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. Agents were compelled to consider any and all means of investigation. The pressure on American law enforcement to find the perpetrator or perpetrators was enormous. Cole, an expert on bioterrorism at Rutgers University, “as though it were teeming with worms.” If you were to peer through a microscope at a cross-section of an anthrax victim’s blood vessel at the moment of death, it would look, says Leonard A. The final stages before death are excruciatingly painful.As their minds disintegrate, victims literally drown in their own fluids. Massive lesions soon form in the lungs and brain, as a few thousand bacilli propagate within days into literally trillions of voracious parasitic microbes. Anthrax infections typically begin with flu-like symptoms. Inhaled anthrax bacteria devour the body from within. Police were swamped with calls from citizens suddenly suspicious of their own mail.Īmericans had good reason to fear. The attacks spawned a spate of hoax letters nationwide. But at least 17 people would fall ill and five would die-a photo editor at The Sun two postal employees at a Washington, D.C., mail-processing center a hospital stockroom clerk in Manhattan whose exposure to anthrax could never be fully explained and a 94-year-old Connecticut widow whose mail apparently crossed paths with an anthrax letter somewhere in the labyrinth of the postal system. The letters accompanying the anthrax read like the work of a jihadist, suggesting that their author was an Arab extremist-or someone masquerading as one-yet also advised recipients to take antibiotics, implying that whoever had mailed them never really intended to harm anyone. Government mail service quickly shut down. Three weeks later, two more envelopes containing anthrax arrived at the Senate offices of Democrats Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, each bearing the handwritten return address of a nonexistent “Greendale School” in Franklin Park, New Jersey. Postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, and believed to have been sent from a mailbox near Princeton University, the initial mailings went to NBC News, the New York Post, and the Florida-based publisher of several supermarket tabloids, including The Sun and The National Enquirer.

T he first anthrax attacks came days after the jetliner assaults of September 11, 2001.

JET Ambushed by J.E. Vassar