How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1)

Robert goes through the colorful life and backstory of future Trump administration official Steven Hatfill, who went from Rhodesian military volunteer to biological weapons expert to (innocent) suspect of a major terrorist attack. 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.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  Hey everyone, it's Still Behind the Bastards. Part two of our episodes on how the FBI and the media created a monster by repeatedly accusing the wrong people of terrorism. And we're talking, we talked the last episode with our guest Courtney Kosak about Richard Jewell and the Olympic Park bombing. And in these next two episodes, we're going to be talking about the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States that killed like five people and freaked the whole country the fuck out. You know, these happened right in the wake of 9/11. If you're on the younger side of things, I don't think this is as famous, but basically

• 0:45Robert Evans?

  right after 9/11, a bunch of people, including guys like Tom Daschle, some like people in government, started receiving letters that had white powder in them. Several people got sick and died, mostly folks who were just, happened to be in and around like the mailrooms and stuff where the letters were being opened. And they never found who did it. But they had a suspect for several years. And that suspect is a guy who is a bastard, I think, by my standards, but is also, again, not the bad guy of this story. And we're going to spend this episode talking about his life and times because again, he's a fascinating person.

• 1:26Robert Evans?

  And I think there's a lot, like on his own, we probably could do a bastards episode, but the thing he's best known for is being wrongly accused of being the anthrax mail guy. And it just felt like, I don't know, it seems weird to do an episode about how much this guy sucks, but also he's fine here. Like this wasn't his fault. He was done dirty. So we're just talking about like how both of these, in both of these terrorist attacks, the same fucked up thing happened, thanks to the FBI and the media being the kinds of organs that they are.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Is Steve our protagonist this time?

• 2:03Robert Evans?

  Steve is, and this is going to be more of a traditional Bastards episode, this one, and then in part three, whenever we record that, we'll get to the actual Anthrax attack and what happened to him. But we have to talk about Steve Hatfield because who he is and the kind of life he leads are what makes him into the suspect for this terrorist attack, right? And like, is why people are, is why people in the FBI and the media become so convinced that it was him. And he is a, he's a perfect candidate for Bastards. Like, his backstory is insane. He's told a bunch of different versions of his life, many of which can't be true. Independent reporting has repeatedly shown that like, different things he said about his resume and his CV could not have happened that way. So there's

• 2:46Robert Evans?

  a lot of really fun untangling and record correcting to do. So anyway, let's, let's talk about Steve J. Hatfield.

• 2:57Speaker 02

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• 4:36Robert Evans?

  So, um, he was born on October 24th, 1953 in St. Louis, Missouri, like me. He was raised in Mattoon, Illinois. He was the oldest of two kids and the only boy in his family. His mother was a homemaker and part-time interior decorator, and his father was an electrical engineer and salesman. Now, the details I've come across don't make it look like his childhood was particularly noteworthy. There's no major trauma or at least anecdotes that we have that foreshadow the man he would become. He describes himself as a bad student and told one reporter, "I never took a book home from school. He did better when it came to electives." Yeah, and he's another one of these like autodidacts, right?

• 5:21Robert Evans?

  Like he reads obsessively, at least according to him. He just can't study anything he's not interested in, right? It's, I, maybe it's ADHD brain, you know? But he's primarily interested in like medical science and military history, and he can't make himself care about anything else. He does better when it comes to electives. He wrestles for the varsity team in high school. He flies glider planes and is allowed to solo pilot a glider at age 14, which seems early, but you know, go off kid. He graduates Mattoon Senior High and is admitted to Southwestern College in Kansas, where he majors in biology and joins an ROTC-like summer leadership program hosted by the Marine Corps. And his goal at this point, and this has been his life goal

• 6:06Robert Evans?

  for at least his latter adolescent period to the start of his adulthood, is to become a fighter pilot for the Marine Corps. Right? He wants to fly jet fighters, you know? It's the coolest job you can do in the military. That's what he wants. And so he goes in and the Marine Corps tests his vision and it's not perfect. And you know what you can't do if you don't have naturally perfect vision? Is fly a fucking jet, you know? Like, sorry, kid, you're screwed.

• 6:32Robert Evans?

  Anyway, so this, this fucks his life. Uh, it seems to have broken something inside of him because the Marines are like, well, you could be a navigator. And he's like, I don't want to be a fucking navigator. I want to be a fucking Top Gun jet pilot. Like, anybody wants to be a navigator? Come on. That's just such a bummer job. Navigators are the bike cops of the piloting world. Where it's like, this isn't what you signed up to do and I know it. Like, I know you don't want to be sitting back there.

• 6:59Robert Evans?

  Who needs a navigator anyway? Just bomb wherever. That's what I'm always saying. What?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I would be too scared to, I would be a navigator. I hate to say it.

• 7:07Robert Evans?

  Well, I mean, then I get to be the pilot, I guess. So that's a win for me.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I just want, I just want you to know, I do not trust you to fly a plane.

• 7:18Robert Evans?

  I think I'd be a great fighter pilot. I mean, so if you look at how many F-35s and F-22s they're crashing these days, F-18s, you know? I could do at least that well. I could crash one of those things.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  The bar is low, yeah.

• 7:29Robert Evans?

  I could crash that son of a bitch into whatever, you know? A house? I don't care. You're allowed to do anything in the Marine Corps, I assume. So, uh, he doesn't join the Marine Corps though, because again, he doesn't get to be a pilot. And this kind of, I get the feeling, reading his backstory, that this kind of like shatters him. So he, he cut, he partially drops out of, it's, it's less accurate to say he drops out of college because he will go back. But he like suspends his college education and just flies to Africa. Now, he's got no formal medical training, but he finds a mission hospital in the Congo. This is not a safe place. This is not an easy place to get to. So he travels and he doesn't reach out to them beforehand.

• 8:10Robert Evans?

  He travels to the Congo, finds this mission, doing like medical work. It's like a missionary hospital type deal. And it's like, hey, can I help? And the people running this mission are Glenn and Lena Eshtuth. Lena describes the 19-year-old Steve as being something of a mystery when he showed up. Quote, "Nobody sent him. I don't even know how he knew about us." But they're like, well, he's volunteering and we don't have enough people, so let's take him in. I mean, if nothing else, he's just like a lone white kid in the Congo. So we should probably not just let him wander off. So they take him in and he works there and they taught him, he learns, you know, the basics of hematology and parasitology, right?

• 8:54Robert Evans?

  Like, he's not enough that he could be a practitioner, but enough that he knows that he's interested in getting a real medical education, right? He gets some hands-on experience and he's like, oh, this is almost as good as killing people in a plane. So he, what? Not quite as good. Every doctor would rather be dropping a JDAM, you know? We all know that. But- He does have balls, though. That part is consistent, like- That part is consistent, yeah. Yes, yeah. I don't know. Straight to the Congo.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  I think we should, I don't think our friend Dr. Hoda would agree.

• 9:29Robert Evans?

  You don't think, I think, I think he would agree that it takes the balls to just at 19, go straight to the Congo to see if you can find a place to work?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Fair enough.

• 9:38Robert Evans?

  As like an American who grew up in the suburbs?

• 9:43Robert Evans?

  So he returns to the US after this, like, year. He spends, like, I think it's about a year in the Congo, and he goes back to Southwestern and he finishes and he gets his degree. He gets his undergraduate degree. In 1975, at which point he joins the Army. Now, every version of the story that Hat Phil tells, and quite a few of the articles about Hat Phil that are written by reporters who talk to him, will repeat this next part, because he claims that as soon as he joins the Army, he gets into the Green Berets. Do you know what the Green Berets are, Courtney? They're special. They're special. It's a, yeah. They're very special boys. Some of the specialist boys in the whole Army. That's right, guys. It's a special forces unit. They're more

• 10:28Robert Evans?

  focused on, like, the Green Berets are the guys you send in if you've got- If you, if you have a bunch of like local militia types that you want to train up into a fighting force to fuck with whatever country that you're having a great power conflict with, you send in the Green Berets and they spend long periods of time, you know, in the wilderness, basically, training, uh, people how to be insurgents. That's kind of their gig, right? That's, that's what the Green Berets do.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Is it like Navy SEAL adjacent?

• 10:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's at that level of special forces, right?

• 11:03Speaker 04

  But they come in before or they're trainers?

• 11:06Robert Evans?

  They just do different things. They do like the Navy SEALs are more the guys carrying out assassinations. The Green Berets are more the guys who are trying to teach, you know, indigenous allies how to set up tripwires in the jungle or whatever, or carry out ambushes on NVA caravans, if we're talking about like Vietnam or whatever. Um, so Hatfield claims to have joined the Green Berets and most of the news articles about him say that he joined the Green Berets. The standard version of that story, uh, I'm going to quote, uh, from an Atlantic article by David Freed here. "He took a direct enlistment option to join the Green Berets, attended parachute school, trained as a radio operator and was assigned to the Army's 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an operational A-team, Hatfield re-entered

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  civilian life. He joined the National Guard, married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon he had worked with in Africa, and returned to Mattoon to work the night shift as a security guard at a radiator factory." Now, there's some issues with this version of events. First off, he was not in the Green Berets, at least not according to reporting by Marilyn Thompson that was published in the Washington Post. Quote, "Military records show he did enlist in the Army in 1975 and entered the rigorous special forces qualification course at Fort Bragg in 1976, but he didn't last long there. After a few weeks, he was discharged from active duty and wound up in the Army National Guard." That's a really different version of events, right?

• 12:30Speaker 04

  That's like not making it through boot camp? Is that what happened?

• 12:33Robert Evans?

  He made it through boot camp. He doesn't make it through special forces qualifying school. And then he changes from being enlisted in active duty to being in the National Guard. So something happened. We don't really, I don't know that we'll ever know what, but something happened to where like he not only make, is it made clear that he's not going to be in special forces, but he's not going to be active duty, right?

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:55Robert Evans?

  Like, so this is a fairly rapid shift for him. And it suggests that something went really wrong during his special forces qualification course. It may just have been that he was, he couldn't make the cut, but for whatever reason, this is not something he does, but he will spend a lot of his life, a lot of articles about this guy say that he was a Green Beret, right?

• 13:14Speaker 04

  In his mind, he was.

• 13:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, in his mind, he was, sure.

• 13:20Robert Evans?

  So that's a very different version of events. And that Atlantic article also describes Hatfield's first marriage in a way that leaves out some details present in other accounts. It sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song there, like, oh, he got injured, so he couldn't deploy. And he had to, you know, he married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon and he went on to be a security guard in a radiator factory, you know? That's not, not true, but when you kind of describe it that way, you lose some important context because Steve fell in love when he was in Africa with the Estruth's teenage daughter Carolyn. Now, they're close to the same age. He's like 19, I think she's 17 and turns 18, right? So the age thing is not a big deal.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:04Robert Evans?

  I say teenage, but he's teenage too. I don't want to make it out like I'm saying he was being creepy. I don't think it's weird for a 17 year old and 19 year old to get interested in each other or whatever. They get married in 1976. And in April of 1977, her dad, Glenn, is captured by mercenaries who invaded Zaire from Angola. And he's executed. He's found dead several weeks later. And the Washington Post reports, quote, "Hatfield's marriage soured quickly after his father-in-law's death. He accompanied Carolyn to a funeral service in Michigan, and that was the last time Lena Estruth saw him. He and Carolyn divorced in 1978. He had no contact with his only child, a daughter named Cayman, who was born shortly

• 14:46Robert Evans?

  before the divorce until several years ago," Carolyn Estruth says. So.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  Why was his dad the glue?

• 14:53Robert Evans?

  I don't know that it was, but it's just after he dies, the marriage falls. It may just have not been, they meet when they're teenagers. Maybe they were just never gonna, yeah, I don't know what happened here. But he leaves and he has nothing to do with his kid, right? I don't know if, I'd say he abandoned them. Cause I'm unaware of like, is he paying any form of alimony? Is he sending child support? None of that is clear to me.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  Not a father of the year, yeah.

• 15:18Robert Evans?

  But he's gone, right? Like he bounces, you know? Now, part of why Steve is not around for his daughter's life is that right after he gets out, like right after this divorce happens, uh, and after he graduates, he returns to Africa. Now, like the rest of Steve's life, there are conflicting stories here. But what we can, what's definitely solid, what we know is that in 1978, as soon as he divorces his wife and leaves his kid and ex-wife behind, he moves to Rhodesia. That's his first stop. Now, Rhodesia does not exist today, but it was at the time, a white supremacist pariah state. This is a British colony where a tiny number of white people ruled over a larger number of black people

• 16:03Robert Evans?

  who had a very different set of rights, uh, under the laws of that country. Rhodesia, uh, basically becomes a pariah state because they refuse to give up or transition like away from this system of government effectively. And they get wind up being blacklisted by everyone, right? Like the British government who they're supposed to, they were supposed to be a colony of, refuses to recognize them. You're not supposed to trade with Rhodesia. You're not supposed, certainly not supposed to sell them guns. South Africa is basically their big economic lifeline. Um, in addition to like the Portuguese colonies, but it's a really sketchy situation. And by the time he moves there in 1978, Rhodesia is like an international pariah. They are the white separatist state, right?

• 16:47Robert Evans?

  Uh, the white supremacist pariah state, right?

• 16:49Speaker 04

  You just made so many references to Rhodesia that I have heard and not understood. It finally makes sense.

• 16:56Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I, I love Rhodesia. Uh, one of my favorite stories. Um, so again, Rhodesia- Doesn't exist anymore because about two years after he moves there, they lose their war to these Marxist insurgents and becomes Zimbabwe. But for the last two years that Rhodesia exists, that's where Steve Hatfield lives and he attends the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury, which I think was the capital. So choosing to move to Rhodesia in 1978 is at minimum morally questionable, right? Yes. Nobody just travels there because you're like Rhodesia, the name sounds nice. You're aware in the news that the whole world considers them a pariah for the racism and the

• 17:39Robert Evans?

  brutal Bush war that they're persecuting, which is killing huge numbers of civilians. Which means that Steve probably didn't have an issue with that, right? The white supremacist government was clinging to power however it could and the state security forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon. Hatfield would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia, he volunteered as a medic for the Rhodesian Army and was attached to the cellus scouts, which was Rhodesia's answer to the Navy SEALs, right? This is Rhodesia's special premier special forces organization. And again, you see this repeated constantly in articles about him that, yeah, and he, a lot of times they'll just say he was one of the cellus scouts, he was a member of this elite unit.

• 18:22Robert Evans?

  The Atlantic reports that, yeah, he was a medic attached to the unit. I've seen both ways, neither seem to be true. So the cellus scouts and the Rhodesian military occupy a place of honor within the modern far right's conception of military history. Because of the way this Bush conflict between these insurgents that represent a much larger portion of the country and the military, which is a mixed race military, but exists to support the white supremacist state. Rhodesia kind of invents modern counter insurgent warfare tactics. A lot of stuff that you see that you've seen the US in the global war on Turkey, using Afghanistan and Iraq, these like huge route clearance vehicles, they're like up armored

• 19:04Robert Evans?

  to survive IEDs, the way in which like patrols are done, the way in which like you attempt to like isolate problem villages or like all of these different tactics for how you're supposed to deal with and to smoke out insurgents. The modern

• 19:21Robert Evans?

  Like insurgent warfare handbook gets written by Rhodesia, right?

• 19:26Speaker 04

  That is fascinating.

• 19:27Robert Evans?

  This is arguably accurate, but it's not anything to be proud of because yeah, Rhodesia does pioneer a lot of modern counter insurgent warfare tactics. They don't win, they lose. And by the way, every country who copied their tactics, including the US, also loses a lot of the wars that they use those tactics in. These aren't successful tactics. They're just tactics like, and so there's this whole like, well, the Rhodesians, they were the ones who really before anyone else knew what the future of warfare was gonna be. And so you get a lot of like people nerding out over the Rhodesian army over that. You get a lot of people obsessing over the Salus scouts in particular, because after Rhodesia fell in 1980, a bunch of former scouts wrote articles and memoirs about their

• 20:12Robert Evans?

  combat experiences that massively exaggerated how good they had been. Again, they lose the war. And this all feeds into, starting in the eighties, there's this growing worship of like special forces that's almost like a cult, right? It reaches its height during the global war on terror. But this is, we start like, it becomes in the media, there's more and more movies about special forces units. And so especially for people on the far right, the Salus scouts are like this, they're idolized, right? And so like the fact that Hat Phil really wants people to believe he was in this unit makes a lot of sense, given his, again, this guy today is in the Trump administration, given his politics and just given socially what's, what's going on.

• 20:56Robert Evans?

  I'm not surprised he wanted to be affiliated with this unit.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Like racist special forces? What could be better?

• 21:01Robert Evans?

  The most racist special forces, yes. Like the Salus scouts and the SS, both use the same acronym. So that's, that's, that's easy.

• 21:12Robert Evans?

  Now that said, there's good reason to doubt that he had anything to do with the scouts. Per the Washington Post, Hatfield's resume also claimed that he'd served as a cellu scout, though his time in the Rhodesian military overlapped with his time in the US Army. Rhodesian military records have been hard to find, but cellu scouts veterans told reporters they'd never heard of Hatfield. The true circumstances of his connection with the unit, if any, remain unclear. So, I can't say he didn't have any connection with them. I don't know, maybe he was sent somewhere as a scout, but we don't have like, evidence really, other than his word that I've seen. So, given the other discrepancies in his background, I would need to see some actual evidence that he served with his unit to believe stories like the one he told the Atlantic. Quote, "While he was in Rhodesia,"

• 21:55Robert Evans?

  Hatfield says, "a truck he was riding in was ambushed by Marxist insurgents. Leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose." This, he claims, gives him like, a lifelong breathing injury that will be relevant a little bit later. But, again, did that happen? Did he just break his nose some other way? Did he have any exciting encounters with insurgents at all? Unclear to me. Now, there is some evidence to suggest that his habit of exaggerating the truth dates back at least as far as his time in college. One of his former classmates told Simon Cooper from The Observer, quote, "He was an extraordinary guy and very, very bright, but he was also a real Walter Mitty kind of character, and he would tell these enormous awful lies. He once told me his wife died in the Congo."

• 22:39Robert Evans?

  Again, he just left, they divorced, he left her with the kid.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  Her dad.

• 22:45Robert Evans?

  Her dad died in the Congo?

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:47Robert Evans?

  And that gives you something too, where like, that's why I think, yeah, he may have been embedded with some chunk of the Rhodesian military as a medic, or maybe, back at base, he treated some cellu scouts or something.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Yes, he did some stitches.

• 23:01Robert Evans?

  There's usually a degree of like, truth that we're then exaggerating, right?

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:06Robert Evans?

  He went to Fort Bragg, he got, did the special forces like, tests, but he didn't quite become a Green Beret, right? Like, he's kind of making ends meet in his stories a lot of the time. But you know who always tells the truth?

• 23:22Speaker 04

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• 23:24Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. They would never pretend to have been a member of the Rhodesian military because they were it. They served in the Rhodesian military. All of our sponsors, former Rhodesian Special Forces. We didn't try to make it that way. It's weird.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Your first instinct is to slander.

• 23:44Robert Evans?

  They love it. It's like negging, you know? That doesn't actually work for dating. The Pickup Artist guys are wrong about that, but it's incredible for advertising.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Corporate people, yeah.

• 23:55Robert Evans?

  No, no. Sometimes I'll just walk. I just walked into Ford's offices the other day and I was like, oh, you guys, is this an F-150? Call it like an F-75, you know? It was like half a truck, maybe. And I just walked out and they just mailed us a check.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 24:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's how you do it, people. Negging. Here's an ad.

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• 24:47Robert Evans?

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• 25:46Robert Evans?

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• 25:57Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So yeah, it's worth noting, because of what comes later, that Hatfield's time in Rhodesia did directly overlap with something that's going to be very relevant to the thing that's going to come to define his adult life, which is the anthrax attacks in the United States. Because while he is in Rhodesia, Rhodesia suffers the largest, one of the largest anthrax epidemics ever seen in history, right? From 1978 to 1980, the years that he's there, thousands and thousands of cattle and several hundred human beings are killed by anthrax exposure in Rhodesia. Now, we don't fully know why this happened. And I want to state up top,

• 26:39Robert Evans?

  anthrax, we don't, people, when you hear anthrax, you think it's like a weapon, right? Anthrax is a natural thing. Like, it occurs. There are places, Rhodesia is one of them. There are places in the world where livestock just get anthrax. Like, it's an outbreak, it's a bacteria, you know? Like, and livestock, if you are not taking proper care of them, if you're not, and in an area where anthrax is endemic, they can get anthrax, and they can spread anthrax to people, right? Now, the kind of exposure human beings tend to get when exposed to livestock that have anthrax is different from, say, inhaling anthrax that has been weaponized and turned into this fine powder. That's much deadlier, you're less likely to die.

• 27:21Robert Evans?

  But anthrax can just happen and does just happen and has nothing to do with anybody using a weapon, right?

• 27:27Speaker 04

  Was this targeted, like, the version that you're talking about?

• 27:31Robert Evans?

  We don't know. Maybe is the answer I'll give you because Rhodesia had a massive chemical and biological weapons program and they used chemical and biological weapons on insurgents, right? So there's, and there's, there's good reasons to think that this massive pandemic may have been started by the, the Rhodesian military using biological weapons. Um, there's a couple of good reasons to suspect this. Yeah. The, um, the pandemic almost exclusively affected cattle on what were called tribal trust lands, which are subsistent farms operated by the majority black population. And it tended to skip over the herds of white owned commercial farms, right?

• 28:15Robert Evans?

  The people who died were all black Rhodesians and nearly all of the human beings who got exposed to anthrax in Rhodesia were black.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  That is some racist bacteria.

• 28:24Robert Evans?

  It's a racist bacteria. Yeah. Uh, Rhodesia had for years used chemical weapons and disease to try and murder Marxist guerrilla fighters, in part because they couldn't buy traditional weapons from most other countries. So they were really kind of scraping the barrel of like, what kind of weapon systems can we put together? So as their chances of victory declined, Dr. Robert Symington, who was a professor at the unity of Rhodesia's medical school where Steve Hatfield studied, urged the country to adopt a new counter insurgency program based on chemical and biological weapons. The government agreed. To summarize how this worked out, I want to quote now from an article in the journal Curious by Matthew Turner. Drawing from a number of medical and veterinary students from the University of Rhodesia,

• 29:07Robert Evans?

  Symington allegedly began human experimentation as early as 1975. The CBW program experimented with a number of compounds, including warfarin, paratheon, thallium, and vibrocolari. Dr. Simington was said by one officer to have killed more terrorists than the Rhodesian light infantry during certain months of the war. The CBW program saw its greatest successes with the use of parathion, an organophosphate used in pesticides. In isolated locations, CBW employees soaked hundreds of articles of clothing in parathion solutions, afterwards drying them to eliminate the smell. The poisoned clothing was then distributed to guerrilla forces through local contacts who had directly donated to guerrilla recruits by contaminating discovered caches of guerrilla

• 29:49Robert Evans?

  supplies, or by stocking stores that were in guerrilla-heavy areas and expected to be ransacked. Other uses of CBW included the deliberate poisoning of foodstuffs with thallium and warfarin, as well as the deployment of cholera to contaminate water sources known to be frequented by guerrillas. The use of cholera in warfare made Rhodesia the first nation to intentionally deploy biological weapons after the 1975 passage of the Biological Weapons Convention. Again, great guys, great country, really, really good people.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 30:22Robert Evans?

  And again, this is where he chooses to go to medical school.

• 30:27Robert Evans?

  It says a lot about you that, yeah, this is where you wanted to be at this point in your life.

• 30:33Robert Evans?

  Now, we do know the Rhodesian military absolutely did and is confirmed to have weaponized and used anthrax on human beings on multiple occasions. The elite Selu scouts actually used, like, were one of the groups that deployed anthrax against, like, targeted groups of guerrillas, right? We don't know how many people died from Rhodesian CBW use, but it's at least in the hundreds and probably in the thousands, and it may account for as many as 15% of all casualties in the Bush War. So this is fucked up and important, but I also need to end this digression on a counterintuitive note, which is that, that all makes it really seem like, okay, well, they definitely caused that anthrax outbreak in 1978 to 1980, right? Obviously, they did, right?

• 31:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:16Robert Evans?

  And this is kind of, I brought it up this way because it's a good example of why Richard Jewell got suspected in the first episode and why Hatfield is going to get suspected in this one is if you just look at a narrow chunk of the facts, you can make a case that, wow, this is the only possible thing, right? If you just read out the facts I just read you, obviously Rhodesia caused this massive pandemic, right? There's the, it's the only explanation. They were using anthrax as a weapon. Why wouldn't they have done this, right? However, as Matthew Turner points out in this study, which is not at all sympathetic to the Rhodesian military and talks to the extent about their horrible war crimes with chemical and biological weapons, there's a lot of good reason to believe that this was a natural anthrax outbreak.

• 32:00Robert Evans?

  And there's, there's some scientific reasons just because of the type of anthrax that these animals are sick with and how it spreads that looks more like a natural pandemic than one that was used by weaponized anthrax. But there's other reasons. For one thing, this is late in the war. The Rhodesian government is collapsing. They have suspended all of their large scale veterinary programs to improve livestock health. They had been vaccinating, like dipping and whatnot, all cattle in the country, and that has stopped by 1978. Anthrax is naturally endemic to the region and the outbreak occurred alongside other outbreaks that infected cattle populations. The anthrax outbreak is one of a number of outbreaks that's wiping out cattle in Rhodesia

• 32:43Robert Evans?

  because the state programs to like treat cattle have gone away because of the war, right? Um, now there's also, again, we talked about how it primarily hit cattle in like these black subsistence farms as opposed to like the corp, because those farms had money and were able to continue medicating their cattle, right?

• 33:04Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 33:05Robert Evans?

  And again, why is it more black? But well, number one, the vast majority of the country is black. And number two, the white people are eating and spending their time farming animals that have access to good medical care, right?

• 33:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 33:18Robert Evans?

  Like, so when you, and again, this is going to be the case with, when Steve Hatfield gets suspected of, if you look at one subset of the facts, obviously the guy did it. And then if you look, peel back and look at more of the facts, like, well, no, maybe I was looking at too narrow a subset of information. Now, I should say, it's so possible Rhodesia did this, that like, the anthrax pandemic was, or epidemic was a purposeful one, that they like, were trying to wipe out the foods, because we know that they were. It's just, we have a lot of data on other times they used these weapons, and this really doesn't look like that. It does look a lot more like a natural outbreak.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  They wouldn't have been successful if they did it.

• 34:02Robert Evans?

  No, no, no. This would have gone worse, because they were, they were bad at this. Now, I should also note, again, that because Steve is going to be accused of being the anthrax bomber, the fact that he is in Rhodesia, and allegedly had worked with the Salus scouts, who used anthrax, and is in Rhodesia at the same time as an anthrax outbreak, again, in 2001, people are going to read about this and go, "Obviously, it's this guy," right? It has to be him. Now, more diligent reporting, and there was not nearly enough of that when Steve was being accused, would point out, among other things, like, "Okay, but the Rhodesian military, this guy's like, an American, without any real experience, who's in med

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  school. Why would they have looped him in on their secret, incredibly illegal plans to use deadly chemical and biology? He's like, fucking 20? Like, why would they do that? Like, he's not who you pick. You don't need him." And there's no evidence whatsoever that he had anything to do with the chemical and biological weapons campaign carried out by Rhodesia. It's possible that this is why he starts to get interested in chemical and biological weapons, which he does, and he's going to become an expert on them later, but that's speculation on my part. So, he graduates, I think he has to go from Rhodesia to South Africa, but he eventually does graduate, and he gets the equivalent of an M.D. in 1984.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  They're like, "Actually, you're Rhodesian med school, not you're here."

• 35:29Robert Evans?

  South Africa takes it, though. They're fine. So, this is a near thing. In 1983, he failed, and he had to repeat a year of med school. One British newspaper reported that when he found this out, he had a tantrum in the hallway. The Post interviewed one of his former classmates, who told a story about Hatfield punching out a peer. Quote, "He is not someone I would ever want to cross," wrote another classmate. So maybe not, you know, the nicest guy, although all of these quotes do come from when he was suspected of carrying out a terrorist attack that killed five people. So part of me is like, should I even trust these quotes? Cause they're from people who like, were deliberately being solicit- that said, there's enough in his background to be like, yeah, maybe he just was kind

• 36:13Robert Evans?

  of a dick with a short temper, you know? Two things could be true at once. So he becomes a doctor. He does a one-year internship in a rural South African hospital, after which point he is recruited to do a 14-month tour with South Africa's National Antarctic Expedition. Through the 1980s, yeah, so he does that. Cool. Career's going well. That sounds awesome. Yeah, yeah, that sounds a lot better than what he's gonna wind up doing for a living.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  What school is he attending here?

• 36:42Robert Evans?

  Uh, it's Cape Town.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:45Robert Evans?

  University of Cape Town. Through the 1980s, he gets three master's degrees in different sciences there, and he tries to get a PhD. He almost finishes it, but his doctoral thesis isn't accepted. We'll come back to that later, because this is gonna be another case, like with the Green Berets, where he almost had a PhD, but he didn't, and some of the things, some of the resumes he writes out are sure gonna say PhD, right? So during his years as a student in South Africa, Hatfield is alleged to have run into more conflicts with his peers, per the Washington Post reporting. A Johannesburg newspaper reported that Hatfield had carried a gun into South African medical laboratories and boasted to colleagues that he'd trained bodyguards for white separatist

• 37:29Robert Evans?

  Eugene Terblanche. And just carrying a gun into the lab, it is very South African stuff, and the fact that South Africans are being like, no, but he did it in a weird way? He was talking about being racist in a weird way to us in apartheid South Africa.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 37:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, just the brat. And again, I don't, I don't see any evidence that he trained bodyguards for this white separatist, but it gives you an idea of like where his politics are, right? If that's true, you know, can't say for certain that, uh, that newspapers reporting is accurate, but that's what was reported. Hatfield would later fill his resume with claims that he'd also gotten a medical degree in the UK. And in fact, there are, there's at least some evidence that he pretended his degree was from the UK as opposed to from, you know, these African colleges he went to. He would claim to have been a member of the Royal Society of Medicine. Neither of these seem to be accurate, per the observer, quote, "One professional resume claimed he had a medical degree from the Royal College of Physicians

• 38:32Robert Evans?

  and Surgeons, Edinburgh, a body which doesn't exist. Another said his medical degree was gained in Edinburgh at 1984, when he in fact qualified as a doctor that year in Zimbabwe. The Royal Society of Medicine has no record of him and he is not a fellow of the society as his resume claims."

• 38:47Speaker 04

  That's like bold, pre-internet lying.

• 38:50Robert Evans?

  Right. And you could so get away with this shit before, that's what bums me out, man. I could be so many things. I could be doing surgery today. I could be cutting into a motherfucker and taking an organ out today. If it was the 1980s, my God.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  I don't think I want you to do that either.

• 39:08Robert Evans?

  I think I'd be great at it, but no one's gonna let me try. They're scared that I'd show them up. That'd be better.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:15Robert Evans?

  Maybe I'll be too good. Maybe I'm too good at surgery.

• 39:18Speaker 04

  If you're the kind of guy who would just like take off the, and go to the Congo, like without an invitation, you are also the kind of guy who would like just blatantly lie on your resume.

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  Wild.

• 39:34Robert Evans?

  Now Hatfield is, you know, he, he did, he does some stuff in, in England. He's at Oxford briefly. He works as like a cancer specialist in the Nuffield Department of Pathology and Bacteriology in Oxford in 1994. But he also, I mean, he's at least accused of having faked a reference. Again, per the observer's report- He faked a reference quote from the distinguished Oxford professor James O D McGee to apply for his next job back in the United States that he didn't have. And, you know, a little bit of resume fakery. Who amongst us hasn't done that? Although, maybe not if you're trying to be a doctor. And he is a real doctor. I want to be clear, but he does have a real MD. It's a PhD he didn't get.

• 40:18Robert Evans?

  And yeah, that's the last really big question mark on his resume is that he would periodically claim to have a PhD from Rhodes University in South Africa, in addition to his MD. And he makes this claim after he returns to the US when he's trying to get a federal research grant. However, back in Rhodes University, his dissertation on treating leukemia had been denied by the review committee. They decided his methodology was flawed and they declined to give him a PhD in 1995. Now, he will say that like, when I applied for this grant, basically, I thought I was going to get the PhD, so I wrote it down. It was before, you know, they turned me down. I don't know. Maybe it was the case of him just, you know, thinking he was going to pass and it was fine because he'd done everything else.

• 41:00Robert Evans?

  That said, it's pretty consistent with the other, I don't know, the tenuous relationship with the truth that we've seen previously here, right? So, yeah, he spends the mid 90s. He goes back to the US for a bit. He does that fellowship at Oxford. And the job at Oxford gets him a job studying not just cancer, but HIV and Lyme disease for the National Institutes of Health in the United States. And his interest in infectious diseases starts to guide him now. In late 1997, he starts a two-year fellowship with USAMRID to study Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers. USAMRID is the acronym, and it's U S A M R I I D.

• 41:41Robert Evans?

  USAMRID is the acronym for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. This is the top biodefense laboratory in the country with a mission to study both biological weapons and diseases like Ebola that are seen to have a high potential for weaponization. Their primary client is the US Army, and they do a lot of work in Fort Detrick, which is where the US used to host its germ weapons R and D department until we stopped admitting that we had a germ weapon R and D department in 1969. Officially, we stopped making germ biological weapons in 1969.

• 42:17Robert Evans?

  Do I think we totally stopped? I don't know. I don't know if I think we did. But officially, we did. Now, USAMRIT is an extremely serious organization, and they are doing some of the most dangerous work imaginable, right? Like, this is a thing you would need in any country, even if it was an ethical defense department, right? Is a branch of the government whose job is to figure out what kind of diseases or illnesses may be weaponized or invented, and how would we fight against them, right? Like, that's an important thing to do, you know? Just the world being what it is. In his book, "The Demon in the Freezer", Richard Preston gives a useful description, and by useful, I mean terrifying,

• 42:59Robert Evans?

  description of USAMRIT headquarters that is just kind of chilling. "The main building of USAMRIT is a dun-colored two-story monolith that looks like a warehouse. It has virtually no windows, and tubular chimneys sprout from its roof. The building covers seven acres of ground. There are biocontainment suites near the center of the building, groups of laboratory rooms that are sealed off and kept under negative air pressures so that nothing contagious will leak out. The suites are classified at differing levels of biosecurity, from biosafety level two to level three, and finally to level four, which is the highest, and where scientists wearing biosafety spacesuits work with hot agents, lethal incurable viruses. A bioprotective spacesuit is a pressurized plastic suit that covers the entire body. It is a soft-plastic head bubble with a clear faceplate, and it is fed by sterile air

• 43:44Robert Evans?

  coming through a hose and an air regulator. The chimneys of the buildings are always exhausting super-filtered and superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of the biocontainment zones. USAMRIT was now surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent a truck bomb from cracking open a biosafety-level-four suite and releasing a hot agent into the air." So just going through the list of security, that gives you an idea of how deadly this shit in here is, right? Okay, can I catch up for a second? These are your planet killers.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  Okay, so we're in the UK and these guys are actually, right? And we're, and these guys are actually doing-

• 44:17Robert Evans?

  He's back in the US, he's moved to the US.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  Oh, we're in the US.

• 44:20Robert Evans?

  USAMRIT is the, is a US, like it's, it's the US bio, bio war, like biological weapons research.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Until we said we shut it down and these guys are actually doing good stuff?

• 44:30Robert Evans?

  No, we, we shut down the R and D department at Fort Dietrich, right? So USAMRIT is based out of Fort Dietrich too. Fort Dietrich is where all of our scary chemical and biological weapon stuff is. So we stopped making new weapons in 69, but we still research what kind of weapons people might make and research like ways to defend them, right? That's what USAMRIT is doing is they are trying to know, and it's not just weapons, but like, you know, when you have an Ebola outbreak in Africa, right? USAMRIT starts, you know, you're going to increase the amount of people who are working on, okay, like, well, if it spreads over here, if it gets here, if we have an outbreak, what might that look like? How would we treat it, right? What if someone weaponized Ebola? Is that possible? Let's look into whether or not you could weaponize it.

• 45:15Robert Evans?

  What would the defense against that be, right? They're doing stuff like that, you know? If somebody started to, wanted to carry out an anthrax attack, how theoretically would an anthrax attack look? How deadly would it be? What would be the procedures we need to establish? You know, what do we need to have ready so that if that happens at a moment's notice, we can get guys into an area in order to deal with an anthrax outbreak, right? That's the kind of shit USAMRIT is trying to figure out.

• 45:39Speaker 04

  I totally get that this is important and necessary, but it does seem like the line of like, are you doing more harm than good? Gets a little bit dicey when you talk about this stuff.

• 45:49Robert Evans?

  And it's also the line between like, well, what counts as R and D for new, new-

• 45:53Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 45:54Robert Evans?

  New shit, like as opposed to R and D on how to fight it. Yeah, and it's, there's always a, again, the, the degree of security in this facility is proof of the danger, because you have had, like in Russia, there was a horrible anthrax outbreak because one of, like a Russian equivalent to this facility had a fucking breach and a bunch of people got sick, right? Like, these are scary places and the consequences of things going wrong in a place like Fort Dietrich and the- Samrad facility there is is very high. Stephen King's the stand for like focuses on, I think it's basically a base that's meant to stand in for Fort Dietrich. I forget exactly what it's called on that, but that's, that's how the virus that kills the whole world gets out is it's something where that's part of like a research.

• 46:39Robert Evans?

  And there's a breach and it gets out and it kills everybody. And, you know, I don't know if any of the diseases that they have access to could wipe out the whole planet, but they could kill a shitload of people like they have a lot of scary stuff at the Samrad facility. And so if you are working there, you are working with very scary stuff. Steve Hatfield is doing very serious work at this point, right? And he is qualified to do it, not as qualified as his resumes and CV make up sound, but he does have the MD. He did do like he went to Oxford and he did that year there, like he's got qualifications. He just, I think he just can't help judge it up a little bit. It's he's not as cool as he wants to be. That's my interpretation.

• 47:22Robert Evans?

  So he's, uh, one of his first jobs there is he's carrying out experiments on macaque monkeys, infecting them with deadly viruses and watching them die. This fucks him up to some extent. He'd sneak the animals Reese's pieces out of sheer guilt to try to like, maybe if I give him candy, I won't feel as bad about killing these monkeys.

• 47:41Robert Evans?

  It doesn't seem like a fun job to me. Over the next couple of years, Hatfield makes himself into one of the nation's top experts on germ warfare. He's a virus guy. He's not into anthrax. Anthrax is a bacteria, so he doesn't really work. He never works directly with anthrax, although he is aware of it. He studies it somewhat, but he's more into the viruses. He's very charismatic and he's good at teaching. So he soon starts getting contracts to instruct special forces teams on defensive techniques. Right? So in addition to this job with you Samrad, he's getting like, he's giving seminars, he's giving speeches, and he's also conducting training classes on like, okay, if you encounter a biological weapons factory in the field. Right? Here's what you would do. Here's what the things to look out for that could be dangerous. Here's how to make the scene safe.

• 48:26Robert Evans?

  Here are the different prophylactics you could use in different kinds of situations. Like he's training them on that kind of stuff, right? And this is all, you know, right around the late 90s is like the millennium's coming to an end. There's a couple of hoax anthrax attacks in the US where letters that are filled with white powder that isn't anthrax, but the letter claims that they're anthrax, are sent to varying places, right? And so there's panics in the media and the public over anthrax attacks. And this corresponds to a growing public and official awareness that bioterrorism is a real threat. And Hatfield, he kind of picks his moment well, right as Americans are starting to freak out about bioterrorism, he cashes in on it. And I

• 49:07Robert Evans?

  don't mean that in an unethical sense, just in that he makes a good career move. He starts giving lectures at conventions and talking to reporters about America's unreadiness to face a weaponized pathogen. In 1998, he's interviewed by Insight Magazine and he makes the, in retrospect, poor choice to let them photograph him dressed in biohazard gear, cooking up diseases in a kitchen, right? I saw that photo. Yeah, those photos are going to be found when he's accused of doing the anthrax attacks and they will not make him look good. He warned the interviewer in that article that these fake anthrax attacks could, quote, "be a form of testing for a future terrorist attack." Now, I haven't run into any evidence that Hatfield's colleagues questioned his

• 49:51Robert Evans?

  expertise or skill at his job during this period, but some of them did question his judgment in other areas. Per the Washington Post, "At a seminar in New York, he demonstrated one of his favorite bioterrorism scenarios, a terrorist using a wheelchair to sneak past White House security with a biological agent," says Jerome Howard, then New York City's emergency preparedness director. Howard was appalled. After the presentation, he says, "He called Hatfield aside and told him he had gone too far. It was too detailed, too specific to go into a public forum. Hatfield listened," Howard said, but he shrugged it off. And so he's like, he's like laying out, he's not just saying, "Oh, it'd be cool, like, you could maybe do this." He's like walking through, "Here are all the different levels of security in the White House and here's how you would get past each one with

• 50:33Robert Evans?

  a weaponized pathogen in a wheelchair?" Like, he's really making a very easy to follow guide for poisoning the White House? Here's the blueprint. Yeah. And that is his job to an extent, but maybe you don't have to do that at like a public presentation. That might not be- On a hot mic, yeah. That might not be the most, most responsible thing to do. You know who would never poison anyone with a wheelchair filled with anthrax?

• 50:59Speaker 04

  The sponsors, those goodies.

• 51:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they don't even have access to anthrax. Weaponized Ebola? Absolutely. Oh my God, the Blue Apron guys actually have enough weaponized Ebola to wipe out the whole planet, but that's just a part of their Salisbury steak Friday package. Yeah, the taste of Ebola.

• 51:25Speaker 02

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• 51:54Robert Evans?

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• 52:54Robert Evans?

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• 53:04Robert Evans?

  And we're back. I don't think we're gonna get any more Blue Apron money, Sophie.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 53:10Robert Evans?

  That's okay. I don't think they ever gave us any money. It was that other company that I forget.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  HelloFresh.

• 53:15Robert Evans?

  HelloFresh. Yeah, they don't have any Ebola.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Ebola-free dinners.

• 53:21Robert Evans?

  Ebola-free. That's right. HelloFresh. Say goodbye to Ebola. So, a lot of Hatfield's success within the field of bioterrorism warfare research came down to the fact that he picked a good mentor. He got very lucky that he like, he hits it off with this guy who had worked at USAMRIT. He'd been one of the scientists back in like the 50s who'd helped create our US bioweapons arsenal back when we still officially had one. And then he retired from USAMRIT and became a bio warfare consultant. He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax, Bill Patrick. So Bill is like the top guy in the terrifying murder weapons business, right?

• 54:01Speaker 04

  How do you get a secret patent?

• 54:03Robert Evans?

  It's a patent for something that's like, you did it and you, you, you're, you get the patent on it in case anyone ever like makes it and makes money off it. But you can't publish the patent because then people would know how to weaponize anthrax. And we don't want that. We don't want people just like looking up the patent for weaponized anthrax and following that, right?

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Fair enough.

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  So maybe you want to keep certain things a secret. Yeah, yeah, probably keep that sealed. In this case, I am in alignment with the government policy. Yeah, right. I shouldn't have the weaponized anthrax plans online.

• 54:37Robert Evans?

  Also, this brings me to a special ad from our sponsor, Audible, and their new book this week. How to Weaponize Anthrax in Five Easy Steps. You don't even have to read it. You can just listen to it and you could be weaponizing anthrax in under 48 hours.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  No, listen to Antirney or something.

• 54:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, listen to Antirney or something. Yeah. Uh, maybe listen to the anthrax book when you're trying to get to sleep.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  You're disappointing me today.

• 55:02Robert Evans?

  Well. I won't be disappointing you when I weaponize some anthrax, Sophie. Then I'll have anthrax. Nope. Probably shouldn't talk about that online. So Patrick wants a protege, you know, this guy, he's in his 70s now, he's getting older, and he wants someone to follow in his footsteps. And he meets Hatfield and considers him just gung ho enough for the job. And per the Washington Post, quote, "The two struck up a friendship, like father and son," says one bioterror expert who watched the ties develop. When Patrick's schedule was too full to attend a program or contribute to his study, he recommended Hatfield, who often did the work for free. Hatfield drove Patrick to consulting jobs at SAIC and traveled with him to professional conferences and classified briefings on the weaponization

• 55:44Robert Evans?

  process. Hatfield was often a dinner guest at Patrick's home, where, Patrick says, "He keeps the basic lab equipment needed to make bacteria into a finely ground powder." Normal thing to keep in your house?

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 55:57Robert Evans?

  Normal thing to keep in your house, Patrick?

• 56:01Robert Evans?

  I too keep that. Nope. Okay. In 1999, Patrick helps Hatfield get a job at the Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC. This is a private contractor. They do a bunch of shit. One of the things they do is they help the DoD as consultants with bioweapons defense. So by this point, Steve is a recognized expert, and he's hit, in just a couple of years, he's gotten to the point, anyone in a field like this wants to, where you can, he's still employed at USAMRID, but you can start taking private sector money as a consultant, because that's where the real cash is, baby. And he is an expert, but he often does still make claims about his knowledge that go beyond at least what his official resume should have made

• 56:44Robert Evans?

  possible. For example, he claimed to have knowledge of both wet and dry biological agents and how to produce them. The number of Americans who can do, who can actually claim that, to have extensive knowledge of wet and dry biological agents and how to produce them, was at this point maybe 50 to 100 people, right? This is the number of people who could take anthrax and turn it into a dry powdered biological agent, right? Maybe 100 people tops in the whole country could have done that, right?

• 57:13Speaker 04

  Saying he's not good enough, but he's, he's like,

• 57:15Robert Evans?

  He may have been. He's saying he is, but he does not have, he doesn't have the professional background to have done that.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  He's like, Patrick showed me over dinner.

• 57:23Robert Evans?

  Right. Well, that's kind of, that's kind of the situation where when, when he'll make claims like this, his colleagues will be like, well, Patrick probably showed him, right? Like, cause they, they are close and Patrick knows how to do it. And maybe he did know how to do it because of Patrick. I'm not, I'm not saying he's lying here. I'm just saying that like,

• 57:37Speaker 04

  We don't know.

• 57:38Robert Evans?

  He's only been doing the job a couple of years. He shouldn't be at that level, but because of his connection to Patrick, a lot of stuff is possible that might not otherwise be, right?

• 57:47Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 57:48Robert Evans?

  And it's the kind of thing where maybe he was exaggerating a bit, again, to get jobs. If so, this is going to bite him in the ass because come 2001, when there's an anthrax attack, you don't want to be one of the 50 to 100 Americans who could credibly make the claim to know how to weaponize anthrax, right? That becomes less of a positive thing once someone's done it.

• 58:08Speaker 04

  That is so funny.

• 58:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. In 2001, Stephen applied for a top secret security clearance so that he could work at the CIA. He had to take a polygraph test, too, and that apparently did not go well. We don't know why. It's the CIA. They don't just tell you stuff like that. It may have been that they uncovered some of the same discrepancies that journalists latched on to in his background. Maybe it's just that the CIA looked into him and they found out, oh, he's, he's, he's fibbed about a bunch of stuff and that just doesn't work for us. We're the CIA, you know? You lie about certain things at the CIA, but not that, right? We don't really know what happened, but they deny him. They turn him down. They won't give him a top secret security clearance. And in fact, their denial, they don't just

• 58:51Robert Evans?

  say no, they say no and a bunch of other really mean shit. And it's such a serious denial that like, this could fuck up his whole career. Cause he's still working with sensitive information, right? And it could fuck up his career.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  What did they say?

• 59:05Robert Evans?

  They say basically this guy can't be trusted. He can't be trusted with a top secret clearance and maybe he shouldn't even have a security clearance at all. And in fact, soon after, because he appeals the CIA's decision and they turned him down again. And right after that, the Department of Defense suspends his security clearance. So whatever the CIA found, whether it's that they just found out that he had exaggerated or in their, if they decided he had lied about his background, maybe that's why they did it. Maybe there's something else we don't know that they find, but whatever it is they find, they are like, not only can this guy not work with us, but the DOD shouldn't be giving him any kind of security clearance. And this endangers his job at SAIC, it endangers his job at his work with USAMRIT, it endangers

• 59:49Robert Evans?

  his whole career, right? And this is all happening in 2001, right? Right in the run up to 9/11. So one of the last projects that he would start at SAIC before 9/11 was an attempt to design a fake mobile biowarfare production laboratory. Now, this is one of those things where, so 9/11 hasn't happened yet, but George W. Bush is president, right? And George W. Bush's dad invaded Iraq and didn't go all the way. And there's a lot of argument to George W. Bush, was he always going to invade Iraq? Would he have tried to do it if 9/11 hasn't happened? Well, this is kind of a little, this is like a little bead in the he always wanted to

• 1:00:30Robert Evans?

  do that thing because before 9/11's happened, they're starting to train soldiers with the expectation that we will have troops in the Middle East again, in a country where the leader is suspected of having chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Iraq, right? And so the military is like, we need someone to build a fake mobile bioweapons lab that we can train troops on so that they can see what one would look like and know how to recognize it and know like what to do when they find one. Because definitely Saddam has a bunch of mobile bioweapons labs, for sure, right? He's for sure got the same kind of bioweapons capability that we do. We just haven't found it yet, right? And there's, there's a dark humor in the fact that the US government pays Steve Hatwell

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

  to design a mobile WMD production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have in order to train US soldiers so that they could recognize the facility if they wound out in Iraq, even though their government was the only one with the resources to build one, right?

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Oops.

• 1:01:31Robert Evans?

  And Hatfield dutifully builds a lab into an 18 wheeler trailer and he fills it with old lab equipment. Now, it was never operational, nor was it meant to be. But again, when the anthrax attacks hit, and it becomes clear very soon after the anthrax attacks, that the anthrax either came directly from a military stockpile, or was made by somebody who utilized the same techniques that we did to make weaponized anthrax. This is also gonna look really... Wait, you built like a mobile lab? You know how to just like build a lab and stick it in a truck and make anthrax with it? Okay, maybe you're on the list, right?

• 1:02:09Speaker 04

  The CIA totally knew.

• 1:02:12Robert Evans?

  So, 9/11 happens, and that's where the episode's going to end with 9/11. You know, because after 9/11, not long after, we're gonna get the anthrax attacks, and Steve's life is going to change dramatically for the worse. But I think we've set up the dominoes of like, why this guy is going to wind up in the crosshairs of the media and federal law enforcement over this?

• 1:02:35Robert Evans?

  Like...

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Well, fuck, I'm gonna be chomping at the bit to figure out what happened to Steve and how he got into the Trump administration.

• 1:02:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  All of these things were like, yes, love that resume point.

• 1:02:48Robert Evans?

  Part three. But first, wanna plug your pluggables?

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  You guys, I wrote a book. It's a coming of age memoir. It's called Girl Gone Wild. I alternate between thinking it's totally embarrassing that I did it, and that it's awesome. And so, you decide. You order it and decide.

• 1:03:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You decide, we report something or other like that. Anyway, everybody, this has been Behind the Bastards. Until next week, or wherever, until the next episode, I don't know. Go away.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio 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/behindthebastards.

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