David Pakman: David Willman is author of the new book "The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the
Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War". And it was David's reporting for the "Los
Angeles Times" that brought to light the explosive first look at developments surrounding the
2001 anthrax letter attacks. Pleasure to speak with you, David.
David Willman: Pleasure to be with you, David.
David: I've been looking at the book, and it is fascinating, and you say the nation
is now more at risk from insiders equipped to launch a bioterrorism attack. And my instinct
has always been that this is true in this particular case, that this attack would be
easy to launch and that we are at risk, but at the same time, I'm kind of aware in the
back of my mind of the desire on the part of many to keep people afraid of different
types of attacks constantly, for a number of political reasons. So personally, I find
it hard to discern when I hear we're at a big risk for this type of attack what political
factors may also go into that. What's your thought?
Willman: Well, I think it's the case, after our government decided in the aftermath of
the anthrax letter attacks, which of course came on the heels of the September 11th attacks,
that we were going to put a lot more emphasis on developing medical countermeasures products
to perhaps counter the effects of a biological attack. The anthrax attacks were the worst
bioattack we've ever had, five deaths, a number of other hospitalizations and serious injuries.
But, you know, the country has now been funneling billions of dollars into these products that
may or may not come online, and so built around that demand, so to speak, the customer, the
United States government, built around it is a... are a number of companies that want
in on the action. And so...
David: But before getting to... before getting to why you actually think we really are at
risk of such an attack, there is a lot of money being made around the fear of a potential
anthrax attack, that we know.
Willman: Well, without the fear, you're not going to drive the policy, that's for sure.
David: Sure.
Willman: And so far as my own personal view of what these threats are, I think we'd have
to go sort of agent by agent. I could give you my seat of the pants on that, but I don't
want to be depicted as buying into a massive threat of biological attack from any number
of different potential pathogens.
David: OK, so, but then let's get into why is the U.S. particularly at risk, or at least
as risk as ever now to an anthrax attack than before?
Willman: Well, I'm not sure we are more or less, and that's also part of the difficulty
when you're in this area, because we're dealing with, often, intelligence tips that, the Iraq
War experience, by the way, is recently instructive, can be highly flawed if not flat-out wrong.
So with anthrax, that happens to be a highly-portable pathogen that exists in the natural environment,
and clearly, people who are in terrorist organizations have had a desire to use it. I mean, the Aum
Shinrikyo group in Japan tried to use it in the 90s and came up with sort of a veterinary
strain that didn't kill people. It is a lot harder to get these highly-virulent strains,
to purify it in such a way that you could use it as a terrorist weapon, and then to
disseminate it in a way that would cause any mass casualties. So it's a lot...
David: Well, the advantages... the advantages of not specifically anthrax, but of any kind
of a bioterrorist attack over planes, trains, a big sporting event, bombs, etc., are, like
you said, the discretion and the difficulty in noticing the magnitude of what someone
is doing in the moment. I mean, you can be much more discreet, can you not?
Willman: Yeah, I mean, perhaps you could say compared to what, but yes. I mean, things
can be disseminated and there may or may not be immediate knowledge. With the anthrax letters,
we had literally letters saying, you know, in one of them... in one batch of them, this
is anthrax, so we knew. You know, there've been a lot of hypothetical scenarios of agents
being disseminated.
I also think it's the case, you know, our country used to have an offensive biological
weapons program. We never used those weapons, and part of the reason, according to my research
for this book, is that, you know, it's very tough to unleash these things without being
able to guarantee that the wind isn't going to shift and you're going to kill your own
people.
David: So tell me a little bit about the Bush administration and some data that they disregarded
to exploit the anthrax letter attacks as part of the pretext for war. And as we know, there
were many components to that pretext.
Willman: There were, but the anthrax letter attacks, David, were a gift in the lap of
those who had been gunning for Saddam, so to speak, for a very long time. And almost
immediately, there was speculation without any basis for it that Saddam must be responsible
for the attacks.
So it's not only people in the Bush administration, when you have people like Paul Wolfowitz and
Don Rumsfeld who had sent a letter to then-President Clinton in 1998 saying that the only viable
policy option in that region of the world is to forcibly take out Saddam, that was in
1998, fast forward to 2001, and, you know, Paul Wolfowitz obviously was gunning for Saddam.
October 26th of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the letter attacks, we had ABC News leading
the "World News Tonight", their chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross saying that he had,
you know, first-hand sources verifying that the attack material appeared to be traceable
to Saddam's biological weapons program in Iraq. That's very, very powerful stuff.
And in the interviews for my book, I will tell you, I mean, one of the people I interviewed
obviously was Paul Wolfowitz, and he told me that he was convinced in the run-up to
war that Saddam and/or al Qaeda must be responsible for the attacks.
There's a number of other, you know, pieces of evidence that show this is the case. President
Bush, in his memoir "Decision Points", has very little to say about the anthrax attacks,
but one crucial thing he does say is that what he described as a highly-respected European
intelligence service told us, that would be the Bush administration and the White House,
that Saddam Hussein was behind the anthrax attacks.
Well, we know what that administration was doing with intelligence, and if they have
a highly-respected European service telling them that, I think they put a lot of credibility
into that. Tom Ridge, who was at the time President Bush's Homeland Security adviser
and then Homeland Security Secretary, told me in interviews that a number of people throughout
the White House were convinced that Saddam was responsible for the attacks.
David: And the administration used the anthrax attacks also as a basis to increase the facilities
and the number of people handling anthrax and these biowarfare pathogens, but my understanding
is that there are really no new safeguards against a potential insider scientist terrorist
in these labs, is that true?
Willman: Well, I'm really glad you're speaking to that, David, because I think it's an important
part of my book. In the epilogue, I talk about this policy response we have to exponentially
grow the number of laboratories that are handling Level 3 and also Level 4 pathogens, these
are things like anthrax, tularemia, plague, you know, highly-deadly, highly-portable pathogens.
So we have these labs across the country now, hundreds of them, that are able to handle
these things and are, and we have thousands of new scientists who are working these laboratories
without commensurate controls on who these people are and how we're satisfying ourselves
that they don't pose a danger.
I mean, the biodefense industry, which includes a lot of people in academia who prefer to
have academic freedom, they strongly resist having baseline psychological testing of these
people. The lab directors almost unanimously oppose having a two-person rule, in other
words, you can't work in a biological containment hot suite without having two people in there.
That's a measure, by the way, that would've greatly inhibited Bruce Ivins's nocturnal
activities in the lead-up to the anthrax letter attacks.
David: So if I understand correctly, David, it's possible, and realistically, it's happening,
that individuals who have not had psychiatric screening are working by themselves in some
of these anthrax and other potential biowarfare pathogen labs, unsupervised, having had no
psychiatric screening?
Willman: I would... I would agree with that statement with the exception of, quote-unquote,
"unsupervised". I mean, yeah, there's going to be somebody there who's somewhere else
in the facility, but no, that person that you're describing could be working in a biocontainment
hot suite and doing whatever he or she wanted with the pathogen in the privacy of the hot
suite.
I mean, there yet is no requirement, by the way, for mandatory video cameras in the hot
suites. There was not, by the way, at Fort Detrick where Bruce Ivins worked. There are
now video cameras there, but that's not a mandatory requirement for getting federal
funds to run one of these laboratories.
David: And real quick as you mention Bruce Ivins, he was hired by the Army in 1980 as
a microbiologist, and he grew and maintained these stocks of anthrax for almost 30 years.
He was never evaluated for mental fitness, and as you reveal in detail, he was deeply
troubled from the time he was a kid, and he had specific plots to murder at least two
other scientists. This is probably someone who should not have been handling these materials,
correct?
Willman: I would agree with that, and I would say irrespective of whether someone is convinced
by the evidence marshalled against Bruce Ivins, I think any reasonable person has to stand
back and say that this is an individual who never should've been allowed near a biocontainment
hot suite handling something as dangerous as anthrax.
To just add a little more texture to what you're describing about those threats Bruce
Ivins has made, I mean, it is a fact that in 1979, Bruce Ivins conceded to his then
psychiatrist that he had had a recent plot to poison and kill a woman with whom he was
obsessed who had been a doctoral student down at UNC Chapel Hill. Then he was hired in December
of 1980 by the U.S. Army. And fast-forwarding to July of 2000, he told another behavioral
therapist that he had had another recent plot, which he didn't carry out, to poison and kill
a recently-departed lab tech, another woman with whom he was obsessed.
So there's a lot of flags here with Bruce Ivins. I mean, he was on several psychiatric
medications. The Army people knew this, but inevitably deferred to his privacy and his
status as a respected Ph.D. microbiologist.
David: Incredible. The book is "The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and
America's Rush to War". We've been speaking with David Willman. Fascinating book. Congratulations
on it, and thank you so much for talking to us today.
Willman: Thank you for having me, David.
Transcript provided by Subscriptorium Multimedia Linguistic Services. For transcripts, translations,
captions, and subtitles, or for more information, visit www.Subscriptorium.com, or write us
at subscriptorium@gmail.com.