Remembering the anthrax attacks 25 years later
WASHINGTON — When David Malet arrived at his job on Capitol Hill on Oct. 15, 2001, some semblance of normalcy was just starting to return after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The flags were back at full-staff. Things were calming down, even as reports simmered around the country about mysterious envelopes sent to media outlets through the mail.
But the panic and uncertainty came roaring back that day in then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s office, where Malet worked as a research assistant. An intern opened a letter purportedly from a fourth-grade class, and white powder spilled out.
“Capitol Police had already responded to a couple of false alarms already,” Malet said, so it was hard to tell if the letter was just “another practical joke.”
“There wasn’t an immediate lockdown protocol” as first-responders arrived, he recalled. Instead, staffers in other parts of the building continued their work, though the air ventilation system was cut off.
The answer came soon: It was the deadly bacteria that causes anthrax.
Now, 25 years later, some who worked in the Hart Senate Office Building reflect on how lucky they were. Two postal workers died after the letter to Daschle passed through a mail sorting facility in Washington, D.C., along with another anthrax-filled envelope that was addressed to then-Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., but never reached its destination.
In the end, five people were killed and at least 17 sickened in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
A letter addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was discovered in the 280 barrels of congressional mail quarantined after the first anthrax-laced letter, addressed to Senate Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle, was opened. The letter postmarked Trenton, N.J., was intercepted at an off-site inspection facility set up after the Daschle letter was discovered on Capitol Hill.
Building shut down
Daschle, a South Dakotan who led Senate Democrats for 10 years, had followed the news about anthrax sent to NBC’s offices in New York and assumed “it wouldn’t take much for Congress to be another target.”
“But I was really surprised it was me,” he said. “You’re never ready for something like that.”
Daschle arrived to work a little late that morning after a doctor’s appointment and heard of the incident from his chief of staff. At the time, the majority leader spoke daily with then-President George W. Bush.
“I just talked to Leader Daschle. His office received a letter, and it had anthrax in it,” Bush told reporters at the White House. “The letter was field tested. The staffers that have been exposed are being treated.”
Dachle described the period afterward as “chaotic, confusing, anxious.” He recalled, “people being asked to put their anthrax-exposed clothing in a black garbage bag and bring it into the Capitol for proper disposal.”
A hazardous material worker sprays his colleagues on Nov. 18, 2001, after an anthrax search at Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington. Authorities closed two Senate office buildings to test for anthrax spores after investigators discovered a contaminated letter addressed to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
Lines snaked into the halls as people waited for nasal swabs. More than two dozen tested positive for exposure. By Oct. 17, the Hart Building was shut down for decontamination. It didn’t reopen until January.
“Senators offered up their office space to other senators who were displaced temporarily. Republicans and Democrats did that together, both ways,” Daschle said.
Many on the Hill spent months on antibiotics, including the broad-spectrum fluoroquinolone known as Cipro.
“They gave the toughest thing they possibly could,” Malet said, citing lingering effects he attributes to Cipro. “I definitely started having some internal bleeding issues … which still show up once in a while, 25 years later, in my digestive system.”
Someone ordered a pizza the day of the attack, sneaking the delivery person through what Malet described as a “back staircase” as Daschle’s staff waited to hear what they should do.
“It wasn’t until later that somebody realized, ‘Oh no, that guy could have been exposed and could have exposed other people,’ and they had to find him and retrace his steps and give him medication,” Malet said.
Malet said the government also offered staffers an anthrax vaccine, though it wasn’t clear what the effects would be.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle talks about anthrax in his office and on Capitol Hill in Washington during an Oct. 17, 2001, news briefing with Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., left, and Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., right.
‘Nation on edge’
Back then, the future Republican Sen. Todd Young of Indiana was a young staffer who worked with then-Sen. Richard Lugar, whose office was in Hart.
Speculation gripped the country. For Young, the overriding feeling was “a nation on edge, and it was certainly a Washington D.C. area on edge.”
He had served in the U.S. Marine Corps but, looking back, he said his “time of greatest danger may have been that domestic assignment as a D.C. staffer,” including working at the Heritage Foundation on 9/11 and his close call with the biological attack “within days of joining” Lugar’s office.
“Compared to the very graphic and dramatic images of 9/11, this was less notable,” he said of the anthrax scenes. “But it just added to an atmosphere of anxiety and consternation, and a desire for answers among the American people to some pretty hard questions related to how the homeland was being protected.”
Years later, investigators linked the anthrax strain to Bruce Ivins, a biodefense researcher at an Army laboratory who died by suicide in 2008 as prosecutors prepared charges.
The incident brought permanent changes to the Capitol complex. Mail is now sorted offsite, for example, and signs outside senators’ offices warn against direct deliveries.
Things that may now seem routine were shocking at the time, according to Malet, who said they “never went back to the same kind of normal” after 2001.
“Most people never really worried about security in a way that people who lived through 9/11 and anthrax think about it,” he said.
A Capitol police officer seals off the road around the Hart Building on Dec. 15, 2001, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
Unprepared
Malet began a career researching military applications of biotech. Now an associate professor at American University, he said his work on the issue is “100 percent related” to his experience 25 years ago.
Similarly, Young went on to chair the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a legislative branch advisory entity.
Daschle is on the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense at the Atlantic Council, a privately funded group. “I don’t see how you can experience something of that magnitude and not be affected by it permanently,” he said. “It affected a lot of choices I’ve made in the last 25 years.”
MI5 warns that threats from Iran and Russia have surged, while AI and biological warfare pose emerging security risks to the UK.
In the age of artificial intelligence, bioterror could take on a new meaning.
“We are told it’s going to become easier for bad actors to develop really dangerous germs and to distribute or disseminate those germs and to harm others,” Young said. “We’re going to have to adapt our tactics and our protective measures.”
Daschle said on a scale of one to 10, he’d give the nation “about a two” for preparedness.
“We spend basically the equivalent of one half of an aircraft carrier on biological defense,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think we’re probably far more vulnerable today because of AI to another attack — or any one of a number of new threats that didn’t even exist back then.”
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