As senators debate anti-terror legislation, airborne anthrax infiltrates Capitol Hill. And Black postal workers and their families demand answers—was their workplace knowingly left at risk?
Chapter 1: Who is Thomas Morris Jr. and what happened on October 21, 2001?
It's October 21st, 2001. Thomas Morris Jr. is calling for help.
My breathing is late. My chest feels constricted. Um... I am getting here, but to get up and walk and what have you, it feels like I might just pass out.
Thomas tells the operator that about a week earlier, he'd been close by when a co-worker opened a suspicious letter.
I suspected I might have been exposed to anthrax. A woman found the envelope, and I was in the vicinity. It had powder in it.
With all the recent news, 911 was already getting a lot of panicked calls.
In the current atmosphere, anthrax scares and hoaxes, rather than real attacks, have all but paralyzed parts of the United States.
But Thomas' call is different, because he's an employee of the U.S. Postal Service. And America's mail system over the last two weeks has been transformed into a kind of terrorism delivery service. It turns out that there's another letter.
We believe that there may be other envelopes. Don't shake it. Don't taste it. Don't sniff it. The call, law enforcement.
A few days after Thomas' colleague at the mail facility handled that letter with powder in it, Thomas started feeling achy and came down with a headache. And now it's 4.39 a.m. on a Sunday, and he can't stop vomiting. He tells the 911 operator how all week he's been hearing from his bosses that there's nothing to worry about.
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Chapter 2: How did the FBI respond to the anthrax threat and what challenges did they face?
At this moment, the FBI has essentially no evidence, zero suspects, and a lot of pressure to solve this. Pressure from the public, from the White House, and especially from Decker's boss, the FBI's new director, Robert Mueller.
He had a tiger by the tail, and he was brand new at the job. I mean, he looked frazzled and tired, but I don't think he went home to sleep. If he did, I never saw him leave.
Decker is working with Mueller at FBI headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown D.C. The director's office is just a few steps down the hall, and Decker can almost feel the weight of Mueller's expectations bearing down on him.
To not show progress was very unnerving, embarrassing. And Bob Mueller is not a jokey person. He wants the answers and he wants them quick. He wants you to immediately say what you know and say it with confidence. And if we didn't have results to show in those meetings, it was uncomfortable. I mean, he didn't have to say anything.
He just looked at you and you knew you better get your butt in gear. Decker's spending long nights at the office, too. He'd just separated from his wife, so he's throwing himself into the anthrax case. And the stress was getting to him.
It affected me. I got in a fair amount of trouble during that time. I just lost my temper a couple times, which you're not supposed to do in the FBI. You've got to keep cool.
To catch the anthrax mailer, Decker and the FBI need to figure out what the mailer wants. So far, there are no demands. And the best physical evidence they have is a letter sent to NBC calling for death to America and the now empty envelope it came in. Not a lot to go on. And on top of that, their job has just gotten much more complicated because the American public has become paranoid.
People start seeing what they think is anthrax everywhere.
All across the country today, it was precaution in the face of peril.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of the anthrax attack on Senator Tom Daschle's office?
She gently moved the envelope far from her face.
I remember holding the letter with two hands down by my feet and I said, hey guys, I just spilled white powder all over myself. And everybody sort of froze and looked at me.
This aerosolable anthrax had pervasively covered and got into the atmosphere around her. There were, I think, 27 people at the time in the office and they were all exposed.
The FBI arrives within minutes. We were escorted up to the suite where the letter was opened. Arriving on the scene is another FBI special agent named Scott. This one, Agent Scott Stanley.
We have a white powder letter. We have somebody who's been exposed. And everybody in that suite has been exposed.
And just like Agent Scott Decker, he's a scientist with a Ph.D. in biomedical sciences.
The individual who opened that letter was still sitting in a chair. We did not enter the suite. She was still sitting in a chair holding the envelope with the powder on her lap. I think fortuitously, this individual had just been trained on what to do if you open up a white powder letter. And she remained very calm, held it upright so nothing else spilled out of it.
Agent Stanley takes stock of the room, still crowded with members of Daschle's staff.
How do you protect them? You know, what do you do? What do you tell them? And the fact of the matter is that if you ultimately want to protect them, you got to go do your job, right?
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Chapter 4: How did the anthrax exposure affect the Capitol Hill and government operations?
Chapter 5: What was the role of Agent Scott Stanley and how was the threat contained?
And inside those Capitol buildings, as many as 20,000 staffers, lawmakers, and visitors walk in and out every day. They shut the air conditioning off. But it might be too late. Stanley, the FBI, and the White House can only hope they've done enough.
As the deadly bacteria have now turned up in the American capital.
I just talked to Leader Daschle. His office received a letter and it had anthrax in it. The staffers that have been exposed are being treated.
I was heading to work that morning and listening to reports coming in on the local radio news station.
It's been reported that the office... If there are people that again... On the ongoing anthrax investigation... My office opened a suspicious package.
Joby Warwick is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covers national security for the Washington Post.
By the time I get to work, we have reporters down at the scene. I'm working the phones to try to figure out what a story would say. But colleagues are there physically at the building, and the pictures that are coming back are of people in moon suits.
Joby had investigated biological and chemical weapons threats in war zones and dicey basement labs all over the world. But he never expected this.
You know, investigators coming in dressed up like it's the hot zone and they're heading out to check on a plague. But they're walking into a Senate office, a building that we all know so well, we've been in dozens of times. That meant that the government was also under attack and that, you know, among the possible victims could be any member of Congress or any elected official.
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Chapter 6: What controversies surrounded the USA Patriot Act during the anthrax attacks?
You know, what is everybody? A dead man walking? You know, it was a human experiment in progress. Nobody knew how it would come out.
The latest letter to have been discovered, addressed to a congressman, is thought to contain literally billions of spores of the deadly disease.
We live in a new era where someone is using the deadly bacteria as a form of terror.
And then, when the rest of the test results come in, the really bad news comes.
It was discovered that a sample came back from the Ford House office building mailroom as positive for anthrax.
So they now know there's anthrax not just in multiple rooms of Daschle's building, but in several neighboring buildings as well.
The U.S. House of Representatives is closing offices today.
Nothing like this has ever happened. The last time Congress was interrupted and the Capitol shut down was more than a century earlier, for the War of 1812.
Our national capital region was just chaotic. It was a buzz. There was people everywhere. There was absolute fear, hysteria.
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Chapter 7: What was the extent of the anthrax contamination in government buildings?
Joby Warwick, the Washington Post reporter, saw all of this unfold over the next few days in real time, just blocks from his office.
To see them shut down, to see yellow police tape, to see soldiers and police officers around, to see images of investigators coming into the building with their biohazard suits —
Agent Scott Stanley watches hundreds and then thousands of people line up in another building to get nasal swabs and a three-day supply of Cipro.
There was just a tremendous surge capacity that came into the Capitol from the military, from the Coast Guard. We had strike teams. We had decon teams. We had people going in, nasally swabbing thousands of patients. And this was all at the Capitol at the United States. Everybody who was responding at the time had been dealing with for 20 plus hours a day. Nobody was getting any sleep.
Everybody was working themselves to the bone. This is the worst biological attack in this country's history.
About 36 hours after the Dasha letter was opened, much of the U.S. Capitol complex is evacuated and closed. But in this catastrophe, there's a tiny silver lining for the FBI. They now have another envelope, this one with some anthrax remaining in it, and now a second letter.
It's reported to contain the words, death to America, death to Israel.
Allah is great. You cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid?
The FBI compares the D.C. letter to the New York letter, and there are striking similarities. First, some of the letter's wording, death to America, death to Israel, Allah is great, is the exact same language. And so is the way it's written.
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