Deadly Delivery

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

For most of last week, it seemed as though the nation's anthrax outbreak was going to be limited to South Florida--indeed, to just a single building. The hot zone, the headquarters of tabloid publisher American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, had already been sealed off, and its employees and their families were undergoing tests for the dread bacterium. By midweek, one death and two exposures had been reported, but they appeared to be the only casualties. Despite false alarms in Ohio, upstate New York and Hawaii, it looked as though the worst was over.

Then on Friday everything changed. At about midday, authorities reported that one of Tom Brokaw's assistants on the NBC Nightly News in New York City had developed a form of anthrax as well, possibly from something contained in mail she had handled a couple of weeks earlier. And even as New York City and federal executives went on television to urge the public to remain calm, word began to circulate that the third-floor newsroom at the New York Times, just 10 blocks from the NBC studios, had been evacuated. Reason: a Times reporter had opened an envelope that morning, pulled out what is described as a "threatening letter"--and watched a puff of white powder disperse into the air.

Similar scares swept the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio and the rural biweekly Dickson Herald in Tennessee. Fox News in New York revealed that a letter addressed to its president, Roger Ailes--opened, as was Brokaw's letter, by an assistant--had also contained a mysterious white powder. And in Reno, Nev., officials said a letter returned to a Microsoft Corp. office from Malaysia, apparently having been intercepted and tampered with, had initially tested positive for traces of anthrax.

Copycats tend to come out of the woodwork at times like these, and no evidence has yet been found that ties any of the anthrax scares to the tragic events of Sept. 11--unless you count the fact that a man suspected of involvement with hijackers had a paid subscription to the Globe, an American Media tabloid. The newly opened FBI investigation into the NBC incident is independent, so far, of the probe in Boca Raton. But at least two of the incidents appear to be related: the letter to the Times and one of two sent to NBC both had St. Petersburg, Fla., postmarks, and both were addressed in a similar unsteady scrawl. Neither appeared to contain anthrax, however; the infectious letter at NBC turned out to be a different envelope, with a Trenton, N.J., postmark. The Times letter is being retested, since overnight assays like the one that initially cleared it are sometimes wrong. After three inconclusive tests, in fact, the Microsoft letter was declared positive last Saturday afternoon. That made three confirmed anthrax attacks: at Microsoft, NBC and American Media.

Yet no matter what the final, definitive tests show, it is striking how many of these attacks--real and false--were directed at media companies. Having attacked America's financial and military centers on Sept. 11, the al-Qaeda terror network might well be tempted to hit the nation's media--which manage to embody both freedom and excess. Is al-Qaeda trying to panic U.S. journalists into doing the terrorists' work for them, spreading the fear that has now hit them where they work? Addressing the possibility that the anthrax scare is a follow-up to the attack on the World Trade Center, Vice President Dick Cheney wondered aloud, "Are they related? We don't know. We don't have enough evidence to be able to pin down that kind of connection. But...we have to be suspicious."

If this was a coordinated terrorist assault, though, it was pretty ineffectual. Given anthrax's lethal potential, an assault that caused one death, one nonfatal infection and two noninfectious exposures (a number that had risen to seven by Saturday, said American Media, though federal health officials wouldn't confirm it) is like the Sept. 11 hijackers' commandeering a motorcycle and driving it into a telephone booth. "Get real," says a photographer who works for tabloid newspapers. "If this was a terrorist incident, they would have put it in the ventilating system, and 400 people would have anthrax right now."

Not everyone is taking the matter so casually. The public, sensitized to the horrors of bioterrorism by weeks of government warnings and media coverage, was ready to assume the worst. Even though a mass attack is considered unlikely, doctors in South Florida and New York have been besieged with demands for ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, the only antibiotic specifically approved for treating anthrax. Police all over the U.S. have been fielding calls reporting suspicious substances; on Friday a single precinct in New York City responded to three different alerts, quarantining one building in lower Manhattan for two hours. The city's emergency rooms were besieged as well. "There's a lot of anxiety," reports Dr. Marc Stoller of the city's Beth Israel Medical Center.

Since two of the Florida victims worked in American Media's mailroom, postal workers who sorted and delivered the company's mail have also been tested, and Postal Service employees are demanding blanket testing for everyone in the Boca Raton-area post offices. Mail clerks in half a dozen other cities with anthrax scares were also tested, and media outlets--including TIME--temporarily shut down mailrooms while they scrambled to beef up security. The Postal Service has issued new guidelines on how to do that (examples: don't open any mail on which the postmark and return address don't match; don't open unexpected mail from someone you don't know, especially if the address is handwritten). The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control, meanwhile, are trying to get a handle on the scope of the problem and beginning the painstaking detective work that could pin down the source--or sources--of the bugs used in the attacks.

When the first infection struck, authorities assumed it was a naturally occurring strain--one of those rare cases that pop up from time to time. Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the Sun, was an avid outdoorsman, and anthrax is endemic in wild animals. True, Stevens had contracted his infection by inhaling anthrax bacteria--so rare a form of transmission that no case had been reported in a quarter-century (several cases of plague, by contrast, turn up in the U.S. each year). But on Oct. 5, the day Stevens succumbed to the disease, health officials who met with American Media staff members were still sticking with the theory that he had picked up the infection from a natural source and that his co-workers had nothing to fear.

The staff members, many of them experienced journalists, were not convinced. Given how rare and deadly anthrax can be--and that Stevens lived up the road in Lantana, where the Sept. 11 hijackers perfected their flight skills--shouldn't the building be shuttered for a day or two to check for traces, just in case? "There was a feeling," one of Stevens' colleagues recalls, "that if the building had been located in New York City or Washington, they would have paid more attention to us."

That official complacency would not last long. Within days, testing had revealed the presence of anthrax spores on Stevens' computer keyboard and in the nostrils of two American Media mailroom employees. Both were dosed with antibiotics, and neither developed the disease. But it was clear that Stevens had not picked up anthrax during a jaunt through the Everglades. The amount of anthrax involved and the fact that it was inhaled convinced authorities that someone had deliberately "weaponized" the bacterium--that is, cultured the spores to produce a significant quantity, then mixed the results into a powder.

How the spores got into Stevens' lungs is still a mystery. One theory involves an eccentric "love letter" sent to the actress Jennifer Lopez in care of one of American Media's publications. Tabloid staff members recall that Stevens was present when the letter was opened and passed around. It contained a powdery substance ("some kind of aphrodisiac," someone joked at the time) and a charm that looked like a Star of David. The letter was apparently discarded.

As for who might be responsible, the FBI and CDC are hoping the bacterium itself might provide a clue. Every strain of Bacillus anthracis has a genetic fingerprint; no one knows exactly how many strains of anthrax exist, but scientists have collected more than 1,200 samples from outbreaks in animals around the world. Only about a third have been studied extensively so far. The American Media bacterium is similar to strains that were isolated as early as the 1950s in places as far apart as Haiti and Iowa State University, but this one doesn't definitively match any of them. That has raised concerns that the bug may have come from overseas--from Iraq perhaps, or from rogue scientists in parts of the former Soviet Union.

If there is some sort of terrorist connection, the NBC case could help nail it down. In mid-September Brokaw's assistant, Erin O'Connor, 38, came in contact with two noteworthy pieces of mail. The first contained a threatening letter and a substance that resembled sand; the woman who opened it threw away the "sand"--it raised no suspicion--and gave O'Connor the letter, which she filed. The second letter, mailed from St. Petersburg, contained a white powder; NBC reported that one to the FBI.

The bureau did not test it, though, until O'Connor developed a rash and a fever. An initial biopsy of the rash tested negative. But when O'Connor developed a dark lesion on her chest several days later, she saw an infectious-disease specialist who sent the CDC a biopsy sample. The lesion tested positive for anthrax. Now the FBI got serious about the white powder--but it tested negative. Then O'Connor's co-worker recalled the first letter, and when the FBI tested it, evidence of anthrax was found there as well. The anonymous letter, in a plain, white envelope with no return address, was postmarked Sept. 18, Trenton.

Fortunately for O'Connor, the disease is far less dangerous on the skin than in the lungs; she was never contagious and is expected to recover fully. Still, NBC and city and federal authorities are taking no chances. Parts of two floors at the network's headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where Nightly News offices are located, were evacuated. Everyone who works there is being tested, including the woman who opened the Trenton letter. Brokaw delivered his broadcast on Friday evening from the Today show studios in an adjacent building.

The New York Times scare began, coincidentally, just as the NBC anthrax-test result came to light. Reporter Judith Miller, who covers the Middle East and has co-authored a best-selling book on bioterrorism, was at her desk in the Times' third-floor newsroom on West 43rd Street when she received a letter through the internal mail system.

When Miller opened the envelope, a white, talcum-like powder fell on her face, hands and sweater. A lot of it went into the air as well, and shortly after the incident was reported, she and the people working closest to her were told to move and work elsewhere. Then, after another half hour or so, the newsroom was sealed; the reporters were evacuated to the lobby while agents in haz-mat suits headed up the stairs. It wasn't until Saturday that the staff learned that the powder was almost certainly anthrax-free.

If the attacks and false alarms this week turn out to be the peak of the anthrax mailings, Americans can consider themselves lucky. The bacterium has long been the bug of choice for anybody interested in waging germ warfare. Both American and Soviet scientists perfected anthrax weapons during the cold war. Today an estimated 17 countries have germ-warfare programs, many of which include anthrax.

Until last week, however, nobody had successfully used anthrax spores as weapons. Scientists' best idea of what such an attack might look like comes from a 1979 Soviet accident in Sverdlovsk. Dr. David Walker, chairman of the department of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was part of a U.S. team that visited Russia in 1992, just before Boris Yeltsin finally acknowledged the escape of anthrax from a bioweapons plant. Confronted with the evidence of an unprecedented 77 infections and 64 deaths, Walker and the others began thinking hard about the biology of anthrax and how doctors might deal with an outbreak. When Bacillus anthracis emerges from inhaled spores, they knew, it grows and multiplies and starts secreting a powerful toxin that chews through tissue and enters the bloodstream. From there the poison spreads throughout the body to attack internal organs. Lymph nodes, meanwhile, clogged with immune-system cells that have been summoned to fight the invader, begin to press on the organs and interfere with their functioning.

This suggested, says Walker, that doctors must find better ways to drain lymph from around the organs, in order to relieve the pressure. And they need to develop an antitoxin, since even when antibiotics kill off the bacteria, the poison that the bug has emitted can still kill the patient. There is also an anthrax vaccine, made exclusively for the U.S. government by a private manufacturer named BioPort in Lansing, Mich. But in 1999 the FDA asked the company to stop shipment of its vaccine until BioPort instituted better quality-control measures. The company expects to begin shipping vaccines again by the end of the year, but even so, the side effects of the vaccine can be so unpleasant that some Gulf War soldiers risked court-martial rather than take the shot.

Until these cures and preventives can be perfected, though, antibiotics are the only reliable treatment--and they work only when they are given soon after exposure. For that reason, authorities can only hope that the difficulties involved in culturing large quantities of anthrax spores, weaponizing them and delivering them to large numbers of people will prevent a large-scale attack.

In that regard, the experience of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult is instructive. The group, which carried out an infamous nerve-gas attack in the Tokyo subways in 1995, had tried to work up an anthrax weapon. Aum had plenty of cash, recruited scientists into its ranks and cultivated biological-warfare experts in the former Soviet Union. But in the end, it never could pull off a successful assault using anthrax.

Terrorism experts figure that al-Qaeda might have similar problems; even if it got its supplies from a pariah like Saddam Hussein, it would have to find a way to deliver them. Officials know that hijacker Mohamed Atta asked about crop dusters before the Sept. 11 attacks. And a Delray Beach, Fla., drugstore owner says a man resembling Atta showed up at his store in late August seeking treatment for a burning sensation on his abnormally red hands. But none of this is conclusive.

While the events of last week achieved one goal terrorists usually aim for--to sow a widespread sense of fear and uncertainty--they also raised the public's consciousness about anthrax in a way no public-service announcement ever could. Just as it would be harder to hijack a plane today than it was a month or so ago, it's now going to be a lot harder to take Americans by surprise with envelopes full of powder. If this really was another bin Laden-inspired attack, America may be safer than we think.

--Reported by Alice Park and Amanda Ripley/New York, Tim Padgett and Kathie Klarreich/Boca Raton, and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, with other bureaus

TIME.com To see a commonsense guide to living with terrorists, go to time.com/unhysterical.com

With reporting by Alice Park and Amanda Ripley/New York, Tim Padgett and Kathie Klarreich/Boca Raton, and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, with other bureaus