The Demon in the Freezer

Anthrax Letters and a New Fear

In the fall of 2001, a man named Robert Stevens became one of the first victims of the anthrax letter attacks in the United States. He worked in Florida at the National Enquirer and seemed at first to have a mysterious infection. When doctors examined him, they found anthrax in his body, something so rare that it immediately raised alarm. Soon after, another worker in the same building also tested positive, and investigators found anthrax spores in the mailroom. That evidence showed the disease had not come from nature. It had arrived through the mail.

A second shock came in Washington, D.C., when an envelope was opened in Senator Tom Daschle’s office. A fine powder floated into the air and moved through the building’s ventilation system before anyone understood what had happened. The Hart Senate Office Building had to be shut down for months, and the cleanup cost millions. When specialists examined the powder, they saw right away that it was not crude material. It was unusually light, smooth, and easy to spread, the kind of substance that behaves less like dust and more like smoke.

At the Army’s biodefense laboratory, Peter Jahrling and his team worried about more than anthrax alone. Anthrax is deadly, but it does not spread from person to person. Smallpox is different. If someone managed to hide smallpox inside a powder attack, the result could be far worse. That fear pushed scientists to examine the anthrax samples under powerful microscopes, searching for any trace of a second agent. They found only anthrax, but what they did find was still deeply unsettling.

Under the microscope, the spores looked unusually pure and active. They did not clump together the way natural anthrax often does. Instead, they lifted easily into the air and even seemed to creep along surfaces. Further testing showed the powder contained silica, a glass-like substance that helped keep the spores from sticking to each other. This was strong evidence that the anthrax had been carefully prepared as a weapon. The attacks had already killed people, but they also did something else. They reopened the question of whether an even more dangerous disease, smallpox, could return.