Dr. Steven Hatfill was <i>The Wrong Man</i>

By John Ballard

Thanks to Kat, our researcher who brought it to my attention, I just read David Freed's The Wrong Man in the Atlantic, about Dr. Steven Hatfill's ordeal as the target of an official investigation of the famous "anthrax letters" that showed up a few days after the WTC attack in 2001.

It's hard to believe those days will soon be nine years past. Young adults today were still in elementary school at the time and a few years from now a population of voters and community leaders will be in charge who were not even born as these events unfolded. For that reason it is important that Hatfill's story not simply slip into a pile of footnotes in an otherwise overwhelming narrative of 9/11, because his story is yet another example of how overweening diligence and perverted good intentions can lead to official malfeasance on a scale which leaves innocent survivors with scars for the rest of their lives. 

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My interest in this story was piqued because in October, 2001 my wife and I were in New York. I have told the story elsewhere, but our youngest daughter was a United Air Lines flight attendant flying the transcontinental routes and as family members we were able to fly free at that time. During the few days we were in New York suspicious letters, likely hoaxes or copy-cats, were being reported in three Manhattan locations. So Dr. Hatfill's experiences carry extra interest for me.

The pressure on American law enforcement to find the perpetrator or perpetrators was enormous. Agents were compelled to consider any and all means of investigation. One such avenue involved Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar College and a self-styled literary detective, who had achieved modest celebrity by examining punctuation and other linguistic fingerprints to identify Joe Klein, who was then a Newsweek columnist, as the author of the anonymously written 1996 political novel, Primary Colors. Foster had since consulted with the FBI on investigations of the Unabomber and Atlanta�s Centennial Olympic Park bombing, among other cases. Now he was asked to analyze the anthrax letters for insights as to who may have mailed them. Foster would detail his efforts two years later in a 9,500-word article for Vanity Fair.

Surveying the publicly available evidence, as well as documents sent to him by the FBI, Foster surmised that the killer was an American posing as an Islamic jihadist. Only a limited number of American scientists would have had a working knowledge of anthrax. One of those scientists, Foster concluded, was a man named Steven Hatfill, a medical doctor who had once worked at the Army�s elite Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), which had stocks of anthrax.

On the day al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with hijacked jetliners, Hatfill was recovering from nasal surgery in his apartment outside the gates of Fort Detrick, Maryland, where USAMRIID is housed. We�re at war, he remembers thinking as he watched the news that day�but he had no idea that it was a war in which he himself would soon become collateral damage, as the FBI came to regard him as a homegrown bioterrorist, likely responsible for some of the most unsettling multiple murders in recent American history. His story provides a cautionary tale about how federal authorities, fueled by the general panic over terrorism, embraced conjecture and coincidence as evidence, and blindly pursued one suspect while the real anthrax killer roamed free for more than six years. Hatfill�s experience is also the wrenching saga of how an American citizen who saw himself as a patriot came to be vilified and presumed guilty, as his country turned against him.

This is not fiction.Dr. Hatfill's story is real. And what happened to him could happen to anyone wrongly accused.

We have no hint about Dr. Hatfill's politics or opinions about current events. There is plenty in the narrative to become grist for everyone's mill. But unless or until one side or the other buys him out (please forgive my cynical attitude) everyone needs to be aware of his story.