Terrorist Use of Biological Weapons - Deadly Cultures: Biological Weapons Since 1945 - page 300

beyond the capabilities of anyone not specifically trained to prepare it.
Very few people in the world have such training; most of them are cur-
rent or past Ph.D.-level employees of the US or Soviet BW programs or
biodefense programs. 30
Messages in the early letters were discarded; later ones contained
crudely lettered warnings that identified the contents as anthrax, and
wording apparently linking them to militant Islam. The latter feature is
now widely thought to be an attempt to deflect suspicion from a domestic
perpetrator. However, they probably were also intended to call attention
to the contents of the letters, and thus to avoid casualties. Other features
of the letters—they were tightly taped shut and contained a conspicuous
amount of powder—also suggest an intent to alarm but not to kill.
Hoaxes
Although actual bioterrorist attacks have been extraordinarily rare,
threats and hoaxes have not. From the first prominent bioterrorist hoax
—the 1997 sending of a petri dish claiming to contain a B. anthracis cul-
ture to the B'nai B'rith center in Washington, D.C.—to the anthrax letter
attacks in 2001, police and the FBI had probably responded to more than
1,000 hoaxes. There were occasional hoaxes overseas as well. The actual
anthrax attacks in 2001 stimulated a resurgence of hoaxing and threaten-
ing, such that in the few years since there have been thousands of addi-
tional threats in the US and additional thousands overseas. The total is
probably in the tens of thousands. The toll on law enforcement agencies
and potential victims has clearly been substantial; domestic US costs have
probably topped $100 million. Very few perpetrators of hoaxes have been
identified and prosecuted. 31
In addition to hoaxes, a high level of sensitivity to the possibility of
bioterrorist attack has led to a large number of incidents in which pow-
ders of various kinds have provoked suspicion and stimulated formal re-
sponses to entirely innocent mail. For the Washington, D.C., area it was
recently estimated that there are 3-10 alerts on Capitol Hill alone every
day, and the FBI is called to investigate about 10 per week in the Dis-
trict. 32 Clearly, a huge investment of resources is required to deal with
such suspicions.
Initial reactions to hoaxes were draconian; 33 potential victims were re-