Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everyone, it's still behind the Bastards. Part two of
Speaker 2: our episodes on how the FBI and the media created
Speaker 2: a monster by repeatedly accusing the wrong people of terrorism,
Speaker 2: and we're talking. We talked to the last episode with
Speaker 2: our guests Courtney Cosak about Richard Jewel and the Olympic
Speaker 2: Park bombing, and in these next two episodes we're going
Speaker 2: to be talking about the two thousand and one anthrax
Speaker 2: attacks in the United States, killed like five people and
Speaker 2: freaked the whole country the fuck out. You know, these
Speaker 2: happened right in the wake of nine to eleven. If
Speaker 2: you're on the younger side of things, I don't think
Speaker 2: this is as famous. But basically, right after nine to eleven,
Speaker 2: a bunch of people, including guys like Tom Dashel, some
Speaker 2: people in government, started receiving letters that had white powder
Speaker 2: in them. Several people got sick and died, mostly folks
Speaker 2: who were just happened to be in and around like
Speaker 2: the mail rooms and stuff where the letters were being opened.
Speaker 2: And they never found who did it, but they had
Speaker 2: a suspect for several years. And that suspect is a
Speaker 2: guy who is a bastard. I think by my standards,
Speaker 2: but is also again not the bad guy of this story,
Speaker 2: and we're gonna spend this episode talking about his life
Speaker 2: and times, because again, he's a fascinating person and I
Speaker 2: think there's a lot on his own. We probably could
Speaker 2: do a Bastard's episode, but the thing he's best known
Speaker 2: for is being wrongly accused of being the Anthrax male guy.
Speaker 2: And it just felt like, I don't know, it seems
Speaker 2: weird to do an episode about how much this guy tucks,
Speaker 2: but also he's fine here, like this wasn't his fault.
Speaker 2: He was done dirty.
Speaker 1: So we're just.
Speaker 2: Talking about, like how both of these in both of
Speaker 2: these terrorist attacks, the same fucked up thing happened thanks
Speaker 2: to the FBI and the media being the kinds of
Speaker 2: Organs that they are.
Speaker 1: Steve our protagonists this time.
Speaker 2: Steve is and this is going to be more of
Speaker 2: a traditional Bastards episode this one, and then in part three,
Speaker 2: whenever we record that, we'll get to the actual Anthrax
Speaker 2: attack and what happened to him. But we have to
Speaker 2: talk about Steve Hatville because who he is and the
Speaker 2: kind of life he leads are what makes him into
Speaker 2: the suspect for this terrorist attack, right, and like is
Speaker 2: why people are is why people in the FBI and
Speaker 2: the media becomes so convinced that it was him, and
Speaker 2: he is a fet He's a perfect candidate for bastards
Speaker 2: like His backstory is insane. He's told a bunch of
Speaker 2: different versions of his life, many of which can't be true.
Speaker 2: Independent reporting has repeatedly shown that, like different things he
Speaker 2: said about his resume and his CV could not have
Speaker 2: happened that way. So there's a lot of really fun
Speaker 2: untangling and record correcting to do. So anyway, let's talk
Speaker 2: about Steve J. Hatville. So. He was born on October
Speaker 2: twenty fourth, nineteen fifty three, in Saint Louis, Missouri. Like me,
Speaker 2: he was raised in Mattoon, Illinois. He was the oldest
Speaker 2: of two kids and the only boy in his family.
Speaker 2: His mother was a homemaker and part time interior decorator,
Speaker 2: and his father was an electrical engineer and salesman. Now,
Speaker 2: the details I've come across don't make it look like
Speaker 2: his childhood was particularly noteworthy. There's no major trauma or
Speaker 2: at least anecdotes that we have that foreshadow the man
Speaker 2: he would become. He describes himself as a bad student
Speaker 2: and told one reporter, I never took a book home
Speaker 2: from school. He did better when it came to electives. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he's other one of these like autodid acts, right, Like,
Speaker 2: he reads obsessively, at least according to him. He just
Speaker 2: can't study anything he's not interested in.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's adhd rain, you know, but he's primarily interested
Speaker 2: in like medical science and military history, and he can't
Speaker 2: make himself care about anything else. He does better when
Speaker 2: it comes to electives. He wrestles for the varsity team.
Speaker 2: In high school, he flies glider planes and is allowed
Speaker 2: a solo pilot a glider at age fourteen, which seems early,
Speaker 2: but you know, go off kid. He graduates Mattoon Senior
Speaker 2: High and is admitted to Southwestern College in Kansas, where
Speaker 2: he majors in biology and joins an ROTC like summer
Speaker 2: leadership program hosted by the Marine Corps. And his goal
Speaker 2: at this point, and this has been his life goal
Speaker 2: for at least his latter adolescent period to the start
Speaker 2: of his adulthood, is to become a fighter pilot for
Speaker 2: the Marine Corps. Right. He wants to fly jet fighters.
Speaker 2: You know, it's the coolest job you can do in
Speaker 2: the military. That's what he wants. And so he goes
Speaker 2: in and the Marine Corps tests his vision and it's
Speaker 2: not perfect. And you know what you can't do if
Speaker 2: you don't have naturally prayericvision is fly a fucking jet.
Speaker 2: You know, Like, no, sorry, kid, you're screwed anyway. So this,
Speaker 2: this fucks his life. It seems to have open something
Speaker 2: inside of him because the Marines are like, well, you
Speaker 2: could be a navigator, and he's like, I don't want
Speaker 2: to be a fucking navigator. I want to be a
Speaker 2: fucking top gunjet pilot, like nobody was to be a navigator.
Speaker 2: Come on, that's just such a bummer job. Navigators are
Speaker 2: the bike cops of the piloting world, where it's like,
Speaker 2: this isn't what you signed up to do. And I
Speaker 2: know it, Like I know you don't want to be
Speaker 2: sitting back there. Who needs a navigator anyway? Just bomb wherever.
Speaker 2: That's what I saying what.
Speaker 1: I would be too scared I would be a navigator.
Speaker 1: I hate to say it.
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean then I get to be the pilot,
Speaker 2: I guess, so that's a win for me. I have
Speaker 2: my vision.
Speaker 4: I just want to know I do not trust you
Speaker 4: to fly a plane.
Speaker 2: I think I'd be a great fighter pilot. I mean, Sophy,
Speaker 2: look at how many F thirty five's and F twenty
Speaker 2: two's they're crashing these days, F eighteen's. You know I
Speaker 2: could do at least that. Well, I could crash.
Speaker 1: One of those things, Barslow, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I could crash that son of a bitch into whatever,
Speaker 2: you know, a house or I don't care. You're allowed
Speaker 2: to do anything in the Marine Corps, I assume. So
Speaker 2: he doesn't join the Marine Corps though, because again he
Speaker 2: doesn't get to be a pilot. And this kind of
Speaker 2: I get the feeling reading his backstory that this kind
Speaker 2: of like shatters him. So he cut He partially drops
Speaker 2: out of it's less accuracy. He drops out of college
Speaker 2: because you will go back, but he like suspends his
Speaker 2: college education and just flies to Africa. Now he's got
Speaker 2: no formal medical training, but he finds a mission hospital
Speaker 2: in the Congo. This is not a safe place, This
Speaker 2: is not an easy place to get to. So he
Speaker 2: travels and he doesn't reach out to them beforehand. He
Speaker 2: travels to the Congo, finds this mission doing like medical work.
Speaker 2: It's like a missionary hospital type deal, and is like, hey,
Speaker 2: can I help? And the people running this mission are
Speaker 2: Glenna and Lena eshtruth. Lena describes the nineteen year old
Speaker 2: Steve as being something of a mystery when he showed
Speaker 2: up quote, nobody sent him. I don't even know how
Speaker 2: he knew about us. But they're like, well, he's he's
Speaker 2: volunteering and we don't have enough people, so let's take
Speaker 2: him in. I mean, if nothing else, he seems like
Speaker 2: a lone white kid in the Congo, so he should
Speaker 2: probably not just let him wander off. So they take
Speaker 2: him in and he works there and they taught him.
Speaker 2: He learns, you know, the basics of hematology and parasitology, right,
Speaker 2: Like he's not enough that he could be a practitioner,
Speaker 2: but enough that he knows that he's interested in getting
Speaker 2: a real medical education. Right. He gets some hands on
Speaker 2: experience and he's like, oh, this is almost as good
Speaker 2: as killing people in a plane. So he were what
Speaker 2: I mean, he's not quite as good. Every doctor would
Speaker 2: rather be dropping a j dam. You know, we all
Speaker 2: know that.
Speaker 3: But he does have balls though that part is consistent,
Speaker 3: Like that part is consistent, Yeah, yes, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Straight to the Congo, I think we should.
Speaker 4: I don't think doctor our friend doctor Hodo would agree.
Speaker 2: You don't think that. I think I think he would
Speaker 2: agree that it takes the balls to just at nineteen
Speaker 2: go straight to the Congo to see if you can
Speaker 2: fight the place to work. It's like an American who
Speaker 2: grew up in the suburbs. So he returns to the
Speaker 2: US after this like year he'spens like I think it's
Speaker 2: about a year in the Congo, and he goes back
Speaker 2: to Southwestern and he finishes and gets his degree. He
Speaker 2: gets his undergraduate degree in nineteen seventy five, at which
Speaker 2: point he joins the Army. Now, every version of the
Speaker 2: story that hat Phil tells, and quite a few of
Speaker 2: the articles about Hatfill that are written by reporters who
Speaker 2: talk to him, will repeat this next part, because he
Speaker 2: claims that as soon as he joins the Army, he
Speaker 2: gets into the Green Berets. Do you know what the
Speaker 2: Green Berets are, Courtney.
Speaker 1: They're special, They're special.
Speaker 2: It's a yeah, they're very special boys. Some of the
Speaker 2: specialist boys in the whole army. That's right, guys, it's
Speaker 2: a special forces unit. They're more focused on like the
Speaker 2: Green Beraves are the guys you send in if you've
Speaker 2: got if you have a bunch of like local militia
Speaker 2: tie that you want to train up into a fighting
Speaker 2: force to fuck with whatever country that you're having a
Speaker 2: great power conflict with, you send them the Green Berets
Speaker 2: and they spend long periods of time, you know, in
Speaker 2: the wilderness basically training people how to be insurgents. That's
Speaker 2: kind of their gig, right, That's that's what the Green
Speaker 2: Berets do.
Speaker 1: Is it like Navy Seal adjacent?
Speaker 2: Yah, it's at that level of special forces, right, like they.
Speaker 1: Come in before or their trainers.
Speaker 2: They just do different things. They do it like the
Speaker 2: Navy Seals are more of the guys carrying out assassinations.
Speaker 2: The Green Berets are more the guys who are trying
Speaker 2: to teach, you know, indigenous allies how to set up
Speaker 2: trip wires in the jungle or whatever, or carry out
Speaker 2: ambushes on NVA caravans if we're talking about like Vietnam
Speaker 2: or whatever. So hat Phil claims to have joined the
Speaker 2: Green Berets, and most of the news articles about him
Speaker 2: say that he joined the Green Berets. The standard version
Speaker 2: of that story I'm going to quote from an Atlantic
Speaker 2: article by David Freed. Here, he took a direct enlistment
Speaker 2: option to join the Green Berets, attended parachute school, trained
Speaker 2: as a radio operator, and was assigned to the Army's
Speaker 2: seventh Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When
Speaker 2: a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an
Speaker 2: operational a team, Hatfill re entered civilian life. He joined
Speaker 2: the National Guard, married the daughter of a Methodist surgeon
Speaker 2: he had worked with in Africa, and returned to matun
Speaker 2: to work the night shift as a security guard at
Speaker 2: a radiator factory. Now there's some issues with this version
Speaker 2: of events. First off, he was not in the Green Berets,
Speaker 2: at least not according to reporting by Marilyn Thompson that
Speaker 2: was published in the Washington Post. Quote military records show
Speaker 2: he did enlist in the Army in nineteen seventy five
Speaker 2: and entered the rigorous Special Forces qualification course at Fort
Speaker 2: Bragg in nineteen seventy six, but he didn't last long there.
Speaker 2: After a few weeks he was discharged from active duty
Speaker 2: and wound up in the Army and National Guard. So
Speaker 2: that's a really different version of events.
Speaker 1: It's like not making it through boot camp. Is that
Speaker 1: what happened?
Speaker 2: He made it through boot camp, he doesn't make it
Speaker 2: through Special Force his qualifying school, and then he changes
Speaker 2: from being enlisted in active duty to being in the
Speaker 2: National Guard. So something happened. We don't really I don't
Speaker 2: know that we'll ever know what, but something happened to
Speaker 2: where like he not only make is it made clear
Speaker 2: that he's not going to be in Special Forces, but
Speaker 2: he's not going to be active duty right like, So
Speaker 2: this is a fairly rapid shift for him, and it
Speaker 2: suggests that something went really wrong during his Special Forces
Speaker 2: of qualification course. It may just have been that he
Speaker 2: was he couldn't make the cut, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: this is not something he does. But he will spend
Speaker 2: a lot of his life. A lot of articles about
Speaker 2: this guy say that he was a Green Beret right
Speaker 2: in his she was yeah, in his mind, he was sure.
Speaker 2: So that's a very different version of events. And that
Speaker 2: Atlantic article also describes Hatfill's first marriage in a way
Speaker 2: that leaves out some details present in other accounts. It
Speaker 2: sounds like a Bruce Spreensting song there, like, oh, he
Speaker 2: got injured so he couldn't deploy, and he had to.
Speaker 2: You know, he married the duck of a Methodist surgeon
Speaker 2: and he went on to be a security guard and
Speaker 2: a radiator factory. You know that's not not true. But
Speaker 2: when you kind of describe it that way, you lose
Speaker 2: some important context. Because Steve fell in love when he
Speaker 2: was in Africa with the esh Truth's teenage daughter, Carolyn.
Speaker 2: Now they're close to the same age. He's like nineteen.
Speaker 2: I think she's seventeen and turns eighteen, right, so the
Speaker 2: age thing is not a big deal. Yeah, I say teenage,
Speaker 2: but he's teenage too. I don't want it to make
Speaker 2: it out like I'm saying he was being creepy. I
Speaker 2: don't think it's weird for a seventeen year old and
Speaker 2: nineteen year old to get interested in each other or whatever.
Speaker 2: They get married in nineteen seventy six, and in April
Speaker 2: of nineteen seventy seven, her dad, Glenn, is captured by
Speaker 2: mercenaries who invaded Zyir from Angola, and he's executed. He's
Speaker 2: found dead several weeks later, and the Washington Post reports
Speaker 2: quote Hatfill's marriage soured quickly after his father in law's death.
Speaker 2: He accompanied Carolyn to a funeral service in Michigan, and
Speaker 2: that was the last time Lena Estruth saw him. He
Speaker 2: and Carolyn divorced in nineteen seventy eight. He had no
Speaker 2: contact with his only child, a daughter named Kayman, who
Speaker 2: was born shortly before the divorce, until several years ago.
Speaker 2: Carolyn Estruth says, so why, I don't know that it was,
Speaker 2: but it's just after he dies the marriage. It may
Speaker 2: just have not been. They meet when they're teenagers. Maybe
Speaker 2: they were just never gonna Yeah, I don't know what
Speaker 2: happened here, but he leaves and he has nothing to
Speaker 2: do with his kid, right. I don't know if I'd
Speaker 2: say he abandoned them because I'm unaware of Like is
Speaker 2: he paying any form of alimony? Is he sending child support?
Speaker 2: None of that is not the fire of the year, Bud.
Speaker 2: He's gone right like he bounces.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: Now, part of why Steve is not around for his
Speaker 2: daughter's life is that right after he gets out, like
Speaker 2: right after this divorce happens, and after he graduates, he
Speaker 2: returns to Africa. Now, like the rest is Steve's life.
Speaker 2: There are conflicting stories here, but what we can what's
Speaker 2: definitely solid, what we know is that in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: As soon as he divorces his wife and leaves his
Speaker 2: kid and ex wife behind, he moves to Rhodesia. That's
Speaker 2: his first stop. Now, Rhodesia does not exist today, but
Speaker 2: it was at the time a white supremacist pariah state.
Speaker 2: This is a British colony where a tiny number of
Speaker 2: white people ruled over a larger number of black people
Speaker 2: who had a very different set of rights under the
Speaker 2: laws of that country. Rhodesia basically becomes a pariah state
Speaker 2: because they refuse to give up or transition like away
Speaker 2: from this system of government effectively, and they get wind
Speaker 2: up being blacklisted by everyone, right like the British government,
Speaker 2: whoy're supposed to they were supposed to be a colony
Speaker 2: of refuses to recognize them. You're not supposed to trade
Speaker 2: with Rhodesia, You're not supposed to certainly not supposed to
Speaker 2: sell them guns. South Africa is basically their big economic
Speaker 2: lifeline in addition, like the Portuguese colonies. But it's a
Speaker 2: really sketchy situation, and by the time he moves there
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy eight, Rhodesia is like an international pariah.
Speaker 2: They are the white separatist state, right, the white supremacist
Speaker 2: pariah state. Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you just made so many references to Rhodesia that
Speaker 3: I've heard and not understood.
Speaker 1: Finally makes sense.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I love Rode, one of my favorite stories.
Speaker 2: So again, Rhodesia doesn't exist anymore because about two years
Speaker 2: after he moves there, they lose their war to these
Speaker 2: Marxist insurgents and becomes Zimbabwe. But for the last two
Speaker 2: years that Rhodesia exists, that's where Steve hat Phil lives
Speaker 2: and he attends the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury,
Speaker 2: which I think was the capital. So choosing to move
Speaker 2: to Rhodesia in nineteen seventy eight, is it minimum morally questionable?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 2: Nobody just travels there because you're like Rhodesia, the name
Speaker 2: sounds nice. You're aware in the news that the whole
Speaker 2: world considers them a pariah for the racism and the
Speaker 2: brutal Bush War that they're persecuting, which is killing huge
Speaker 2: numbers of civilians, which means that Steve probably didn't have
Speaker 2: an issue with that. Right, the white supremacist government was
Speaker 2: clinging to power wherever it could and the state security
Speaker 2: forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon hat. Phil
Speaker 2: would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia, he
Speaker 2: volunteered as a medic for the Rhodesian Army and was
Speaker 2: attached to the Sellus Scouts, which was Rhodesia's answer to
Speaker 2: the Navy Seals. Right, this is Rhodesia's special premier special
Speaker 2: forces organization. And again you see this repeated constantly in
Speaker 2: articles about him, that yeah, and he a lot of
Speaker 2: times they'll just say he was one of the Sellu Scouts.
Speaker 2: He was a member of this elite unit. The Atlantic
Speaker 2: reports that, yeah, he was a medica attached to the unit.
Speaker 2: I've seen both ways. Neither seem to be true. So
Speaker 2: the Sellus Scouts and the Rhodesian military occupy a place
Speaker 2: of honor within the modern far right conception of military
Speaker 2: history because of the way this Bush conflict between these
Speaker 2: insurgents that represent a much larger portion of the country
Speaker 2: and the military, which is a mixed race military but
Speaker 2: exists to support the white supremacist state. Rhodesa kind of
Speaker 2: invents modern counter insurgent warfare tactics. A lot of stuff
Speaker 2: that you see that you've seen the US in the
Speaker 2: Global waruntary using in Afghanistan, in Iraq. There like huge
Speaker 2: route clearance vehicles that are like up armored to survive IEDs.
Speaker 2: The way in which like patrols are done, the way
Speaker 2: in which like you attempt to isolate problem villages or
Speaker 2: like all of these different tactics for how you're supposed
Speaker 2: to deal with in it to smoke out insurgents. The
Speaker 2: modern like insurgent warfare Handbook gets written by Rhodesia right now,
Speaker 2: It's fascinating, this is arguably accurate, but it's not anything
Speaker 2: to be proud of, because, yeah, Rhodesia does pioneer a
Speaker 2: lot of modern counterinsurgent warfare tactics. They don't win, they lose,
Speaker 2: and by the way, every country who copied their tactics,
Speaker 2: including the US, also loses a lot of the wars
Speaker 2: that they use those tactics. And these aren't successful tactics,
Speaker 2: they're just tactics, like and so there's this whole like, well, there, Rhodesians,
Speaker 2: they were the ones who really before anyone else knew
Speaker 2: what the future of warfare was gonna be. And so
Speaker 2: you get a lot of like people nerding out of
Speaker 2: the Rhodesian Army over that, and you get a lot
Speaker 2: of people assessing over the Sellu Scouts, in particular because
Speaker 2: after Rhodisia fell in nineteen eighty a bunch of former
Speaker 2: Scouts wrote articles and memoirs about their combat experiences that
Speaker 2: massively exaggerated how good they had been. Again, they lose
Speaker 2: the war. And this all feeds into starting in the eighties,
Speaker 2: there's this growing worship of like special forces that's almost
Speaker 2: like a cult, right. It reaches its height during the
Speaker 2: Global War on Terar, But this is we start. It
Speaker 2: becomes in the media. There's more and more movies about
Speaker 2: special forces units, and so especially for people on the
Speaker 2: far right, the Sellu Scouts are like this, Uh, they're idolized, right,
Speaker 2: And so like the fact that hat Phil really wants
Speaker 2: people to believe he was in this unit makes a
Speaker 2: lot of sense given his Again, this guy today is
Speaker 2: in the Trump administration, given his politics, and just given
Speaker 2: socially what's what's going on, I'm not surprised he wanted
Speaker 2: to be affiliated with this.
Speaker 1: Unit racist special forces. What could be the.
Speaker 2: Most racist special forces? Yes, like the Sellu Scouts and
Speaker 2: the SS both use the same acronym so that's that's
Speaker 2: that's easy. Now. That said, there's good reason to doubt
Speaker 2: that he had anything to do with the Scouts. Per
Speaker 2: the Washington Post, Hatfill's resume also claimed that he'd served
Speaker 2: as a Sello Scout that was time in the Rhodesian
Speaker 2: military overlapped with his time in the US Army. Rhodesian
Speaker 2: military records have been hard to find, but Sello Scouts
Speaker 2: veterans told reporters they'd never heard of Hatfill. The true
Speaker 2: circumstances of his connection with the unit, if any, remain unclear.
Speaker 2: So I can't say he didn't he didn't have any
Speaker 2: connection with them. I don't know. Maybe he was sent
Speaker 2: somewhere as a scout, but we don't have evidence really
Speaker 2: other than his word that I've seen, so given the
Speaker 2: other discrepancies in his background, I would need to see
Speaker 2: some actual evidence that he served with his unit to
Speaker 2: believe stories like the one he told The Atlantic Quote.
Speaker 2: While he was in Rhodesia, Hatfield says a truck he
Speaker 2: was writing and was ambushed by Marxist insurgents. Leaping from
Speaker 2: the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose.
Speaker 2: He claims, gives him like a lifelong breathing injury that
Speaker 2: will be relevant a little bit later. But again, did
Speaker 2: that happen? Did he just break his nose some other way?
Speaker 2: Did he have any exciting encounters with insurgents at all?
Speaker 2: Unclear to me. Now, there is some evidence to suggest
Speaker 2: that his habit of exaggerating the truth dates back at
Speaker 2: least as far as his time in college. One of
Speaker 2: his former classmates told Simon Cooper from the Observer quote,
Speaker 2: he was an extraordinary guy and very very bright, but
Speaker 2: he was also a real Walter Midty kind of character,
Speaker 2: and he would tell these enormous, awful lies. He once
Speaker 2: told me his wife died in the Congo, and again
Speaker 2: he just left. They divorced. He left her with the kid,
Speaker 2: her dad died in the Congo. Yeah, and that gives
Speaker 2: you something too. Where like he And that's why I think, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he may have been embedded with some chunk of the
Speaker 2: Rhodesian military as a medic, or maybe back at base
Speaker 2: he treated some Selu scouts or something. It's usually a
Speaker 2: degree of like truth that were then exaggerating.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: He went to Fort Bragg, he got did the Special
Speaker 2: Forces like tests, but he didn't god become a green Beret, right,
Speaker 2: like he's kind of making ends meet in his stories
Speaker 2: a lot of the time. But you know who always
Speaker 2: tells the truth me sponsors. That's right, that's right. They
Speaker 2: would never pretend to have been a member of the
Speaker 2: Rhodesian military because they were it. They served in the
Speaker 2: Rhodesian military. All of our sponsors former Rhodesian Special Forces.
Speaker 2: It should We didn't right to mega that way. It's weird.
Speaker 1: Your first instinct is to slam.
Speaker 2: They love it. It's like negging, you know, like that
Speaker 2: doesn't actually work for dating the pickup artist guys are
Speaker 2: wrong about that, but it's incredible for advertising.
Speaker 1: Cor for people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, sometimes I'll just walk I just walked
Speaker 2: into Ford's offices the other day and I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: you guys, this in F one fifty call it like
Speaker 2: an F seventy five, you know. I was like half
Speaker 2: a truck maybe, and they just walked out and they
Speaker 2: just mailed us at check. Oh yeah, that's how you
Speaker 2: do it, people negging.
Speaker 6: Here's that.
Speaker 2: And we're back. So yeah, it's worth noting because of
Speaker 2: what comes later that Hatfield's time in Rhodesia did directly
Speaker 2: overlap with something that's going to be very relevant to
Speaker 2: the thing that's going to come to define his adult life,
Speaker 2: which is the anthrax attacks in the United States, because
Speaker 2: while he is in Rhodesia, Rhodesia suffers the largest, one
Speaker 2: of the largest anthrax epidemics ever seen in history. Right
Speaker 2: from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty, the years that
Speaker 2: he's there, thousands and thousands of cattle and several hundred
Speaker 2: human beings are killed by anthrax exposure in Rhodesia. Now,
Speaker 2: we don't fully know why this happened, and I want
Speaker 2: to stay up top anthrax. We don't. People, when you
Speaker 2: hear anthraxs you think it's like a weapon, right, Anthrax
Speaker 2: is a natural thing, like it occurs. There are places,
Speaker 2: Rhodesia is one of them. There are places in the
Speaker 2: world where livestock just get anthrax like it's an outbreak.
Speaker 2: It's a bacteria, you know, like and livestock if you
Speaker 2: are not taking proper care of them. If you're not
Speaker 2: and in an area where anthrax is and endemic, they
Speaker 2: can get anthrax and they can spread anthrax to people.
Speaker 2: Right now, the kind of exposure human beings tend to
Speaker 2: get when exposed to like livestock that have anthrax is
Speaker 2: different from say, inhaling anthrax that has been like weaponized
Speaker 2: and turned into this like fine powder, that's much deadlier,
Speaker 2: You're less likely to die. But anthrax can just happen
Speaker 2: and does just happen and has nothing to do with
Speaker 2: anybody using a weapon.
Speaker 5: Right, was this targeted like the version that you're talking about.
Speaker 2: We don't know. Maybe is the answer I'll give you.
Speaker 2: Because Rhodesia had a massive chemical and biological weapons program,
Speaker 2: and they used chemical and biological weapons on insurgents. Right,
Speaker 2: So there's there, and there's there's good reasons to think
Speaker 2: that this massive pandemic may have been started by the
Speaker 2: Rhodesian military using biological weapons. There's a couple of expect this. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the pandemic almost exclusively affected cattle on what we're called
Speaker 2: tribal trust lands, which are subsistent farms operated by the
Speaker 2: majority black population, and it tended to skip over the
Speaker 2: herds of white owned commercial farms.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The people who died were all black Rhodesians, and nearly
Speaker 2: all of the human beings who got exposed to anthrax
Speaker 2: in Rhodesia were black.
Speaker 1: That is racist bacteria.
Speaker 2: It's a racist bacteria. Yeah, Rhodesia had four years used
Speaker 2: chemical weapons and disease to try and murder Marxist guerrilla fighters,
Speaker 2: in part because they couldn't buy traditional weapons from most
Speaker 2: other countries, so they were really kind of scraping the
Speaker 2: barrel of like what kind of weapons systems can we
Speaker 2: put together? So as their chances of victory declined, doctor
Speaker 2: Robert Simington, who was a professor at the Unity of
Speaker 2: Rhodesha's medical school where Steve Hatfill studied, urged the country
Speaker 2: to adopt a new counterinsurgency program based on chemical and
Speaker 2: biological weapons. The government agreed to summarize how this worked out.
Speaker 2: I want to quote now from an article in the
Speaker 2: journal Curious by Matthew Turner, drawing from a number of
Speaker 2: medical and veterinary students from the University of Rhodesia. Simington
Speaker 2: allegedly began human experimentation as early as nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 2: The CBW program experimented with a number of compounds, including warfarin,
Speaker 2: paratheon thallium, and vibro cholera. Doctor Symington was said by
Speaker 2: one officer to have killed more terrorists than the Rodesian
Speaker 2: Light Infantry during certain months of the war, the CBW
Speaker 2: program saw its greatest successes with the use of parathion,
Speaker 2: an organophosphate used in pesticides. In isolated locations, CBW employees
Speaker 2: soaked hundreds of articles of clothing and parathion solutions, afterwards
Speaker 2: drying them to eliminate the smell. The poison clothing was
Speaker 2: then distributed to gorilla forces through local contacts who had
Speaker 2: directly donate it to gorilla recruits by contaminating discovered caches
Speaker 2: of gorilla supplies or by stalking stores that were in
Speaker 2: gorilla heavy areas and expected to be ransacked. Other uses
Speaker 2: of CBW included the deliberate poisoning of food stuffs with
Speaker 2: thallium and warfarin, as well as deployment of cholera to
Speaker 2: contaminate water sources known to be frequented by guerrillas. The
Speaker 2: use of cholera and warfare made Rhodesia the first nation
Speaker 2: to intentionally deploy biological weapons after the nineteen seventy five
Speaker 2: passage of the Biological Weapons Convention. Again, great guys, great country,
Speaker 2: really really good people. And again this is where he
Speaker 2: chooses to go to medical school. It says a lot
Speaker 2: about you that, Yeah, this is where you wanted to
Speaker 2: be at this point in your life. Now, we do
Speaker 2: know the Rhodesian military absolutely did and is confirmed to
Speaker 2: have weaponized and used anthras on human beings on multiple occasions.
Speaker 2: The elite SELLU scouts actually used like we're one of
Speaker 2: the groups that deployed anthrax against like targeted groups of gorillas.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: We don't know how many people died from Rhodesian cbwus,
Speaker 2: but it's at least in the hundreds and probably in
Speaker 2: the thousands, and it may account for as many as
Speaker 2: fifteen percent of all casualties in the Bush War. So
Speaker 2: this is fucked up and important. But I also need
Speaker 2: to end this digression on a counterintuitive note, which is
Speaker 2: that that all makes it really seem like, Okay, well
Speaker 2: they definitely cause that anthrax outbreak nineteen seventy eight to
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty, right, obviously they did, right, Yeah, And this
Speaker 2: is kind of I brought it up this way because
Speaker 2: it's it's a good example of why Richard Jewle got
Speaker 2: suspected in the first episode and why Hatfill is going
Speaker 2: to get suspected in this one. Is if you just
Speaker 2: look at a narrow chunk of the facts you can
Speaker 2: make a case that while this is the only possible thing, right,
Speaker 2: if you just read out the facts that I just read,
Speaker 2: you obviously Rhodesia caused this massive pandemic, right, It's the
Speaker 2: only explanation. They were using anthrax as a weapon. Why
Speaker 2: wouldn't they have done this? Right? However, as Matthew Turner
Speaker 2: points out in this study, which is not at all
Speaker 2: sympathetic to the Rhodesian military and talks an extent about
Speaker 2: their horrible warcarms of chemical and biological weapons, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of good reason to believe that this was a
Speaker 2: natural anthrax outbreak. And there's there's some scientific reasons just
Speaker 2: because of the type of anthrax that these animals are
Speaker 2: sick with and how it spreads, that looks more like
Speaker 2: a natural pandemic than one that was used by weaponized anthrax.
Speaker 2: But there's other reasons for one thing, this is late
Speaker 2: in the war. The Rhodesian government is collapsing. They have
Speaker 2: suspended all of their large scale veterinary programs to improve
Speaker 2: livestock health. They had been vaccinating, like dipping and what not,
Speaker 2: all cattle in the country, and that has stopped. By
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy eight, anthrax is naturally endemic to the region,
Speaker 2: and the outbreak occurred alongside other outbreaks that infected cattle populations.
Speaker 2: The anthrax outbreak is one of a number of outbreaks
Speaker 2: that's wiping out cattle in Rhodesia because the state programs
Speaker 2: to treat cattle have gone away because of the war.
Speaker 2: Right now, there's also again we talked about how it
Speaker 2: primarily hit cattle and like these black subsistent farms as
Speaker 2: opposed to like the corp because those farms had money
Speaker 2: and we're able to continue medicating their cattle. Right and again,
Speaker 2: why is it more black? Well, Number one, the vast
Speaker 2: majority of the country's black, and number two, the white
Speaker 2: people are eating and spending their time farming animals that
Speaker 2: have access to good medical care. Right yes, Like so
Speaker 2: when you and again this is going to be the
Speaker 2: case with when Steve Hatfiel gets suspected of If you
Speaker 2: look at one subset of the facts, obviously the guy
Speaker 2: did it. And then if you look peel back and
Speaker 2: look at more of the facts, it's like, well, no,
Speaker 2: maybe I was looking at too narrow a subset of information.
Speaker 2: Now I should say it's still possible Rodisha did this.
Speaker 2: That like the anthrax pandemic was or epidemic was a
Speaker 2: purposeful one that they like were trying to wipe out
Speaker 2: the foods, because we know that they were. It's just
Speaker 2: we have a lot of data on other times they
Speaker 2: used these weapons and this really doesn't look like that.
Speaker 2: It does look a lot more like a natural outbreak.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't have been successful.
Speaker 2: It would fitted no, no, no, like this. It would
Speaker 2: have gone worse because they were they were.
Speaker 1: Bad at this.
Speaker 2: Now I should also note again that because Steve is
Speaker 2: going to be accused of being the Anthra expumber, the
Speaker 2: fact that he is in Rhodesia and allegedly had worked
Speaker 2: with the Sellu scouts who used anthrax and is in
Speaker 2: Rhodesia at the same time as an anthrax outbreak again
Speaker 2: in two thousand and one, people are gonna read about
Speaker 2: this and go, obviously it's this guy, right, it has
Speaker 2: to be him. Now. More diligent reporting and there was
Speaker 2: not nearly enough of that when Steve was being accused,
Speaker 2: would point out, among other things like, okay, but the
Speaker 2: Rhodesian military, this guy's like an American without any real experience,
Speaker 2: who's in med school. Why would they have looped him
Speaker 2: in on their secret, incredibly illegal plans to use deadly
Speaker 2: chemical and biology. He's like fucking twenty, like why would
Speaker 2: they do that? Like he's not who you pick, you
Speaker 2: don't need him, and there's no evidence whatsoever they had
Speaker 2: anything to do with the chemical and biological weapons campaign
Speaker 2: carried out by Rhodesia. It's possible that this is why
Speaker 2: he starts to get interested in chemical and biological weapons,
Speaker 2: which he does, and he's going to become an expert
Speaker 2: on them later, but that speculation on my part. So
Speaker 2: he graduates, I think he has to go from Rhodesia
Speaker 2: to South Africa, but eventually does graduate and he gets
Speaker 2: the equivalent of an MD in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 3: But they're like actually EU Rhodesian med schools not yet.
Speaker 2: South Africa takes it though they're fine, so this is
Speaker 2: a near thing. In nineteen eighty three, he failed and
Speaker 2: he had to repeat a year of med school. One
Speaker 2: British newspaper reported that when he found this out, he
Speaker 2: had a tantrum in the hallway. The Post interviewed one
Speaker 2: of his former classmates, who told a story about Hatfille
Speaker 2: punching out a peer quote. He is not someone I
Speaker 2: would ever want to cross, wrote another classmate, So maybe not,
Speaker 2: you know, the nicest guy. Although all of these quotes
Speaker 2: do come from when he was suspected of carrying out
Speaker 2: a terrorist attack that killed five people, So part of
Speaker 2: me is like, should I even trust these quotes because
Speaker 2: they're from people who like were deliberately being solicit. That said,
Speaker 2: there's enough in his background to be like, yeah, maybe
Speaker 2: he just was kind of a dick with a short temper.
Speaker 2: You know, two things could be true at once. So
Speaker 2: he becomes a doctor. He does a one year internship
Speaker 2: in a rural South African hospital, after which point he
Speaker 2: is recruited to do a fourteen month tour with South
Speaker 2: Africa's National Antarctic Expedition in the nineteen eighties. Yeah, so
Speaker 2: he does that. Cool career's going well, yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 2: sounds a lot better than what he's going to wind up.
Speaker 1: Doing for a living.
Speaker 4: What school is he attending here?
Speaker 2: It's Cape Town University of Cape Town through the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2: He gets three master's degrees in different sciences there, and
Speaker 2: he tries to get a PhD. He almost finishes it,
Speaker 2: but his doctoral thesis isn't accepted. We'll come back to
Speaker 2: that later, because this is going to be another case
Speaker 2: like with the Green Berets, where he almost had a
Speaker 2: PhD but he didn't And some of the things, some
Speaker 2: of the the resumes he writes out are sure gonna
Speaker 2: say PhD.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So, during his years as a student in South Africa,
Speaker 2: hat Phil is alleged to have run into more conflicts
Speaker 2: with his peers, per The Washington Post reporting a Johannesburg
Speaker 2: newspaper reporter that hat Phil had carried a gun into
Speaker 2: South African medical laboratories and boasted the colleagues that he'd
Speaker 2: trained bodyguards for white separatist Eugene terre Blanche and just
Speaker 2: carrying a gun into the lab is very South African stuff,
Speaker 2: and the fact that South Africans are being like nah,
Speaker 2: but he did it in a weird way. He was
Speaker 2: talking about being racist in a weird way to us
Speaker 2: and apartheid South Africa. Wow, yeah, just the Bratton Again.
Speaker 2: I don't see any evidence that he trained bodyguards for
Speaker 2: this white separatist, but it gives you an idea of
Speaker 2: like where's politics are right? If that's true, you know,
Speaker 2: can't say for certain that that newspaper's reporting is accurate,
Speaker 2: but that's what was reported. Hat Phil would later fill
Speaker 2: his resume with claims that he'd also gotten a medical
Speaker 2: degree in the UK, and in fact there are there's
Speaker 2: at least some evidence that he pretended his degree was
Speaker 2: from the UK as opposed to from you know, these
Speaker 2: African college as he went to. He would claim to
Speaker 2: have been a member of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Speaker 2: Neither of these seem to be accurate, per the Observer quote.
Speaker 2: One professional resume claimed he had a medical degree from
Speaker 2: the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, Edinburgh, a body
Speaker 2: which doesn't exist. Another said his medical degree was gained
Speaker 2: in Edinburgh at nineteen eighty four, when he in fact
Speaker 2: qualified as a doctor that year in Zimbabwe. The Royal
Speaker 2: Society of Medicine has no record of him and he
Speaker 2: is not a fellow of the Society, as his resume claims.
Speaker 1: That's like bold pre internet lying, right.
Speaker 2: And you could so get away with this shit before.
Speaker 2: That's what bums me out. I could be so many things.
Speaker 2: I could be doing surgery today. I could be cutting
Speaker 2: into a motherfucker and taking an oregon out today. If
Speaker 2: it was the nineteen eighties, my god.
Speaker 4: I don't think I wanted you to do that either.
Speaker 2: I think I'd be great at it, but no one's
Speaker 2: going to let me try. They're scared that I'd show
Speaker 2: him up. It'd be better. Oh yeah, maybe he'll be
Speaker 2: too good. Maybe I'm too good at surgery.
Speaker 3: If you're the kind of guy who would just like
Speaker 3: take off the and go to the congo like without
Speaker 3: an invitation, you are also the kind of guy who
Speaker 3: would like just blatantly lie on your.
Speaker 2: Absolutely absolutely wild. Now hatfill is you know, he does
Speaker 2: some stuff in England. He's at Oxford briefly he works
Speaker 2: as like a cancered specialist in the Nuffield Department of
Speaker 2: Pathology and Bacteriology in Oxford in nineteen ninety four. But
Speaker 2: he also, I mean, he's at least accused of having
Speaker 2: faked a reference again per the observers reporting, he faked
Speaker 2: a reference quote from the distinguished Oxford professor James O.
Speaker 2: D McGee to apply for his next job back in
Speaker 2: the United States that he didn't have. And you know,
Speaker 2: a little bit of resume fakery. Who amongst us hasn't
Speaker 2: done that, although maybe not if you're trying to be
Speaker 2: a doctor and he is a real doctor, would be clear.
Speaker 2: But he does have a real MD. It's a PhD
Speaker 2: he didn't get. And yeah, that's the last really big
Speaker 2: question mark on his resume is that he would periodically
Speaker 2: claim to have a PhD from Rhodes University in South
Speaker 2: Africa in addition to his MD. And he makes this
Speaker 2: claim after he returns to the US when he's trying
Speaker 2: to get a federal research grant. However, back in Rhodes University,
Speaker 2: his dissertation on treating leukemia had been denied by the
Speaker 2: review committee. They decided his methodology was flawed and they
Speaker 2: declined to give him a PhD in nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 2: Now he will say that, like, when I applied for
Speaker 2: this grant, basically I thought I was going to get
Speaker 2: the PhD, so I wrote it down. It was before,
Speaker 2: you know, they turned me down. I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 2: it was the case of him just you know, thinking
Speaker 2: he was going to pass and it was fine because
Speaker 2: he'd done everything else. That said, it's pretty consistent with
Speaker 2: the other I don't know, the tenuous relationship with the
Speaker 2: truth that we've seen previously here. Right, So, yeah, he
Speaker 2: spends the mid nineties, he goes back to the oost
Speaker 2: for a bit. He does that fellowship at Oxford, and
Speaker 2: the job at Oxford gets him a job studying not
Speaker 2: just cancer but HIV and LYME disease for the National
Speaker 2: Institutes of Health in the United States, and his interest
Speaker 2: in infectious diseases starts to guide him.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: In late nineteen ninety seven, he starts a two year
Speaker 2: fellowship with USAMRID to study Ebola and other haemorrhagic fevers.
Speaker 2: USAMRID is the acronyms and it's usamriid. USAMRID is the
Speaker 2: acronym for the United States Army and Medical Research Institute
Speaker 2: of Infectious Diseases. This is the top biodefense laboratory in
Speaker 2: the country, with a mission to study both biological weapons
Speaker 2: and diseases like a bola that are seen to have
Speaker 2: a high potential for weaponization. Their primary client is the
Speaker 2: US Army, and they do a lot of work in
Speaker 2: Fort Detrick, which is where the US used to host
Speaker 2: its Germ Weapons R INDEED Apartment until we stopped admitting
Speaker 2: that we had a Germ weaponr in DED department in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty nine. Officially, we stopped making germ biological weapons
Speaker 2: in nineteen sixty nine. Do I think we totally stopped.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't home I think we did, but officially we did.
Speaker 2: Now Usamrid is an extremely serious organization and they are
Speaker 2: doing some of the most dangerous work imaginable. Right Like,
Speaker 2: this is a thing you would need in any country,
Speaker 2: even if it was an ethical defense department. Right is
Speaker 2: a branch of the government whose job is to figure
Speaker 2: out what kind of diseases or illnesses maybe weaponized or invented,
Speaker 2: and how would we fight against them? Right Like, that's
Speaker 2: an important thing to do, you know, just the world
Speaker 2: being what it is. In his book The Demon in
Speaker 2: the Freezer, Richard Preston gives a useful description and by useful,
Speaker 2: I mean terrifying description of you Samrid, a headquarters that
Speaker 2: is just kind of chilling. The main building of you
Speaker 2: Samrid is a dun colored two story monolith that looks
Speaker 2: like a warehouse that is virtually no windows and tubular
Speaker 2: chimneys sprout from its roof. The building cover seven acres
Speaker 2: of ground. There are biocontainment suites near the center of
Speaker 2: the building, groups of laboratory rooms that are sealed off
Speaker 2: and kept under negative air pressure. So that nothing contagious
Speaker 2: will leak out. The suites are classified at differing levels
Speaker 2: of biosecurity, from biosafety level two to level three, and
Speaker 2: finally to level four, which is the highest and where
Speaker 2: scientists wearing biosafety spacesuits work with hot agents lethal in
Speaker 2: curable viruses. A bioprotective spacesuit is a pressurized plastic suit
Speaker 2: that covers the entire body. It is a soft plastic
Speaker 2: head bubble with a clear face plate, and it is
Speaker 2: fed by sterile air coming through a hose and an
Speaker 2: air regulator. The chimneys of the buildings are always exhausting,
Speaker 2: superfiltered and superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of
Speaker 2: the biocontainment zones. Usamrid was now surrounded by concrete barriers
Speaker 2: to prevent a truck bomber cracking open a biosafety level
Speaker 2: four sweet and releasing a hot agent into the air. So,
Speaker 2: just going through the list of security that gives you
Speaker 2: an idea of how deadly the shit in here is. Right, Okay,
Speaker 2: these are your planet killers?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so we're.
Speaker 5: In the UK and these guys are actually right, and
Speaker 5: we're and these guys.
Speaker 2: Are actually do us he's moved to the US. Oh
Speaker 2: we're in the Usamrid is the is a US, like
Speaker 2: it's it's the US biowar like biological weapons research.
Speaker 5: Until we said we shut it down and these guys
Speaker 5: are actually doing good stuff.
Speaker 2: No, we shut down the R and D department at
Speaker 2: Fort Dietrich, Right, So you Samrid is based out of
Speaker 2: Fort Dietrich too. Fort Dietrich is where all of our
Speaker 2: scary chemical and biological weapons stuff is. So we stopped
Speaker 2: making new weapons in sixty nine, but we still research
Speaker 2: what kind of weapons people might make and research like
Speaker 2: ways to defend them. Right, That's what you Samrid is
Speaker 2: doing is they are trying to know and it's not
Speaker 2: just weapons, but like you know, when you have a
Speaker 2: bowl outbreak in Africa, right you Samrid starts, you know,
Speaker 2: you're going to increase the amount of people who are
Speaker 2: working on Okay, Like, well, if it spreads over here,
Speaker 2: if it gets here, if we have an outbreak, what
Speaker 2: might that look like? How would we treat it?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: What if someone weaponized a bola? Is that possible? Let's
Speaker 2: look into whether or not you could weaponize it. What
Speaker 2: would the defense against that be? Right, they're doing stuff
Speaker 2: like that. You know, if somebody started to wanted to
Speaker 2: carry out an anthrax attack, how theoretically would an anthrax attack? Look,
Speaker 2: how deadly would it be? What would be the procedures
Speaker 2: we need to establish?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: What do we need to have ready so that if
Speaker 2: that happens at a moment's notice, we can get guys
Speaker 2: into an area in order to deal with an anthrax outbreak? Right,
Speaker 2: that's the kind of shit you stamrit's trying to figure out.
Speaker 5: I totally get that this is important and necessary, but
Speaker 5: it does seem like.
Speaker 1: The line of like, are you doing more harm than good?
Speaker 1: Gets a little bit dicey when you talk about this.
Speaker 2: And it's also the line between like, well, what counts
Speaker 2: as R and D for new new Yes? Yeah, shit
Speaker 2: like as opposed to R and D on how to
Speaker 2: fight it? Yeah, And it's there's always a Again, the
Speaker 2: degree of security in this facility is proof of the
Speaker 2: danger because you have had like in Russia, there was
Speaker 2: a horrible anthrax outbreak because one of like a Russian
Speaker 2: equivalent to this facility had a fucking breach and a
Speaker 2: bunch of people got sick. Right, Like, these are scary
Speaker 2: places and the consequences of things going wrong in a
Speaker 2: place like Fort Dietrich and the USAMRIID Facility, there is
Speaker 2: very high Stephen King's the stand for like focuses on.
Speaker 2: I think it's basically a base that's meant to stand
Speaker 2: in for Fort Ditrich. I forget exactly what it's called
Speaker 2: on that, but that's that's how the virus that kills
Speaker 2: the whole world gets out. Is it's something where that's
Speaker 2: part of like a research and there's a breach and
Speaker 2: it gets out and it kills everybody. And you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know if any of the diseases that they
Speaker 2: have access to could wipe out the whole planet, but
Speaker 2: they could kill a shitload of people. Like they have
Speaker 2: a lot of scary stuff at the USAMRIID Facility, and
Speaker 2: so if you are working there, you are working with
Speaker 2: very scary stuff. Steve Hatfill is doing very serious work
Speaker 2: at this point, right and he is qualified to do it,
Speaker 2: not as qualified as his resumes and CV makeums out,
Speaker 2: but he does have the MD. He did do like
Speaker 2: he went to Oxford and he did that year there,
Speaker 2: Like he's got qualifications. He just I think he just
Speaker 2: can't help judge it up a little bit. He's not
Speaker 2: as cool as he wants to be, that's my interpretation.
Speaker 2: So he's one of his first jobs there is he's
Speaker 2: carrying out experiments on the cock monkeys, infecting them with
Speaker 2: deadly viruses and watching them die. This fucks them up
Speaker 2: to some extent. He'd sneak the animals Reese's pieces out
Speaker 2: of sheer guilt to try to like, maybe if I
Speaker 2: give him candy, I don't feel as bad about killing
Speaker 2: these monkeys. It doesn't seem like a fun job to be.
Speaker 2: Over the next couple of years, Hatfilm makes himself into
Speaker 2: one of the nation's top experts on germ warfare. He's
Speaker 2: a virus guy. He's not into anthrax. Anthrax is a bacteria,
Speaker 2: so he doesn't really work. He never works directly with anthrax,
Speaker 2: although he is aware of it. He studies it somewhat,
Speaker 2: but he's more into the viruses. He's very charismatic and
Speaker 2: he's good at teaching, so he ston starts getting contracts
Speaker 2: to instruct special forces teams on defensive techniques. Right, So,
Speaker 2: in addition to this job with you, Samred, he's getting
Speaker 2: like he's giving seminars, he's giving speech and he's also
Speaker 2: conducting training classes on like, Okay, if you encounter a
Speaker 2: biological weapons factory in the field, right, here's what you
Speaker 2: would do. Here's what the things to look out for
Speaker 2: that could be dangerous. Here's how to make the scene safe.
Speaker 2: Here are the different prophylactics you could use in different
Speaker 2: kind of situations. Like he's training them on that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff, right, And this is all you know. Right
Speaker 2: around the late nineties is like the millenniums coming to
Speaker 2: an end. There's a couple of hoax anthrax attacks in
Speaker 2: the US where letters that are filled with white powder
Speaker 2: that isn't anthrax, but the letter claims that they're anthrax,
Speaker 2: are sent to varying places, right, And so there's panics
Speaker 2: in the media in the public over anthrax attacks. And
Speaker 2: this corresponds to a growing public and official awareness that
Speaker 2: bioterrorism is a real threat. And hat Phil he kind
Speaker 2: of picks his moment well, right as Americans are starting
Speaker 2: to freak out about bioterrorism, he cashes in on it.
Speaker 2: And I don't mean that in an ethical sense, just
Speaker 2: in a he makes a good career move. He starts
Speaker 2: give lectures at conventions and talking to reporters about America's
Speaker 2: unreadiness to face a weaponized pathogen. In nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 2: he's interviewed by Insight magazine and he makes the in
Speaker 2: retrospect poor choice to let them photograph him dressed in
Speaker 2: biohazard gear cooking up diseases in a kitchen. Right.
Speaker 1: I found that photo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those photos are going to be found when he's
Speaker 2: accused of doing the anthrax attacks. That they will not
Speaker 2: make him look good. He warned the interviewer in that
Speaker 2: article that these fake anthrax attacks could quote be a
Speaker 2: form of testing for a future terrorist attack. Now. I
Speaker 2: haven't run into any evidence that Hatfield's colleagues questioned his
Speaker 2: expertise or skill at his job during this period, but
Speaker 2: some of them did question his judgment in other areas,
Speaker 2: per The Washington Post, At a seminar in New York,
Speaker 2: he demonstrated one of his favorite bioterrorism scenarios, a terrorist
Speaker 2: using a wheelchair to sneak past White House security with
Speaker 2: a biological agent, says Jerome Hower, the New York City's
Speaker 2: Emergency Preparedness director. Hower was a pall after the presentation.
Speaker 2: He says, he called hat phil aside and told him
Speaker 2: he had gone too far. It was too detailed, too
Speaker 2: specific to go into a public forum. Hatfhil listened, Hall
Speaker 2: Power said, but he shrugged it off. And so he's
Speaker 2: like he's like laying out. He's not just saying, oh,
Speaker 2: it'd be cool, like you could maybe do this. He's
Speaker 2: like walking through, here are all the different levels of
Speaker 2: security in the White House, and here's how you would
Speaker 2: get past each one with a weaponized pathogen and a wheelchair.
Speaker 2: Like he's really making a very easy to follow guide
Speaker 2: for poisoning the White House.
Speaker 1: Here's the bootprint.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that is his job to an extent. But
Speaker 2: maybe you don't have to do that at like a
Speaker 2: public presentation. That might not be Yeah, that might not
Speaker 2: be the most most responsible thing to do. You know,
Speaker 2: who would never poison anyone with a wheelchair filled with anthrax?
Speaker 3: The sponsors those duties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't even have access to anthrax. Weaponized bola absolutely,
Speaker 2: Oh my god. Thew Apron guys actually have enough weaponized
Speaker 2: a bowla to wipe out the whole planet. But that's
Speaker 2: just a part of their their Salisbury Steak Friday package. Hmm. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the taste of a bola and we're back. I don't
Speaker 2: think we're going to get any more Blue Apron money, Sophie.
Speaker 4: That's okay, that's okay.
Speaker 2: I don't think they ever gave us any money. It
Speaker 2: was that other company that I forget Hello Fresh, Hello Fresh. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they don't have any abola.
Speaker 1: Yeah, bowl of free, dinner.
Speaker 2: Bowl of free. That's right, Hello Fresh, say goodbye to
Speaker 2: a Bolao. So a lot of Hatfill's success within the
Speaker 2: field of bioterrorism warfare research came down to the fact
Speaker 2: that he picked a good mentor he got very lucky
Speaker 2: that he like he hits it off with this guy
Speaker 2: who had worked at Usamred. He'd been one of the
Speaker 2: scientists back in like the fifties who'd help create our
Speaker 2: US bioweapons arsenal back when we still officially had one,
Speaker 2: and then he retired from you Stamford and became a
Speaker 2: bio warfare consultant. He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax,
Speaker 2: Bill Patrick. So Bill is like the top guy and
Speaker 2: the terrifying murder weapons business. Right, how do you get
Speaker 2: it's a patent for something that's like you did it,
Speaker 2: and you you get the patent on it in case
Speaker 2: anyone ever like makes it and makes money off it.
Speaker 2: But you can't publish the patent because then people would
Speaker 2: know how to weaponize anthrax, and we don't want that.
Speaker 2: We don't people just like looking up the patent for
Speaker 2: weaponized anthrax and following that, right, So maybe you want
Speaker 2: to keep that certain things the secret. Yeah, yeah, probably
Speaker 2: keep that sealed. In this case, I am in alignment
Speaker 2: with the government policy. Yeah, I shouldn't have the weaponized
Speaker 2: anthrax plans online. Also, this brings me to a special
Speaker 2: ad from our sponsor, Audible and their new book, how
Speaker 2: to Weaponize Anthrax and five Easy Steps. You don't even
Speaker 2: have to read it. You can just listen to it
Speaker 2: and you could be weaponizing anthrax and.
Speaker 1: Under forty eight listen to on Tyranny or something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was, Yeah, maybe listen to the anthrax book
Speaker 2: when you're trying.
Speaker 4: To you're disappointing me today.
Speaker 2: Well, I won't be disappointing you when I weaponized some
Speaker 2: anthrax Selvie. Then I'll have anthrax. Nope, I probably shouldn't
Speaker 2: talk about that online. So Patrick wants a protege. You
Speaker 2: know this guy, he's in his seventies now, he's getting older,
Speaker 2: and he wants someone to follow in his footsteps, and
Speaker 2: he meets hat Phil and considers him just gung ho
Speaker 2: enough for the job, and per the Washington Post quote,
Speaker 2: the two struck up a friendship like father and son,
Speaker 2: says one bio terror expert who watched the ties develop.
Speaker 2: When Patrick's schedule was too full to attend a program
Speaker 2: or contribute to his study, he recommended Hatfill, who often
Speaker 2: did the work for free. Hatfil drove Patrick to consulting
Speaker 2: jobs at sai C and traveled with him to professional
Speaker 2: conferences and classified briefings on the weaponization process. Hatfill was
Speaker 2: often a dinner guest at Patrick's home, where Patrick says
Speaker 2: he keeps the basic lab equipment needed to make bacteria
Speaker 2: into a finely ground powder. Normal thing to keep in
Speaker 2: your house. Oh, no, normal thing to keep in your house, Patrick,
Speaker 2: I too, keep that noe. Okay. In nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 2: Patrick helps Hatfield get a job at these Science Applications
Speaker 2: International Corporation or SAIIC. This is a private contract or.
Speaker 2: They do a bunch of shit. One of the things
Speaker 2: they do is they help the DoD as consultants with
Speaker 2: bioweapons defense. So by this point Steve is a recognized expert,
Speaker 2: and he's hit in just a couple of years, he's
Speaker 2: gotten to the point anyone in a field like this
Speaker 2: wants to where you can. He's still employed at you, Samred,
Speaker 2: but you can start taking private sector money as a
Speaker 2: consultant because that's where the real cash is. Baby, and
Speaker 2: he is an expert, but he often does still make
Speaker 2: claims about his knowledge that go beyond at least what
Speaker 2: his official resume should have made possible. For example, he
Speaker 2: claimed to have knowledge of both wet and dry biological
Speaker 2: agents and how to produce them. The number of Americans
Speaker 2: who can do who can actually claim that do have
Speaker 2: extensive knowledge of wet and dry biological agents and how
Speaker 2: to produce them was at this point maybe fifty to
Speaker 2: one hundred people. Right, this is the number of people
Speaker 2: who could take anthrax and turn it into a dry,
Speaker 2: powdered biological agent. Right, maybe one hundred people tops in
Speaker 2: the whole country could have done that.
Speaker 1: Right, And we're saying he's not good enough, but he's he's.
Speaker 2: Like, but he does not have he doesn't have the
Speaker 2: professional background to have done that.
Speaker 1: He's like, Patrick, shit showed me over.
Speaker 2: Dinner, Right, Well, that's kind of that's kind of the
Speaker 2: situation where when when he'll make claims like this, his
Speaker 2: colleagues will be like, well, Patrick probably showed him right,
Speaker 2: like because they are close and Patrick knows how to
Speaker 2: do it, and maybe he did know how to do
Speaker 2: it because of Patrick. I'm not I'm not saying he's
Speaker 2: lying here. I'm just saying that like his now, he's
Speaker 2: only been doing the job a couple of years, he
Speaker 2: shouldn't be at that level. But because of his connection
Speaker 2: to Patrick, a lot of stuff is possible that might
Speaker 2: not otherwise be right. And it's the kind of thing
Speaker 2: where maybe he was exaggerating a bed again to get jobs.
Speaker 2: If so, this is going to bite him in the ass,
Speaker 2: because come two thousand and one, when there's an anthrax attack,
Speaker 2: you don't want to be one of the fifty to
Speaker 2: one hundred Americans who could credibly make the claim to
Speaker 2: know I don't weaponize anthrax. Right. That becomes less of
Speaker 2: a positive thing once someone's done it. So funny, Yeah,
Speaker 2: In two thousand and one, Steven applied for a top
Speaker 2: secret security clearance so that he could work at the CIA.
Speaker 2: He had to take a polygraph test too, and that
Speaker 2: apparently did not go, well, we don't know why. It's
Speaker 2: the CIA. They don't just tell you stuff like that.
Speaker 2: It may have been that they uncovered some of the
Speaker 2: same discrepancies that journalists latched onto in his background. Maybe
Speaker 2: it's just that the CIA looked into him and they
Speaker 2: found out, Oh, he's fibbed about a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 2: and that just doesn't work for us. We're the CIA.
Speaker 2: You know, you lie about certain things that the CIA,
Speaker 2: but not that, right, we don't really know what happened.
Speaker 2: But they deny him, they turn him down, they won't
Speaker 2: give him a top secrets security clearance, and in fact
Speaker 2: they're denial. They don't just say no, they say no
Speaker 2: and a bunch of other really mean shit. And it's
Speaker 2: such a serious denial that like this could fuck up
Speaker 2: his whole career because he's still working with sensitive information, right,
Speaker 2: and it can. They say, basically, this guy can't be trusted,
Speaker 2: He can't be trusted with a top secret clearance, and
Speaker 2: maybe he shouldn't even have a security clearance at all.
Speaker 2: And in fact, soon after because he appeals the CIA's
Speaker 2: decision and they turn him down again, and right after that,
Speaker 2: the Department of Defense suspends his security clearance. So whatever
Speaker 2: the CIA found, whether it's that they just found out
Speaker 2: that he had exaggerated or in there if they decided
Speaker 2: he had lied about his background, maybe that's why they
Speaker 2: did it. Maybe there's something else we don't know that
Speaker 2: they find. But whatever it is they find, they are like,
Speaker 2: not only can this guy not work with us, but
Speaker 2: the DoD shouldn't be giving him any kind of security clearance.
Speaker 2: And this endangers his job at SAICE, it endangers the
Speaker 2: job at his work with Usambord, and dangerous his whole career. Right,
Speaker 2: And this is all happening in two thousand and one, right,
Speaker 2: right in the run up to nine to eleven. So
Speaker 2: one of the last projects that he would start at
Speaker 2: SAIIC before nine to eleven was an attempt to design
Speaker 2: a fake mobile biowarfare production laboratory. Now this is one
Speaker 2: of those things where so nine eleven hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 2: But George W. Bush's president, right, and George W. Bush's
Speaker 2: dad invaded Iraq and didn't go all the way. And
Speaker 2: there's a lot of argument to George W. Bush, was
Speaker 2: he always going to invade Iraq? Would you've tried to
Speaker 2: do it? If nine to eleven hasn't happened. Well, this
Speaker 2: is kind of a little this is like a little
Speaker 2: bead in the he always wanted to do that thing,
Speaker 2: because before nine eleven's happened, they're starting to train soldiers
Speaker 2: with the expectation that we will have troops in the
Speaker 2: Middle East again in a country where the leader is
Speaker 2: suspected of having chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction Iraq, Right,
Speaker 2: And so the military is like, we need someone to
Speaker 2: build a fake mobile bioweapons lab that we can train
Speaker 2: troops on so that they can see what one would
Speaker 2: look like and know how to recognize it and know
Speaker 2: what to do when they find one. Because definitely Saddam
Speaker 2: has a bunch of mobile bioweapons labs for sure. Right,
Speaker 2: He's for sure got the same kind of bioweapons capability
Speaker 2: that we do. We just haven't found it yet.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: And there's a dark humor in the fact that the
Speaker 2: US government pays Steve Hatwell to design a mobile WMD
Speaker 2: production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have in order
Speaker 2: to train US soldiers that they could recognize the facility
Speaker 2: if they wound out in Iraq, even though their government
Speaker 2: was the only one with the resources to build one, right,
Speaker 2: and Hatfill dutifully builds a lab into an eighteen wheeler
Speaker 2: trailer and he fills it with old lab equipment. Now,
Speaker 2: it was never operational, nor was it meant to be.
Speaker 2: But again, when the anthrax attacks hit, and it becomes
Speaker 2: clear very soon after the anthrax attacks that the anthrax
Speaker 2: either came direct from a military stockpile or was made
Speaker 2: by somebody who utilized the same techniques that we did
Speaker 2: to make weaponized anthrax. This is also going to look
Speaker 2: really wait, you built like a mobile lab, you know
Speaker 2: how to just like build a lab and stick it
Speaker 2: in a truck and make anthrax with it. Okay, maybe
Speaker 2: you're on the list right the CIA. Yeah, so nine
Speaker 2: to eleven happens, and that's where the episode's going to end.
Speaker 2: With nine to eleven. Uh, you know, because after nine
Speaker 2: to eleven, not long after, we're going to get the
Speaker 2: anthrax attacks and Steve's life is going to change dramatically
Speaker 2: for the worst. But I think we've set up the
Speaker 2: dominoes of like why this guy is going to wind
Speaker 2: up in the crosshairs of the media and federal law
Speaker 2: enforcement over this?
Speaker 1: Like, well, fuck, I'm going.
Speaker 3: To be chomping at the bit to figure out what happened?
Speaker 3: Is Stephen how he got into the Trump administration?
Speaker 1: Yeah, all of these things are like, yes, love.
Speaker 2: That rest part three, but first want to plug your pluggables.
Speaker 1: You guys. I wrote a book.
Speaker 5: It's coming to an age memoir. It's called Girl Gone Wild.
Speaker 5: I alternate between thinking it's.
Speaker 3: Uh, totally embarrassing that I did it, and that it's awesome.
Speaker 3: And so you decide you order it and decide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you decide we report something or other like that. Anyway,
Speaker 2: everybody just been Behind the Bastards until next week or
Speaker 2: wherever until the next episode, I don't know, go away.
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