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

freaked the whole country the fuck out. You know, these happened right in the wake of nine to eleven. If you're on the younger side of things, I don't think this is as famous. But basically, right after nine to eleven, a bunch of people, including guys like Tom Dashel, some 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 mail rooms 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 gonna spend this episode talking about his life and times, because again, he's a fascinating person and I

think there's a lot on his own. We probably could do a Bastard's episode, but the thing he's best known for is being wrongly accused of being the Anthrax male guy. And it just felt like, I don't know, it seems weird to do an episode about how much this guy tucks, but also he's fine here, like this wasn't his fault. He was done dirty.

attack and what happened to him. But we have to talk about Steve Hatville 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 becomes so convinced that it was him, and he is a fet 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 a lot of really fun untangling and record correcting to do. So anyway, let's talk about Steve J. Hatville. So. He was born on October twenty fourth, nineteen fifty three, in Saint 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 other one of these like autodid acts, right, Like, he reads obsessively, at least according to him. He just can't study anything he's not interested in.

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 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 prayericvision is fly a fucking jet. You know, Like, no, sorry, kid, you're screwed anyway. So this, this fucks his life. It seems to have open 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 gunjet pilot, like nobody was 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. Who needs a navigator anyway? Just bomb wherever. That's what I saying what.

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. He travels to the Congo, finds this mission doing like medical work. It's like a missionary hospital type deal, and is like, hey, can I help? And the people running this mission are

Glenna and Lena eshtruth. Lena describes the nineteen 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 he's volunteering and we don't have enough people, so let's take him in. I mean, if nothing else, he seems like a lone white kid in the Congo, so he 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, 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 were what I mean, he's not quite as good. Every doctor would rather be dropping a j dam. You know, we all know that.

point he joins the Army. Now, every version of the story that hat Phil tells, and quite a few of the articles about Hatfill 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.

the wilderness basically training people how to be insurgents. That's kind of their gig, right, That's that's what the Green Berets do.

say that he joined the Green Berets. The standard version of that story I'm going to quote 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 seventh Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an

operational a team, Hatfill re entered civilian life. He joined the National Guard, married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon he had worked with in Africa, and returned to matun 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 nineteen seventy five and entered the rigorous Special Forces qualification course at Fort Bragg in nineteen seventy six, but he didn't last long there. After a few weeks he was discharged from active duty and wound up in the Army and National Guard. So that's a really different version of events.

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 like, So this is a fairly rapid shift for him, and it suggests that something went really wrong during his Special Forces of 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 in his she was yeah, in his mind, he was sure. So that's a very different version of events. And that Atlantic article also describes Hatfill's first marriage in a way that leaves out some details present in other accounts. It sounds like a Bruce Spreensting song there, like, oh, he got injured so he couldn't deploy, and he had to.

You know, he married the duck of a Methodist surgeon and he went on to be a security guard and 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 esh Truth's teenage daughter, Carolyn. Now they're close to the same age. He's like nineteen. I think she's seventeen and turns eighteen, right, so the age thing is not a big deal. Yeah, I say teenage,

but he's teenage too. I don't want it to make it out like I'm saying he was being creepy. I don't think it's weird for a seventeen year old and nineteen year old to get interested in each other or whatever. They get married in nineteen seventy six, and in April of nineteen seventy seven, her dad, Glenn, is captured by

mercenaries who invaded Zyir from Angola, and he's executed. He's found dead several weeks later, and the Washington Post reports quote Hatfill'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 nineteen seventy eight. He had no contact with his only child, a daughter named Kayman, who was born shortly before the divorce, until several years ago.

Carolyn Estruth says, so why, I don't know that it was, but it's just after he dies the marriage. 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 because I'm unaware of Like is he paying any form of alimony? Is he sending child support? None of that is not the fire of the year, Bud.

He's gone right like he bounces.

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 who had a very different set of rights under the

laws of that country. Rhodesia 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, whoy'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 to certainly not supposed to sell them guns. South Africa is basically their big economic

lifeline in addition, like the Portuguese colonies. But it's a really sketchy situation, and by the time he moves there in nineteen seventy eight, Rhodesia is like an international pariah. They are the white separatist state, right, the white supremacist pariah state. Right?

forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon hat. Phil would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia, he volunteered as a medic for the Rhodesian Army and was attached to the Sellus 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 Sellu Scouts.

He was a member of this elite unit. The Atlantic reports that, yeah, he was a medica attached to the unit. I've seen both ways. Neither seem to be true. So the Sellus Scouts and the Rhodesian military occupy a place of honor within the modern far right 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. Rhodesa kind of invents modern counter insurgent warfare tactics. A lot of stuff that you see that you've seen the US in the Global waruntary using in Afghanistan, in Iraq. There like huge route clearance vehicles that are like up armored to survive IEDs. The way in which like patrols are done, the way in which like you attempt to isolate problem villages or like all of these different tactics for how you're supposed

to deal with in it to smoke out insurgents. The modern like insurgent warfare Handbook gets written by Rhodesia right now, It's fascinating, this is arguably accurate, but it's not anything to be proud of, because, yeah, Rhodesia does pioneer a lot of modern counterinsurgent 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. And these aren't successful tactics, they're just tactics, like and so there's this whole like, well, there, 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 of the Rhodesian Army over that, and you get a lot of people assessing over the Sellu Scouts, in particular because after Rhodisia fell in nineteen eighty a bunch of former Scouts wrote articles and memoirs about their 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 Terar, But this is we start. 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 Sellu Scouts are like this, Uh, 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, I'm not surprised he wanted to be affiliated with this.

veterans told reporters they'd never heard of Hatfill. The true circumstances of his connection with the unit, if any, remain unclear. So I can't say he didn't 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 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, Hatfield says a truck he

was writing and was ambushed by Marxist insurgents. Leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose. 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 Midty kind of character, and he would tell these enormous, awful lies. He once told me his wife died in the Congo, and again he just left. They divorced. He left her with the kid, her dad died in the Congo. Yeah, and that gives

you something too. Where like he And 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 Selu scouts or something. It's usually a degree of like truth that were then exaggerating.

It should We didn't right to mega that way. It's weird.

of the largest anthrax epidemics ever seen in history. Right from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty, 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 stay up top anthrax. We don't. People, when you hear anthraxs 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 and 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 like livestock that have anthrax is different from say, inhaling anthrax that has been like weaponized and turned into this like fine powder, that's much deadlier, You're less likely to die. But anthrax can just happen and does just happen and has nothing to do with anybody using a weapon.

Rhodesian military using biological weapons. There's a couple of expect this. Yeah, the pandemic almost exclusively affected cattle on what we're 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.

put together? So as their chances of victory declined, doctor Robert Simington, who was a professor at the Unity of Rhodesha's medical school where Steve Hatfill studied, urged the country to adopt a new counterinsurgency 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. Simington allegedly began human experimentation as early as nineteen seventy five. The CBW program experimented with a number of compounds, including warfarin, paratheon thallium, and vibro cholera. Doctor Symington was said by one officer to have killed more terrorists than the Rodesian 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 and parathion solutions, afterwards drying them to eliminate the smell. The poison clothing was then distributed to gorilla forces through local contacts who had directly donate it to gorilla recruits by contaminating discovered caches of gorilla supplies or by stalking stores that were in

gorilla heavy areas and expected to be ransacked. Other uses of CBW included the deliberate poisoning of food stuffs with thallium and warfarin, as well as deployment of cholera to contaminate water sources known to be frequented by guerrillas. The use of cholera and warfare made Rhodesia the first nation to intentionally deploy biological weapons after the nineteen seventy five passage of the Biological Weapons Convention. Again, great guys, great country,

really really good people. And again this is where he chooses to go to medical school. It says a lot about you that, Yeah, this is where you wanted to be at this point in your life. Now, we do know the Rhodesian military absolutely did and is confirmed to have weaponized and used anthras on human beings on multiple occasions. The elite SELLU scouts actually used like we're one of the groups that deployed anthrax against like targeted groups of gorillas.

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 cause that anthrax outbreak nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty, right, obviously they did, right, Yeah, And this is kind of I brought it up this way because it's it's a good example of why Richard Jewle got suspected in the first episode and why Hatfill 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 while this is the only possible thing, right, if you just read out the facts that I just read, you obviously Rhodesia caused this massive pandemic, right, 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 an extent about their horrible warcarms of chemical and biological weapons, there's a lot of good reason to believe that this was a

natural anthrax outbreak. 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 what not,

all cattle in the country, and that has stopped. By nineteen seventy eight, 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 because the state programs to treat cattle have gone away because of the war.

Right now, there's also again we talked about how it primarily hit cattle and like these black subsistent farms as opposed to like the corp because those farms had money and we're able to continue medicating their cattle. Right and again, why is it more black? Well, Number one, the vast majority of the country's black, and number two, the white people are eating and spending their time farming animals that

have access to good medical care. Right yes, Like so when you and again this is going to be the case with when Steve Hatfiel 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, it's like, well, no, maybe I was looking at too narrow a subset of information. Now I should say it's still possible Rodisha 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.

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 school. Why would they have looped him in on their secret, incredibly illegal plans to use deadly chemical and biology. He's like fucking twenty, like why would

they do that? Like he's not who you pick, you don't need him, and there's no evidence whatsoever they 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 speculation on my part. So he graduates, I think he has to go from Rhodesia to South Africa, but eventually does graduate and he gets the equivalent of an MD in nineteen eighty four.

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 because 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 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 fourteen month tour with South Africa's National Antarctic Expedition in the nineteen eighties. Yeah, so he does that. Cool career's going well, yeah, yeah, that sounds a lot better than what he's going to wind up.

but he did it in a weird way. He was talking about being racist in a weird way to us and apartheid South Africa. Wow, yeah, just the Bratton Again. I don't see any evidence that he trained bodyguards for this white separatist, but it gives you an idea of like where's politics are right? If that's true, you know, can't say for certain that that newspaper's reporting is accurate,

but that's what was reported. Hat Phil 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 college as 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 and Surgeons, Edinburgh, a body which doesn't exist. Another said his medical degree was gained in Edinburgh at nineteen eighty four, 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.

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, would be clear. But he does have a real MD. It's a PhD

he didn't get. 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 nineteen ninety five. 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. 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 nineties, he goes back to the oost 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.

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 INDEED Apartment until we stopped admitting that we had a Germ weaponr in DED department in nineteen sixty nine. Officially, we stopped making germ biological weapons in nineteen sixty nine. Do I think we totally stopped.

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 description of you Samrid, a headquarters that is just kind of chilling. The main building of you Samrid is a dun colored two story monolith that looks like a warehouse that is virtually no windows and tubular

chimneys sprout from its roof. The building cover 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 pressure. 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 in

curable viruses. A bioprotective spacesuit is a pressurized plastic suit that covers the entire body. It is a soft plastic head bubble with a clear face plate, and it is fed by sterile air coming through a hose and an air regulator. The chimneys of the buildings are always exhausting, superfiltered and superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of the biocontainment zones. Usamrid was now surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent a truck bomber cracking open a biosafety level

four sweet and releasing a hot agent into the air. So, just going through the list of security that gives you an idea of how deadly the shit in here is. Right, Okay, these are your planet killers?

ways to defend them. Right, That's what you Samrid is doing is they are trying to know and it's not just weapons, but like you know, when you have a bowl outbreak in Africa, right you Samrid 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?

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 USAMRIID Facility, there 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 Ditrich. 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 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 USAMRIID Facility, and so if you are working there, you are working with

very scary stuff. Steve Hatfill is doing very serious work at this point, right and he is qualified to do it, not as qualified as his resumes and CV makeums out, 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. He's not as cool as he wants to be, that's my interpretation.

So he's one of his first jobs there is he's carrying out experiments on the cock monkeys, infecting them with deadly viruses and watching them die. This fucks them 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 don't feel as bad about killing these monkeys. It doesn't seem like a fun job to be. Over the next couple of years, Hatfilm 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 ston starts getting contracts

to instruct special forces teams on defensive techniques. Right, So, in addition to this job with you, Samred, he's getting like he's giving seminars, he's giving speech 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. Here are the different prophylactics you could use in different

kind of situations. Like he's training them on that kind of stuff, right, And this is all you know. Right around the late nineties is like the millenniums 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 in the public over anthrax attacks. And this corresponds to a growing public and official awareness that bioterrorism is a real threat. And hat Phil he kind of picks his moment well, right as Americans are starting to freak out about bioterrorism, he cashes in on it. And I don't mean that in an ethical sense, just in a he makes a good career move. He starts give lectures at conventions and talking to reporters about America's

unreadiness to face a weaponized pathogen. In nineteen ninety eight, 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.

form of testing for a future terrorist attack. Now. I haven't run into any evidence that Hatfield's colleagues questioned his 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 Hower, the New York City's

Emergency Preparedness director. Hower was a pall after the presentation. He says, he called hat phil aside and told him he had gone too far. It was too detailed, too specific to go into a public forum. Hatfhil listened, Hall Power 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 a weaponized pathogen and a wheelchair. Like he's really making a very easy to follow guide for poisoning the White House.

bio warfare consultant. He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax, Bill Patrick. So Bill is like the top guy and the terrifying murder weapons business. Right, how do you get it's a patent for something that's like you did it, and you 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 people just like looking up the patent for weaponized anthrax and following that, right, So maybe you want to keep that certain things the secret. Yeah, yeah, probably keep that sealed. In this case, I am in alignment with the government policy. Yeah, I shouldn't have the weaponized anthrax plans online. Also, this brings me to a special ad from our sponsor, Audible and their new book, how to Weaponize Anthrax and five Easy Steps. You don't even

have to read it. You can just listen to it and you could be weaponizing anthrax and.

talk about that online. So Patrick wants a protege. You know this guy, he's in his seventies now, he's getting older, and he wants someone to follow in his footsteps, and he meets hat Phil 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 bio terror expert who watched the ties develop.

When Patrick's schedule was too full to attend a program or contribute to his study, he recommended Hatfill, who often did the work for free. Hatfil drove Patrick to consulting jobs at sai C and traveled with him to professional conferences and classified briefings on the weaponization process. Hatfill 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. Oh, no, normal thing to keep in your house, Patrick, I too, keep that noe. Okay. In nineteen ninety nine, Patrick helps Hatfield get a job at these Science Applications International Corporation or SAIIC. This is a private contract or. 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 you, Samred, 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 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 do have extensive knowledge of wet and dry biological agents and how to produce them was at this point maybe fifty to one hundred people. Right, this is the number of people who could take anthrax and turn it into a dry, powdered biological agent. Right, maybe one hundred people tops in the whole country could have done that.

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. And it's the kind of thing where maybe he was exaggerating a bed again to get jobs. If so, this is going to bite him in the ass, because come two thousand and one, when there's an anthrax attack, you don't want to be one of the fifty to one hundred Americans who could credibly make the claim to know I don't weaponize anthrax. Right. That becomes less of

a positive thing once someone's done it. So funny, Yeah, In two thousand and one, Steven 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 onto in his background. Maybe it's just that the CIA looked into him and they found out, Oh, 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 that 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 secrets security clearance, and in fact they're denial. They don't just 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 because he's still working with sensitive information, right, and it can. 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 turn 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 there 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 SAICE, it endangers the job at his work with Usambord, and dangerous his whole career. Right, And this is all happening in two thousand and one, right, right in the run up to nine to eleven. So one of the last projects that he would start at SAIIC before nine to eleven was an attempt to design a fake mobile biowarfare production laboratory. Now this is one of those things where so nine eleven hasn't happened yet.

But George W. Bush's 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 you've tried to

do it? If nine to eleven hasn't happened. Well, this is kind of a little this is like a little bead in the he always wanted to do that thing, because before nine eleven'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 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.

But again, when the anthrax attacks hit, and it becomes clear very soon after the anthrax attacks that the anthrax either came direct from a military stockpile or was made by somebody who utilized the same techniques that we did to make weaponized anthrax. This is also going to 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 the CIA. Yeah, so nine to eleven happens, and that's where the episode's going to end. With nine to eleven. Uh, you know, because after nine to eleven, not long after, we're going to get the anthrax attacks and Steve's life is going to change dramatically for the worst. 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?