Terrorists: the Found and the Missing
Categories: In the News , Nonfiction , Health & Nutrition
A friend of mine confessed--it seemed like a confession--that he was relieved when Theodore Kaczynski turned out to be the Unabomber, because a friend of his pretty much fit the profile.
I understood perfectly, having spent some time in high school trying to track down Patricia Hearst (really impossible from rural South Carolina before the Internet). I just finished reading Robert Graysmith's 2003 Amerithrax: the Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, and the most interesting part isn't about anthrax at all: it's the report of an interview between Mohammad Atta and Johnelle Bryant, manager of the Homestead, Florida, office of the U.S. Departure of Agriculture.
Bryant portrays Atta as an idiot, albeit a scary one. At first he refused to talk with Bryant because she was "but a woman." Atta had bought a book that described ways of getting free money from the U.S. government. The fact that he'd bought the book from cable TV, rather than from network TV or from a normal bookstore, seems significant to Graysmith.
Atta wanted a $650,000 loan to buy a plane that he could use both for charter flights and for crop dusting. According to Bryant, Atta planned to walk away with the $650,000 in cash, without completing any application. Bryant refused the loan for a number of reasons. Atta asked Bryant what would stop him from stepping behind the desk, cutting her throat, and stealing the contents of the office safe. Bryant said there was no money in the safe.
Atta noticed a framed aerial photograph of Washington, D.C., on Bryant's wall and started throwing money down on her desk, demanding to buy the picture. He pointed out the Washington Monument and the Pentagon. Bryant refused sell.
Weeks later, Atta returned to Bryant's office in an unconvincing disguise, claiming to be an accountant wanting $500,000 for a sugarcane farm. Three other terrorists came in separately, also seeking loans, but "they were not as successful at dealing with people as Atta."
It is satisfying, if not completely convincing, to think of the 9/11 terrorists as bumbling thugs who got lucky. Patricia Hearst's brilliant autobiography Every Secret Thing makes a similar case for (against?) her captors, the Symbionese Liberation Army. On the other hand, it's law enforcement that pretty much got lucky in the Timothy McVeigh case.
The story of the anthrax bioterrorist attacks that occured just after 9/11 remains deeply unsatisfying for many reasons, one of which is that we haven't found the perpetrator. Graysmith's convincingly argues that the case against Stephen Hatfill is not exactly cut and dried--the best evidence seems to be that Hatfill was in London at a time when a hoax anthrax letter was mailed from London to Senator Daschle.
Amerithrax clings to the view that the anthrax was "weapons grade," which has since turned out to be only a rumor. The spores were not aerosolized and therefore could have been created by less skilled people, and more cheaply, than Graysmith suggests. You can also read The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story (2003) and The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed (2003).
With few post-2003 anthrax-attack books in print, you're probably best served by newspapers like The New York Times, and even The Times isn't offering new information. There are conspiracy-theory Web sites: The Anthrax Conspiracy Theories Page, last updated in 2002. Ed Lake's pages are more recent, covering a time period from from 2005-2007. After visiting these sites, see Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts, for a more sober point of view.
For a long time, we didn't know what had happened to Pan Am Flight 103, and maybe it's still not completely clear that we do. You can check out Jack the Ripper movies (or just wait for them to come on on TV). Who he was still bothers a lot of people. We don't know for sure who killed Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister. As with the identity of the anthrax killer, we may never know, and it's enough to drive a person crazy.
Years after Patricia Hearst's release from prison, I met someone who claimed, unconvincingly, to have known someone who had met Patricia Hearst (the Jack Scott connection) while she was on the run. It's not actually hard for me to understand why a person would invent a story like that.
