How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1)

Robert goes through the colorful life and backstory of future Trump administration official Steven Hatfill, who went from Rhodesian military volunteer to biological weapons expert to (innocent) suspect of a major terrorist attack.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hey everyone, it's still behind the Bastards. Part two of
our episodes on how the FBI and the media created
a monster by repeatedly accusing the wrong people of terrorism,
and we're talking. We talked to the last episode with
our guests Courtney Cosak about Richard Jewel and the Olympic

(00:26):
Park bombing, and in these next two episodes we're going
to be talking about the two thousand and one anthrax
attacks in the United States, killed like five people and
freaked the whole country the fuck out. You know, these
happened right in the wake of nine to eleven. If
you're on the younger side of things, I don't think
this is as famous. But basically, right after nine to eleven,

(00:47):
a bunch of people, including guys like Tom Dashel, some
people in government, started receiving letters that had white powder
in them. Several people got sick and died, mostly folks
who were just happened to be in and around like
the mail rooms and stuff where the letters were being opened.
And they never found who did it, but they had

(01:07):
a suspect for several years. And that suspect is a
guy who is a bastard. I think by my standards,
but is also again not the bad guy of this story,
and we're gonna spend this episode talking about his life
and times, because again, he's a fascinating person and I
think there's a lot on his own. We probably could

(01:29):
do a Bastard's episode, but the thing he's best known
for is being wrongly accused of being the Anthrax male guy.
And it just felt like, I don't know, it seems
weird to do an episode about how much this guy tucks,
but also he's fine here, like this wasn't his fault.
He was done dirty.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
So we're just.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Talking about, like how both of these in both of
these terrorist attacks, the same fucked up thing happened thanks
to the FBI and the media being the kinds of
Organs that they are.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
Steve our protagonists this time.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Steve is and this is going to be more of
a traditional Bastards episode this one, and then in part three,
whenever we record that, we'll get to the actual Anthrax
attack and what happened to him. But we have to
talk about Steve Hatville because who he is and the
kind of life he leads are what makes him into
the suspect for this terrorist attack, right, and like is

(02:23):
why people are is why people in the FBI and
the media becomes so convinced that it was him, and
he is a fet He's a perfect candidate for bastards
like His backstory is insane. He's told a bunch of
different versions of his life, many of which can't be true.
Independent reporting has repeatedly shown that, like different things he
said about his resume and his CV could not have

(02:46):
happened that way. So there's a lot of really fun
untangling and record correcting to do. So anyway, let's talk
about Steve J. Hatville. So. He was born on October
twenty fourth, nineteen fifty three, in Saint Louis, Missouri. Like me,

(03:09):
he was raised in Mattoon, Illinois. He was the oldest
of two kids and the only boy in his family.
His mother was a homemaker and part time interior decorator,
and his father was an electrical engineer and salesman. Now,
the details I've come across don't make it look like
his childhood was particularly noteworthy. There's no major trauma or

(03:31):
at least anecdotes that we have that foreshadow the man
he would become. He describes himself as a bad student
and told one reporter, I never took a book home
from school. He did better when it came to electives. Yeah,
and he's other one of these like autodid acts, right, Like,
he reads obsessively, at least according to him. He just
can't study anything he's not interested in.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Right.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Maybe it's adhd rain, you know, but he's primarily interested
in like medical science and military history, and he can't
make himself care about anything else. He does better when
it comes to electives. He wrestles for the varsity team.
In high school, he flies glider planes and is allowed
a solo pilot a glider at age fourteen, which seems early,

(04:14):
but you know, go off kid. He graduates Mattoon Senior
High and is admitted to Southwestern College in Kansas, where
he majors in biology and joins an ROTC like summer
leadership program hosted by the Marine Corps. And his goal
at this point, and this has been his life goal
for at least his latter adolescent period to the start
of his adulthood, is to become a fighter pilot for

(04:36):
the Marine Corps. Right. He wants to fly jet fighters.
You know, it's the coolest job you can do in
the military. That's what he wants. And so he goes
in and the Marine Corps tests his vision and it's
not perfect. And you know what you can't do if
you don't have naturally prayericvision is fly a fucking jet.
You know, Like, no, sorry, kid, you're screwed anyway. So this,

(04:58):
this fucks his life. It seems to have open something
inside of him because the Marines are like, well, you
could be a navigator, and he's like, I don't want
to be a fucking navigator. I want to be a
fucking top gunjet pilot, like nobody was to be a navigator.
Come on, that's just such a bummer job. Navigators are
the bike cops of the piloting world, where it's like,
this isn't what you signed up to do. And I
know it, Like I know you don't want to be

(05:20):
sitting back there. Who needs a navigator anyway? Just bomb wherever.
That's what I saying what.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
I would be too scared I would be a navigator.
I hate to say it.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
Oh, I mean then I get to be the pilot,
I guess, so that's a win for me. I have
my vision.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
I just want to know I do not trust you
to fly a plane.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
I think I'd be a great fighter pilot. I mean, Sophy,
look at how many F thirty five's and F twenty
two's they're crashing these days, F eighteen's. You know I
could do at least that. Well, I could crash.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
One of those things, Barslow, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
I could crash that son of a bitch into whatever,
you know, a house or I don't care. You're allowed
to do anything in the Marine Corps, I assume. So
he doesn't join the Marine Corps though, because again he
doesn't get to be a pilot. And this kind of
I get the feeling reading his backstory that this kind
of like shatters him. So he cut He partially drops
out of it's less accuracy. He drops out of college

(06:15):
because you will go back, but he like suspends his
college education and just flies to Africa. Now he's got
no formal medical training, but he finds a mission hospital
in the Congo. This is not a safe place, This
is not an easy place to get to. So he
travels and he doesn't reach out to them beforehand. He
travels to the Congo, finds this mission doing like medical work.

(06:39):
It's like a missionary hospital type deal, and is like, hey,
can I help? And the people running this mission are
Glenna and Lena eshtruth. Lena describes the nineteen year old
Steve as being something of a mystery when he showed
up quote, nobody sent him. I don't even know how
he knew about us. But they're like, well, he's he's

(07:00):
volunteering and we don't have enough people, so let's take
him in. I mean, if nothing else, he seems like
a lone white kid in the Congo, so he should
probably not just let him wander off. So they take
him in and he works there and they taught him.
He learns, you know, the basics of hematology and parasitology, right,
Like he's not enough that he could be a practitioner,

(07:21):
but enough that he knows that he's interested in getting
a real medical education. Right. He gets some hands on
experience and he's like, oh, this is almost as good
as killing people in a plane. So he were what
I mean, he's not quite as good. Every doctor would
rather be dropping a j dam. You know, we all
know that.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
But he does have balls though that part is consistent,
Like that part is consistent, Yeah, yes, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Straight to the Congo, I think we should.

Speaker 4 (07:50):
I don't think doctor our friend doctor Hodo would agree.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
You don't think that. I think I think he would
agree that it takes the balls to just at nineteen
go straight to the Congo to see if you can
fight the place to work. It's like an American who
grew up in the suburbs. So he returns to the
US after this like year he'spens like I think it's
about a year in the Congo, and he goes back
to Southwestern and he finishes and gets his degree. He

(08:15):
gets his undergraduate degree in nineteen seventy five, at which
point he joins the Army. Now, every version of the
story that hat Phil tells, and quite a few of
the articles about Hatfill that are written by reporters who
talk to him, will repeat this next part, because he
claims that as soon as he joins the Army, he
gets into the Green Berets. Do you know what the

(08:36):
Green Berets are, Courtney.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
They're special, They're special.

Speaker 2 (08:41):
It's a yeah, they're very special boys. Some of the
specialist boys in the whole army. That's right, guys, it's
a special forces unit. They're more focused on like the
Green Beraves are the guys you send in if you've
got if you have a bunch of like local militia
tie that you want to train up into a fighting

(09:02):
force to fuck with whatever country that you're having a
great power conflict with, you send them the Green Berets
and they spend long periods of time, you know, in
the wilderness basically training people how to be insurgents. That's
kind of their gig, right, That's that's what the Green
Berets do.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Is it like Navy Seal adjacent?

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yah, it's at that level of special forces, right, like they.

Speaker 1 (09:27):
Come in before or their trainers.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
They just do different things. They do it like the
Navy Seals are more of the guys carrying out assassinations.
The Green Berets are more the guys who are trying
to teach, you know, indigenous allies how to set up
trip wires in the jungle or whatever, or carry out
ambushes on NVA caravans if we're talking about like Vietnam
or whatever. So hat Phil claims to have joined the

(09:51):
Green Berets, and most of the news articles about him
say that he joined the Green Berets. The standard version
of that story I'm going to quote from an Atlantic
article by David Freed. Here, he took a direct enlistment
option to join the Green Berets, attended parachute school, trained
as a radio operator, and was assigned to the Army's
seventh Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When
a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an

(10:13):
operational a team, Hatfill re entered civilian life. He joined
the National Guard, married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon
he had worked with in Africa, and returned to matun
to work the night shift as a security guard at
a radiator factory. Now there's some issues with this version
of events. First off, he was not in the Green Berets,
at least not according to reporting by Marilyn Thompson that

(10:33):
was published in the Washington Post. Quote military records show
he did enlist in the Army in nineteen seventy five
and entered the rigorous Special Forces qualification course at Fort
Bragg in nineteen seventy six, but he didn't last long there.
After a few weeks he was discharged from active duty
and wound up in the Army and National Guard. So
that's a really different version of events.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
It's like not making it through boot camp. Is that
what happened?

Speaker 2 (10:57):
He made it through boot camp, he doesn't make it
through Special Force his qualifying school, and then he changes
from being enlisted in active duty to being in the
National Guard. So something happened. We don't really I don't
know that we'll ever know what, but something happened to
where like he not only make is it made clear
that he's not going to be in Special Forces, but
he's not going to be active duty right like, So

(11:19):
this is a fairly rapid shift for him, and it
suggests that something went really wrong during his Special Forces
of qualification course. It may just have been that he
was he couldn't make the cut, but for whatever reason,
this is not something he does. But he will spend
a lot of his life. A lot of articles about
this guy say that he was a Green Beret right
in his she was yeah, in his mind, he was sure.

(11:44):
So that's a very different version of events. And that
Atlantic article also describes Hatfill's first marriage in a way
that leaves out some details present in other accounts. It
sounds like a Bruce Spreensting song there, like, oh, he
got injured so he couldn't deploy, and he had to.
You know, he married the duck of a Methodist surgeon
and he went on to be a security guard and
a radiator factory. You know that's not not true. But

(12:09):
when you kind of describe it that way, you lose
some important context. Because Steve fell in love when he
was in Africa with the esh Truth's teenage daughter, Carolyn.
Now they're close to the same age. He's like nineteen.
I think she's seventeen and turns eighteen, right, so the
age thing is not a big deal. Yeah, I say teenage,
but he's teenage too. I don't want it to make

(12:30):
it out like I'm saying he was being creepy. I
don't think it's weird for a seventeen year old and
nineteen year old to get interested in each other or whatever.
They get married in nineteen seventy six, and in April
of nineteen seventy seven, her dad, Glenn, is captured by
mercenaries who invaded Zyir from Angola, and he's executed. He's
found dead several weeks later, and the Washington Post reports

(12:55):
quote Hatfill's marriage soured quickly after his father in law's death.
He accompanied Carolyn to a funeral service in Michigan, and
that was the last time Lena Estruth saw him. He
and Carolyn divorced in nineteen seventy eight. He had no
contact with his only child, a daughter named Kayman, who
was born shortly before the divorce, until several years ago.
Carolyn Estruth says, so why, I don't know that it was,

(13:18):
but it's just after he dies the marriage. It may
just have not been. They meet when they're teenagers. Maybe
they were just never gonna Yeah, I don't know what
happened here, but he leaves and he has nothing to
do with his kid, right. I don't know if I'd
say he abandoned them because I'm unaware of Like is
he paying any form of alimony? Is he sending child support?

(13:40):
None of that is not the fire of the year, Bud.
He's gone right like he bounces.

Speaker 4 (13:45):
You know.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Now, part of why Steve is not around for his
daughter's life is that right after he gets out, like
right after this divorce happens, and after he graduates, he
returns to Africa. Now, like the rest is Steve's life.
There are conflicting stories here, but what we can what's
definitely solid, what we know is that in nineteen seventy eight.

(14:07):
As soon as he divorces his wife and leaves his
kid and ex wife behind, he moves to Rhodesia. That's
his first stop. Now, Rhodesia does not exist today, but
it was at the time a white supremacist pariah state.
This is a British colony where a tiny number of
white people ruled over a larger number of black people
who had a very different set of rights under the

(14:30):
laws of that country. Rhodesia basically becomes a pariah state
because they refuse to give up or transition like away
from this system of government effectively, and they get wind
up being blacklisted by everyone, right like the British government,
whoy're supposed to they were supposed to be a colony
of refuses to recognize them. You're not supposed to trade

(14:51):
with Rhodesia, You're not supposed to certainly not supposed to
sell them guns. South Africa is basically their big economic
lifeline in addition, like the Portuguese colonies. But it's a
really sketchy situation, and by the time he moves there
in nineteen seventy eight, Rhodesia is like an international pariah.
They are the white separatist state, right, the white supremacist

(15:12):
pariah state. Right?

Speaker 3 (15:13):
Yeah, you just made so many references to Rhodesia that
I've heard and not understood.

Speaker 1 (15:19):
Finally makes sense.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
Oh yeah, yeah, I love Rode, one of my favorite stories.
So again, Rhodesia doesn't exist anymore because about two years
after he moves there, they lose their war to these
Marxist insurgents and becomes Zimbabwe. But for the last two
years that Rhodesia exists, that's where Steve hat Phil lives

(15:40):
and he attends the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury,
which I think was the capital. So choosing to move
to Rhodesia in nineteen seventy eight, is it minimum morally questionable?

Speaker 5 (15:52):
Right?

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Nobody just travels there because you're like Rhodesia, the name
sounds nice. You're aware in the news that the whole
world considers them a pariah for the racism and the
brutal Bush War that they're persecuting, which is killing huge
numbers of civilians, which means that Steve probably didn't have
an issue with that. Right, the white supremacist government was

(16:15):
clinging to power wherever it could and the state security
forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon hat. Phil
would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia, he
volunteered as a medic for the Rhodesian Army and was
attached to the Sellus Scouts, which was Rhodesia's answer to
the Navy Seals. Right, this is Rhodesia's special premier special
forces organization. And again you see this repeated constantly in

(16:40):
articles about him, that yeah, and he a lot of
times they'll just say he was one of the Sellu Scouts.
He was a member of this elite unit. The Atlantic
reports that, yeah, he was a medica attached to the unit.
I've seen both ways. Neither seem to be true. So
the Sellus Scouts and the Rhodesian military occupy a place
of honor within the modern far right conception of military

(17:01):
history because of the way this Bush conflict between these
insurgents that represent a much larger portion of the country
and the military, which is a mixed race military but
exists to support the white supremacist state. Rhodesa kind of
invents modern counter insurgent warfare tactics. A lot of stuff
that you see that you've seen the US in the

(17:23):
Global waruntary using in Afghanistan, in Iraq. There like huge
route clearance vehicles that are like up armored to survive IEDs.
The way in which like patrols are done, the way
in which like you attempt to isolate problem villages or
like all of these different tactics for how you're supposed
to deal with in it to smoke out insurgents. The
modern like insurgent warfare Handbook gets written by Rhodesia right now,

(17:50):
It's fascinating, this is arguably accurate, but it's not anything
to be proud of, because, yeah, Rhodesia does pioneer a
lot of modern counterinsurgent warfare tactics. They don't win, they lose,
and by the way, every country who copied their tactics,
including the US, also loses a lot of the wars
that they use those tactics. And these aren't successful tactics,

(18:14):
they're just tactics, like and so there's this whole like, well, there, Rhodesians,
they were the ones who really before anyone else knew
what the future of warfare was gonna be. And so
you get a lot of like people nerding out of
the Rhodesian Army over that, and you get a lot
of people assessing over the Sellu Scouts, in particular because
after Rhodisia fell in nineteen eighty a bunch of former
Scouts wrote articles and memoirs about their combat experiences that

(18:37):
massively exaggerated how good they had been. Again, they lose
the war. And this all feeds into starting in the eighties,
there's this growing worship of like special forces that's almost
like a cult, right. It reaches its height during the
Global War on Terar, But this is we start. It
becomes in the media. There's more and more movies about
special forces units, and so especially for people on the

(19:01):
far right, the Sellu Scouts are like this, Uh, they're idolized, right,
And so like the fact that hat Phil really wants
people to believe he was in this unit makes a
lot of sense given his Again, this guy today is
in the Trump administration, given his politics, and just given
socially what's what's going on, I'm not surprised he wanted

(19:21):
to be affiliated with this.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Unit racist special forces. What could be the.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Most racist special forces? Yes, like the Sellu Scouts and
the SS both use the same acronym so that's that's
that's easy. Now. That said, there's good reason to doubt
that he had anything to do with the Scouts. Per
the Washington Post, Hatfill's resume also claimed that he'd served
as a Sello Scout that was time in the Rhodesian
military overlapped with his time in the US Army. Rhodesian

(19:48):
military records have been hard to find, but Sello Scouts
veterans told reporters they'd never heard of Hatfill. The true
circumstances of his connection with the unit, if any, remain unclear.
So I can't say he didn't he didn't have any
connection with them. I don't know. Maybe he was sent
somewhere as a scout, but we don't have evidence really
other than his word that I've seen, so given the

(20:10):
other discrepancies in his background, I would need to see
some actual evidence that he served with his unit to
believe stories like the one he told The Atlantic Quote.
While he was in Rhodesia, Hatfield says a truck he
was writing and was ambushed by Marxist insurgents. Leaping from
the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose.
He claims, gives him like a lifelong breathing injury that

(20:31):
will be relevant a little bit later. But again, did
that happen? Did he just break his nose some other way?
Did he have any exciting encounters with insurgents at all?
Unclear to me. Now, there is some evidence to suggest
that his habit of exaggerating the truth dates back at
least as far as his time in college. One of
his former classmates told Simon Cooper from the Observer quote,

(20:52):
he was an extraordinary guy and very very bright, but
he was also a real Walter Midty kind of character,
and he would tell these enormous, awful lies. He once
told me his wife died in the Congo, and again
he just left. They divorced. He left her with the kid,
her dad died in the Congo. Yeah, and that gives
you something too. Where like he And that's why I think, Yeah,

(21:15):
he may have been embedded with some chunk of the
Rhodesian military as a medic, or maybe back at base
he treated some Selu scouts or something. It's usually a
degree of like truth that were then exaggerating.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
He went to Fort Bragg, he got did the Special
Forces like tests, but he didn't god become a green Beret, right,
like he's kind of making ends meet in his stories
a lot of the time. But you know who always
tells the truth me sponsors. That's right, that's right. They
would never pretend to have been a member of the

(21:52):
Rhodesian military because they were it. They served in the
Rhodesian military. All of our sponsors former Rhodesian Special Forces.
It should We didn't right to mega that way. It's weird.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
Your first instinct is to slam.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
They love it. It's like negging, you know, like that
doesn't actually work for dating the pickup artist guys are
wrong about that, but it's incredible for advertising.

Speaker 1 (22:18):
Cor for people.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, no, no, sometimes I'll just walk I just walked
into Ford's offices the other day and I was like, oh,
you guys, this in F one fifty call it like
an F seventy five, you know. I was like half
a truck maybe, and they just walked out and they
just mailed us at check. Oh yeah, that's how you
do it, people negging.

Speaker 6 (22:38):
Here's that.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
And we're back. So yeah, it's worth noting because of
what comes later that Hatfield's time in Rhodesia did directly
overlap with something that's going to be very relevant to
the thing that's going to come to define his adult life,
which is the anthrax attacks in the United States, because
while he is in Rhodesia, Rhodesia suffers the largest, one

(23:06):
of the largest anthrax epidemics ever seen in history. Right
from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty, the years that
he's there, thousands and thousands of cattle and several hundred
human beings are killed by anthrax exposure in Rhodesia. Now,
we don't fully know why this happened, and I want
to stay up top anthrax. We don't. People, when you

(23:29):
hear anthraxs you think it's like a weapon, right, Anthrax
is a natural thing, like it occurs. There are places,
Rhodesia is one of them. There are places in the
world where livestock just get anthrax like it's an outbreak.
It's a bacteria, you know, like and livestock if you
are not taking proper care of them. If you're not
and in an area where anthrax is and endemic, they

(23:50):
can get anthrax and they can spread anthrax to people.
Right now, the kind of exposure human beings tend to
get when exposed to like livestock that have anthrax is
different from say, inhaling anthrax that has been like weaponized
and turned into this like fine powder, that's much deadlier,
You're less likely to die. But anthrax can just happen

(24:11):
and does just happen and has nothing to do with
anybody using a weapon.

Speaker 5 (24:14):
Right, was this targeted like the version that you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (24:19):
We don't know. Maybe is the answer I'll give you.
Because Rhodesia had a massive chemical and biological weapons program,
and they used chemical and biological weapons on insurgents. Right,
So there's there, and there's there's good reasons to think
that this massive pandemic may have been started by the

(24:40):
Rhodesian military using biological weapons. There's a couple of expect this. Yeah,
the pandemic almost exclusively affected cattle on what we're called
tribal trust lands, which are subsistent farms operated by the
majority black population, and it tended to skip over the
herds of white owned commercial farms.

Speaker 3 (25:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
The people who died were all black Rhodesians, and nearly
all of the human beings who got exposed to anthrax
in Rhodesia were black.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
That is racist bacteria.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
It's a racist bacteria. Yeah, Rhodesia had four years used
chemical weapons and disease to try and murder Marxist guerrilla fighters,
in part because they couldn't buy traditional weapons from most
other countries, so they were really kind of scraping the
barrel of like what kind of weapons systems can we
put together? So as their chances of victory declined, doctor
Robert Simington, who was a professor at the Unity of

(25:35):
Rhodesha's medical school where Steve Hatfill studied, urged the country
to adopt a new counterinsurgency program based on chemical and
biological weapons. The government agreed to summarize how this worked out.
I want to quote now from an article in the
journal Curious by Matthew Turner, drawing from a number of
medical and veterinary students from the University of Rhodesia. Simington

(25:55):
allegedly began human experimentation as early as nineteen seventy five.
The CBW program experimented with a number of compounds, including warfarin,
paratheon thallium, and vibro cholera. Doctor Symington was said by
one officer to have killed more terrorists than the Rodesian
Light Infantry during certain months of the war, the CBW
program saw its greatest successes with the use of parathion,

(26:17):
an organophosphate used in pesticides. In isolated locations, CBW employees
soaked hundreds of articles of clothing and parathion solutions, afterwards
drying them to eliminate the smell. The poison clothing was
then distributed to gorilla forces through local contacts who had
directly donate it to gorilla recruits by contaminating discovered caches
of gorilla supplies or by stalking stores that were in

(26:39):
gorilla heavy areas and expected to be ransacked. Other uses
of CBW included the deliberate poisoning of food stuffs with
thallium and warfarin, as well as deployment of cholera to
contaminate water sources known to be frequented by guerrillas. The
use of cholera and warfare made Rhodesia the first nation
to intentionally deploy biological weapons after the nineteen seventy five
passage of the Biological Weapons Convention. Again, great guys, great country,

(27:04):
really really good people. And again this is where he
chooses to go to medical school. It says a lot
about you that, Yeah, this is where you wanted to
be at this point in your life. Now, we do
know the Rhodesian military absolutely did and is confirmed to
have weaponized and used anthras on human beings on multiple occasions.

(27:28):
The elite SELLU scouts actually used like we're one of
the groups that deployed anthrax against like targeted groups of gorillas.

Speaker 6 (27:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
We don't know how many people died from Rhodesian cbwus,
but it's at least in the hundreds and probably in
the thousands, and it may account for as many as
fifteen percent of all casualties in the Bush War. So
this is fucked up and important. But I also need
to end this digression on a counterintuitive note, which is
that that all makes it really seem like, Okay, well

(27:58):
they definitely cause that anthrax outbreak nineteen seventy eight to
nineteen eighty, right, obviously they did, right, Yeah, And this
is kind of I brought it up this way because
it's it's a good example of why Richard Jewle got
suspected in the first episode and why Hatfill is going
to get suspected in this one. Is if you just
look at a narrow chunk of the facts you can

(28:18):
make a case that while this is the only possible thing, right,
if you just read out the facts that I just read,
you obviously Rhodesia caused this massive pandemic, right, It's the
only explanation. They were using anthrax as a weapon. Why
wouldn't they have done this? Right? However, as Matthew Turner
points out in this study, which is not at all
sympathetic to the Rhodesian military and talks an extent about

(28:40):
their horrible warcarms of chemical and biological weapons, there's a
lot of good reason to believe that this was a
natural anthrax outbreak. And there's there's some scientific reasons just
because of the type of anthrax that these animals are
sick with and how it spreads, that looks more like
a natural pandemic than one that was used by weaponized anthrax.
But there's other reasons for one thing, this is late

(29:01):
in the war. The Rhodesian government is collapsing. They have
suspended all of their large scale veterinary programs to improve
livestock health. They had been vaccinating, like dipping and what not,
all cattle in the country, and that has stopped. By
nineteen seventy eight, anthrax is naturally endemic to the region,
and the outbreak occurred alongside other outbreaks that infected cattle populations.

(29:26):
The anthrax outbreak is one of a number of outbreaks
that's wiping out cattle in Rhodesia because the state programs
to treat cattle have gone away because of the war.
Right now, there's also again we talked about how it
primarily hit cattle and like these black subsistent farms as
opposed to like the corp because those farms had money

(29:48):
and we're able to continue medicating their cattle. Right and again,
why is it more black? Well, Number one, the vast
majority of the country's black, and number two, the white
people are eating and spending their time farming animals that
have access to good medical care. Right yes, Like so
when you and again this is going to be the

(30:09):
case with when Steve Hatfiel gets suspected of If you
look at one subset of the facts, obviously the guy
did it. And then if you look peel back and
look at more of the facts, it's like, well, no,
maybe I was looking at too narrow a subset of information.
Now I should say it's still possible Rodisha did this.
That like the anthrax pandemic was or epidemic was a

(30:32):
purposeful one that they like were trying to wipe out
the foods, because we know that they were. It's just
we have a lot of data on other times they
used these weapons and this really doesn't look like that.
It does look a lot more like a natural outbreak.

Speaker 1 (30:46):
They wouldn't have been successful.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
It would fitted no, no, no, like this. It would
have gone worse because they were they were.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Bad at this.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Now I should also note again that because Steve is
going to be accused of being the Anthra expumber, the
fact that he is in Rhodesia and allegedly had worked
with the Sellu scouts who used anthrax and is in
Rhodesia at the same time as an anthrax outbreak again
in two thousand and one, people are gonna read about
this and go, obviously it's this guy, right, it has

(31:15):
to be him. Now. More diligent reporting and there was
not nearly enough of that when Steve was being accused,
would point out, among other things like, okay, but the
Rhodesian military, this guy's like an American without any real experience,
who's in med school. Why would they have looped him
in on their secret, incredibly illegal plans to use deadly

(31:36):
chemical and biology. He's like fucking twenty, like why would
they do that? Like he's not who you pick, you
don't need him, and there's no evidence whatsoever they had
anything to do with the chemical and biological weapons campaign
carried out by Rhodesia. It's possible that this is why
he starts to get interested in chemical and biological weapons,

(31:58):
which he does, and he's going to become an expert
on them later, but that speculation on my part. So
he graduates, I think he has to go from Rhodesia
to South Africa, but eventually does graduate and he gets
the equivalent of an MD in nineteen eighty four.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
But they're like actually EU Rhodesian med schools not yet.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
South Africa takes it though they're fine, so this is
a near thing. In nineteen eighty three, he failed and
he had to repeat a year of med school. One
British newspaper reported that when he found this out, he
had a tantrum in the hallway. The Post interviewed one
of his former classmates, who told a story about Hatfille
punching out a peer quote. He is not someone I

(32:38):
would ever want to cross, wrote another classmate, So maybe not,
you know, the nicest guy. Although all of these quotes
do come from when he was suspected of carrying out
a terrorist attack that killed five people, So part of
me is like, should I even trust these quotes because
they're from people who like were deliberately being solicit. That said,
there's enough in his background to be like, yeah, maybe

(33:00):
he just was kind of a dick with a short temper.
You know, two things could be true at once. So
he becomes a doctor. He does a one year internship
in a rural South African hospital, after which point he
is recruited to do a fourteen month tour with South
Africa's National Antarctic Expedition in the nineteen eighties. Yeah, so
he does that. Cool career's going well, yeah, yeah, that

(33:24):
sounds a lot better than what he's going to wind up.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
Doing for a living.

Speaker 4 (33:28):
What school is he attending here?

Speaker 2 (33:31):
It's Cape Town University of Cape Town through the nineteen eighties.
He gets three master's degrees in different sciences there, and
he tries to get a PhD. He almost finishes it,
but his doctoral thesis isn't accepted. We'll come back to
that later, because this is going to be another case
like with the Green Berets, where he almost had a
PhD but he didn't And some of the things, some

(33:54):
of the the resumes he writes out are sure gonna
say PhD.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Right.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
So, during his years as a student in South Africa,
hat Phil is alleged to have run into more conflicts
with his peers, per The Washington Post reporting a Johannesburg
newspaper reporter that hat Phil had carried a gun into
South African medical laboratories and boasted the colleagues that he'd
trained bodyguards for white separatist Eugene terre Blanche and just
carrying a gun into the lab is very South African stuff,

(34:24):
and the fact that South Africans are being like nah,
but he did it in a weird way. He was
talking about being racist in a weird way to us
and apartheid South Africa. Wow, yeah, just the Bratton Again.
I don't see any evidence that he trained bodyguards for
this white separatist, but it gives you an idea of
like where's politics are right? If that's true, you know,

(34:46):
can't say for certain that that newspaper's reporting is accurate,
but that's what was reported. Hat Phil would later fill
his resume with claims that he'd also gotten a medical
degree in the UK, and in fact there are there's
at least some evidence that he pretended his degree was
from the UK as opposed to from you know, these

(35:07):
African college as he went to. He would claim to
have been a member of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Neither of these seem to be accurate, per the Observer quote.
One professional resume claimed he had a medical degree from
the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, Edinburgh, a body
which doesn't exist. Another said his medical degree was gained
in Edinburgh at nineteen eighty four, when he in fact
qualified as a doctor that year in Zimbabwe. The Royal

(35:29):
Society of Medicine has no record of him and he
is not a fellow of the Society, as his resume claims.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
That's like bold pre internet lying, right.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
And you could so get away with this shit before.
That's what bums me out. I could be so many things.
I could be doing surgery today. I could be cutting
into a motherfucker and taking an oregon out today. If
it was the nineteen eighties, my god.

Speaker 4 (35:53):
I don't think I wanted you to do that either.

Speaker 2 (35:56):
I think I'd be great at it, but no one's
going to let me try. They're scared that I'd show
him up. It'd be better. Oh yeah, maybe he'll be
too good. Maybe I'm too good at surgery.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
If you're the kind of guy who would just like
take off the and go to the congo like without
an invitation, you are also the kind of guy who
would like just blatantly lie on your.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Absolutely absolutely wild. Now hatfill is you know, he does
some stuff in England. He's at Oxford briefly he works
as like a cancered specialist in the Nuffield Department of
Pathology and Bacteriology in Oxford in nineteen ninety four. But

(36:38):
he also, I mean, he's at least accused of having
faked a reference again per the observers reporting, he faked
a reference quote from the distinguished Oxford professor James O.
D McGee to apply for his next job back in
the United States that he didn't have. And you know,
a little bit of resume fakery. Who amongst us hasn't
done that, although maybe not if you're trying to be

(36:59):
a doctor and he is a real doctor, would be clear.
But he does have a real MD. It's a PhD
he didn't get. And yeah, that's the last really big
question mark on his resume is that he would periodically
claim to have a PhD from Rhodes University in South
Africa in addition to his MD. And he makes this
claim after he returns to the US when he's trying
to get a federal research grant. However, back in Rhodes University,

(37:22):
his dissertation on treating leukemia had been denied by the
review committee. They decided his methodology was flawed and they
declined to give him a PhD in nineteen ninety five.
Now he will say that, like, when I applied for
this grant, basically I thought I was going to get
the PhD, so I wrote it down. It was before,
you know, they turned me down. I don't know. Maybe
it was the case of him just you know, thinking

(37:44):
he was going to pass and it was fine because
he'd done everything else. That said, it's pretty consistent with
the other I don't know, the tenuous relationship with the
truth that we've seen previously here. Right, So, yeah, he
spends the mid nineties, he goes back to the oost
for a bit. He does that fellowship at Oxford, and

(38:04):
the job at Oxford gets him a job studying not
just cancer but HIV and LYME disease for the National
Institutes of Health in the United States, and his interest
in infectious diseases starts to guide him.

Speaker 3 (38:15):
Now.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
In late nineteen ninety seven, he starts a two year
fellowship with USAMRID to study Ebola and other haemorrhagic fevers.
USAMRID is the acronyms and it's usamriid. USAMRID is the
acronym for the United States Army and Medical Research Institute
of Infectious Diseases. This is the top biodefense laboratory in

(38:37):
the country, with a mission to study both biological weapons
and diseases like a bola that are seen to have
a high potential for weaponization. Their primary client is the
US Army, and they do a lot of work in
Fort Detrick, which is where the US used to host
its Germ Weapons R INDEED Apartment until we stopped admitting
that we had a Germ weaponr in DED department in

(38:57):
nineteen sixty nine. Officially, we stopped making germ biological weapons
in nineteen sixty nine. Do I think we totally stopped.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
I don't home I think we did, but officially we did.
Now Usamrid is an extremely serious organization and they are
doing some of the most dangerous work imaginable. Right Like,
this is a thing you would need in any country,
even if it was an ethical defense department. Right is
a branch of the government whose job is to figure

(39:28):
out what kind of diseases or illnesses maybe weaponized or invented,
and how would we fight against them? Right Like, that's
an important thing to do, you know, just the world
being what it is. In his book The Demon in
the Freezer, Richard Preston gives a useful description and by useful,
I mean terrifying description of you Samrid, a headquarters that

(39:49):
is just kind of chilling. The main building of you
Samrid is a dun colored two story monolith that looks
like a warehouse that is virtually no windows and tubular
chimneys sprout from its roof. The building cover seven acres
of ground. There are biocontainment suites near the center of
the building, groups of laboratory rooms that are sealed off
and kept under negative air pressure. So that nothing contagious
will leak out. The suites are classified at differing levels

(40:12):
of biosecurity, from biosafety level two to level three, and
finally to level four, which is the highest and where
scientists wearing biosafety spacesuits work with hot agents lethal in
curable viruses. A bioprotective spacesuit is a pressurized plastic suit
that covers the entire body. It is a soft plastic
head bubble with a clear face plate, and it is
fed by sterile air coming through a hose and an

(40:33):
air regulator. The chimneys of the buildings are always exhausting,
superfiltered and superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of
the biocontainment zones. Usamrid was now surrounded by concrete barriers
to prevent a truck bomber cracking open a biosafety level
four sweet and releasing a hot agent into the air. So,
just going through the list of security that gives you
an idea of how deadly the shit in here is. Right, Okay,

(40:57):
these are your planet killers?

Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah, okay, so we're.

Speaker 5 (41:00):
In the UK and these guys are actually right, and
we're and these guys.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Are actually do us he's moved to the US. Oh
we're in the Usamrid is the is a US, like
it's it's the US biowar like biological weapons research.

Speaker 5 (41:13):
Until we said we shut it down and these guys
are actually doing good stuff.

Speaker 2 (41:17):
No, we shut down the R and D department at
Fort Dietrich, Right, So you Samrid is based out of
Fort Dietrich too. Fort Dietrich is where all of our
scary chemical and biological weapons stuff is. So we stopped
making new weapons in sixty nine, but we still research
what kind of weapons people might make and research like
ways to defend them. Right, That's what you Samrid is

(41:40):
doing is they are trying to know and it's not
just weapons, but like you know, when you have a
bowl outbreak in Africa, right you Samrid starts, you know,
you're going to increase the amount of people who are
working on Okay, Like, well, if it spreads over here,
if it gets here, if we have an outbreak, what
might that look like? How would we treat it?

Speaker 3 (41:57):
Right?

Speaker 2 (41:58):
What if someone weaponized a bola? Is that possible? Let's
look into whether or not you could weaponize it. What
would the defense against that be? Right, they're doing stuff
like that. You know, if somebody started to wanted to
carry out an anthrax attack, how theoretically would an anthrax attack? Look,
how deadly would it be? What would be the procedures
we need to establish?

Speaker 3 (42:17):
You know?

Speaker 2 (42:17):
What do we need to have ready so that if
that happens at a moment's notice, we can get guys
into an area in order to deal with an anthrax outbreak? Right,
that's the kind of shit you stamrit's trying to figure out.

Speaker 5 (42:27):
I totally get that this is important and necessary, but
it does seem like.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
The line of like, are you doing more harm than good?
Gets a little bit dicey when you talk about this.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
And it's also the line between like, well, what counts
as R and D for new new Yes? Yeah, shit
like as opposed to R and D on how to
fight it? Yeah, And it's there's always a Again, the
degree of security in this facility is proof of the
danger because you have had like in Russia, there was
a horrible anthrax outbreak because one of like a Russian
equivalent to this facility had a fucking breach and a

(43:00):
bunch of people got sick. Right, Like, these are scary
places and the consequences of things going wrong in a
place like Fort Dietrich and the USAMRIID Facility, there is
very high Stephen King's the stand for like focuses on.
I think it's basically a base that's meant to stand
in for Fort Ditrich. I forget exactly what it's called
on that, but that's that's how the virus that kills

(43:22):
the whole world gets out. Is it's something where that's
part of like a research and there's a breach and
it gets out and it kills everybody. And you know,
I don't know if any of the diseases that they
have access to could wipe out the whole planet, but
they could kill a shitload of people. Like they have
a lot of scary stuff at the USAMRIID Facility, and
so if you are working there, you are working with

(43:44):
very scary stuff. Steve Hatfill is doing very serious work
at this point, right and he is qualified to do it,
not as qualified as his resumes and CV makeums out,
but he does have the MD. He did do like
he went to Oxford and he did that year there,
Like he's got qualifications. He just I think he just
can't help judge it up a little bit. He's not
as cool as he wants to be, that's my interpretation.

(44:09):
So he's one of his first jobs there is he's
carrying out experiments on the cock monkeys, infecting them with
deadly viruses and watching them die. This fucks them up
to some extent. He'd sneak the animals Reese's pieces out
of sheer guilt to try to like, maybe if I
give him candy, I don't feel as bad about killing
these monkeys. It doesn't seem like a fun job to be.

(44:30):
Over the next couple of years, Hatfilm makes himself into
one of the nation's top experts on germ warfare. He's
a virus guy. He's not into anthrax. Anthrax is a bacteria,
so he doesn't really work. He never works directly with anthrax,
although he is aware of it. He studies it somewhat,
but he's more into the viruses. He's very charismatic and
he's good at teaching, so he ston starts getting contracts
to instruct special forces teams on defensive techniques. Right, So,

(44:54):
in addition to this job with you, Samred, he's getting
like he's giving seminars, he's giving speech and he's also
conducting training classes on like, Okay, if you encounter a
biological weapons factory in the field, right, here's what you
would do. Here's what the things to look out for
that could be dangerous. Here's how to make the scene safe.
Here are the different prophylactics you could use in different

(45:16):
kind of situations. Like he's training them on that kind
of stuff, right, And this is all you know. Right
around the late nineties is like the millenniums coming to
an end. There's a couple of hoax anthrax attacks in
the US where letters that are filled with white powder
that isn't anthrax, but the letter claims that they're anthrax,
are sent to varying places, right, And so there's panics

(45:38):
in the media in the public over anthrax attacks. And
this corresponds to a growing public and official awareness that
bioterrorism is a real threat. And hat Phil he kind
of picks his moment well, right as Americans are starting
to freak out about bioterrorism, he cashes in on it.
And I don't mean that in an ethical sense, just
in a he makes a good career move. He starts

(45:59):
give lectures at conventions and talking to reporters about America's
unreadiness to face a weaponized pathogen. In nineteen ninety eight,
he's interviewed by Insight magazine and he makes the in
retrospect poor choice to let them photograph him dressed in
biohazard gear cooking up diseases in a kitchen. Right.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
I found that photo.

Speaker 2 (46:20):
Yeah, those photos are going to be found when he's
accused of doing the anthrax attacks. That they will not
make him look good. He warned the interviewer in that
article that these fake anthrax attacks could quote be a
form of testing for a future terrorist attack. Now. I
haven't run into any evidence that Hatfield's colleagues questioned his
expertise or skill at his job during this period, but

(46:42):
some of them did question his judgment in other areas,
per The Washington Post, At a seminar in New York,
he demonstrated one of his favorite bioterrorism scenarios, a terrorist
using a wheelchair to sneak past White House security with
a biological agent, says Jerome Hower, the New York City's
Emergency Preparedness director. Hower was a pall after the presentation.
He says, he called hat phil aside and told him

(47:02):
he had gone too far. It was too detailed, too
specific to go into a public forum. Hatfhil listened, Hall
Power said, but he shrugged it off. And so he's
like he's like laying out. He's not just saying, oh,
it'd be cool, like you could maybe do this. He's
like walking through, here are all the different levels of
security in the White House, and here's how you would
get past each one with a weaponized pathogen and a wheelchair.
Like he's really making a very easy to follow guide

(47:25):
for poisoning the White House.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
Here's the bootprint.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
Yeah, and that is his job to an extent. But
maybe you don't have to do that at like a
public presentation. That might not be Yeah, that might not
be the most most responsible thing to do. You know,
who would never poison anyone with a wheelchair filled with anthrax?

Speaker 3 (47:46):
The sponsors those duties.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
Yeah, they don't even have access to anthrax. Weaponized bola absolutely,
Oh my god. Thew Apron guys actually have enough weaponized
a bowla to wipe out the whole planet. But that's
just a part of their their Salisbury Steak Friday package. Hmm. Yeah,
the taste of a bola and we're back. I don't

(48:17):
think we're going to get any more Blue Apron money, Sophie.

Speaker 4 (48:20):
That's okay, that's okay.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
I don't think they ever gave us any money. It
was that other company that I forget Hello Fresh, Hello Fresh. Yeah,
they don't have any abola.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
Yeah, bowl of free, dinner.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Bowl of free. That's right, Hello Fresh, say goodbye to
a Bolao. So a lot of Hatfill's success within the
field of bioterrorism warfare research came down to the fact
that he picked a good mentor he got very lucky
that he like he hits it off with this guy
who had worked at Usamred. He'd been one of the
scientists back in like the fifties who'd help create our

(48:54):
US bioweapons arsenal back when we still officially had one,
and then he retired from you Stamford and became a
bio warfare consultant. He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax,
Bill Patrick. So Bill is like the top guy and
the terrifying murder weapons business. Right, how do you get

(49:15):
it's a patent for something that's like you did it,
and you you get the patent on it in case
anyone ever like makes it and makes money off it.
But you can't publish the patent because then people would
know how to weaponize anthrax, and we don't want that.
We don't people just like looking up the patent for
weaponized anthrax and following that, right, So maybe you want

(49:36):
to keep that certain things the secret. Yeah, yeah, probably
keep that sealed. In this case, I am in alignment
with the government policy. Yeah, I shouldn't have the weaponized
anthrax plans online. Also, this brings me to a special
ad from our sponsor, Audible and their new book, how
to Weaponize Anthrax and five Easy Steps. You don't even

(49:59):
have to read it. You can just listen to it
and you could be weaponizing anthrax and.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Under forty eight listen to on Tyranny or something.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yeah, it was, Yeah, maybe listen to the anthrax book
when you're trying.

Speaker 4 (50:10):
To you're disappointing me today.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Well, I won't be disappointing you when I weaponized some
anthrax Selvie. Then I'll have anthrax. Nope, I probably shouldn't
talk about that online. So Patrick wants a protege. You
know this guy, he's in his seventies now, he's getting older,
and he wants someone to follow in his footsteps, and
he meets hat Phil and considers him just gung ho
enough for the job, and per the Washington Post quote,

(50:37):
the two struck up a friendship like father and son,
says one bio terror expert who watched the ties develop.
When Patrick's schedule was too full to attend a program
or contribute to his study, he recommended Hatfill, who often
did the work for free. Hatfil drove Patrick to consulting
jobs at sai C and traveled with him to professional
conferences and classified briefings on the weaponization process. Hatfill was

(50:57):
often a dinner guest at Patrick's home, where Patrick says
he keeps the basic lab equipment needed to make bacteria
into a finely ground powder. Normal thing to keep in
your house. Oh, no, normal thing to keep in your house, Patrick,
I too, keep that noe. Okay. In nineteen ninety nine,
Patrick helps Hatfield get a job at these Science Applications

(51:19):
International Corporation or SAIIC. This is a private contract or.
They do a bunch of shit. One of the things
they do is they help the DoD as consultants with
bioweapons defense. So by this point Steve is a recognized expert,
and he's hit in just a couple of years, he's
gotten to the point anyone in a field like this
wants to where you can. He's still employed at you, Samred,

(51:39):
but you can start taking private sector money as a
consultant because that's where the real cash is. Baby, and
he is an expert, but he often does still make
claims about his knowledge that go beyond at least what
his official resume should have made possible. For example, he
claimed to have knowledge of both wet and dry biological

(52:00):
agents and how to produce them. The number of Americans
who can do who can actually claim that do have
extensive knowledge of wet and dry biological agents and how
to produce them was at this point maybe fifty to
one hundred people. Right, this is the number of people
who could take anthrax and turn it into a dry,
powdered biological agent. Right, maybe one hundred people tops in

(52:22):
the whole country could have done that.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
Right, And we're saying he's not good enough, but he's he's.

Speaker 2 (52:26):
Like, but he does not have he doesn't have the
professional background to have done that.

Speaker 1 (52:32):
He's like, Patrick, shit showed me over.

Speaker 2 (52:34):
Dinner, Right, Well, that's kind of that's kind of the
situation where when when he'll make claims like this, his
colleagues will be like, well, Patrick probably showed him right,
like because they are close and Patrick knows how to
do it, and maybe he did know how to do
it because of Patrick. I'm not I'm not saying he's
lying here. I'm just saying that like his now, he's
only been doing the job a couple of years, he
shouldn't be at that level. But because of his connection

(52:55):
to Patrick, a lot of stuff is possible that might
not otherwise be right. And it's the kind of thing
where maybe he was exaggerating a bed again to get jobs.
If so, this is going to bite him in the ass,
because come two thousand and one, when there's an anthrax attack,
you don't want to be one of the fifty to
one hundred Americans who could credibly make the claim to
know I don't weaponize anthrax. Right. That becomes less of

(53:17):
a positive thing once someone's done it. So funny, Yeah,
In two thousand and one, Steven applied for a top
secret security clearance so that he could work at the CIA.
He had to take a polygraph test too, and that
apparently did not go, well, we don't know why. It's
the CIA. They don't just tell you stuff like that.
It may have been that they uncovered some of the

(53:38):
same discrepancies that journalists latched onto in his background. Maybe
it's just that the CIA looked into him and they
found out, Oh, he's fibbed about a bunch of stuff,
and that just doesn't work for us. We're the CIA.
You know, you lie about certain things that the CIA,
but not that, right, we don't really know what happened.
But they deny him, they turn him down, they won't

(53:59):
give him a top secrets security clearance, and in fact
they're denial. They don't just say no, they say no
and a bunch of other really mean shit. And it's
such a serious denial that like this could fuck up
his whole career because he's still working with sensitive information, right,
and it can. They say, basically, this guy can't be trusted,

(54:19):
He can't be trusted with a top secret clearance, and
maybe he shouldn't even have a security clearance at all.
And in fact, soon after because he appeals the CIA's
decision and they turn him down again, and right after that,
the Department of Defense suspends his security clearance. So whatever
the CIA found, whether it's that they just found out
that he had exaggerated or in there if they decided

(54:41):
he had lied about his background, maybe that's why they
did it. Maybe there's something else we don't know that
they find. But whatever it is they find, they are like,
not only can this guy not work with us, but
the DoD shouldn't be giving him any kind of security clearance.
And this endangers his job at SAICE, it endangers the
job at his work with Usambord, and dangerous his whole career. Right,

(55:03):
And this is all happening in two thousand and one, right,
right in the run up to nine to eleven. So
one of the last projects that he would start at
SAIIC before nine to eleven was an attempt to design
a fake mobile biowarfare production laboratory. Now this is one
of those things where so nine eleven hasn't happened yet.

(55:24):
But George W. Bush's president, right, and George W. Bush's
dad invaded Iraq and didn't go all the way. And
there's a lot of argument to George W. Bush, was
he always going to invade Iraq? Would you've tried to
do it? If nine to eleven hasn't happened. Well, this
is kind of a little this is like a little
bead in the he always wanted to do that thing,
because before nine eleven's happened, they're starting to train soldiers

(55:46):
with the expectation that we will have troops in the
Middle East again in a country where the leader is
suspected of having chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction Iraq, Right,
And so the military is like, we need someone to
build a fake mobile bioweapons lab that we can train
troops on so that they can see what one would
look like and know how to recognize it and know

(56:08):
what to do when they find one. Because definitely Saddam
has a bunch of mobile bioweapons labs for sure. Right,
He's for sure got the same kind of bioweapons capability
that we do. We just haven't found it yet.

Speaker 3 (56:21):
Right.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
And there's a dark humor in the fact that the
US government pays Steve Hatwell to design a mobile WMD
production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have in order
to train US soldiers that they could recognize the facility
if they wound out in Iraq, even though their government
was the only one with the resources to build one, right,

(56:43):
and Hatfill dutifully builds a lab into an eighteen wheeler
trailer and he fills it with old lab equipment. Now,
it was never operational, nor was it meant to be.
But again, when the anthrax attacks hit, and it becomes
clear very soon after the anthrax attacks that the anthrax
either came direct from a military stockpile or was made

(57:03):
by somebody who utilized the same techniques that we did
to make weaponized anthrax. This is also going to look
really wait, you built like a mobile lab, you know
how to just like build a lab and stick it
in a truck and make anthrax with it. Okay, maybe
you're on the list right the CIA. Yeah, so nine

(57:24):
to eleven happens, and that's where the episode's going to end.
With nine to eleven. Uh, you know, because after nine
to eleven, not long after, we're going to get the
anthrax attacks and Steve's life is going to change dramatically
for the worst. But I think we've set up the
dominoes of like why this guy is going to wind
up in the crosshairs of the media and federal law
enforcement over this?

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Like, well, fuck, I'm going.

Speaker 3 (57:48):
To be chomping at the bit to figure out what happened?
Is Stephen how he got into the Trump administration?

Speaker 1 (57:54):
Yeah, all of these things are like, yes, love.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
That rest part three, but first want to plug your pluggables.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
You guys. I wrote a book.

Speaker 5 (58:06):
It's coming to an age memoir. It's called Girl Gone Wild.
I alternate between thinking it's.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
Uh, totally embarrassing that I did it, and that it's awesome.
And so you decide you order it and decide.

Speaker 2 (58:21):
Yeah, you decide we report something or other like that. Anyway,
everybody just been Behind the Bastards until next week or
wherever until the next episode, I don't know, go away.

Speaker 6 (58:39):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
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(59:00):
at Behind the Bastards