Who is Steven Hatfill? The Prospect has spoken with dozens of biowarfare scientists, other government contractors who work in bio-defense, former medical school associates and colleagues, and sources close to the FBI investigation to get a clearer picture of the Maryland scientist. Hatfill belongs to a small pool of people who have access to and detailed knowledge of how to grow and weaponize the highly lethal, concentrated dry powder spores of anthrax that were sent in letters to media personalities and members of Congress last October. Specifically, by virtue of his government contracts, Hatfill had access to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) in Frederick, Maryland, up until early March. As one of a handful of places in the country where scientists grow the most lethal germs in order to develop vaccines to defend against them, USAMRIID and its Utah cousin, Dugway Proving Grounds, have been at the center of the eight-month-old FBI investigation. Last month, genetic analysis of the letter-anthrax suggested that it was indistinguishable from a strain developed at USAMRIID.
Hatfill, who was employed as an Ebola researcher at USAMRIID from 1997 to 1999, has since worked as a government contractor who specializes in training U.S. Special Forces, embassy employees, emergency workers, and other government officials to respond to biological attacks. Today, Hatfill continues to perform bio-defense training work, to which his colleagues say he is passionately devoted.
Hatfill's longer biography is riddled with gaps where classified projects presumably belong. The son of a thoroughbred horse breeder, Hatfill was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1953, then raised in Illinois. He studied biology at small Southwestern College in Kansas, taking a year off midway through to work with a Methodist doctor in Zaire. He graduated in 1975, married in 1976, had a daughter, and got divorced in 1978. From 1975 to 1978, he served with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, while simultaneously, his resume says, serving in the Special Air Squadron (SAS) of the white supremacist regime in Rhodesia. He attended medical school in Rhodesia from 1978 to 1984, and then moved to South Africa, where he completed various military-medical assignments while obtaining three master's degrees, studying for a doctoral degree, and practicing in a South African clinic.
"After graduating from Southwestern College," he wrote his alumni newsletter, "Hatfill received a medical degree from the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Rhodesia, with board certification in hematological pathology from South Africa. The South African government recruited him to be a medical officer on a one-year tour of duty in Antarctica, and he completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford University in England…His military background includes the United States Army's Institute for Military Assistance, the Rhodesian SAS, and Selous Scouts [Rhodesian counterinsurgency forces]."
There is something curious about Hatfill's claim, on his resume, to have worked concurrently with the U.S. Army Institute for Military Assistance in Fort Bragg and with the Rhodesian Special Air Squadron. Indeed, several of his associates have told the Prospect that Hatfill bragged of having been a double agent in South Africa -- which raises some intriguing questions. Was the U.S. military biowarfare program willing to hire and give sensitive security clearances to someone who had served in the apartheid-era South African military medical corps, and with white-led Rhodesian paramilitary units in Zimbabwe's civil war two decades earlier? Or did Hatfill serve in the Rhodesian SAS, and later in the South African military medical corps, at the behest of the U.S. government?
In any case, when Hatfill returned to the United States in 1995, he took a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. A former colleague there describes Hatfill as very bright but restless. He jumped from project to project, becoming increasingly interested in the bioterrorism defense work spearheaded by the U.S. Army lab in nearby Frederick. After Hatfill landed his dream job as a research scientist at USAMRIID in 1997, the former NIH colleague says he rarely heard from him again.
But Hatfill only stayed at USAMRIID until 1999. Why did he leave his dream job so quickly? Certainly, Hatfill did not leave for lack of interest in bioterrorism. On the contrary, during his two-year stint at the laboratory, Hatfill became increasingly invested in the issue.
Indeed, Hatfill has been offering the press warnings about bioterror-attack scenarios for several years. His first high-profile media moment came shortly after April 24, 1997, when an 8-by-10-inch manila envelope oozing red gelatinous goo was delivered to the offices of B'nai B'rith International in Washington, D.C.. More than 100 employees were quarantined for eight hours in the building on 17th Street and Rhode Island Avenue, while the two workers who had come into contact with the package were stripped to their underwear and hosed down on the street with decontaminating bleach.
The substance in the envelope turned out to be bacillus cereus -- a non-pathogenic cousin to anthrax that is not widely available outside of hospitals and labs. The envelope came complete with a typed, two-page rambling note that included such statements as "the only good Jew is an Orthodox Jew."
A flurry of press attention followed. Among the reports was a piece in The Washington Times by a contributor named Fred Reed. "A sort of terrorism that hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but may yet, is bio-terrorism," Reed wrote in the article, published August 11, 1997. He continued:
A fellow I know is Steve Hatfill, a medical doctor with years of experience in the Third World, and therefore with the diseases to be found there. What would happen, he wonders, if terrorists, with or without the support of governments like Iraq's, tried to use diseases as biological weapons against America? How would they do it? Dr. Hatfill has thought carefully about bio-terrorism. He made some intriguing points. To wit:There exist at least four reasonably distinct levels of possible biological attack.
The first is the B'nai B'rith variety, in which no real organisms are used.("Hello. This is Abdul. We have put anthrax in the food at Throckmorton Middle School." In fact, Abdul hasn't.) We empty public buildings for bomb threats. How about for anthrax threats? After all, sooner or later one might be real.
The second level consists in the release of real bacteria or viruses, but without the intention of infecting many people. For example, a bad guy might spray plague bacteria around the men's room in the World Trade Center. Probably only a few people would get it, and perhaps none would die -- but it would take only one plague case to shut down the entire building, especially if the bug had been sprayed on several floors.
The same year, Hatfill posed for a photo in his kitchen, decked out in an Army supply gas mask and protective body gear made of white trash bags. The photo appeared in Insight magazine's January 26, 1998, special issue on bioterrorism preparedness. An accompanying caption asserted that a determined terrorist could grow deadly plague harvested from wild prairie dogs, and process the germs using household supplies purchased from a grocery story, nurtured in a broth culture heated carefully in his own oven.
In the same issue of Insight, Hatfill commented on two mysterious 1997 incidents that shut down Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., airports, respectively, due to unidentified gases that made some waiting passengers ill. "Hatfill says these types of incidents could be a form of testing for a possible future terrorist attack -- perhaps next time using anthrax," journalist Timothy Maier wrote in his story. "It could be a simple procedure of slipping a chemical into a paint sprayer, [Hatfill] says."
In all his appearances in The Washington Times, Insight, and other print sources, Hatfill stressed a single, consistent message: The United States is woefully under-prepared for an inevitable biological terrorism scenario. It's a sentiment shared by many of Hatfill's colleagues in the U.S. bio-defense community -- in particular, William C. Patrick, one of the founders of the U.S. biological weapons program.
In January 1999, Hatfill went to work for Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a large defense contractor. As a specialist in biological defenses working on contract for various government agencies, Hatfill continued to have access to the Fort Detrick lab; the Army's chemical weapons defense testing facility in Edgewood, Maryland; Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah; and other government labs and military facilities depending on his assignments.
While colleagues at SAIC say that Hatfill's clients adored him, some of them grew concerned about Hatfill this February, after The (Baltimore) Sun ran a story -- not mentioning Hatfill -- about a scientist who was seen taking biosafety cabinets from USAMRIID, at the same time that Hatfill lost his government-issued security clearance and consequently his job at SAIC. Why did he lose his clearance? One military official recounts the story he says Hatfill told him. In this telling, the difficulties began last summer, when Hatfill allegedly applied for a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmentalized Information (TS/SCI) security clearance in order to bid for a top-secret contract with a government agency, perhaps the CIA.
To qualify for this clearance, he was reportedly required to take a polygraph test. Hatfill allegedly told the military official that he failed the polygraph on questions concerning his activities in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The people conducting the polygraph were amateurs, Hatfill allegedly complained to his interlocutor; they couldn't understand what Cold Warriors like himself had to do in Rhodesia. The military official recalls Hatfill as saying that his father-in-law had been killed by rebels in Rhodesia, and that he had consequently undertaken some actions that caused concern when he was given his polygraph test.
Hatfill has appealed the loss of his security clearance in a process that is pending. In the meantime, some former SAIC colleagues have gone to the FBI with concerns that nagged them in the wake of October's letters. They have pointed out that Hatfill was in the UK around November 15 for a business meeting at the very place and time from which a little-publicized hoax anthrax letter was apparently sent to Senator Tom Daschle. One colleague recounts specific comments Hatfill made about the mistakes made by the anthrax-letter perpetrator in his or her planning. For instance, Hatfill allegedly said that anyone who knew "how to grow anthrax spores of one to three microns had to know that the hole in an envelope is 10 microns and that the spores would escape."
It's not easy to shine a light into the secretive world of U.S. military bio-warfare defense work. And it's awfully hard to tell suspicious activities from ordinary ones when you're casting about in the dark. For instance, as previously mentioned, in August 2000 scientists at USAMRIID saw Hatfill taking some old biosafety cabinets from a hallway, throwing them in the back of his car, and driving off. Theoretically, the cabinets could have enabled a knowledgeable user to cultivate deadly germs off-site. One scientist reported the incident to the FBI with understandable concern. But a spokeswoman for the U.S. Special Forces told the Prospect that Hatfill was authorized to take the cabinets as props for a then-classified training session, in which he was to show Special Forces how to recognize a makeshift germ lab. The cabinets were destroyed after two demonstrations, the spokeswoman said.
The cabinets episode raises important questions about the concerns some of Hatfill's colleagues have raised. Do they reflect, as some Hatfill acquaintances feared, suspicious actions and statements, or just the musings of an expert during an extraordinary time of public scrutiny in his very field of study? Were Hatfill's colleagues right to be concerned, or were they seized by the mood of paranoia then gripping the nation? By several accounts, Hatfill appears to believe that such speculations and the snooping of journalists cost him his job. Whether the FBI's assertion earlier this week that Hatfill is not a suspect in the case will quiet these suspicions remains to be seen.
Copyright © 2002 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Laura Rozen, "Who is Steven Hatfill? The FBI has searched a U.S. bio-warfare scientist's apartment as part of its anthrax investigation.," The American Prospect Online, June 27, 2002. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/02/opinion/02KRIS.html
The New York Times, July 2, 2002
Anthrax? The F.B.I. Yawns
The F.B.I.'s bumbling before 9/11 is water under the bridge. But the bureau's
lackadaisical ineptitude in pursuing the anthrax killer continues to threaten
America's national security by permitting him to strike again or, more likely,
to flee to Iran or North Korea.
Almost everyone who has encountered the F.B.I. anthrax investigation is aghast
at the bureau's lethargy. Some in the biodefense community think they know
a likely culprit, whom I'll call Mr. Z. Although the bureau has polygraphed
Mr. Z, searched his home twice and interviewed him four times, it has not
placed him under surveillance or asked its outside handwriting expert to
compare his writing to that on the anthrax letters.
This is part of a larger pattern. Astonishingly, the F.B.I. allowed the
destruction of anthrax stocks at Iowa State University, losing what might
have been valuable genetic clues. Then it waited until December to open the
intact anthrax envelope it found. The F.B.I. didn't obtain anthrax strains
from various labs for comparison until March, and the testing is still not
complete. The bureau did not systematically polygraph scientists at two suspect
labs, Fort Detrick, Md., and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, until a month
ago.
Perhaps it's a cheap shot for an armchair detective to whine about the caution
of dedicated and exceptionally hard-working investigators. Yet months pass
and the bureau continues to act like, well, a bureaucracy, plodding along
in slow motion. People in the biodefense field first gave Mr. Z's name to
the bureau as a suspect in October, and I wrote about him elliptically in
a column on May 24.
He denies any wrongdoing, and his friends are heartsick at suspicions directed
against a man they regard as a patriot. Some of his polygraphs show evasion,
I hear, although that may be because of his temperament.
If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. But
he is a true-blue American with close ties to the U.S. Defense Department,
the C.I.A. and the American biodefense program. On the other hand, he was
once caught with a girlfriend in a biohazard "hot suite" at Fort Detrick,
surrounded only by blushing germs.
With many experts buzzing about Mr. Z behind his back, it's time for the
F.B.I. to make a move: either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting
thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek
to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion.
Whoever sent the anthrax probably had no intention of killing people; the
letters warned recipients to take antibiotics. My guess is that the goal
was to help America by raising preparedness against biological attacks in
the future.
So it seems fair to ask the F.B.I. a few questions:
Do you know how many identities and passports Mr. Z has and are you monitoring
his international travel? I have found at least one alias for him, and he
has continued to travel abroad on government assignments, even to Central
Asia.
Why was his top security clearance suspended in August, less than a month
before the anthrax attacks began? This move left him infuriated. Are the
C.I.A. and military intelligence agencies cooperating fully with the
investigation?
Have you searched the isolated residence that he had access to last fall?
The F.B.I. has known about this building, and knows that Mr. Z gave Cipro
to people who visited it. This property and many others are legally registered
in the name of a friend of Mr. Z, but may be safe houses operated by American
intelligence.
Have you examined whether Mr. Z has connections to the biggest anthrax outbreak
among humans ever recorded, the one that sickened more than 10,000 black
farmers in Zimbabwe in 1978-80? 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 Selous Scouts.
Could rogue elements of the American military have backed the Rhodesian Army
in anthrax and cholera attacks against blacks? Mr. Z's résumé
also claims involvement in the former South African Defense Force; all else
aside, who knew that the U.S. Defense Department would pick an American who
had served in the armed forces of two white-racist regimes to work in the
American biodefense program with some of the world's deadliest germs?
What now? When do you shift into high gear?