How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 2)

Robert discusses the mysterious 2001 anthrax attacks and how the FBI, without any real evidence, decided to destroy a man's life over it. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Oh my gosh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where your host, Robert Evans, hasn't slept in two days. I mean, I slept a little bit. I fell asleep last night at like 2:00 a.m. And then around 4:00, I woke bolt upright, like suddenly perfectly awake and with this just feeling in my bones that some news had happened. And for, you know, the record folks, we're recording this on September 12th, so just a couple of days after Charlie Kirk's assassination. And I just woke up with the feeling that something had happened. So I checked my phone and the authorities announced that they'd taken someone into custody and they announced his name. So from that point, I spent the rest of the night finding this, the shooter's family on the internet and going through

• 0:48Robert Evans?

  all of their social media and doing the thing that I do because this is both what made my career and also something that's permanently damaged my brain. So like about a dozen friends of mine, whenever there's a weird shooting like this, I wind up digging into some internet poisoned young man's life for several hours, which I did. And I found some useful news and published it, posted it and stuff, put it out, got it out there. So now I'm, the term we used to use when I was a kid was cracked out. How are you doing? Guest today, Courtney?

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Hello. Oh my God. That's such an odd relationship to have with this kind of news.

• 1:29Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry.

• 1:31Robert Evans?

  It's, I mean, when the fucking, when the Paway, the synagogue shooting happened, I was flying to Mexico for a vacation and I had to like run into a wine bar in the 90 minutes before my flight and write an article. Like, this is just like how my, what my life has been like for a while now. It's weird, Courtney. How are you?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Weird times. Yeah. I'm good. I'm just chilling.

• 1:55Robert Evans?

  Well, that's good. Are you ready to learn about a different kind of terrorist attack, you know?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  I cannot wait. I honestly, I didn't know if I was going to be back for part three, but I am so excited to hear it.

• 2:06Robert Evans?

  No one, no one else would I tell this story to. So, and we're recording this on September 12th. So it's, you know, obviously this is all fresh in our minds. You remember, I'm sure Courtney, that on September 11th, 2001, the CIA used their low Earth orbit ion cannon to destroy the World Trade Center in New York City. The Twin Towers collapsed within minutes. Obviously, that's one explanation. There are some experts who think that the culprit was a group of terrorists who'd hijacked some commercial flights. Whatever the truth, we'll never know, obviously, but whatever the truth.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Christ, Robert.

• 2:36Robert Evans?

  Americans went crazy, right? Like, people lost, you, you, you and I, I think we remember, like, everyone losing their minds, everyone here on this show, right? After 9/11?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I know it's always weird to me to talk to people, which now, you know, a decent number of people I, I'm social with, don't have strong memories of 9/11. Like,

• 2:57Speaker 01

  I don't think Garrison was born.

• 2:59Robert Evans?

  Gare was not born. Gare does not remember 9/11.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  I remember being in high school, like, sitting in the room and watching the, watching the second one go down.

• 3:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. I came into health class, like, right before the second one hit. Like, I watched that live on TV. And like, you know, talking to, because when I say, like, my younger friends, these people are like 27 to 30, right? They still don't remember 9/11. And it's, it's important, if you, because if you were, if you were old enough to be, like, really cognizant, then, looking back on it, like, people, like, there was something that left everyone's souls. Like, the light in their eyes was different. People fucking, like, my recollection of it is that overnight, all of the most stable, reasonable adults in my life became, like, bloodthirsty. Like, it was like somebody had flipped a switch, you know? It was a very, very, like, odd

• 3:53Robert Evans?

  and unsettling time. And people got, in the wake of the attack, not only were they begging for blood for whoever was responsible, but they were incredibly paranoid, right? Because it felt like anyone might be at risk. You know, I have very strong memories of girls in my suburban North Texas school, like, worried that Al Qaeda was going to hit, like, our middle school, which, like, obviously, that was never in the cards, but people were worried about that because everyone was losing their minds.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I didn't go, I think I was gonna go to college in New York and I didn't go.

• 4:26Robert Evans?

  Absolutely not.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I don't fucking know what's gonna happen.

• 4:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, and that that's totally sensible. And so I bring this up because obviously the anthrax attacks happened right after nine 11, but it's also before we talk about those attacks to understand why the reaction was the way it was and why it wound up fucking up Steven Hatfield's life the way that it did. You have to understand how everyone was out of their minds, every adult in the United States, or at least a majority of them were completely insane for the events of this story.

• 5:00Speaker 02

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• 5:34Robert Evans?

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• 6:09Robert Evans?

  So, less than three weeks after the towers fell, a photo editor for the National Enquirer named Robert Stevens started to feel ill. Stevens was British by birth. He was in his 60s. He'd moved to Florida as a younger man to work and worked for the National Enquirer. He was an image editor, right? And his, the gist of his job was he helped to create fake news. Now, the National Again, if you're young enough that you don't remember these guys, they're not quite like the Onion, like where they would never admit that everything was bullshit, but everything's bullshit in the National Enquirer. You know that picking up a copy, that it's nonsense, right? Like, it's like Bat Boy fucking articles and shit like that. And Stevens's highest-profile

• 6:50Robert Evans?

  gig for the paper was merging photographs of Freddie Prince and Raquel Welch after Prince killed himself to kind of insinuate that the two had been in a relationship together before he killed himself, right? Like, that was like the kind of work that he did. So this is a guy, like, you know, this is not a guy anyone would target necessarily for terrorism. Like, this is just a dude editing pictures for the National Enquirer. And outside of that, seems to have been a pretty normal guy. He was certainly not the kind of person who you'd ever expect to be the target of a sophisticated terrorist attack. But on Saturday, September 30, 2001, he started feeling ill as his wife was driving him home from a trip to North Carolina. The next day, he just kept getting sicker. His fever spiked, and he went home, and he went from normal ill to barely able to speak in the course

• 7:35Robert Evans?

  of a few hours. So on Tuesday, his wife took him to the ER at around 2:00 a.m. in the morning. Doctors initially suspected meningitis, but then he started having seizures. They did a spinal tap, which finally revealed the culprit. Robert Stevens had been exposed to anthrax. Samples were immediately sent to a dedicated lab, which confirmed that his symptoms were consistent with inhalation anthrax. As we noted in the last episodes, there's multiple ways to get anthrax. When there's natural outbreaks, it's usually not inhalation anthrax, right? That's when someone has made, like, weaponized dry anthrax is when you inhale it, generally.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Sorry, I'm dumb. Can you just, what was the cliffhanger of the last episode? Where do we kind of leave off?

• 8:19Robert Evans?

  We had just gotten up to Stephen Hatfield's career, right? Where the last thing he had done before 9/11 happens, he's built, he's built an 18-wheeler trailer into a bioweapons lab model, like, not a real lab, but like, a fake one, because he's training US Special Forces how to recognize bioweapons labs, in the thought that they're going to be invading Iraq and finding all of Saddam's bioweapons labs that he definitely had, right?

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, perfect. Yes, I'm all caught up.

• 8:44Robert Evans?

  So Hatfield is, yeah, working for the US government, but he also, he has just gotten, like, fired and denied a security clearance from the CIA because he lied about a bunch of stuff in his backstory, right? Yeah. So he's, he's also starting to have career issues. Yeah. And anyway, it's into all of this that, yeah. So this guy Stevens comes ill, spinal tap and whatnot, reveals that it's anthrax. And inhalation anthrax is about as rare as illnesses get in the United States. When Stevens got sick, he was the 19th case of anthrax inhalation in the US in 100 years. Oh, wow. Yeah, this is, this does not happen often, right? Crazy. Like, it's not the kind of thing you accidentally tend to do.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  And once it became clear that he had inhaled anthrax, his doctor, and doctors who start looking at this immediately suspect terrorism, right? This, this gets to the CDC very quickly, once it's clear anthrax is involved. And part of why people were ready, people were primed to be scared of this because a few days before he got sick, news articles had come out reporting that two of the 9/11 hijackers had investigated the possibility of renting crop dusters before settling on their ultimate plan. And the Fed's assumption was that they'd wanted to rent crop dusters so that they could deploy anthrax, right? Because if you had a sufficient quantity of dry anthrax, you could deploy it via a crop duster. That was the assumption at the time. I actually don't know, they may have just wanted to fly the crop dusters into buildings,

• 10:11Robert Evans?

  like knowing what they actually did, but this is what people were talking about at the time, right? That's what matters. So Americans not only are flipping out because of 9/11, but were primed to be expect that, like, Al Qaeda's looking for ways to use anthrax. And then suddenly this fucking 60-year-old image editor gets sick with anthrax. Crazy. Stevens slips into a coma a couple of days after getting to the hospital, and he stops breathing in the late afternoon on Friday, October 5th. He was the first of what would be five deaths from a series of anthrax letters that were sent to a bunch of different locations. Oh, shit. Now, yes, this, and sickens a number, a significant number more people, right? A bunch of people get sick, five of them die.

• 10:52Robert Evans?

  The CDC is contacted immediately, and the book, The Demon in the Freezer, gives much more detail about the autopsy of Stevens and the protocols that follow after, if you're interested in all of that. But what's important is that they ultimately tracked the cause of infection, like where he got sick, down to the mailroom for the American Media Building, where he worked. Another employee, Ernesto Blanco, had gone to the hospital soon after Stevens did, suffering respiratory distress, and he also tested positive for anthrax. I think he survives, but the FBI gets involved, right? Now, you've got two people who've gotten anthrax from a mailroom. Something is happening, something intentional, right?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:30Robert Evans?

  On October 15th, 10 days after Stevens died, an employee at the mailroom for the Hart Senate Building Office opened a letter addressed to a Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, with its return address set as the 4th grade class for the Greendale School in New Jersey. She saw powder inside and immediately called the police. The building had to be evacuated for six months because anthrax spores had circulated through the HVAC system. Cleanup alone cost like $26 million, right?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 11:57Robert Evans?

  Do you remember all of this? Like, were you like, because I, this is when I, when the letter to Daschle got found is when I remember becoming aware of the anthrax attacks.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  I remember the vague, like, hysteria over anthrax. I was not following beat by beat the news stories, but, yeah, people were scared.

• 12:14Robert Evans?

  They're scared, and this is scary, by the way. Anthrax is fucking scary, right? It's not unreasonable when anthrax is showing up in the mail and random people are getting sick to be like, oh, fuck, how much worse is this going to get? More letters start showing up in the following days. NBC gets a letter addressed to Tom Brokaw. There's a letter addressed to CBS, to the New York Post, to ABC. And it doesn't take long for news to spread that across the country that someone or someones was executing an unprecedented biological attack on prominent publications and political leaders. The panic that had settled in after 9/11 dropped into, left into high gear. Now, initially, all we know is that there's letters with anthrax, right? Because they can't immediately, like, read the letters because of all the anthrax, right?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 13:00Robert Evans?

  So you have to, you have to get these letters to a secure location, which in this case, which we talked about, you Sam Red in our last episode, that's where Stephen Hatfield worked for years, that this is the primary biological warfare defense organization in the United States, located in Fort Detrick. They get involved at this point. The letters are sent to a secure facility and scientists with all of the gear that you need are able to-

• 13:24Speaker 01

  The whole thing, yeah.

• 13:25Robert Evans?

  Read, yeah, and then see what's written in them, right, safely. One of the letters read, "9/11/0201, you cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." All in big, bold, capitalized letters, very distinctive block lettering, weird looking. Now, that's a weird message, right?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:48Robert Evans?

  Obviously, there had just, I joked about CIA lasers, but there had been a massive, nine 11 was a massive Islamic terrorist attack against the United States. That's what happened.

• 13:59Robert Evans?

  So the idea that this would be involved with that would be a follow-up attack was not weird. That said, if you know anything about like Al Qaeda or the history of Islamic terrorism, this is a weird letter, right? Like, this doesn't actually sound like the kind of things that these people write when they're carrying out their attacks.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  It's like oddly American.

• 14:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, I mean, there'd be a death to America, death to Israel, and they're sure, but it's not like you die now. Are you afraid? That's weird.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like, this isn't, I could, as somebody who's professionally studied this, this is weird.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  I saw this in seven.

• 14:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, um, so once professionals got to look at the samples, the actual anthrax, because they're not, you know, they're looking at the letters, but they're actually able to test anthrax, and this is important because anthrax is a biological thing, right? It's a bacteria, which means there's like a DNA, basically, for it, you know? Like, you can, you can figure, there's different strains, and they, all strains are not created equal. Different strains have different levels of, you know, infectiousness and whatnot, and deadliness, and resistance to antibiotics and the like. There's a bunch of different ways to get infected with anthrax, and, you know, you've got your naturally occurring anthrax, and then you've got your anthrax that are like based off of natural strains, but they've been bred for lethality or whatever, right? Because people have weaponized anthrax.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Sounds like cannabis.

• 15:21Robert Evans?

  It is like pot. Anthrax and marijuana have a lot in common, and one of these days, we'll get those clowns in Congress to legalize anthrax, and I'll be able to grow marijuana and anthrax together, you know? Finally, you can get both in the same store.

• 15:36Robert Evans?

  Bad thing to joke about on the episode about all the people who died from anthrax.

• 15:42Robert Evans?

  No, it's not funny. I'm sorry.

• 15:46Robert Evans?

  Although anthrax would be a good name for a pot strain.

• 15:50Robert Evans?

  But I wouldn't know. I've never smoked the devil's lettuce. So there are 89 known variants of the anthrax bacteria, or at least there were at the time. Maybe we've added a few since. I don't know. I'm not an anthrax expert. But when they tested this anthrax, they were able to identify its exact strain, specifically the anthrax that had been mailed to the American media building. It was the Ames strain of anthrax, A M E S. The Ames strain of anthrax was initially found, I think, in 1981. And it was taken from a 14 month old calf, like a baby cow, that perished in Texas in after a natural outbreak. So this starts out as a natural outbreak and the Ames strain is called the Ames strain

• 16:31Robert Evans?

  because there's like a mailing error when they're sending samples of the anthrax to you SAMRID. And so the researchers there thought that it came from Ames, Iowa and not from Texas. That's why it's called the Ames strain. It's just a little fuck up and them reading the mail or whatever.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  So they just kept it? They just kept it off the cow?

• 16:49Robert Evans?

  Yes, they kept it and they cultured it in order to turn it into, you've got like the wet anthrax, which is when you get like natural infections, it's wet. You know, so it's because it's inside living wet things. And it's very difficult and takes someone who is very skilled to take that and turn it into a dry, like agent, a powder that you could spread and people could inhale it and get sick, right? That's complicated. And that's what they're doing to the, that's what they do to the Ames strain, right? You SAMRID does. And they are doing it, we're not, we're not, we don't make biological weapons anymore. Right?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  But sort of we do.

• 17:25Robert Evans?

  Theoretically, but we do for the purpose of studying how to defend ourselves, right?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Like, okay, whatever you tell yourself.

• 17:36Robert Evans?

  This is not the place to litigate that. I will say that their, their argument is that, well, if we're worried that someone might weaponize this stuff, then we need to have examples of it that we have weaponized in order to test and build defenses against it. Right? So that's what we're still allowed to do because we're not supposed to be making anthrax to stockpile as a weapon for war. Right? But you can have some of it that you're turning into this dry form in order to test different prophylactics and whatnot. Right? And the AIM strain after 81 becomes the strain that is used by USAMRID when they're doing anthrax research. Right? Because it's very deadly. So, I mean, and it's super contagious.

• 18:18Robert Evans?

  So basically, because it's one of the more deadly variants, they use it because if you're wanting to develop something that can protect people, you want to be using the nastiest version of it that you can to develop like a counter. Right?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Totally. They're starting a huge problem.

• 18:33Robert Evans?

  We're talking government logic here. Right? I'm not defending this. I'm just explaining how they think. Right?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 18:40Robert Evans?

  I'm not, I'm not defending the US bioweapons programs. You can feel about that however you want, but these are the arguments that these guys are making. Right? That this stuff will be used against us. It's only a matter of time and so we need to be making and studying it and devoting a lot of money. And this is important. The fact that a lot of guys in the bioweapons research field think that the US is not putting enough money into bioweapons defense. And Hatfield's one of them. Hatfield has publicly complained about this and a lot of guys in his industry have publicly complained. And we could say, well, if you're a bioweapon scientist, of course you think the government should be spending more money researching bioweapons. Right?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's good for business.

• 19:18Robert Evans?

  But after 9/11, it starts to seem, and especially now that now there's anthrax attacks, suddenly everyone's taking bioweapons seriously and suddenly a lot more money starts going to these programs. Soon as people start dying from anthrax, US government starts putting money into anthrax defense. Wild how that works. Right?

• 19:37Robert Evans?

  So, once they have identified, once the guys at USAMRAT know that this is the AIM strain, that really narrows the field of potential culprits. It really can't be Al Qaeda at this point, right?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:51Robert Evans?

  Because this is the specific strain that USAMRAT researches. It can't like, fucking, Osama bin Laden's not getting his hands on the AIM strain of anthrax. How would he? Right?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:01Robert Evans?

  So this seriously narrows the field of potential culprits, per an article by Marilyn Thompson for the Washington Post, quote, "The evidence, as compelling as a human fingerprint, shifted suspicion away from Al Qaeda and suggested another disturbing possibility, that the anthrax attacks were the work of an American bioweapons insider." Now, obviously, it's possible someone else could have gotten access to the AIM strain of anthrax and weaponized it, but the number of people in the entire country who had the technical know-how to do this with any degree of safety, to take a wet bacteria and turn it into a dry agent that you can use as a weapon in this way, 50 to 100, max, in the whole country, and not a lot more than that in the world.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Just like that guy with that home lab.

• 20:46Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 20:49Robert Evans?

  And so, this is, again, and Stephen Hatfield's gonna be one of those 50 to 100 people, right? So immediately, as soon as they know this, anyone who knows anything about anthrax knows it's gotta be somebody at a high level in research, in weapons research, bioweapons research. There's just not many other options. Outside of the weird mode, some other government who has the ability to have stolen a strain of anthrax from USAMRAT might be doing some sort of weird attack, right? But there's not any evidence that that's the case. But it would have had to have been, that's the only other thing it possibly could have been at this point, right? Is like, another state-level actor doing something crazy, or the much more likely thing, one of these scientists has gone rogue. Now, one of the weird things about this case is the FBI does not seem to have wanted to accept this immediately, right?

• 21:33Robert Evans?

  They really drag their feet on like adopting that piece of information and taking that in to their conception of what's happening here. And in order to understand why they're acting the way they are, you have to remember they're still very much in the dark at this point. This is just days after 9/11, really, like a couple of, not long at all, like literally less than a month. And they're still very much in the dark about a lot of the details of how the 9/11 hijackers had done what they did, right? Like, that's still getting unraveled. And the writing in the letters makes everyone assume Islamic terrorists, and there's not a lot of encouragement for people in law enforcement to look deeper, especially since most of them don't know shit about anthrax like the rest of us.

• 22:14Robert Evans?

  And so, some of the first people to reach out to the feds about the possibility that one of these bioweapons scientists had done this were coworkers of Stephen Hatfield, right? It's bioweapons scientists who start, as soon as they hear that it's the ame strain, they start calling the FBI and being like, "Look, man." And, and I love the story. One of the ballsiest of them is this retired researcher, James R.E. Smith. He had worked directly with weaponized anthrax at Fort Detrick, right? Which is something that Stephen Hatfield never did. Hatfield never worked with anthrax. James Smith is a guy who, he made weaponized anthrax, right? And so, when he heard that the anthrax that had been sent through the mail was of the ame strain, he immediately knew the culprit was one of his colleagues. But then days and days go by without the FBI reaching out to him or any of his peers,

• 22:59Robert Evans?

  and he's like, "Why in the fuck aren't they..." You should be, you should be searching my house! But do you know what I know how to do? Like, that's, that's this guy's attitude, right? Like, "Why aren't you raiding me?" Right? Now, the director of the FBI, and it's weird that the FBI fucks up, because the director of the FBI at this time is an unimpeachable fella you might know named Robert Mueller.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Shut the fuck up!

• 23:22Robert Evans?

  Oh, Bonnie Moles! That's right, baby!

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 23:27Robert Evans?

  So he puts the Washington Field Office in charge of investigating the Anthrax attacks, which is weird because the Washington Field Office is also in charge of investigating the 9/11 attacks. This is means that you've got this 35 FBI agents who are investigating both of these things, which is like a lot, maybe too much for 35 people's plates. That's a lot. I feel like 35 people for each of these cases would be reasonable, you know, if not more. Now, when it came to the Anthrax case, these, the Washington Field Office of the FBI did gain the help of another 15 USPS inspectors, which, and those guys are sharp, like the postal office feds are scary guys. Because obviously, this is a postal crime, you know?

• 24:12Robert Evans?

  So they're all working together on this shit. Only, but it's one of those things, you know, the USPS inspectors are good at what they do. FBI agents have a certain competences, but they are not, in general, experts on science or experts on biological and chemical weapons. Only eight of the FBI agents in the Washington Office had relevant scientific experience, which means at this point PhDs. So there are eight PhD, science PhDs on the team, which sounds like a lot and like would be in any normal situation. But that means you only really have eight people on this team who adequately understand immediately what the early evidence means.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:50Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  The USPS guys are just like, I can tell you if it's a book or not.

• 24:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I can tell you how much they paid for their stamps. I don't know, bro. I work for the post office. You know who else works for the post office?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Your mama? Oh, sorry.

• 25:07Robert Evans?

  I was gonna say the 9/11 hijackers, but that's a, that's a theory I have. We'll talk about that when we come back.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

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• 25:45Robert Evans?

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• 26:44Robert Evans?

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• 26:54Robert Evans?

  We're back plugging my documentary Loose Mail about how the post office did 9/11. That's surely not going to blow up my career and reputation. It's gonna be good. It's gonna be good. Everyone can do whatever now. It's fine. I don't know if you've heard the news lately.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I did.

• 27:13Robert Evans?

  People don't get in trouble for things anymore. So the guy leading the FBI investigation at this point in time was the, was an assistant director, an assistant director, obviously there's more than one at the FBI, named Van Harp. And Van Harp's background was in organized crime. He was very competent at prosecuting like mob cases, right? His skill was in building networks of informants and interrogating people to get informations about organizations, right? And that's useful for those things. It's not really useful for this. He has no competence in the bioweapons field. He doesn't know what he's doing here. He has no reason...

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Give me a guy. I'll interrogate the fuck out of him.

• 27:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'll tell you, we don't have a guy. We've got some letters and some poison, you know? Harp's main contribution is that he names the investigation Amerithrax, which is the official name of this, the Amerithrax Investigation. The Amerithrax Tax. Great work.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  C+.

• 28:12Robert Evans?

  I'm really glad. Whatever college you went to, you know, you didn't pay him enough. So, and he goes, this, this tells you, he has, he has full on cop investigator brain, because he becomes obsessed immediately, rather than being really interested in what's the strain of anthrax is and what biologically is going on with the poison and what that tells him, he gets obsessed with the writing on the letters, like the handwriting, and with the return address of that one letter that was returned to fourth grade, that Greendale School, right, in Colorado, or not Colorado, that's community, I forget what Greendale this was supposed to be, different one. Now, a smarter man than Harp might have said, hey, whoever did this is clearly very intelligent, and the letters are written in a weird blocky

• 28:57Robert Evans?

  style, which is probably just the result of someone disguising their handwriting.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  New Jersey, by the way.

• 29:02Robert Evans?

  Because no one's smart enough, huh?

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Greendale, Greendale School is in Franklin Park, New Jersey, by the way.

• 29:07Robert Evans?

  Jersey, yes, thank you, Sophie.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  You're welcome.

• 29:09Robert Evans?

  Nobody's smart enough to weaponize anthrax would use their normal handwriting on the letter, right? They would do something like make it weird block letters.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  This blocky shit is real, yeah.

• 29:20Robert Evans?

  But he, he's convinced that there's something to, which is, again, he buys into the stuff that a lot of Americans and all cops do, that forensic science works when it often and mostly doesn't. Like, you know, fingerprints are kinda real, but often not the way that the cops say that they are. And stuff like handwriting analysis and gait analysis is fucking, I'd say it's voodoo, but like voodoo, I have a lot more respect for, than, than that kind of bullshit, you know?

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Totally. Even on the reporting, the, the Kirk reporting, when they were like, we got a elbow indentation, it's like, what the fuck are you gonna really do with that?

• 29:59Robert Evans?

  And again, they were so like, Cash Patel was so like, yeah, we're gonna get him.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Oh, Cash Patel.

• 30:04Robert Evans?

  You, no, no, because you don't know what, again, and it's, it's the, the FBI was more competent at this point in time, but as the story's going to tell you, not that competent still.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:16Robert Evans?

  So Harp, or like, he is, he gets fucking obsessed. Van Harp gets fucking obsessed with the handwriting and with the return address on this. And he's certain that they're gonna find something there. So he appoints another veteran agent to specifically looking into those aspects of the letter. And this guy, again, is an agent whose only experience is in busting organized crime and the like. His name is Bob Roth, and so he starts investigating the letter itself. Bob Roth, I love that. Bob Roth, yeah, a lot of Fed names here. He consults a handwriting analyst, per the Washington Post. This analyst, quote, "Proposed setting up a computer sting operation in an effort to identify the killer, Smith, the analyst, would try to lure the perpetrator to two

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  websites, handtomein.com and anthraxhunt.com, by making provocative statements about the killer's handwriting and publicizing the sites in interviews and on TVs America's Most Wanted." Right? So that's their plan, is we'll, we'll make a website to trap this guy. He's gonna wanna brag, or something like that, right? Again, it's all like, well, I watched some movies about serial killers' logic. Totally. Which is as real as most of this behavioral analysis shit tends to be. So the FBI spends two months on this sting operation, and there's absolutely no result. Nothing, they get nothing. They do get people to go to those websites, and two of them are on their list, but those guys didn't do anything. Like, on their suspect list, but those guys don't, like, it's useless. It's just a hobby. It's just a waste.

• 31:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Just a hobby, yeah, they're just, they're just, they're just like tweaking the FBI's nose. And in fact, as time goes on, it becomes clear to everyone, nothing the FBI is doing seems to be bringing them any close to a culprit. And this is a real problem for the Bureau, because they missed 9/11, right? They're not the only agency that should have caught 9/11, but stopping 9/11s is one of the FBI's jobs, and they did not. And now these anthrax attacks have happened, and they can't catch the anthrax attack guys. And it wasn't all that long ago that a federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up, and they didn't stop that. And then, you know, if you go back before that, you've got Ruby Ridge and Waco, the FBI doesn't look great at either of those.

• 32:25Robert Evans?

  So the FBI is really hungry for some good PR. They want this to get solved. They kinda need a win, you know? They're your friend who just got like broken up with and fired from their job in the same week and you're like just taking him out to try to you're like walking up to someone to go to the bathroom like would you just tell him he looks good tonight? Like he needs it, man.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 32:48Robert Evans?

  That's where the FBI is here and that's what's gonna wind up fucking up Stephen Hatfield's life, right? So as this case drags on without any sort of like clear suspects, agents start complaining to their bosses about overtime and about how futile the investigation is. Bob Roth begs publicly to be removed from the case. And this brings me back to that bioweapons expert, James Smith, that I talked about, right? The guy who gets angry that the FBI hasn't shown up at his house yet? Now, by this point, he's so furious that he decides to take action. So he sends a letter to Tom Ridge, the chief of Homeland Security, where he says, hey, I'm a bio, I'm one of the the top handful of bioweapons experts in the United States. I understand anthrax.

• 33:30Robert Evans?

  And he describes the kind of whoever pulled off this attack, these are, this is his work experience and this is his educational background. And then he ends the letter by saying, this individual is me, because this man has balls big enough to crush a Mack truck, right?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 33:45Robert Evans?

  Like, he is like, I could have done this easily. Why haven't you come to my house? And the FBI does go to his house at this point, right? Now, obviously, they don't find anything, he's innocent, but he accomplishes his goal, which is that the feds after him, especially, and not that none of them, some of them had been looking in the direction of bioweapon scientists, but not enough. And he really gets them to turn their focus to Fort Detrick and another facility in Utah where weaponized anthrax was stored and scientists who knew how to do that shit worked, right? So kudos to, like, the boss of sending a letter to the director of Homeland Security being like, I am one of the only people in the country who could have pulled off this terrorist attack. What are you doing? Where are you?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Also, for Steve Hatfield, like, he always exaggerated his resume, like, 25 to 75%. So it's like... They're gonna need to account for that.

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  And that's gonna be one of the things that does is part of why he gets in hot water is that it's maybe some people will say he exaggerated his competence at making biological, dry biological agents, and that may be part of why he got focused on, although I don't really want to labor on that because again, this is the FBI's fault, not Hatfield's fault.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:03Robert Evans?

  So this does create a problem, the fact that the like, the FBI is now focusing on the actual anthrax itself and on these scientists, because once they realize that's the kind of investigation this is, they also realize, we don't have the equipment in-house or the people to analyze anthrax properly. Like, we can't do this on our own. We have to use outside bioweapons laboratories, and the people working at them are all our suspects. Like, the only people that we can trust to analyze this stuff are also the people who might be weaponizing it, right? You see how this is a problem?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  This is a problem. What about the guy who wrote in?

• 35:42Robert Evans?

  Right. Well, they do. They do check in on him first. They knock on his door, right? Like, they do check him out. And he's like, and then they start talking to him, and they start talking to other guys. And as they're interviewing these guys, they start to get like, some hints, right? And this leads them, you know, because nothing else is working, they opt for the law enforcement equivalent of homeopathic medicine, which is criminal profiling. And the only things that they have to go on when they're trying to make a profile is the nature of the attack, that it's an anthrax attack, and the targets that were picked, right? As well as the handwriting and the messages left on the letters, very little. And from this, the feds concluded that the terrorist was a middle-aged white man with a scientific background who was angry at the government and picked his

• 36:26Robert Evans?

  targets so they'd make the news. And I think this is a case of after Smith reaches out to them and says, it's definitely a scientist, they work backwards and are like, our analysts have come up with a profile, right? Of this guy. Per the Washington Post, quote, "It was likely, FBI analyst James Fitzgerald said, that the criminal had timed the letters to take advantage of the 9/11 panic and hoped to use them to draw attention to his special, as-yet-unknown cause." Now, that's not super helpful.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Was it totally unrelated?

• 36:57Robert Evans?

  We don't actually know fully, but we'll get to that.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:00Robert Evans?

  I will say this is a thing where there's not a hundred percent answer as to what happened here. We still don't have a, we have a probable person who did it, who's dead now, but we don't know a hundred percent who did it or why.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 37:13Robert Evans?

  We actually still don't. That's one of the weird things about this. But, once investigators start going down this road, and once they have this, this profile together, increasingly, the name Steven Hatfield starts coming up in their interrogations of other scientists and their interviews, because he's a middle-aged white scientist who's just been fucked over by the CIA, right? Because they denied him a top-secret security clearance, and then somebody got his security clearance taken away, and that starts costing him work, right? He's getting, like, he's already has a cause to be angry, is, is what people are saying, right? And once the FBI starts whittling their suspect list down, then they're hearing this guy's name over and over again, Hatfield's one of the few people who knows how, who could

• 37:57Robert Evans?

  make this, and he's pissed off at the government right now, you know? Now, part of why his name comes up is, I think, he seems to have been, shall we say, maybe a polarizing guy in the workplace? There are some stories about him doing stuff like eating snacks while in his, like, wearing his, like, the, the full hazmat suit, and like, stories that he, like, made out with a girlfriend at the, the biohazard facility and stuff.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  What?

• 38:21Robert Evans?

  It's, it's hard to tell how much of them are true, which is why I'm not laboring on them a lot, because like, once he becomes the public suspect, people just start saying shit about Steven Hatfield, right? What I think it's fair and safe to say is that he's a polarizing figure, and so a number of his colleagues, when the feds are like, "We, one of you guys has to have done this", he's the name that comes up to some of his colleagues, right?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, this guy's a weird asshole.

• 38:47Robert Evans?

  That's, I think, what is basically happening is some of his colleagues think that and that's how his name starts coming out, right? Now Hatfield's job at SAIC involved training special forces guys for encountering chemical and biological weapons labs in attacks. And as part of that, one of his duties was designing theoretical bioweapon dispersal devices. In essence, he, part of his job was to think like a terrorist and to build shit like, like recent, like not long before the attack, he builds like a backpack device that could, quote, "spray germs in a combat situation." And obviously, any country with a large military is going to have guys doing stuff like this, right? Thinking up horrible things so you can figure out how to defend against them.

• 39:31Robert Evans?

  That's the best way to look at it, right? But now that there's an anthrax attack, suddenly this guy who before had been doing a job that was like patriotic, seems a lot more suspicious, right? Well, this guy knows how to make terrorist weapons for a living and we just had one of these attacks and he seems angry at the government and maybe unstable. Now, once the FBI starts looking into Hatfield, they do uncover some of the same stuff that I brought up last episode, right? Both that this guy's in Rhodesia during that anthrax outbreak, that he's got, I mean, the fact that he goes to Rhodesia at all, kind of sketchy, like that he's got, he's got this kind of weird history. They, they find out about the lecture that I talked about last episode, in which Steve gave way too much detail on how you could sneak biological weapons into the White House using a wheelchair, right?

• 40:16Robert Evans?

  Stories like that don't make you seem more innocent to the FBI in this scenario.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Totally, but his grievance is with the government. It's not with like the fucking tabloids, right?

• 40:28Robert Evans?

  Yes. And again, when you think about it, it never made all that much sense that they were so certain it was this guy, because there's never that much evidence. But they're desperate. Again, they'd missed 9/11 and they're really under pressure to not fuck this up and this is the only lead they've got. And it just seems like it really must be him. And I think part of it is that... A lot of these FBI investigators, when they start talking to Hatfield's coworkers and reading up on him, they don't like him either. And so they decide the fact that they don't think he's a good person means that he must have done this. And those are two separate things, right? Like, you can feel however you want about stuff. There's a lot of people I dislike that I don't think could weaponize anthrax, or would, right?

• 41:13Robert Evans?

  Now, obviously, there's some blame in the fact that Hatfield's resume, he listed himself as having a working knowledge of wet and dry biological agents, which is why he's on that shortlist of people who could have done this. But, you know, that was also his job, right? And even Hatfield has said, he expected the FBI to look in on to him. He expected them to search his house. He was waiting for it, right? And so he's not surprised when they, they like get a hold of the fake bioweapons lab that he made for his training gig, and they test that to see if he made anthrax in it, and it turns up negative, right? But he's still their suspect. In November of 2001, a second letter is sent to Tom Dashil's office. Now, this one, they, they had new protocols, so they were irradiating the letters that came in at that point. So the powder is safe. I think it's been like rendered

• 41:58Robert Evans?

  safe via radiation by the time that they open it up. So it's, it's not dangerous when they open it up.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  It'll just give you cancer, no problem.

• 42:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe it'll just give you cancer. I don't know. But this letter was sent from London. They know that much. And at the same time it's sent, Hatfield is in England, training to become a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, right?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck.

• 42:19Robert Evans?

  So, and agents confirmed that he rented a car during his visit, which no one else in his group did. So that seems really suspicious.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:26Robert Evans?

  And so that one, that does, no, no, that is a thing where if, if you're, if you're a responsible agent working with that info, that's a reason to look into this guy. I think even Stephen Hatfield would say like, yeah, that's a thing you want to check up on, right? Now, where things get more reachy is another package arrives a little later at a Nevada office for Microsoft with anthrax in it. And this one was mailed from Malaysia. And Stephen's girlfriend at the time came from Kuala Lumpur. Now, she didn't live in Malaysia, still. It's pretty thin stuff to be like, are you thinking he like roped her or a family member into like, but how did he get the anthrax over there? Like, what, what is the whole chain of custody you imagine for this anthrax attack that he, you're thinking

• 43:07Robert Evans?

  he did because his girlfriend come from? Like, that shows you how thin the FBI's evidence is, right? Like, that's like, okay, man, I don't know. I think you're reaching now, homie.

• 43:18Robert Evans?

  But the fact that, you know, they've got, that there's just enough here, you know, that thing about London is just suspicious enough.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:24Robert Evans?

  That he never, no one ever overtakes him on their list. And so by the start of 2002, Hatfield is not publicly suspect, number one, but he's the FBI's only real suspect. And they've talked to enough of his former and current colleagues that a lot of people in his orbit know that he's being investigated very closely, right? He is aware that they're looking at him very closely. And this is where a molecular biologist and citizen investigator named Barbara Rosenberg enters the picture. Now, unlike most citizen investigators, Barb did have real qualifications. She was a biological arms control expert employed by the Federation of American Scientists, Chemical and Biological Arms Control Program, right?

• 44:07Robert Evans?

  So FAS, the Federation of American Scientists, has a chemical and biological arms control program. She's with that. And this is a small field, as we've talked about, and given her position in that field, Rosenberg is aware that the FBI is questioning her colleagues. And she is hearing the same name over and over again that her colleagues are giving out and that the FBI is hearing. She's hearing Stephen Hatfield's name, right? Now, the responsible thing for her to have done would have been to sit back and wait because Barbara knew damn well that Hatfield was being looked at. But she didn't think the feds were looking hard enough, so she starts writing memos, which are effectively blog posts, and she's publishing them on the FAS website. She publishes the first and January of 2002. Per an article in Salon by Anthony York, Rosenberg says her memos began as an effort

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  to pressure the FBI, which she is repeatedly accused of dropping the ball in its investigation. "I began just putting together the data that was available and discussing it on this email list. Then people started sending me information. I sort of became a center for collecting information on the subject," she says.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  All right. Good on you, Barbara.

• 45:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you can see where this comes from a good place, but you can also see that the whole citizen investigator thing can end badly a lot of the time, right? Is it maybe, maybe people are putting together stuff that doesn't need to be put together? Now, Rosenberg doesn't name Hatfield in any of the memos that she published online, but some of these she's sending directly to the feds. And she does describe him. She describes the likely culprit as someone who, quote, "must be angry at some biodefense agency." And a couple of months later, in early spring 2002, she writes another memo. Early in the investigation, a number of inside experts, at least five that I know about, gave the FBI the name of one specific individual as the most likely suspect. That person fits the FBI profile in most respects.

• 45:51Robert Evans?

  Now, she doesn't name Hatfield at this point, but she describes his background, history, and personality in such detail that anyone tangential to their small world would have recognized him. Because it was so obvious who she was talking about, Hatfield opted not to publish this memo openly. She put it on a listserv operated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which Salon describes as "a place where bioweapons experts and journalists lurk to share theories on, among other things, the anthrax killer." Some of the theories that have been voiced on the listserv have found their way into media reports, others have not. So she puts it, instead of publishing it openly, she puts it on basically a forum where she knows it's going to find its way to the media, right? And find its way to people in government and people in law enforcement.

• 46:34Robert Evans?

  And you can critique her, and Hatfield will, for basically dropping the speculation in a place where it was guaranteed to get press attention while pretending that it's not what I'm trying to do. And it does get a lot of attention. The Senate Judiciary Committee invites her to a closed-door meeting with several FBI agents, including Roth. And we don't know precisely what's said in that meeting, or if she names Hatfield, but that's what Hatfield believes, and with some good reason. Because the day after this meeting, June 25, 2002, FBI agents visit and search his apartment. Now, Hatfield had consented to allow agents to swab his apartment. He actually goes to the FBI offices to sign a consent form to let them swab for evidence of anthrax, right? Because he thinks it's of course reasonable that they're looking into me. They should be.

• 47:18Robert Evans?

  They should be looking into everyone at my level. And I want to clear up any suspicion immediately. Yes, you can swab my house, right? And that's what he thinks they're going to do. When he gets back home, he sees that they've torn his apartment apart, and that his apartment is surrounded by news vans. There's dozens of cameramen all around, because the FBI tipped off the press that they were raiding this guy. Because, again, they need good PR. They need to be seen taking action to stop this. They need to be seen to have caught the motherfucker, right? And they don't have enough to charge him yet, and I might say, probably shouldn't be ruining people's names if you don't have enough evidence to charge them on anything, but... They're kind of desperate. So again, this is like all of the stuff they're never supposed

• 48:01Robert Evans?

  to do. The FBI is not supposed to comment on ongoing investigations, let alone tip the press off that they're going to be raiding someone's house, that they have no fucking hard evidence on, right? Like, they were so sure they were gonna find something, I think is why they did it, right? But they don't find anything. Now, that said, the fact that nothing gets found here, the fact that he doesn't get charged, I think if you're a responsible reporter, I hope that if I was looking at this at the time, I'd go, oh, well, maybe it's not, it must not be this guy, right? They searched his house, they didn't find any evidence of it. And he does have that girlfriend. But he's, his girlfriend's Malaysian, you know? So the media starts writing about Stephen Hatfield at this point, right? Now, they don't always name him for liability

• 48:43Robert Evans?

  reasons, but they are aware too. And there's money to be made in writing about this, because this is the big case at the time. And one of the major guys who's really focusing on Stephen Hatfield is Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who, uh, Oh, this motherfucker. This motherfucker. He starts publishing columns in which he names Hatfield Mr. Z, and cites confidential sources, which are FBI agents, to make the case that Hatfield had only avoided arrest thus far because he was a white man and not an Arab national. Kristof also brought up Hatfield's relationship to Rhodesia, and without evidence accused him of participating in genocide in a column framed as an open letter to the FBI. Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak among humans

• 49:28Robert Evans?

  ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978 to 80? There is evidence that the anthrax was released by the white Rhodesian army fighting against black guerrillas, and Mr. Z has claimed that he participated in the white army's much-feared cellu scouts. Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian army in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks? And like, no. First off, the Rhodesian military used chemical and biologic- used cholera, weaponized it. We know they did. They did it, and we know how they did it. They wrote about it.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  He's like, "Oh, I gotta bang this column out."

• 50:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And we also know-

• 50:04Speaker 01

  I'm on a deadline.

• 50:05Robert Evans?

  Hatfield's in college when he's in Rhodesia. He doesn't know how to weaponize anthrax. He's like 20. Like, he's not a doctor yet. He was a- If he served in the military, he was like, I think he did for a period of time, but he's like a private, right? Like, he's not heading up their bio- He's not a scientist then. It's this classic, like, "Well, he's a bioweapons expert now, so clearly when he was a child, he must have also been a bioweapons expert." Like, no, man. He was a college student. He didn't know shit yet.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Crazy.

• 50:35Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 50:36Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  That's a hilarious reminder that, like, sometimes these people don't know shit about what they're writing about.

• 50:43Robert Evans?

  No, no, that is the- Not knowing shit about fuck is the Nicholas Kristoff story in a nutshell. So Rosenberg insists that none of this, none of what happens to Hatfield after this point is her fault, and that she took pains not to name him, right? Hatfield obviously feels differently. I think he's going to sue her after this. He's very angry about what she did and about Kristoff. And it is worth noting that in her memos, Rosenberg engages in similar kinds of conspiratorial thinking to Kristoff. Per one that she put out in June of 2002, "The suspect is part of a clique that includes high-level former USAMRIT scientists and high-level former FBI officials. Some of these people may wish to conceal any suspicions they have about the identity of the perpetrator in order to protect programs and sensitive information. This group most likely agreed with David Franz, former commander of USAMRIT,

• 51:27Robert Evans?

  when he said, 'I think a lot of good has come from it, the anthrax attacks. From a biological or medical standpoint, we have now five people who have died, but we're about to put $6 billion into our budget into defending against bioterrorism.'" And like, that's a fucked up thing for David Franz to say, but she's alleging that, like, there's a conspiracy of FBI agents and scientists to carry out anthrax attacks to get money from the government, right?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  It's like, you're not supposed to say that part out loud.

• 51:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You gotta have more than seems right to me if you're gonna make that claim, right?

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Oh, so funny.

• 52:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So I would argue, I think that these allegations, she's, she's out on a limb here, right? Um, now Rosenberg does write that Hatfield's career setbacks caused by the CIA might be a motive, but also, and this is where it's incoherent, is like, she's both saying that like, well, this guy's got a reason to be angry at the government because the CIA kind of fucked him over, but also he's in with a high level clique of scientists and feds who are going to cover up an anthrax attack together? Like, he both can't keep his security clearance and he's part of this conspiracy? Totally. Which is it? Because it seems like both can't happen, right? Like, um, at any rate, all of this has a calamitous impact on Steve Hatfield's life and career. In very short order, SAIC lets him go. This may have had roots in the fact

• 52:44Robert Evans?

  that the CIA didn't consider him fit for a security clearance, a ball which had started rolling before the anthrax attacks, but that can't be all of it. The DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, considered Hatfield their very best bioweapons expert. He, he is very highly regarded by them. And they thought he is so indispensable that when SAIC lets him go for like laboratory etiquette violations, basically, they begged to have him brought back as a contractor so that he can continue teaching classes to guys about to be deployed to Afghanistan. And SAIC agrees. Like, that's how much the DIA likes this guy. Now, because he's a qualified professional with in-demand skills, Hatfield succeeds in getting another job after he loses his position at SAIC very quickly. He's hired to be the

• 53:26Robert Evans?

  Associate Director of a Louisiana State University program for training first responders in how to deal with terrorist attacks. However, the program is funded by a DOJ grant, and once the DOJ finds out Hatfield's gotten the job, they order LSU to cease and desist using him, and the job offer is rescinded. So now he's lost his job, and maybe he did something to justify it at SAIC. I've certainly heard that alleged, I don't know. But the second one is the DOJ saying, don't hire this guy because we think he's a terrorist, right? Wow. And he hasn't been convicted of shit. Yeah. Things only get worse from there. You know what else gets worse? [laughing] Our sponsors. No shade.

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• 55:41Robert Evans?

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• 55:52Robert Evans?

  And we're back, and we're talking about Stephen Hatfield's life starting to unravel. Per an article in The Atlantic, quote, "Other prospective employment fell through. No one would return his calls. One job vanished after Hatfield emerged from a meeting with prospective employers to find FBI agents videotaping them. His savings dwindled, and he moved in with his girlfriend." So That sucks. That is, the fact that like, coming out of a job interview to find FBI agents videotaping you, this is part of a tactic that the FBI uses. This is a known thing. Like, they talk about this. They train agents to do this. It's called bumper locking. And it's called bumper locking because the idea here is that you are physically surveilling someone 24/7

• 56:34Robert Evans?

  whenever they leave their house, and you are doing it so obviously that they know the whole time, right? And the reason you do that is so they'll slip up, right? So that they'll fuck up, they'll screw up when driving, and they can get pulled over and searched. You can get them with some sort of petty charges then, right? Like, you're just trying to make them fuck up because you're sure they're, they did whatever it is you suspect them of, and you just need to make them slip up, you know? Like, that's why you do this. Now, we might call this harassment and abuse, and like, hideously unethical to do to a citizen who has not committed a crime as far as anyone's aware of, right? But this is what the FBI does. Brad Garrett, an FBI special agent at the time, explained to Frontline, quote, "Management was convinced he was the right guy. And so as a result, there were,

• 57:19Robert Evans?

  you know, intense surveillance, bumper lock type surveillance, of Dr. Hatfield that went on for months." Now Hatfield would later allege that local law enforcement, presumably acting at the FBI's behest, harassed him as well. He was pulled over heading back from dinner one night in DC and issued a warning for failing to signal a lane change. And then after he leaves that stop, like, several minutes later, he's pulled over again for a turn signal-related issue. And the cop asks if he's been drinking, and Hatfield says, "I had a single drink with dinner." He gets ordered out of the car and immediately arrested. He tries to have, like, a blood alcohol test performed to prove that he's sober, but they won't let him do that. And he's forced to attend counseling, and he spends the weekend in jail. Now, do I know that Hatfield was definitely sober during that stop? Of course not. And he will

• 58:03Robert Evans?

  admit that as this nightmare went on, he began drinking more heavily. But I guess ultimately, I don't have trouble believing that the dragnet around him was more to blame for what happened than his personal habits, because what's going on here is insane. Now, because the bioterrorism weapons research world is a small one, Steve's social circle is made up of a lot of his colleagues. And so he loses that social circle because these people have to detach from him in order to avoid damaging their own careers because he is suspected of terrorism. One of the few colleagues who stuck with him is a guy named Jim Klein. And Jim says, basically, like, I stayed with him because I just thought he was going to kill himself. He told The Atlantic, "We have the world against you, and only a few people are willing to look you in the eye and tell you, I believe you. I mean, to this day, I really don't know how the guy survived."

• 58:46Speaker 01

  That's so sad.

• 58:48Robert Evans?

  It's a bummer. So, five weeks after that first June raid where his house gets searched, the FBI searches his house again, this time with a warrant and dogs. And Hatfield makes the mistake of petting one of the dogs, and the dog reacts positively to him, and the agent handling the dog says, "He's identified you as the Anthrax Killer."

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ. What?

• 59:09Robert Evans?

  As Stephen later recalled, "It took every ounce of restraint to stop from laughing." They said, "We know you did it. We know you didn't mean to kill anyone." I said, "Am I under arrest?" They said, "No." I walked out, rented a car, and went to see an attorney about suing the hell out of these people.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:23Robert Evans?

  But the...

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's a normal response, right? And he does, he does, and, you know, he gets... That's how this all ends, but it goes on for a long time before we get to that point. The raids continued. His storage locker gets raided by the FBI, and then a farm his dad owns gets raided by the FBI. The FBI raids his girlfriend's townhouse because he's living there. She later tells The Atlantic, "They told me your boyfriend murdered five people," as they tore through her home, destroying some of her valued possessions. So, as August of 2002 dawns, the FBI has done all of this to Stephen Hatfield and found no evidence linking him to the Anthrax attacks, or, as far as I'm aware, any crime at all. Now, at this point, you might say, "The whole FBI has been going after this one man

• 1:00:10Robert Evans?

  to try to find a single connection to this crime, and we haven't found one. Maybe he's innocent. Maybe he's not the guy, right?" You and I might think that, but that's not how Attorney General John Ashcroft thought. Now, John Ashcroft, being a crafty man, decides to do something that no US Attorney General has ever done. He decides to name the subject of an active investigation. And on August 6, 2002, he tells America that Stephen Hatfield is a person of interest in the anthrax attacks, right? Which is basically saying, "Hey, everybody, get him. This guy did it," you know? Incredible. I hope he got so much money. He does. I mean, and again, I don't like him now. He's in the Trump admin now. I don't

• 1:00:54Robert Evans?

  think he's a good person, but he is absolutely the victim here. Yes. So the harassment continues. Hatfield's phone is tapped. Surveillance cameras are installed outside his girlfriend's condo. When his lawyer offered to have Stephen wear a tracking device, the feds said no. They even turned down his lawyer offers, "I'll let, any time he leaves the house, you can have FBI agents drive with him." And they're like, "No." His attorney later alleged that the FBI was sweating him, quote, "trying to get him to go over the edge." Given where Hatfield sits today in the Trump administration, it would be easy for me to just question his claims about what they did out of partisan disgust, but this really is one of the worst stories of federal overreach into a civilian's life I've ever read. The FBI is not supposed to comment at all in matters pertaining to ongoing investigations.

• 1:01:38Robert Evans?

  But for Hatfield, not only do they name him, FBI agents keep leaking info, embarrassing shit that they find about him to the media. A lot of the quotes and stories about him come out initially because the FBI leaks them to people, right? All this stuff about kind of the sketchier parts of his back, like, that's how some of that stuff gets out, right? And, you know, Hatfield's reputation isn't spotless, and I'm certainly not trying to, like, carry water for the guy, but also, basically 100% of people, if the whole FBI started trying to uncover ugly things about them, would find some ugly things, right? Yeah. It's why it's fucked up for them to do stuff like that, you know? And the fact that he had a, he was a guy who had done some and said some stuff that wasn't

• 1:02:23Robert Evans?

  great in the past does not justify the harassment that he faced from the fucking FBI. Per the Atlantic, quote, "With Hatfield's face splashed all over the news, strangers on the streets stared. Some asked for his autograph. Hatfield was humiliated. Embarrassed to be recognized, he stopped going to the gym. He stopped visiting friends, concerned that the FBI would harass them too. Soon, he stopped going out in public altogether. Once an energetic and ambitious professional who reveled in 14-hour workdays, Hatfield now found himself staring at the walls all day. Television became his steady companion. "I'd never really watched the news before," Hatfield says, "and now I'm seeing my name all over the place and all these idiots like Geraldo Rivera saying, 'Is this the anthrax animal? Is this the guy who murdered innocent people? You might have as well have hooked me up to a battery. It was sanctioned torture.'"

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Jim Bro down.

• 1:03:07Robert Evans?

  This goes on for a full year and then a second year.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Does this happen during Bush?

• 1:03:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is throughout the whole Bush administration. This goes on for years.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Wild. He's not like radicalized against a Republican administration.

• 1:03:24Robert Evans?

  No. I mean, he's, I think he's anti, I don't think he likes the Bush admin very much, but like, again, a lot of Trump guys don't, right? And the whole distrust of the FBI thing, Trump has too. Like, it makes a lot of sense why he winds up in Trump's orbit, right? Like, he's the only one who really has a justified reason to be as angry at the FBI as they all are.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:03:46Robert Evans?

  And the media too, to be fair, you know? So Hatfield starts drinking more heavily, right? And his life narrows to obsessively watching the allegations against him in the news and blacking out, right? Eventually, in August of 2003, he takes offensive action. He sues the federal government. And this process winds on for a while, but it does, eventually, he's able to get Special Agent Harp on the stand. And Harp has to admit that the FBI is going so hard after Hatfield because it was publicly seen as having fucked up in the face of several major terrorist attacks and they needed something to like, restore public confidence. All of these leaks to the press by the FBI were part of a strategy to rebuild that trust. Harp himself admitted to speaking confidentially to more than a dozen journalists, you know,

• 1:04:31Robert Evans?

  giving details of Hatfield's story. For their part, the press was happy to have articles and guilty or not, Hatfield was a story. One reporter even called his girlfriend's former in-laws because her husband had died like a year or two earlier. And they asked if they thought that Hatfield had murdered her husband, like their dead relative. Like, that's insane. Like, that's just crazy shit from a journalist. Um, there's numerous other gotcha moments that failed to pan out in the years that Hatfield spends under investigations. Investigators found that he had been taking Cipro while staying in an isolated cabin, which sounds really suspicious. You know, why would he be taking this powerful antibiotic?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Did he have a UTI?

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  He had like a nasal and sinus infection. Yeah.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Okay. I only know Cipro from UTIs.

• 1:05:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, it's good for other stuff, too.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Okay, gotcha.

• 1:05:21Robert Evans?

  And he also, this isolated cabin that the news described was like a three-bedroom weekend home in Virginia that his friend owned, right? Um, perhaps the craziest moment came near the end of 2002. Per the Washington Post, "The FBI learned from a Hatfield business associate that he'd once talked hypothetically about how a smart person might dispose of materials contaminated with anthrax by throwing them in a body of water. The tip was specific enough to lead a team to the Frederick Municipal Forest in a network of ponds, then solidly frozen. Agents sealed off Bucolat country roads with crime scene tape, then expert divers plunged in. Over the course of several frigid weeks, divers pulled up a collection of intriguing items. The most promising was a plastic or plexiglass box that appeared to be fashioned into a crude scientific glove box with holes cut into the sides to allow for gloved hands

• 1:06:05Robert Evans?

  to work within it." Now, I found news reports at the time, several of them, that describe it this way, as like, "Oh, it's a scientific plexiglass glove box, you know, for working on specimens that are dangerous to touch." Do you want to know what it seems like it actually was?

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I'm so nervous.

• 1:06:22Robert Evans?

  It was probably a turtle trap. It was probably a turtle trap.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Why did I think it was a jerk-off machine? I was like, probably. I was closer to Courtney.

• 1:06:35Robert Evans?

  We know Virginia, Courtney. It's every, every lake is filled with jerk-off machines. The FBI found one glove box and 1,000 jerk-off machines in these lakes. It was just divers bringing up jerk-off machines all day long. It's been a third of their budget storing them.

• 1:06:52Robert Evans?

  That was the FBI's real problem in 2003. Too many jerk off machines from the lakes.

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  Incredible.

• 1:06:57Robert Evans?

  So in spring of 2003, Hatfield was being driven by his girlfriend to a paint store when FBI agents bumper locking him ran a red light in a school zone during school hours when there were children out. Hatfield has his girlfriend pull over so he can take a picture of the agents and yell at them for endangering kids. The agents drive off and they drive off and because of how close they are to him, they run over his foot and injure him as they're doing it.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:07:21Robert Evans?

  And because he has no health insurance or savings, he turns down an ambulance ride, right? To go to the hospital and then Washington police who show up ticket him for, quote, "walking to create a hazard." Because again,

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Oh my fucking god.

• 1:07:33Robert Evans?

  The whole security state is focused on this one dude, right? Like, again, I don't want to like fucking apologize for him in the present day, but how could this not blow your head up? Right? The whole FBI and a lot of the security state outside of it being focused on just you, right? Like that, that would drive you crazy. That's, that's a crazy thing to deal with. Now by 2004,

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  I think he's justified.

• 1:08:01Robert Evans?

  I understand a little bit, right? Where he comes from here. By 2004, after two years without any leads, the investigation efforts against Hatfield started to ebb. He began to resume something that resembled a normal life, even flying to Sri Lanka in early 2005 to help provide medical relief aid after a terrible tsunami. Gradually, he got his life back, but what he never got was an apology or an official announcement that he was no longer suspected of having done it, right? You know, by the time we hit like 2005, six, it's been years. I think most people who know him are like, that probably wasn't Steve and they probably would have arrested him by now if he had done it, right? But they don't say anything.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  How long does the lawsuit take?

• 1:08:42Robert Evans?

  I mean, it, the lawsuits are going on for years after he stops being the suspect, right? Because once it's announced that he's no longer the suspect, it gets a lot easier to sue people, you know? And, you know, this is not a podcast about that kind of stuff, so we're not going to go into detail about it. But what I will say is that in 2007, the FBI brings in a new team to look at the case, because the old one had not done the job, right? And so after six years, they're like, we should probably get some new guys looking at this, maybe we could solve it, you know? And this new team, except Hatfield's protestations of innocence, right? Either they're just smarter than their colleagues, or they're legitimately smart and are like, what the fuck is wrong with you guys? Like, you didn't find anything and you kept harassing him for five years? The fuck is wrong with you?

• 1:09:24Robert Evans?

  The most compelling piece of evidence against the idea that Hatfield had done this is that despite his expertise and despite what he did for a living, Stephen Hatfield had never in his entire life had direct access to anthrax. He was a virus guy. It's a bacteria. Oh, right. This is not his kind of agent, right? He knows theoretically how to weaponize anthrax, right? I think that's the claim that at least that he makes on his, I don't know how to do it, so I can't say that he could. But my understanding of his resume is that he said that he had the ability to, but he had never worked with anthrax, right? And there were guys who had, and those guys would be the ones that you'd suspect of this, right? So the FBI at this point in time, they moved to focusing, and it's one of those things,

• 1:10:08Robert Evans?

  it's eventually made public that he's no longer being looked at, but they never like to be as, to do the thing they should do, which you should make a full court press to be like, we fucked up, we're sorry, right? That does not happen. But the FBI does stop looking at him, and they do, they eventually find another guy, a senior microbiologist at USAMRed named Bruce Edward Ivins. Ivins is an anthrax expert. Anthrax was his specialty, right? He had actually consulted with the FBI when they started the investigation, and he's not someone that they had looked into previously, but now they start doing the same things to him that they did to Hatfield, right? They're bumper locking him, they're following him, they're telling him that he murdered people, right?

• 1:10:52Robert Evans?

  He loses his job, and... He doesn't have either, you know, I don't know if it's just his, his mental state. He's not as mentally stable as Hatfield, or he just doesn't have the support network. But in July of 2008, he checks himself into a psychiatric clinic for treatment of depression and anxiety. And then, once he gets out, he takes a fatal dose of Tylenol and kills himself. He dies at 62.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:11:18Robert Evans?

  Right? Now, if you ask the FBI today, Ivans did it, right? That's their conclusion. He killed himself because they were getting too close. He must have been the guy, right? Maybe.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  That's a lot of fucking Tylenol.

• 1:11:32Robert Evans?

  Maybe. He's the guy. We don't actually know. And this is the, this is where I have to tell you, we don't know who did the anthrax attacks. Ivans is the most likely name out there, but there's some reason, there's significant reason to doubt that it was him.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  You're just saying, like, maybe the mental strain of, like, being followed and fucked with like that?

• 1:11:57Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. And I'm also kind of insinuating, maybe that was the FBI's goal with Hatfield. Maybe they cared, they didn't care so much, did he do it? But like, if he kills himself while we're investigating him, we can say, we got him.

• 1:12:11Robert Evans?

  Obviously, he was the guy. An innocent man wouldn't kill himself. Case closed. We're heroes.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  How do these people sleep at night?

• 1:12:18Robert Evans?

  I think that's kind of what the FBI was thinking with Hatfield, and I think they got their way with Ivans. Maybe he did do it. Again, it, there's a good chance he did, because it had to have been a guy like him, right? There's not a lot of guys it could have been. However, the National Academy of Science has since determined that it is not possible to, because the reason they think it's Ivans is they, they basically trace back the, the specific type of aim strain to a jar of anthrax that he made, right? So the FBI is saying, we know the anthrax that killed those people was anthrax that Ivans made, right? But in the years since they made that claim, the National Academy of Science has come out and with actual, serious scientific data said, it's impossible to do that.

• 1:13:04Robert Evans?

  Like it's physically impossible to trace back the origin of an anthrax sample like the one that was collected from the letters, the way that they're claiming they do and tie it to Ivins, which doesn't mean he didn't do it, right? Again, he did have access to anthrax. There are a number of reasons that he may have done it. I'm, I'm very much smoothing out his case. There's a good chance it was him, but the current conclusion of the scientific community is we don't really know. Maybe it was this guy, but the FBI way oversold the, the degree of certainty that they had that it was this guy, right?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  There are probably other people that had access to it too.

• 1:13:37Robert Evans?

  There were some, and again, maybe it was Ivins. I don't know. The theory with Ivins is that again, his, his program had suffered budget cuts and he wanted there to be an anthrax attack so that they'd get more money, which they did, right? And that, you know, that may be why whoever did it, did it, right? Like ultimately, but we just don't know who it was. And the investigation was so fucking botched from the jump that we'll never know. Uh, and you know, one of the things we got out of this whole balance, I don't know where Steven Hatfield would have wound up politically if this hadn't happened, but I have, I'll say this, he's not a happier, healthier man because this all happened to him, right?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:14:17Robert Evans?

  You know, this didn't make him better. It wouldn't make me better. Um, anyway, that's the story. How do you feel about the FBI?

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  I feel like I was terrorized by the government a little bit.

• 1:14:32Robert Evans?

  Jesus Christ. It's so funny seeing Cash, again, this all continues because like the FBI under Cash Patel was desperate to like, get this guy after Charlie Kirk got shot, was desperate to like be the, like, like solve it, right? To, to, to have, to the point that this suit, the second they took a guy into custody, Cash Patel announced, the director of the FBI announced, we've got the guy. We have the man who killed Charlie Kirk. And then like an hour later has to be like, no, it totally wasn't that guy.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  And their names got out? Several, several different people that did that too. Do you think they got the right guy?

• 1:15:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, yes, yes. Because he confessed to his dad.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right, right, right.

• 1:15:08Robert Evans?

  Right. Like we're pretty sure it's him, but it had nothing, the FBI didn't do shit, right?

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Robert Evans?

  His dad was the one who's, who did this, solved this caper. I mean, I, there's more to it than that.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  I hope somebody told that poor guy who's like still analyzing his handwriting.

• 1:15:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. Somebody's fucking looking at his fucking handwriting on the bullets. Oh, man. Courtney, got some plugables to plug?

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  Hey, y'all. I am recording the audiobook of my debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, and it's fucking good. I was worried for a second, but as I was reading it, I was like, this slaps. So anyway, get yourself a copy.

• 1:15:49Robert Evans?

  Hell, yeah. Get yourself a copy of Courtney's book, which slaps. And then slap yourself? I don't know. Maybe don't do that. But I don't care what you do. Do do anything, you know? Not anything. Don't do any of the things that we talked about in this week of episodes.

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:16:04Robert Evans?

  For sure.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Call your nice relatives if you want.

• 1:16:08Robert Evans?

  Call a relative that you care about and talk to them about something that has nothing to do with the internet. You know what? Go, everyone go do that right now. And also buy Courtney's book.

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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