of some people,
the widow finally settled last December.
But all those years that course -- that case went through the courts
and it -- it really -- even though it was settled,
even though it wasn't brought to trial, it has established a kind
of precedent for dangerous material owned by the government.
Who's responsible when the dangerous material gets out?
And that's a -- that's a very important thing
that I think that the family did.
Multiple lawsuits by Stephen Hatfield --
he was accused in the press really, and by certain individuals
of being the prime suspect for the Anthrax letter attacks.
The FBI never made him a prime suspect but he did suffer a lot
in the media and he -- he held them responsible.
He held the Department of Justice responsible and one of the things
that he did of course, was he got a very large,
large multi-million dollar settlement
from the Department of Justice.
Took years to do it and he also -- because he sued the New York Times
and Vanity Fair, he also changed the libel laws that now pertain with --
when a newspaper comes out and they want to say something negative,
they have to look at half those cases and say, "Well, you know,
can we get away with this."
You know, because he didn't consider himself a public figure
and he did not consider himself a person who was in any way guilty.
He was in a sense but he was being represented very strongly in --
in editorials as a guilty party.
So that was -- those lawsuits are very important.
And then just -- just finally on the civil actions,
how does America respond?
One of the results of the Anthrax letters was a large increase
in what we call Bio-Defense.
That is the U.S. government investment in basic science research
on Anthrax, tularemia, plague, botchulinum toxins, Ebola virus --
you can go down the list.
Unusual diseases that have been used in weapons programs
or theoretical in, you know, considered as good agents
in some sort of biological weapons conflict.
So we developed right after the Anthrax letters, a great expansion
of Bio-Defense so that it went from maybe $900 million if you just look
at the research and development aspect of it, up to about $5 billion
in the course of one, two years.
So -- so in order to have this research done,
there was a great expansion of what we call Double-Three Laboratories,
the ones where you have to gown up
and where the select agent being studied is dangerous
but for which there are cures.
It also resulted in the increase in what we call BSL3,
Bio-Safety Level -- I'm sorry, Bio-Safety Level Four Laboratories,
and those laboratories are the ones that do research
on incurable diseases and that's SARS and Ebola
and other hemorrhagic fevers.
So in order to do this research you need the physical plants.
So a lot of money went into building new laboratories,
expanding the number I'll call them BSL3 Laboratories
and expanding the number of BLS4 Laboratories as well,
so that if you go back to around 2000, I think there were
about four Level Four Laboratories in the United States and I think
if you look around now, you'll find easily double that number
and then maybe a few more on top of it.
So these laboratories have to built
in communities somewhere, don't they?
And so the communities and I'm speaking very much here
about Boston become upset, because they don't know what's going on
and they don't know how secure and safe that research is going to be.
So up in Boston, there were two separate legal challenges
to Boston University Medical Center as to the endangerment
that the laboratory posed to the community
under the Environmental Protection Act
and that -- this is all legitimate.
If you build a facility in the middle of the city for example,
or anywhere, you have to answer to the Environmental Protection Act
that says -- asks you the question, "Are you posing a danger
to the local community" and you must offer the worst case scenario.
That is, it is your legal obligation for you to pose what the risks are,
not to wait for somebody else to do it but you as the entity that wants
that lab, you must give us the scenario.
You must talk about a possible release.
And so Boston University did respond to the EPA requirement but,
its presentation of the facts of risks was contested in court
and then was contested by a National Science --
Academy of Sciences committee and then it went back and did it again
and the same thing happened again.
They contested it in the courts, it was contested by experts
in the National Science community.
So that -- the building up in Boston is built and it's finished,
it's a very large building which will house Level Three
and Level Four research laboratories.
But it's empty and it's empty -- the equipment is there.
The equipment of course is becoming outdated and it sits there and --
so you could say that's a good thing or a bad thing.
I think if you're -- if you're at Boston University Medical Center,
you'd day it's awful because they put some of their own money in --
$125 million of their own money went into that building.
The National Institute for Allergies
and Infectious Diseases put many millions into the building
of that edifice and got nothing out of it and that's a bad thing.
But on the other side, the local community feels
that this has been a success
and when I say local community I'm really talking here about people
who live, rent homes and apartments in the lower-class area
of the South End where that facility now stands.
So civil action's a very important part of the American response.
[ Silence ]
>> Now let me go back here to Fort Detrick.
Let me go back a bit to the FBI case, and also to Science.
I like this slide.   I put it in my book because it shows
where the Ames Anthrax strain comes in 1981.
It's a dead heifer over in Texas there and it's --
it's died of something really dreadful
and the person who's taking account of this makes sure it gets
to the U.S. Army because the U.S. Army's doing defensive research.
And if you're doing defensive research, here's a principle.
You want the -- the weapon, the Anthrax spores in this case,
you want the weapon to be very, very dangerous because you're presuming
that your enemy has a dangerous weapon, right?
So you don't -- you know there are less virulent forms of Anthrax.
There are forms of Anthrax that are hardly virulent at all.
But go for the strain that's really virulent
because that's what your enemy might have
and that's what you want to be protected again.
It makes perfect sense in developing weapons.
So anyway I'll just end very -- I'm going to end right now with --
with the question Fort Detrick raises, this is a --
this is an early publication.
They have no conclusions but they know the Ames strain is
out of Detrick, and this should have been a red flag for the FBI
about a pool of suspects.
But the FBI didn't get to the pool of suspects
for quite a long period of time.
They know the Ames strain is there and that is the main source
but they couldn't get to the -- again the pool of suspects.
So anyway, along the way, I'll go by this quickly.
This is -- what does America do?
You use Anthrax to build your case for the Iraq War, famous quote
and then here we are at the end of it after years, 2005,
2006 as I described in my book, the FBI has a match from the repository
and the match is Detrick and the match is USAMRIID.
The match is actually a very particular flask which is
in the custody of Bruce Ivins, a very gifted
and very intelligent Anthrax expert at USAMRIID.
Here's a picture of Bruce when he was a teenager, loved Science,
very invested in Biology and Biological Sciences.
Came from a family of pharmacists so that was in -- it was in the family.
And a picture of him getting a medal from the U.S. Government in 2003.
So here's the build-up, we started
with Fort Detrick, here's the build-up.
If you look at that chart above,
the Biotechnology Campus of NCI, that's older.
But the Bio-Defense Campus in the center is new
and glittery and very expensive.   And sits there as an amazing change,
I think very much related to the Anthrax letters.
So here's NIAID funding if you want
to look what happened with the funding issue.
Reemerging infectious diseases come in very strongly.
So when you're hearing lately about H5N1
and you're wondering what were we doing with H5N1?
It's out of Bio-Defense and it -- if you go back to the route of it,
it really is the Anthrax letters.
So here, I'll just -- on this, what are we still learning about?
Well we're still learning
about individual human susceptibility to Anthrax.
We're trying to implement Bio-Defense Project Review.
For example, with H5N1, was there a review process in place
that would let the people who did the research
on that Avian Flu understand what the repercussions might be in terms
of danger or just in terms of media and public response.
So where was the project review?   We must work more on that,
standardizing Bio-Safety and Bio-Security.
Well look back at the Maureen Stevens' case, the Florida case.
Is the government going to be held liable?
Is a commercial entity going to be held liable if bad select agents get
out of their control, and I think the answer's, "Yes."
They're going to be held very legally liable,
so try Bio-Safety on that.
Try Bio-Security, protect people as much as you can.
And then look for institutional accountability.
What you want to do is you want to have people safe at work
and then encourage if you're [inaudible]
to the Biological Weapons Convention.
Anyway, thank you so much.
[ Applause and background conversation ]
>> So we can take the questions and [inaudible].
>> Yes, okay.   [ Background noise ]
>> I'm stunned, here's one.
Well the question is, I'll go just for the very end of it.
Like who sent the letters but suppose it was an Al Qaida theft
of the material and that it was really mailed out
and that the FBI engaged in a cover-up.
Well, I'm a person who was raised in a sort of rationalist,
enlightenment frame of mind.
My first question is, "Where's the evidence?"
If you show me the evidence, I'm happy to look at the evidence.
But I can't make conclusions if I don't have facts.
And so when you get into conspiracy theories
and you say the FBI did this or the FBI did that, I have to wait to see
where those facts are because I -- it's not a road I go down easily.
It is -- it just isn't the way I work.
The best answer I can give you.
[Inaudible question] So that's interesting,
the question is the nature of the targets.
If you go for the media and then you go for two liberal Senators who are
by the way at that time debating the Patriot Bill,
and I think some people would say
that even Senator Leahy was obstructing the Patriot Bill.
So perhaps -- if I understand the question,
then the question would be, "Was it a right-wing source?"
And I think we can again, we'll never know
but it is an interesting idea that for example,
to target the media gets you attention.
But also maybe the person who sent the letters was thinking,
"Well what media would Al Qaida target and I think
that targeting Tom Brokaw by the way was really brilliant
because he was Mr. You-Know American Hero.
He had written a book on World War Two.
He -- on 91 he was on-site at 911 for hours and hours at a time.
He was a really beloved figure, much more than his two competitors.
So what -- you know, he was a really good target.
I mean if you were going to target the World Trade Center,
Tom Brokaw would be the equivalent of targeting the World Trade Center
if you went to the media.   So I thought that was interesting.
The Post had run very negative articles about --
about Al Qaida and the American Media, Inc.,
the National Inquirer -- even worse articles about it.
So the media targeting I think made a lot of sense.
If you go to Senators' Daschle and Leahy, I think you're right.
It makes it look like you know that this is a bit of a right-wing thing.
But again, we're into speculation on that.
Yes?
>> The Sarin attacks in Japan, a small group made that poison.
Is it possible for just individual or small group
to make Anthrax [inaudible]?   You know, to make Anthrax?
>> Well this has always been brought up as that you can do it
in your garage kind of idea.
[Inaudible] Well it depends on who you are [chuckle].
It depends on your skills.   It's not like everybody could do it
but maybe some skilled people could do it, sure.
Of course that's possible.
But in the world of you know, countering terrorist threats
or in the world of keeping us all safe, the likelihood
of that doesn't ring very high.
We haven't had any more Anthrax letters if you'll note.
So if it was that easy, you know, what happened?
What happened is that nothing happened.
I -- I don't know anything about the question about what was there --
somebody in Tennessee doing this?   I don't know.
That doesn't ring a bell with me.
But the hoax letters -- I can tell you the hoax letters continue on now
and so when people want to vent their aggression,
they don't necessarily have to use virulent Anthrax
because people have learned to scare other people in different ways.
So -- but you're raising a very important question and it's
about state-level of investment in biological weapons
versus what somebody could do in a garage and my feeling is
that whenever we see danger from Anthrax
or other biological weapons select agents,
there's usually a large entity involved
and that I take is more normal in history I guess.
Question?   [ Inaudible question ]
>> Well, there are -- there have been decisions made
about where they should be nationally.
The newest one is down in Galveston which already had BLS --
I think it has 36 BSL3 Labs already.
So the University of Texas Medical Branch
at Galveston is a major entity in select agent research.
The Center for Disease Control now has two Level Four,
Fort Detrick of course, well --
and the Fort Detrick campus will have two Level Fours.
The decisions are being made like to put these in very specific places
but I think people should know that there are 10 Centers
of Excellence funded by NIH which are nationally,
regionally distributed and that they become centers
for select agent research within their region,
so you can go northwest or you can go to California or you can go --
all around, all around the United States.
Wait, just one more question back here -- in the back.
Yes?   [ Inaudible question ]
>> Well I would say it's not the money issue although everybody you
know wants the money and say they -- they say they need the money.
I think it's an organizational issue
that you keep asking the question every time you read another
news report.   Who's in charge?
The H5N1 being the -- I think a very good example.
Who's in charge?   Who's watching the store?
But the other thing is should there be another similar event,
who's going to be the spokesperson that Americans will listen to?
And this is one thing that really concerns me a lot
because we were fairly centralized in our response
when you look back on it.
Well maybe we didn't like how you know,
Washington handled the response but basically Mayor Giuliani
and New York was spectacular.
He did a very good job of responding.
Down in Florida, Jeb Bush stood up.   He did his response.
Who -- to whom is you know, is the nation listening?
I think in Washington, we had --
we had President Bush himself who was up there responding.
But now, everything is so FaceBook, Twitter, internet.
Where is the legitimate authority,
the centralized legitimate authority that's going to inform people
in the case of not just of like an Anthrax attack,
but a really serious infectious disease outbreak?
Where are we going to go to get that good information?
Well okay, you can go to the website of the CDC.
What happened in 2001 was that the website
of the CDC broke down a number of times.
It couldn't handle the traffic.
So what's going to protect us against that?
I don't know but I think it's real important for us
to think organizationally, is the Surgeon General
of the United States right at this very moment, sufficiently educated
about infectious disease, emerging infectious diseases
and biological weapons' agents to respond, to tell the public what
to do, you know, in case of an outbreak?
Where -- again, to whom would we go when we need help?
>> [Applause] Please join me to thank Jeanne again
and we have a book signing outside.   So thank you.
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.