Anthrax War. Bob Coen

causes,” according to the Oklahoma City medical examiner. But Dresch had determined that the postmortems were consistent with inhalation anthrax poisoning’s unique killing mode. On his persistence, the medical examiner officially changed his verdict to “unknown.”

      With these two anthrax beachfronts taken, Dresch lit an unfiltered Pall Mall and unstrapped his battle helmet for a moment. But just as soon as he stashed his Bacillus anthracis files in the back end of his cabinet, did the microbe raise its virulent head once more—in post offices along the eastern seaboard. He joined the fray almost immediately, writing congressional investigators and the FBI about leads he thought they should follow and bulking up his own Internet operations.

      Dresch was not prepared to point a finger at a single suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. His goal was to get as many fingers pointing into as many secret corners as possible. Dresch was fast concluding that the diabolical powder was the key to a number of as yet unexplained alliances and secret motives. Germ warfare, like politics, he supposed, had made some very strange bedfellows. Every time the news referred to the anthrax letters as an “unprecedented attack on US soil,” Dresch sighed. Already, he warned investigators, it may have been used by assassins aligned with a sitting US president. And there were other precedents, he pointed out, less close to home—enough to warrant a broader search by the FBI—broader than US borders, and far beyond Fort Detrick.

      When investigators began focusing on a lone domestic culprit, Dresch quickly sent a corrective missive: “In fact, whether of domestic or foreign origin, these anthrax incidents emerge within the rich context of current and historical, foreign and domestic activity involving lethal biological and chemical agents, and the elements comprising this context are interrelated across time and geography.” The phrases “rich context,” “lethal biological and chemical agents” and “interrelated across time and geography” were all in bold text. The letter was sent to Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Committee on International Relations.

      Dresch, of course, suggested that BioPort should be a corporation of interest. In point of fact, Bruce Ivins, working at Fort Detrick, was helping the company out with some technical problems it was having with the vaccine around the time of the attacks. And even the FBI leaked suggestions that one possible motive Ivins had for mailing killer anthrax was to cause a panic, making his vaccine work more valuable. It took the FBI seven years to concede the corporate connection, when it released Ivins’ e-mails detailing some of his frustrations with the vaccine program. It was a rare moment indeed when Stephen Dresch and the FBI were in agreement.