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

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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 last episode with our guest, Courtney Kosak,

about Richard Jewell and the Olympic Park bombing.

And in these next two episodes, we're going to be talking about the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States.

It killed like five people and freaked the whole country the fuck out.

You know, these happened right in the wake of 9-11.

If you're on the younger side of things, I don't think this is as famous, but basically, right after 9-11, a bunch of people, including guys like Tom Dashell, some like 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 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 going to spend this episode talking about his life and times because, again,

he's a fascinating person.

And I think there's a lot, like on his own, we probably could do a bastards 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 sucks, but also he's fine here.

Like this wasn't his fault.

He was done dirty.

So we're just 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.

Is Steve our protagonist this time?

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 Hatfell 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 why people are, is why people in the FBI and the media become 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 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.

Hatfield.

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So,

um, he was born on October 24th, 1953, in St.

Louis, Missouri, Missouri, like me.

He was raised in Battoon, 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 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, he's a, and he's another one of these like autodidacts, right?

Like he reads obsessively, at least according to him.

He just can't study anything he's not interested in, right?

Maybe it's ADHD brain, 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 to solo pilot a glider at age 14,

which seems early, 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 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 perfect vision is fly a fucking jet, you know?

Like,

sorry, kid, you're screwed.

Anyway, so this, this fucks his life.

It seems to have broken 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 gun jet pilot.

Like, nobody wants 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 sitting back there.

Who needs a navigator anyway?

Just bomb wherever.

That's what I'm saying.

What?

I would be too scared to, I would be a navigator.

I hate to say it.

Well,

I mean, then I get to be the pilot, I guess.

So that's a win for me.

My vision.

I just want you to know I do not trust you to fly a plane.

I think I'd be a great fighter pilot.

I mean, Sophie, look at how many F-35s and F-22s they're crashing these days, F-18s.

You know, I could do at least that well.

I could crash one of those things.

Bar is low, yeah.

I could crash that son of a bitch into whatever, you know, a house.

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, he, he partially drops out of school.

It's less accurate to say he drops out of college because he 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.

It's like a missionary hospital type deal, and is like, hey, can I help?

And the people running this mission are Glenn and Lena Estruth.

Lena describes the 19-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 volunteering and we don't have enough people.

So let's take him in.

I mean, if nothing else, I think he's like a lone white kid in the Congo.

So we 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, 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, what?

I mean, not quite as good.

Every doctor would rather be dropping a J-Dam, You know, we all know that.

He does have balls, though.

That part is consistent.

That part is consistent.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Straight to the Congo.

I think we should.

I don't think our friend Dr.

Hodo would agree.

You don't think that I think I think he would agree that it takes the balls to just at 19 go straight to the Congo to see if you can find a place to work.

Fair enough.

It's like an American who grew up in the suburbs.

So he returns to the U.S.

after this like year.

He spends like, I think it's about a year in the Congo, and he goes back to Southwestern and he finishes and he gets his degree.

He gets his undergraduate degree in 1975, at which point he joins the army.

Now, every version of the story that Hatfield tells and quite a few of the articles about Hatfield 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 green berets are, Courtney?

They're special.

They're special.

It's a, yeah,

they're very special boys.

Some of the specialest boys in the whole army.

That's right, guys.

It's a special forces unit.

They're more focused on like the green berets are the guys you send in if you've got.

If you have a bunch of like local militia types that you want to train up into a fighting force to fuck with whatever country that you're having a great power conflict with, you send in 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 what the Green Berets do.

Is it like Navy SEAL adjacent or yeah, it's at that level of special forces, right?

They come in before or they're trainers.

They just do different things.

They do like the Navy SEALs are more 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 tripwires in the jungle or whatever, or carry out ambushes on NVA caravans, if we're talking about like Vietnam or whatever.

So Hatfield claims to have joined the 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 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

When a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving with an Operational A team, Hatfield 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 Mattoon 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 was published in the Washington Post.

Quote, military records show he did did enlist in the Army in 1975 and entered the rigorous special forces qualification course at Fort Bragg in 1976, but he didn't last long there.

After a few weeks, he was discharged from active duty and wound up in the Army National Guard.

So that's a really different version of events, right?

That's like not making it through boot camp.

Is that what happened?

He made it through boot camp.

He doesn't make it through special forces 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, does it make clear that he's not going to be in special forces, but he's not going to be active duty, right?

Okay.

Like, so this is a fairly rapid shift for him.

And it suggests that something went really wrong during his special forces 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 mind, he was.

Yeah, in his mind, he was.

Sure.

So that's a very different version of events.

And that Atlantic article also describes Hatfield'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 daughter of a Methodist surgeon and he went on to be a security guard in a radiator factory, you know?

That's not not true, but 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 Eshtruth's teenage daughter, Carolyn.

Now they're close to the same age.

He's like 19.

I think she's 17 and turns 18, right?

So

the age thing is not a big deal.

I say teenage, but he's teenage too.

I don't want to make it out like I'm.

Sagi was being creepy.

I don't think it's weird for a 17-year-old and 19-year-old to get interested in each each other or whatever.

They get married in 1976.

And in April of 1977, her dad, Glenn, is captured by mercenaries who invaded Zaire from Angola, and he's executed.

He's found dead several weeks later.

And the Washington Post reports, quote, Hatfield'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 1978.

He had no contact with his only child, a daughter named Cayman, who was born shortly before the divorce until several years ago, Carolyn Estruth says.

So, why was his dad the glue?

I don't know that it was, but it's just after he dies, the marriage calls.

It may just have not been.

They meet when they're teenagers.

Maybe they were just never going to, 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 there, is he sending child support?

None of that is.

He's not a father of the year, yeah.

But he's gone, right?

Like he bounces, you know?

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 of Steve's life, there are conflicting stories here.

But what we can, what's definitely solid, what we know is that in 1978, as 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 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 wind up being blacklisted by everyone, right?

Like the British government, who they were supposed to be a colony of, refuses to recognize them.

You're not supposed to trade with Rhodesia.

You're not supposed, certainly not supposed to sell them guns.

South Africa is basically their big economic lifeline, in addition to like the Portuguese colonies, but it's a really sketchy situation.

And by the time he moves there in 1978, Rhodesia is like an international pariah.

They are the white separatist state, right?

The white supremacist pariah state, right?

You just made so many references to Rhodesia that I've heard and not understood.

It finally makes sense.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I love Rhodesia.

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 become Zimbabwe.

But for the last two years that Rhodesia exists, that's where Steve Hatfield lives, and he attends the Godfrey Huggins School of Medicine in Salisbury,

which I think was the capital.

So choosing to move to Rhodesia in 1978 is at minimum morally questionable, right?

Yes.

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 clinging to power wherever it could, and the state security forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon.

Hatfield would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia, he volunteered as a medic for the Rhodesian army and was attached to the Selus 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 articles about him that, yeah,

a lot of times they'll just say he was one of the Selus Scouts.

He was a member of this elite unit.

The Atlantic reports that, yeah, he was a medic attached to the unit.

I've seen both ways.

Neither seem to be true.

So the Selus Scouts and the Rhodesian military occupy a place of honor within the modern far-right's conception of military history because of the way this bush conflict between these insurgents that represent a much much larger portion of the country and the military, which is a mixed-race military but exists to support the white supremacist state,

Rhodesia kind of invents modern counterinsurgent warfare tactics.

A lot of stuff that you see, that you've seen the U.S.

in the global war on terror using in Afghanistan and Iraq, these 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 like isolate problem villages or all of these different tactics for how you're supposed to deal with an to smoke out insurgents.

The modern

insurgent warfare handbook gets written by Rhodesia, right?

Now,

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 U.S., also loses a lot of the wars that they use those tactics in.

These aren't successful tactics, they're just tactics.

Like, and so there's this whole, like, well, the Rhodesians, they were the ones who really, before anyone else, knew what the future of warfare was going to be.

And so, you get a lot of like people nerding out of the Rhodesian army over that.

You get a lot of people obsessing over the Selus scouts in particular because after Rhodesia fell in 1980, a bunch of former scouts wrote articles and memoirs about their combat experiences that massively exaggerated how good they had been.

Again, they lose the war.

And this all feeds into, starting in the 80s, 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 terror.

But this is we start like, it becomes in the media.

There's more and more movies about special forces units.

And so Especially for people on the far right, the Selu scouts are like this,

they're idolized, right?

And so the fact that Hatfield 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, um, and just given socially what's what's going on.

I'm not surprised he wanted to be affiliated with this unit, like racist special forces.

What could be the most racist special forces, yes?

Like the Selu Scouts and the SS both use the same acronym.

So, that's that's that's easy.

Um,

now that said, there's good reason to doubt doubt that he had anything to do with the scouts.

Per the Washington Post, Hatville's resume also claimed that he'd served as a Cello Scout, though his time in the Rhodesian military overlapped with his time in the U.S.

Army.

Rhodesian military records have been hard to find, but Cellus Scouts' veterans told reporters they'd never heard of Hatville.

The true circumstances of his connection with the unit, if any, remain unclear.

So I can't say 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 like evidence really other than his word that I've seen.

Um, so given the 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 riding in was ambushed by Marxist insurgents.

Leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose.

This, he claims, gives him like a lifelong breathing injury that 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: He was an extraordinary guy and very, very bright, but he was also a real Walter Mitty 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.

And that gives you something, too.

We're like,

that's why I think, yeah, 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.

Because there's usually a degree of like truth that we're then exaggerating, right?

He went to Fort Bragg.

He got, did the special forces like tests, but he didn't quite become a Green Beret, right?

Like, he's kind of making ends meet in his stories a lot of the time.

Um,

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 Rhodesian military because they were it, they served in the Rhodesian military, all of our sponsors, former Rhodesian special forces.

I, it should, we didn't try to make it that way.

It's weird.

Your first instinct is to slander.

They love it.

It's the, it's like negging, you know?

Like, that doesn't actually work for dating.

The, the pickup artist guys are wrong about that, but it's incredible for advertising.

Corporate people, 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, is this an F-150?

You should call it like an F-75, you know?

That's like half a truck, maybe.

And they just walked out and they just mailed us a check.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's how you do it, people.

Negging.

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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 of the largest anthrax epidemics ever seen in history, right?

From 1978 to 1980, 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 state up top.

Anthrax, we don't, people, when you hear anthrax, 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 endemic, they 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 and does just happen and has nothing to do with anybody using a weapon right was this targeted like the version that you're talking about

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 good reasons to think that this massive pandemic may have been started by the Rhodesian military using biological weapons.

There's a couple of good reasons to suspect this.

Yeah.

The pandemic almost exclusively affected cattle on what were 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, right?

The people who died were all black Rhodesians, and nearly all of the human beings who got exposed to anthrax in Rhodesia were black.

That is some racist bacteria.

It's a racist bacteria.

Yeah.

Rhodesia had for 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 weapon systems can we put together?

So as their chances of victory declined, Dr.

Robert Symington, who is a professor at the Unity of Rhodesia's Medical School, where Steve Hatfield 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, Symington allegedly began human experimentation as early as 1975.

The CBW program experimented with a number of compounds, including warfarin, parathion, thallium, and vibrocholeri.

Dr.

Symington was said by one officer to have killed more terrorists than the Rhodesian light infantry during certain months of the war.

The CBW program saw its greatest successes with the use of parathion, an organophosphate used in pesticides.

In isolated locations, CBW employees soaked hundreds of articles of clothing in parathion solutions, afterwards drying them to eliminate the smell.

The poisoned clothing was then distributed to guerrilla forces through local contacts who would directly donate it to guerrilla recruits by contaminating discovered caches of guerrilla supplies or by stocking stores that were in guerrilla-heavy areas and expected to be ransacked.

Other uses of CBW included the deliberate poisoning of foodstuffs with thallium and warfarin, as well as the deployment of cholera to contaminate water sources known to be frequented by guerrillas.

The use of cholera in warfare made Rhodesia the first nation to intentionally deploy biological weapons after the 1975 passage of the Biological Weapons Convention.

Again, great guys, great country, 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 anthrax on human beings on multiple occasions.

The elite Selu scouts actually used, like, were one of the groups that deployed anthrax against like targeted groups of guerrillas, right?

We don't know how many people died from Rhodesian CBW use, but it's at least in the hundreds and probably in the thousands.

And it may account for as many as 15% 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, they definitely caused that anthrax outbreak in 1978 to 1980, right?

obviously they did right yeah and this is kind of i i brought it up this way because it's it's a good example of why richard jewell 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 make a case that well this is the only possible thing right if you just read out the facts i just read you obviously rhodesia caused this massive pandemic right there's the it's the only explanation they were using anthrax as a weapon why wouldn't they 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 at extent about their horrible war crimes with chemical and biological weapons, there's a lot of good reason to believe that this was a natural anthrax outbreak.

And 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 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 whatnot, all cattle in the country, and that has stopped by 1978.

Anthrax is naturally endemic to the region, and the outbreak occurred alongside other outbreaks that infected cattle populations.

The anthrax outbreak is one of a number of outbreaks that's wiping out cattle in Rhodesia because the state programs to like treat cattle have gone away because of the war, right?

Now, there's also some, again, we talked about how it primarily hit cattle in like these black subsistent farms as opposed to like the corporate because those farms had money and were able to continue medicating their cattle, right?

And again, why is it more black?

Well, number one, the vast majority of the country is black.

And number two, the white people are eating and spending their time farming animals animals that have access to good medical care, right?

Yes.

Yes.

Like,

so when you, and again, this is going to be the case with when Steve Hatfield 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, like, well, no, maybe I was looking at too narrow a subset of information.

Now, I should say it's still possible Rhodesia did this, that like the anthrax pandemic was, uh, or epidemic was a purposeful one, that they like were trying to wipe out the foods because we know that they were.

Um, 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.

Like, it wouldn't have been successful if they didn't.

No, no, no, like this would have gone worse because they were they were bad at this.

Um, now I should also note again that because Steve is going to be accused of being the anthrax bummer, the fact that he is in Rhodesia and allegedly had worked with the Selu scouts who used anthrax and is in Rhodesia at the same time as an anthrax outbreak.

Again, in 2001, people are going to read about this and go, obviously, it's this guy, right?

It has 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 chemical and biological?

He's like fucking 20.

Like,

why would they do that?

Like, he's not who you pick.

You don't need him.

Um, and there's no evidence whatsoever that he had anything to do with the chemical and biological weapons campaign carried out by Rhodesia.

Um, it's possible that this is why he starts to get interested in chemical and biological weapons, which he does, and he's going to become an expert on them later, but that's speculation on my part.

So he graduates.

I think he has to go from Rhodesia to South Africa, but he eventually does graduate and he gets the equivalent of an MD in 1984.

They're like, actually, your Rhodesian med school's not here.

South Africa takes it, though.

They're fine.

So this is a near thing.

In 1983, 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 Hatville punching out a peer.

Quote, He is not someone I 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 solicited.

That said,

there's enough in his background to be like, yeah, maybe 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 14-month tour with South Africa's National Antarctic Expedition.

Through the 1980s.

Yeah, so he does that.

Cool.

Career's going well.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds a lot better than what he's going to wind up doing for a living.

What school is he attending here?

It's Cape Town.

Okay.

University of Cape Town.

Through the 1980s, 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 of the

resumes he writes out are sure going to say PhD, right?

So during during his years as a student in South Africa, Hatfield is alleged to have run into more conflicts with his peers.

Per the Washington Post reporting, a Johannesburg newspaper reported that Hatfield had carried a gun into South African medical laboratories and boasted to colleagues that he'd trained bodyguards for white separatist Eugene Terre Blanche.

And

just carrying a gun into the lab, and this very South African stuff, and the fact that South Africans are being like, no, but he did it in a weird way.

He was talking about being racist in a weird way to us in apartheid South Africa.

Wow.

Yeah.

And just the breath.

And again, I don't see any evidence that he trained bodyguards for this white separatist, but it gives you an idea of where his politics are, right?

If that's true.

I can't say for certain that

that newspaper's reporting is accurate, but that's what was reported.

Hatfield would later fill his resume with claims that he'd also gotten a medical degree in the UK.

And in fact,

there's at least some evidence that he pretended his degree was from the UK as opposed to from, you know, these African colleges 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 in 1984, when he, in fact, qualified as a doctor that year in Zimbabwe.

The Royal Society of Medicine has no record of him, and he is not a fellow of the society, as his resume claims.

That's like bold pre-internet lying.

Right.

And you could so get away with this shit before the that's what bums me out, man.

I could be so many things.

I could be doing surgery today.

I could be cutting into a motherfucker and taking an organ out today.

If it was the 1980s, my God.

I don't think I want you to do that either.

I think I'd be great at it, but no one's going to let me try.

They're scared that I'd show them up.

Oh, that'd be better.

Oh, yeah.

Maybe I'll be too good.

Maybe I'm too good at surgery.

If you're the kind of guy who would just like take off and go to the Congo, like without an invitation, you are also the kind of guy who would like just blatantly lie on your resume.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Wild.

Now, Hatfield is, you know,

he does some stuff in England.

He, he's at Oxford briefly.

He works as like a cancer specialist in the Nuffield Department of Pathology and Bacteriology in Oxford in 1994.

But he also, I mean, he's at least accused of having faked a reference.

Again, per the Observer's 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 a doctor.

And he is a real doctor.

I want want to 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: 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 U.S.

when he's trying to get a federal research grant.

However, back in Rhodes University, 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 1995.

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 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-90s.

He goes back to the U.S.

for a bit.

He does that that fellowship at Oxford.

And 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 now.

In late 1997, he starts a two-year fellowship with USAMRID to study Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers.

USAMRID is the acronym,

and it's USAMRIID.

USAMRID is the acronym for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

This is the top biodefense laboratory in the country with a mission to study both biological weapons and diseases like Ebola that are seen to have a high potential for weaponization.

Their primary client is the U.S.

Army, and they do a lot of work in Fort Detrick, which is where the U.S.

used to host its germ weapons RD department until we stopped admitting that we had a germ weapon RD department in 1969.

Officially, we stopped making germ biological weapons in 1969.

Do I think we totally stopped?

I don't know.

I don't know.

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?

branch of the government whose job is to figure out what kind of diseases or illnesses may be 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 uh in his book the demon in the freezer richard preston gives a useful description and by useful i mean terrifying description of usamrid a headquarters that is just kind of chilling the main building of usamrid 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 covers 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 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, incurable viruses.

A bioprotective spacesuit is a pressurized plastic suit that covers the entire body.

It has a soft plastic head bubble with a clear faceplate, and it is fed by sterile air coming through a hose and an air regulator.

The chimneys of the buildings are always exhausting super filtered and superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of the biocontainment zones.

Usamarid was now surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent a truck bomb from cracking open a biosafety level four suite 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, can I catch up with you?

These are your planet killers.

Yeah.

Okay, so we're in the UK and these guys are actually right and we're and these guys are actually back in the us he's moved to the u.s oh we're in the u.samrit is the is a u.s like that's it's the u.s bio biowar like biological weapons research until we said we shut it down and these guys are actually doing good stuff No, we shut down the R D department at Fort Dietrich, right?

So USAMRID 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 69,

but we still research what kind of weapons people might make and research like ways to defend them, right?

That's what USAMRID is doing is they are trying to know, and it's not just weapons, but like, you know, when you have an Ebola outbreak in Africa, right?

Usamrid 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, right?

What if someone weaponized Ebola?

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?

You know, 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 Sambritz trying to figure out.

I totally get that this is important and necessary, but it does seem like the line of like, are you doing more harm than good gets a little bit dicey when you talk about this stuff?

And it's also the line between like, well, what counts as R ⁇ D for new to new

shit, like as opposed to R D on how to fight it.

Yeah.

And it's, there's always a, again, the, 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 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 USAMRID facility there is

very high.

Stephen King's The Stand

focuses on, I think it's basically a base that's meant to stand in for Fort Dietrich.

I forget exactly what it's called on that, but that's how the virus that kills the whole world gets out: it's something 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 USAMRID facility.

And so if you are working there, you are working with very scary stuff.

Steve Hatfield is doing very serious work at this point, right?

And he is qualified to do it.

Not as qualified as his resumes and CV makeup sound, 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.

So he's one of his first jobs there is he's carrying out experiments on macaque monkeys, infecting them with deadly viruses and watching them die.

This fucks him 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 won't feel as bad about killing these monkeys.

It doesn't seem like a fun job to me.

Over the next couple of years, Hatfield 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 soon starts getting contracts to instruct special forces teams on defensive techniques, right?

So in addition to this job with USAMRI, he's getting like, he's giving seminars, he's giving speeches, and he's also conducting training classes 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 kinds of situations.

Like he's training them on that kind of stuff, right?

And this is all, you know, right around the late 90s is like the millenniums coming to an end.

There's a couple of hoax anthrax attacks in the U.S.

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 in the media and the public over anthrax attacks.

And this corresponds to a growing public and official awareness that bioterrorism is a real threat.

And Hatfield, 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 unethical sense, just in a, he makes a good career move.

He starts giving lectures at conventions and talking to reporters reporters about America's unreadiness to face a weaponized pathogen.

In 1998, 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?

I saw that photo.

Yeah, those photos are going to be found when he's accused of doing the anthrax attacks, and 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 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 Hauer, then New York City's emergency preparedness director.

Hauer was appalled.

After the presentation, he says he called Hatfield aside and told him he had gone too far.

It was too detailed, too specific to go into a public forum.

Hatfield listened, Hauer 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 in a wheelchair.

Like he's really making a very easy-to-follow guide for poisoning the White House.

Here's the blueprint.

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.

That's not a hot mic.

That might not be the most responsible thing to do.

You know who would never poison anyone with a wheelchair filled with anthrax?

The sponsors.

Those goodies.

Yeah,

they don't even have access to anthrax.

Weaponized Ebola?

Absolutely.

Oh, my God.

Blue Apron guys actually have enough weaponized Ebola to wipe out the whole planet, but that's just a part of their

Salisbury steak Friday package.

Yeah, the taste of Ebola.

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I don't think we're going to get any more blue apron money, Sophie.

That's okay.

That's okay.

I don't think they ever gave us any money.

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So a lot of Hatville'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 USAMRID.

He'd been one of the scientists back in like the 50s who'd helped create our U.S.

bioweapons arsenal back when we still officially had one.

And then he retired from Usamrid and became a bio warfare consultant.

He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax, Bill Patrick.

So Bill is like the top guy in the terrifying murder weapons business, right?

How do you get a secret patent?

It's a patent for something that's like you did it and you, you, you're, 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 want people just like looking up the patent for weaponized anthrax and following that, right?

Fair enough.

So maybe you want to keep certain things a secret.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Probably keep that sealed.

In this case, I am in alignment with the government policy.

Yeah.

Probably shouldn't have the weaponized anthrax plans online.

Nope.

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Yeah, it listen to On Tyranny or something.

Yeah.

Maybe listen to the Anthrax book when you're trying to read it.

You're disappointing me today.

Well,

I won't be be disappointing you when I weaponize some anthrax, Sophie.

Then I'll have anthrax.

Nope.

Probably shouldn't talk about that online.

So Patrick wants a protege.

You know, this guy, he's in his 70s now.

He's getting older.

And he wants someone to follow in his footsteps.

And he meets Hatfield and considers him just gung-ho enough for the job.

And per the Washington Post, quote, the two struck up a friendship like father and son, says one bioterror expert who watched the ties develop.

When Patrick's schedule was too full to attend a program or contribute to a study, he recommended Hatfield, who often did the work for free.

Hatfield drove Patrick to consulting jobs at SAIC and traveled with him to professional conferences and classified briefings on the weaponization process.

Hatfill was 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 the...

Nope.

Okay.

In 1999, Patrick helps Hatfield get a job at the Science Applications International Corporation, or S-A-I-C.

This is a private contractor.

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 USAMRID, 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 agents and how to produce them.

The number of Americans

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 50 to 100 people, right?

This is the number of people who could take take anthrax and turn it into a dry, powdered biological agent, right?

Maybe 100 people tops in the whole country could have done that, right?

And we're saying he's not good enough, but he's he's like

he's saying he is, but he does not have, he doesn't have the professional background to have done that.

He's like, Patrick showed me over dinner.

Right.

Well, that's kind of, that's kind of the situation where 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 to do it because of patrick i'm not i'm not saying he's lying here i'm just saying that like his i don't know he's only been doing the job a couple of years he shouldn't be at that level but because of his connection to patrick a lot of stuff is possible that might not otherwise be right

um and it's the kind of thing where Maybe he was exaggerating a bit again to get jobs.

If so, this is going to bite him in the ass because come 2001, when there's an anthrax attack, you don't want to be one of the 50 to 100 Americans who could credibly make the claim to know how to weaponize anthrax right that becomes less of a positive thing once someone's done it so funny yeah

in 2001 stephen 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 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, he's, 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 at the CIA, but not that, right?

We don't really know what happened, but they deny him.

They turn him down.

They won't give him a top secret security clearance.

And in fact, their 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 could fuck his career.

They say basically this guy can't be trusted.

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 their, if they decided 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 SAIC.

It endangers his job at his work with USAMRIT.

It endangers his whole career, right?

And this is all happening in 2001, right?

Right in the run-up to 9-11.

So one of the last projects that he would start at SAIC before 9-11 was an attempt to design a fake mobile biowarfare production laboratory.

Now, this is one of those things where,

so

9-11 hasn't happened yet, but George W.

Bush is 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 he have tried to do it if 9-11 hasn't happened?

Well, this is kind of a little, this is like a little beat in the he always wanted to do that thing, because

before 9-11 has happened, they're they're starting to train soldiers 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 like 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, right?

And there's a dark humor in the fact that the U.S.

government pays Steve Hatwell to design a mobile WMD production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have in order to train U.S.

soldiers so that they could recognize a facility if they wound out in Iraq, even though their government was the only one with the resources to build one, right?

Oops.

And Hatfield dutifully builds a lab into an 18-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 directly from a military stockpile or was made 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 totally knew yeah

so 9-11 happens and that's where the episode's going to end with 9-11 uh you know because after 9-11 not long after we're going to get the uh the anthrax attacks and steve's life is going to change dramatically for the worse 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

Well, fuck.

I'm going to be chomping at the bit to figure out what happened to Steve and how he got into the Trump administration.

Yeah.

All of these things were like, yes, love that resume point.

Part three.

But first, you want to plug your pluggables?

You guys, I wrote a book.

It's a coming of age memoir.

It's called Girl Gone Wild.

I alternate between thinking it's

totally embarrassing that I did did it and that it's awesome.

And so you decide.

You order it and decide.

Yeah, you decide.

We report something or other like that.

Anyway, everybody, this has been Behind the Bastards.

Until next week or wherever, until the next episode, I don't know.

Go away.

Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

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