Following tracks of anthrax

Jim Hayslett is a detective in a new world. He's part investigator, part educator. His mission? Solve the anthrax mystery.

By STEPHEN BUCKLEY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 23, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Jim Hayslett is an epidemic intelligence service officer for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other words, a disease detective.

In ordinary times, he spends his days solving public health crises in Texas, where he lives. In these extraordinary times, he is a soft-spoken, slope-shouldered investigator roaming the history-soaked corridors of Capitol Hill on the trail of anthrax.

He wears running shoes and a backpack as he weaves through the halls of Congress with the ease of a lobbyist. He talks to police officers and postal workers, political functionaries and FBI agents. He has come to know the inner workings of the congressional postal system the way some politicians know their home districts.

Hayslett is trawling for pieces to a still-emerging puzzle, a puzzle that also has confounded the FBI. Five deaths in three states and the District of Columbia remain unsolved, and investigators say they aren't much closer to solving this mystery than they were when the attacks began 11 weeks ago.

That might not be a surprise, given that anthrax terrorism is Sept. 11 turned on its head.

Those attacks were unimaginable for their sophistication and suddenness and nerve, while anthrax terrorism has been silent, invisible, amorphous -- and diabolically prosaic. The September terrorists needed flight lessons and hundred-ton jets; the anthrax terrorist needed 34-cent stamps and 1-ounce envelopes.

Watching Hayslett work is a window into why answers to the mystery have proved as hard to grasp as the spores themselves.

The labor is hard and the facts sometimes slippery and disconnected. Even when Hayslett manages to pin down a piece of information, it ultimately might prove to be inaccurate or irrelevant. Or, it might help save a life.

Few things faze him. At 43, Hayslett's diverse experiences have prepared him for nearly everything: four years in the Navy, five years on a Navajo reservation working for the Indian Health Service, adventures (professional and personal) all over the world, from Alaska to Australia.

He joined the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service in July 2000. When the anthrax attacks erupted in Washington, he was in Texas working on a botulism outbreak caused by some tainted chili. Fourteen people fell ill.

(To understand how big an outbreak this was, Hayslett says, consider that there are typically 20 botulism cases in the United States annually.)

As Washington panicked, he volunteered to help. He arrived here Oct. 18, joining 100 CDC investigators scrambling all over the city to find clues to help explain, treat and contain anthrax.

Now, Hayslett ambles around the Capitol, backpack brimming with file folders, a case of 50 CDs (he is partial to Bruce Springsteen and John Hiatt), pens, Chap Stick, a rain jacket, a throwaway camera.

He has spent his two months here not only as investigator, but also as educator. Several times a week, he gives talks to postal workers, offering basic information about how anthrax is spread, how to know if you're sick, how to get treated. Mostly, though, he is there to answer the lingering, nervous questions.

Those questions come from people who live and work in neighborhoods that few tourists or politicians see. The queries are no less sophisticated than the ones Hayslett will hear a few hours later on Capitol Hill; they're just grittier, more direct. They remind Hayslett of why he volunteered in the first place.

At 8 a.m., the investigator stands in a bright, sprawling room where carriers are sorting letters, or as they say, "casing the mail." A few wear bright blue rubber gloves.

A supervisor announces Hayslett's presence and derisive grumbles ripple through the room. Nearly two months have passed since two of their colleagues from another post office died, and this is the first time anyone has come around to answer their questions.

It is the week before the government's controversial decision to offer anthrax vaccinations to Capitol Hill employees and D.C. and New Jersey postal workers. The room already is heavy with cynicism and anxiety.

Questions come rapid fire.

"These gloves that we use, would they stop the anthrax?"

"Should we be worried about our families?"

"That woman in Connecticut, how did she get it?"

"I was taking medication and I felt ill, so I stopped. . . . Should I start taking it again?"

Hayslett stays calm and works hard not to sound defensive. He nods and says, "I understand," a lot.

"Just keep asking questions until you get a comfort level," he says.

A couple of workers point to a chart that lists a score of post offices that have been tested for anthrax. The top of the document says it was provided by the CDC. The workers aren't buying it.

Does the CDC know that these places were thoroughly checked, or did technicians just sweep a couple of cubicles in each place? How do the workers know the document is authentic? One gentleman says he could have put together the same document "in three minutes on my computer at home."

"I don't disagree," Hayslett says. "My hope is that things would be done in a lot more logical a manner in the future."

A few minutes later, in a cold rain, Hayslett says the meeting went better than expected.

"Believe it or not, they were pretty calm. I've gone to some places where they were standing up on the tables."

In the halls of Capitol Hill, nobody stands on tables. In the Senate, there are bronze statues and 100-year-old paintings. The floors are so bright they appear wet. The corridors are as wide as boulevards.

At one point, the usually cool investigator admits: "When I think of the folks who could have walked down this hall before me, it's pretty humbling."

Hayslett is on his way to the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy. In mid-October, a letter with anthrax arrived in Washington addressed to the senator from Vermont, about the same time an identical letter went to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. The letters apparently were mailed from Trenton, N.J., by the same person. Both bore the same return address: the "4th Grade" of "Greendale School" in "Franklin Park, N.J."

After the Daschle letter was opened and the Hart Senate Building was shuttered, Leahy's staff stopped opening mail. Which is why the Leahy letter wasn't found until Nov. 16, in one of scores of barrels of quarantined congressional mail.

Scientists finally opened it on Dec. 6 at the Fort Detrick Army Base in Maryland. Experts said the envelope, like the Daschle letter, contained enough anthrax to kill tens of thousands.

Now, Hayslett is trying to find some elusive answers: Did the letter ever get to the senator's office suite before being quarantined? It had been mistakenly routed to the State Department, but was it delivered there? Why is there a small hole in the envelope, and how did it get there?

Investigators assumed it never reached the State Department. They also assumed it never got to Leahy's suite, which tested negative for spores. Hayslett knows all this, but he has to double- and triple-check.

Before anthrax killed Kathy Nguyen in the Bronx and Ottilie Lundgren in Connecticut, this kind of fact-finding was a tangent, a second-tier issue. Now, it might help speed treatment of someone unwittingly exposed to the spores.

"You want to know who would have been exposed, and how they would have been exposed," he says. "We're trying to make sure that if someone gets sick, at least we can explain it."

The visit to Leahy's office lasts 15 minutes. Hayslett slips into an office, frees himself of his backpack, sits down.

Hayslett tells a Leahy aide what he has heard: that the senator's offices tested clean for anthrax, which suggests that the letter never got there.

That's actually not true, the aide says. The letter did get here. It was just never opened here. That's why the offices tested clean.

Hayslett is grateful for the clarity. It means he is closer to grasping another piece of the puzzle. If the Leahy aide is right, and the letter did get to the senator's suite, then maybe more postal workers, and perhaps others, were exposed than everyone originally thought.

It also means there might be more pieces missing than he realized: Who are those who might have been exposed? How were they exposed and for how long? Where are they now?

He makes his way to the Senate post office in the nearby Dirksen building. He knocks on a couple of doors. No one's there.

He tries the postmaster's office around the corner. The postmaster is in. He takes Hayslett back to the post office as he explains that on a typical day, it takes only a few hours to move mail from the main processing center, usually referred to simply as Brentwood, to the senators' suites. (The postal workers who died worked at Brentwood.)

Hayslett learns that mail usually spends an hour at the Dirksen post office. This is good news: It helps to further define the letter's path and clarify how long the envelope may have spent in each location.

A quiet pleasure rises in Hayslett's blue eyes as he leaves the postmaster. He has been lucky today: two interviews, two key threads of information.

He is not always this lucky. There are days when he visits offices, and no one's in. Or, the person he wants to see is in but doesn't have much time, or information. Even when he doesn't need information, he drops in anyway. It is his version of cultivating his sources, the way a beat cop might.

He drops in on the attending physician for Congress and the sergeant at arms (they're out). As he leaves another office, he runs into an FBI agent. He asks if the FBI knows whether the Leahy letter made it to the State Department.

It's an urgent issue because a State Department postal worker was infected (and recovered with treatment), and experts have found pockets of anthrax spores at State. They aren't sure how the anthrax got there.

The Leahy letter would seem a possible source, but for one thing: It's missing a date and time of day stamp that usually goes on the envelope when it goes through to State.

"Maybe the machine that makes the stamp was out of ink, and there's an imprint that's just not apparent to the naked eye," Hayslett says.

Hayslett has asked the FBI to provide a document tracing the path of the Leahy letter, to no avail. He can't understand why the FBI hasn't provided it, but he doesn't want to criticize the agency.

"They say they don't have a list" of the places the letter has been, he says. "Maybe they have one, and they just don't want to show it to me. Anyway, I'm sure it'll turn up. It's got to be out there."

The FBI says it does not have a list. The agency apparently isn't aware that Hayslett has discovered that the letter may have gone all the way to the senator's suite.

"We believe (the Leahy letter) never got to Capitol Hill," spokesman Chris Murray says. "We believe the letter was stopped when they quarantined all the mail" at a congressional mail processing site on P Street.

The next morning, Hayslett is in downtown Washington at a government printing office turned postal processing center. Workers are dressed in wool hats and gloves as a chilly rain falls. Three X-ray machines stand on a dock, where several times a day 28-foot trucks haul in letters and packages destined for Congress.

This is where the P Street processing center has moved while technicians decontaminate it. Inside, Hayslett interviews a couple of Capitol Hill police officers who were at P Street when the Daschle and Leahy letters passed through.

They tell him that mail was X-rayed in trays (not in huge metal containers, as Hayslett thought). That means the letter might have been handled more than Hayslett initially believed, which in turn means more people might have been exposed. It also might mean that this is where the pinhole came from.

Which begs an urgent question: "Were the doors open?" he asks.

Yes, he's told.

He is relieved, but guarded: "It gives us some comfort knowing there was decent air flow, but in the end, we still don't know how quickly the spores were leaking out that day."

Still, it is useful information. It is only 10 a.m., and already it has been a good day. He smiles as he walks out into the rain, armed with another piece of his ever-evolving puzzle.

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