by Gregory D. Koblentz and Jonathan B. Tucker
Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 52, no. 1, February–March 2010, pp. 159–186
Order a copy of the issue here
<First 500 words>
On 18 September 2001, exactly one week after the 11 September terrorist attacks in the United States, five letters containing dry powdered spores of Bacillus anthracis – rugged, seed-like forms of the bacterium that causes anthrax – were mailed to media outlets in Florida and New York City. Three weeks later, two more letters containing a more refined preparation of anthrax spores were sent to US Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in Washington DC. The tainted letters contaminated several buildings and caused 22 cases of anthrax (half involving the skin and half the lungs) in five states and the District of Columbia. Five of the people who contracted the inhalational form of anthrax died: two US Postal Service employees in Washington; an employee of American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida; a 94-year-old woman in Oxford, Connecticut; and a hospital worker in New York City. The anthrax letter attacks also had pervasive ripple effects, forcing thousands of people to take antibiotics as a precaution, disrupting the US Postal Service, temporarily shutting down the US Senate, causing nationwide anxiety about the safety of the mail, and triggering a flood of false alarms and hoaxes involving white powders. All told, the cost of the incident was estimated at $6 billion.
Because the anthrax letter attacks unfolded slowly over two months, they intensified the nation’s deep sense of vulnerability to terrorism in the wake of 11 September. With no credible claims of responsibility, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Postal Inspection Service launched an intensive investigation, code-named Amerithrax.The list of possible perpetrators included al-Qaeda, US biodefence scientists and domestic extremists, but neo-conservative hawks immediately pointed to Iraq as a possible source of the attacks. In a television interview on 17 October 2001, retired US Army colonel Richard Spertzel, the former head of the biological-weapons section of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, noted that Iraq was ‘certainly capable of producing ... weapons-grade anthrax’ and expressed his personal view that there was an ‘Iraq–bin Laden connection’. As evidence for such a link, Spertzel claimed that US government tests had shown that the mailed anthrax spores had been ‘weaponised’ by treating them with bentonite, a silica additive used only by Iraq. This assertion, which later proved to be false, helped spread the myth that Iraq was responsible for the anthrax letter attacks. On 18 October, Senator John McCain told TV host David Letterman that ‘there is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may – and I emphasize may – have come from Iraq’.
Rumours of a possible link between Iraq and the nation’s worst incident of bioterrorism fell on receptive ears within the George W. Bush administration. In late 2001, the Pentagon created the Office of Special Plans to compile raw intelligence indicating that the Iraqi regime had close ties to al-Qaeda and had reconstituted its chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons programmes, which had been eliminated by United Nations inspectors in the aftermath of the 1991…
Get full article here
Gregory D. Koblentz is Deputy Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program and Assistant Professor of Government and Politics in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Jonathan B. Tucker is a Senior Fellow specialising in biological- and chemical-weapons issues in the Washington DC office of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Related articles
Is Pandemic Flu a Security Threat? by Christian Enemark (February–March 2009)
Biotechnology and Bioterrorism: An Unprecedented World by Christopher F. Chyba and Alex L. Greninger (Summer 2004)
SARS: A Warning by Elizabeth M. Prescott (Autumn 2003)
Biological Terrorism and Public Health by Christopher F. Chyba (Spring 2001)
