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

Summary

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

Podcast: Behind the Bastards
Host: Brandon (with co-host Sophie and guest Courtney Kosak)
Date: October 2, 2025
Episode Theme:
A deep dive into the early life, character, and career of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill—the man wrongly accused of the 2001 anthrax mail attacks in the U.S. This episode unpacks how Hatfill’s strange backstory, eccentricities, and false claims made him an appealing but ultimately innocent target for the FBI and media, setting the stage for a notorious federal debacle.

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Episode Overview

In part one of this multi-episode arc, the hosts introduce the context of post-9/11 America and the subsequent anthrax attacks. They explore how the media and FBI, in their zeal to find the perpetrator, zeroed in on Dr. Steven Hatfill—a man with a “bastardly” yet ultimately unrelated life story. This episode focuses exclusively on Hatfill’s biography and the events that made his name synonymous with an uncommitted crime.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: The 2001 Anthrax Attacks (00:01–02:57)

• Anthrax-laced letters were sent to politicians and media just after 9/11, causing national panic and five deaths.
• Dr. Steven Hatfill became a suspect, largely because of his unusual life and credentials.

Quote:
“These happened right in the wake of 9/11...they never found who did it, but they had a suspect for several years. And that suspect is a guy who is a bastard...but...he was done dirty.” (Brandon, 01:01)

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2. Introducing Steven Hatfill: The Eccentric Candidate (05:30–08:11)

• Born in 1953, Mattoon, Illinois; normal middle-class upbringing, nothing to foreshadow future controversy.
• Admits to being a poor student, “I never took a book home from school.”
• Early interests: medical science, military history, electives; flew gliders at 14, aspired to be a Marine Corps fighter pilot, but disqualified due to imperfect vision.
• The disappointment “shattered” him—he dropped out of college for a year to volunteer at a mission hospital in the Congo.

Quote:
“He travels to the Congo, finds this mission, doing like, medical work...he’s volunteering and we don’t have enough people, so let’s take him in.” (Brandon, 08:33)

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3. Adventuring and Mythmaking: Africa, the Military, and Special Forces Tales (10:10–14:10)

• Returns to Southwestern College, earns a degree, joins the Army, but fails Special Forces (Green Berets) qualification—despite later presenting himself as a veteran Green Beret.
• The official record: “He did enlist...entered the rigorous Special Forces qualification course...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.” (Brandon quoting Marilyn Thompson, 12:00–13:17)
• Early marital life complicated by tragedy (father-in-law executed in Africa), followed by divorce and estrangement from his daughter.

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4. Rhodesia: Moral Quandaries and Medical School in a Pariah State (16:10–24:00)

• 1978: Hatfill moves to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then a white supremacist, internationally isolated apartheid state.
• Here, he attends medical school and claims to have served as a medic with the elite Selous Scouts (Rhodesian special forces)—a claim doubted by other veterans and official records.
• Rhodesia was notorious both for pioneering ruthless counterinsurgency tactics and, increasingly, for being mythologized by modern far-right military enthusiasts.
• Recurrent exaggeration and fabrication: “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.” (Brandon reads, 23:20)
• Notable moment: The hosts highlight how pervasive this mythmaking was—for Hatfill, resume inflation began early and persisted.

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5. The Anthrax Epidemic in Rhodesia and the Seeds of Suspicion (28:54–38:22)

• While Hatfill studied in Rhodesia, a devastating anthrax epidemic hit, mainly affecting Black-owned farms.
• Rhodesia’s government was known to use chemical/biological weapons on “insurgents”. There is extensive debate among historians and scientists whether the anthrax outbreak was a natural disaster or a deliberate act.
• The episode emphasizes that, despite the timing, there is no evidence Hatfill participated in Rhodesia’s CBW program.
• “[Rhodesia] absolutely did and is confirmed to have weaponized and used anthrax on human beings...But as Matthew Turner points out...there’s a lot of good reason to believe that this was a natural anthrax outbreak.” (Brandon, 33:47–34:10)
• Biographical parallel: Years later, these coincidences would be used (superficially but powerfully) against Hatfill during the U.S. anthrax scare.

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6. Questionable Credentials and Professional Turbulence (39:37–44:05)

• Continues studies in South Africa (University of Cape Town), claiming several master’s degrees and attempting (but failing to attain) a PhD.
• Habitually padded his resume: at various times claimed UK medical credentials and Royal Society membership—none substantiated.
• Anecdotes surface of him carrying a gun to labs and allegedly bragging to have trained white supremacist bodyguards—a rumor consistent with, but not confirmed by, his political leanings at the time.

Quote:
“That’s like bold pre-Internet lying, right? You could so get away with this shit before...I could be doing surgery today if it was the 1980s.” (Sophie & Brandon, 41:44–42:05)

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7. Rising Through the Ranks: U.S. Government and Biosecurity Work (44:07–63:10)

• Hatfill’s skill as a scientist and teacher lands him white-collar jobs at the National Institutes of Health and, in 1997, a prestigious two-year fellowship at USAMRIID (the U.S. Army’s top bioweapons research center).
• The hosts describe the genuinely terrifying, top-security facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
• Hatfill develops a reputation as an alarming but talented expert in germ warfare (mainly viruses like Ebola, not anthrax).
• Partners with Bill Patrick, a legendary (if sinister) bioweapons scientist with “five secret patents on weaponized anthrax.”
• Hatfill’s professional network, rare expertise, and confidence make him a fixture in U.S. biodefense—even as he continues to exaggerate his experience.

Quote:
“In just a couple of years, he’s gotten to the point anyone in a field like this wants to, where...you can start taking private sector money as a consultant, because that’s where the real cash is, baby.” (Brandon, 61:01)

Quote:
“The number of Americans who can actually claim that—have extensive knowledge of wet and dry biological agents and how to produce them—was, at this point, maybe 50 to 100 people.” (Brandon, 62:07)

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8. Red Flags: Security Clearances, CIA Polygraphs, and Mobile Weapons Labs (63:14–67:16)

• In 2001 Hatfill applies for a top-secret CIA clearance. He fails the polygraph, is denied, and the denial triggers a suspension of his Department of Defense clearance.
• He becomes a liability for federal contractors and is isolated from sensitive projects.
• Just pre-9/11, Hatfill develops a mock “mobile biowarfare lab” for the U.S. military, which eerily mirrors what officials later speculate Saddam Hussein owns.
• The hosts note the unintended irony: “the US Government pays Steve Hatfill to design a mobile WMD production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have…even though their government was the only one with the resources to build one.” (Brandon, 66:16)

Quote:
“You don’t wanna be one of the 50 to 100 Americans who could credibly make the claim to know how to weaponize anthrax…That becomes less of a positive thing once someone’s done it.” (Brandon, 63:14)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On resume inflation:
  “He once told me his wife died in the Congo. Again, he just left. They divorced. He left her with the kid. Her dad died in the Congo.” (Brandon, 23:20)

• On Hatfill’s dangerous expertise:
  “He’s very charismatic...He starts getting contracts to instruct special forces teams on defensive techniques…He’s giving seminars, he’s giving speeches, and he’s also conducting training classes...” (Brandon, 50:09–50:36)

• On how quickly things can spiral:
  “Come 2001, when there’s an anthrax attack, you don’t wanna be one of the 50 to 100 Americans who could credibly make the claim to know how to weaponize ant[hrax]. That becomes less of a positive thing once someone’s done it.” (Brandon, 63:10)

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Structure & Flow

The episode artfully balances biographical narrative, historical digression, and sharp, irreverent commentary on the intersection of mythmaking and suspicion in American security culture. Brandon and his co-hosts regularly step back to question the reliability of sources, the moral ambiguities of Hatfill’s decisions, and the broader institutional failures of the FBI and media.

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 00:01–02:57 — Introduction, recap, and episode premise
• 05:30–08:11 — Early life, gliding, and military disappointment
• 10:10–14:10 — Army, Special Forces stories, and first marriage
• 16:10–24:00 — Rhodesian years, Selous Scouts myths, far-right fascination
• 28:54–38:22 — Rhodesian anthrax outbreak: natural or weaponized?
• 39:37–44:05 — Medical degrees, UK credentials, and South African politics
• 44:07–50:27 — USAMRIID, infectious disease work, and rise in U.S. biosecurity
• 61:01–63:10 — Mentor Bill Patrick, weaponized anthrax expertise, and rare skills
• 63:14–67:16 — CIA clearance denial and the infamous mobile weapons lab
• 67:16–end — 9/11 as the threshold for Hatfill’s infamy (to be explored in Part 2)

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Conclusion & Set-Up for Part 2

Part one concludes with Dr. Hatfill’s life teetering on the edge: credentials questioned, security clearances pulled, just as the world changes with 9/11. The ensuing anthrax panic and the FBI’s fateful decision to focus in on this “perfectly flawed” candidate is set for next episode.

Quote:
“…after 9/11, not long after, we’re going to get 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...” (Brandon, 67:18)

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For listeners, this episode offers a fascinating, sometimes darkly funny forensic biography of a complicated man cast as villain not by his actions, but by a blend of bluster, bad timing, and the fevered anxieties of post-9/11 America.

Transcript

[Brandon]

Call Zone media. 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. 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 Daschle, 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 gonna 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 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. This wasn't his fault. He was done dirty. So we're just talking about how 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.

[Sophie]

Is Steve, our protagonist this time.

[Brandon]

Steve is. And this is gonna 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 Hatfill, because who he is and the kind of life he leads are what makes him into the suspect for this terrorist attack.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

And like, is why people in the FBI and the media become so convinced that it was him. And he is a. 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. Hatfill.

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[Brandon]

So he was born on October 24, 1953 in St. Louis, Missouri. Like me, he was raised in Mattoon, Illinois. He was the oldest of two kids and the only boy in 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, 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 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 wanna 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 is what I'm saying.

[Sophie]

What I would be too scared to. I would be a navigator. I hate to say it.

[Brandon]

Well, I mean, then I get to be the pilot, I guess. So that's A win for me, my vision.

[Sophie]

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

[Brandon]

I think I'd be a great fighter pilot. I mean, Sophie, look at how many F35s and F22s they're crashing these days. F18s. You know, I could do at least that. Well, I could crash one of those things.

[Sophie]

The bar is low.

[Brandon]

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 partially drops out of. It's less accurate to say he drops out of college because he will go back, but he 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 mission 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, 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, he seems 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 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

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? Not quite as good. Every doctor would rather be dropping a jdam, you know, we all know that.

[Sophie]

But he does have balls, though. That part is consistent.

[Brandon]

Like, that part is consistent.

[Courtney Kosak]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Yes. Yeah.

[Brandon]

I don't know. Straight to the Congo.

[Sophie]

I think we should. I don't think our friend Dr. Hodo would agree.

[Brandon]

You don't think? I think. I think you 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.

[Sophie]

Fair enough.

[Brandon]

It's like an American who grew up in the suburbs. So he returns to the US after this year. He spends. 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 Hatfill tells and quite a few of the articles about Hatfill 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?

[Sophie]

They're special.

[Brandon]

They're special. It's. Yeah, they're very special boys. Some of the specialist 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 fight fuck with whatever country that you're having a great power conflict with, you send them the Green Berets. And they spend long periods of time in the wilderness basically training people how to be insurgents. That's kind of their gig, right? That's what the Green Berets do.

[Sophie]

Is it like Navy SEAL adjacent or.

[Brandon]

Yeah, it's at that level of Special Forces, Right?

[Sophie]

Like, they come in before or they're trainers.

[Brandon]

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 indigenous allies how to set up tripwires in the jungle or whatever, or carry out ambushes on NVA caravans if we're talking about Vietnam or whatever. So Hatfill 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 gonna 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, Hatfill 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. Military records show he 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.

[Sophie]

That's like not making it through boot camp. Is that what happened?

[Brandon]

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. Is it made clear that he's not going to be in Special Forces, but he's not going to be active duty?

[Courtney Kosak]

Right. Okay.

[Brandon]

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?

[Sophie]

In his mind, yeah.

[Brandon]

In his mind, he was. Sure. So that's a very different version of events. And that Atlantic article also describes Hatfill's first marriage in a way that leaves out some details present in other accounts. It sounds like a Bruce Spreenstein 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 esh truths teenage daughter Carolyn. Now they're close to the same age. He's like, 19, I think she's 17 and turns 18.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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 saying he was being creepy. I don't think it's weird for a 17 year old and 19 year old to get interested in each other or whatever. They get married in 1976 and in April of 1977 her dad Gwyn 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, Hatfill'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 Kamin, 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 gonna. Yeah, I don't know what happened here, but he leaves and he has nothing to do with his kid.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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 he sending child support? None of that.

[Sophie]

Is not a father of the year.

[Brandon]

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 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 get wind up being blacklisted by everyone.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

Like the British government who they're supposed to, 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right, yeah.

[Sophie]

You just made so many references to Rhodesia that I have heard and not understood. Finally makes sense.

[Brandon]

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 becomes Zimbabwe. But for the last two years that Rhodesia exists, that's where Steve Hatfill 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Sophie]

Yes.

[Brandon]

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, 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

The white supremacist government was clinging to power wherever it could and the state security forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon. Hatfill would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia, he volunteered as a medic for the Rhodesian army and was attached to the Selous 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. A lot of times he'll just say he was one of the SELU 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 Selous 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 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 US in the global war on terror, using in Afghanistan and Iraq these huge route clearance vehicles that are 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 like all of these different tactics for how you're supposed to deal with an to Smoke out Insurgents. The modern, like, insurgent warfare handbook gets written by Rhodesia right now. This is fascinating, 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 us, also loses. A lot of the wars that they use those tactics in, these aren't successful tactics, they're just tactics. 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 over the Rhodesian army over that. You get a lot of people obsessing over the Selu 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 culture. 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

And so the fact that Hatfill 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 and just given socially what's going on, I'm not surprised he wanted to be affiliated with, with this unit.

[Sophie]

Like racist Special Forces.

[Brandon]

What could be the most racist Special Forces? Yes, like the SELU Scouts and the SS both use the same acronym, so that's easy. Now, that said, there's good reason to doubt that he had anything to do with the Scouts. Per the Washington Post, Hatfill's resume also claimed that he'd served as a SELU scout, though his time in the Rhodesian military overlapped with his time in the US Army. Rhodesian military records have been hard to find, but sell a Scout veterans told reporters they'd never heard of Hatfill. 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. 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, quote, 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. Again, he just left. They divorced. He left her with the kid. Her dad died in the Congo. And that gives you something too, where, like, he. And 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right, right.

[Brandon]

He went to Fort Bragg, he did the Special Forces, like, tests, but he didn't quite become a Green Beret.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

He's kind of making ends meet in his stories a lot of the time. But you know who always tells the truth? Me.

[Sophie]

Our sponsors.

[Brandon]

That's right. That's right. They would never pretend to have been a member of the Rhodesian military because they were. They served in the Rhodesian military. All of our sponsors, former Rhodesian Special Forces. We didn't try to make it that way. It's weird.

[Sophie]

Your first instinct is to slander.

[Brandon]

They love it. It's like negging, you know, that doesn't actually work for dating. The pickup artist guys are wrong about that. But it's incredible for advertising, corporate people.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

No, no, sometimes I'll just walk. I just walked into Ford's offices the other day and I was like, oh, you guys, this is an F150. Call it like an F75. You know, it was like half a truck, maybe. And then I just walked out and they just mailed us a check. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's how you do it. People negging. Here's Ab.

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[Brandon]

And we're back. So, yeah, it's worth noting, because of what comes later, that Hatfill'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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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 stay 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Sophie]

Was this targeted, like the version that you're talking about?

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

So there's there and 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 expect this. Yeah. The pandemic almost extremely 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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

[Sophie]

That is some racist bacteria.

[Brandon]

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 weapons systems can we put together? So as their chances of victory declined, Dr. Robert Symington, who was a professor at the Unity of Rhodesia's medical school where Steve Hatfill 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, pyratheion, thallium and vibro choleri. 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 great greatest successes with the use of parathion, an organophosphate used in pesticides. In isolated locations, CBW employees soaked hundreds of articles of clothing and 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 gorillas. 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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 1978-1980.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

Obviously they did, right, yeah. And this is kind of. I brought it up this way because 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, wow, this is the only possible thing. Right. If you just read out the facts. I just read you, obviously Rhodesia caused this massive pandemic.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

It's the only explanation. They were using anthrax as a weapon. Why wouldn't they have done this?

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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 corp. Because those farms had money and were able to continue medicating their cattle.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

Oh, and again, why is it more black? Well, number one, the vast majority of the country's black and number two, the white people are eating and spending their time farming animals that have access to good medical care.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Sophie]

Yes, yes.

[Brandon]

So when you. And again, this is gonna be the case with when Steve Hatfill 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 or epidemic was a purposeful one, that they were trying to wipe out the foods. Cause we know that they were. 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.

[Sophie]

They wouldn't have been successful if they didn't.

[Brandon]

No, no, no. It would have gone worse because they were bad at this. Now I should also note again that because Steve is going to be accused of being the anthrax bomber, 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 gonna 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 biology. He's like fucking 20. Why would they do that? He's not who you pick. You don't need him. And there's no evidence whatsoever that he had anything to do with the chemical and biological weapons campaign carried out by Rhodesia. 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.

[Sophie]

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

[Brandon]

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 Hatfill 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 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. Awesome. Yeah, yeah, that sounds a lot better than what he's gonna wind up doing for a living.

[Sophie]

What school is he attending here?

[Brandon]

It's Cape Town 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. Accepted. We'll come back to that later because this is gonna be another case like with the Green Berets, where he almost had a Ph.D. but he didn't. And some of the things, some of the resumes he writes out are sure gonna say PhD, right? So during his years as a student in South Africa, Hatfill is alleged to have run into more conflicts with his peers, Per the Washington Post reporting. A Johannesburg newspaper reported that Hatfill had carried a gun into South African medical laboratories and boasted to colleagues that he'd bodyguards for white separatist Eugene Terblanche and just carrying a gun into the lab. 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.

[Sophie]

Wow.

[Brandon]

Yeah, just the brat. 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, can't say for certain that that newspaper's reporting is accurate, but that's what was reported. Hatfill 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 at 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.

[Sophie]

That's like bold pre Internet lying, right?

[Brandon]

You could so get away with this shit before. 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.

[Sophie]

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

[Brandon]

I think I'd be great at it, but no one's gonna let me try. They're scared that I'd show them up. It'd be better. Oh yeah, maybe I'll be too good. Maybe I'm too good at surgery.

[Sophie]

If you're the kind of guy who would just like take off though, 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.

[Brandon]

Absolutely.

[Incels Podcast Host]

Wild.

[Brandon]

Now Hatfill is, you know, he does some stuff in England. 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 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 is that 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 US 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 when I applied for this grant, basically I thought I was gonna get the PhD. So I wrote it down. It was before they turned me down. I don't know, maybe it was the case of him just thinking he was going to pass and it was fine cause 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

So yeah, he spends the mid-90s, he goes back to the OS for a bit, he does 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 US army and they do a lot of work in Fort Detrick, which is where the US used to host its germ weapons RD department until we stopped admitting that we had a germ weapon R and D department in 1969. Officially we stopped making germ biological weapons in 1969. Do I think we totally stopped? I don't know.

[Sophie]

I don't know if I think we.

[Brandon]

Did, but officially we did. Now, SAMRID is an extremely serious organization and they are doing some of the most dangerous work imaginable.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

This is a thing you would need in any country, even if it was an ethical defense department.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

Is a 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. In his book the Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston gives a useful description. And by useful, I mean terrifying description of you. Samrid, a headquarters that is just. Just kind of chilling. The main building of Usamrid is a dun colored two story monolith that looks like a warehouse. It has 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 2 to level 3 and finally to level 4, 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 bio containment zones. Usamrid was now surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent a truck bomb from cracking open a biosafety level 4 suite and releasing a hot agent into. Into the air. So just going through the list of security that gives you an idea of how deadly the shit in here is.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Sophie]

Okay. Can I catch up?

[Brandon]

These are your. These are your planet killers. Yeah.

[Sophie]

Okay, so we're in the UK and these guys are actually. Right. And we're. And these guys are actually back in.

[Brandon]

The U.S. he's moved to the U.S. oh, we're in the USAMRID is the. Is a U.S. like that's. It's the U.S. biowar, like biological weapons research.

[Sophie]

Until we said we shut it down. And these guys are actually doing good stuff.

[Brandon]

No, we shut down the R&D department at Fort Detrick.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

So USAMRID is based out of Fort Detrick too. Fort Detrick 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

That's what USAMRIT 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? You samrid 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?

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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?

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

That's the kind of shit USAMRIT's trying to figure out.

[Sophie]

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.

[Brandon]

And it's also the line between, like, well, what counts as R and D for new to new shit, like, as opposed to R and D on how to fight it. Yeah. And there's always a. Again, the degree of security in this facility is proof of the danger. Cause you have had, like, in Russia, there was a horrible anthrax outbreak because a Russian equivalent to this facility had a fucking breach and a bunch of people got sick.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

Like, these are scary places. And the consequences of things going wrong in a place like Fort Detrick 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 Detrick. I forget exactly what it's called in that, but that's how the virus that kills the whole world gets out is 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 Hatfill is doing very serious work at this point.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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.

[Sophie]

Oh, God.

[Brandon]

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, Hatfill 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 usamrid, he's getting like. He's giving seminars, he's giving speeches, and he's also conducting trainings 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 kind of situations. He's training them on that kind of stuff, right? And this is. All, right, around the late 90s is like, the millennium's coming to an end. There's a couple of hoax anthrax attacks in the US 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 Hatfill, 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. He Starts giving lectures at conventions and talking to 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Sophie]

I saw that photo.

[Brandon]

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 Hower, then New York City emergency preparedness director. Hauer was appalled. After the presentation, he says he called Hatfill aside and told him he had gone too far. It was too detailed, too specific to going to a public forum. Hatfill listened, Hauer said, but he shrugged it off. And so 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 and a wheelchair. Like, he's really making a very easy to follow fellow guide for poisoning the White House.

[Sophie]

Here's the blueprint.

[Brandon]

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 might not be the most most responsible thing to do. You know who would never poison anyone with a wheelchair filled with anthrax?

[Sophie]

The sponsors those goodies.

[Courtney Kosak]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

They don't even have access to anthrax. Weaponized Ebola. Absolutely. Oh, my God. The 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

The taste of Ebola.

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[Incels Podcast Host]

On this podcast Incels we unpack an emerging mindset I am a loser.

[Brandon]

If I was a woman, I wouldn't date me either.

[Incels Podcast Host]

A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.

[Brandon]

Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge.

[Incels Podcast Host]

This is Incels. Listen to Incels cells on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you want early access to new episodes and to hear exclusive bonus content, be sure to subscribe to the I Heart True Crime plus channel today. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts.

[Brandon]

This is a tape recorded statement. Person being interviewed is Krista Gale Pike. This is in regards to the death of a Colleen she started going off on me when I hit her. I just hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her.

[Narrator (Unrestorable Podcast)]

On a cold January day in 1995, 18 year old Christa pike killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Christa has been sitting on death row. The state has asked for an execution date for Krista. We let people languish in prison for decades raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable. How does someone prove that they deserve to live?

[Brandon]

We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Krista Pike.

[Narrator (Unrestorable Podcast)]

Listen to unrestorable Season 2 proof of life on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Incels Podcast Host]

It was an unimaginable crime.

[Idaho Massacre Podcast Host]

It's four consecutive live terms for Bryan Kohberger, who killed the four University of Idaho students.

[Sacred Scandal Podcast Host]

The defense are on a sinking ship. It was clear at that point he was out of options.

[Incels Podcast Host]

Nearly 30 months of silence until bombshell.

[Idaho Massacre Podcast Host]

Development brought Ryan Kohberger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.

[Incels Podcast Host]

No trial, no testimony.

[Brandon]

He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts, one of burglary and then four counts of murder.

[Incels Podcast Host]

In this final season, we return to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.

[Brandon]

Why did the prosecution take this? They were holding all the cars.

[Narrator (Unrestorable Podcast)]

How on earth could you make a deal?

[Advertiser Voice]

What message does that send?

[Incels Podcast Host]

Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Brandon]

And we're back. I don't think we're gonna get any more blue apron money. Sophie.

[Sophie]

That's okay.

[Brandon]

That's okay. I don't think they ever gave us any money. It was that other company that I forget.

[Sophie]

Hello? Fresh.

[Brandon]

Hellofresh. Yeah, they don't have any Ebola.

[Sophie]

Yeah, Ebola free dinners.

[Brandon]

Ebola free. That's right. Hellofresh. Say goodbye to Ebola. So a lot of Hatfill'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 US bioweapons arsenal back when we still officially had one. And then he retired from Usamrid and became a biowarfare 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.

[Sophie]

How do you get a secret patent?

[Brandon]

It's a patent for something that's like, you did it, and you get the patent on it in case anyone ever makes it and makes money off it.

[Courtney Kosak]

But.

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Sophie]

Fair enough.

[Brandon]

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. Yep. Also, this brings me to a special ad from our sponsor, Audible, and their new book this week, how to weaponize anthrax in five easy steps. You don't even have to read it. You can just listen to it, and you could be weaponizing anthrax in under 48 hours.

[Sophie]

Listen to on tyranny or something.

[Brandon]

Yeah, Listen to On tyranny or something. Yeah. Maybe listen to the anthrax book when you're trying to get some stuff all.

[Sophie]

Right, you're disappointing me today.

[Brandon]

Well, I won't 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 Hatfill 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 Hatfill, who often did the work for free. Hatfill 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.

[Sophie]

Oh, no.

[Brandon]

Normal thing to keep in your house, Patrick. I, too, keep the.

[Courtney Kosak]

No.

[Brandon]

Okay. In 1999, Patrick helps Hatfield get a job at the Science Applications International Corporation, or saic. 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

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

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

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

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Sophie]

And we're saying he's not good enough, but he's. He's. Like, he may have been.

[Brandon]

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

[Sophie]

He's like Patrick showed me over dinner.

[Brandon]

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. Cause they are close and Patrick knows how to do it.

[Courtney Kosak]

And.

[Brandon]

And maybe he did know how to do it because of Patrick. I'm not saying he's lying here. I'm just saying that, like, we 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.

[Sophie]

Got it.

[Brandon]

And it's the kind of thing where maybe he was exaggerating a bit again to get jobs. If so, this is gonna bite him in the ass. Because come 2001, when there's an anthrax attack, you don't wanna be one of the 50 to 100Americans who could credibly make the claim to know how to weaponize ant.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

That becomes less of a positive thing once someone's done it.

[Sophie]

That's so funny.

[Brandon]

Yeah. In 2001, Steven 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 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

And it could fuck with his career. What do they say? 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 a job at his work with usamber. It endangers his whole career.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

And this is all happening in 2001.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right?

[Brandon]

Right in the run up to 9 11. So one of the last projects that he would start at SAIC before 911 was an attempt to design a fake mobile biowarfare production laboratory. Now this is one of those things where. So 911 hasn't happened yet, but George W. Bush is president.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

And George W. Bush's dad invaded Iraq and didn't go all the way. And there's a lot of argument that George W. Bush, was he always going to invade Iraq? Would he have tried to do it if, if 911 hasn't happened? Well, this is kind of a little. This is like a little bead in the. He always wanted to do that thing because before 9 11's happened, 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

He's for sure got the same kind of bioweapons capability that we do. We just haven't found it yet.

[Courtney Kosak]

Right.

[Brandon]

And there's a dark humor in the fact that the US Government pays Steve Hatwell to design a mobile WMD production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have in order to train US Soldiers 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.

[Sophie]

Oops.

[Brandon]

And Hatfill 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. 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 gonna 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?

[Sophie]

The CIA totally knew.

[Courtney Kosak]

Yeah.

[Brandon]

So 911 happens. And that's where the episode's going to end, with 9 11, you know, because after 9 11, not long after, we're going to get 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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Well, fuck.

[Sophie]

I'm going to be chomping at the bit to figure out what happened to Steven, how he got into the Trump administration. Yeah, all of these things were like, yes, love that resume, part three.

[Brandon]

But first, you want to plug your pluggables.

[Sophie]

You guys, I wrote a book. It's a page memoir. It's called Girl Gone Wild. I alternate between thinking it's totally embarrassing that I did it and that it's awesome. And so you decide. You order it and decide.

[Brandon]

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.

[Courtney Kosak]

Go away.

[Sophie]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Brandon]

For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit.

[Sophie]

Our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheartradio.com Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Brandon]

Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

[Sophie]

Subscribe to our channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Incels Podcast Host]

On this podcast Incels, we unpack an emerging mindset.

[Brandon]

I am a loser. If I was a woman, I wouldn't date me either.

[Incels Podcast Host]

A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.

[Brandon]

Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge.

[Incels Podcast Host]

This is Incels. Listen to incels on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you want early access to new episodes and to hear exclusive bonus content, be sure to subscribe to the I Heart True Crime plus channel today. Available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. It was an unimaginable crime.

[Idaho Massacre Podcast Host]

It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Coburger, who killed the four University of Idaho students.

[Incels Podcast Host]

Nearly 30 months of silence until bombshell development.

[Idaho Massacre Podcast Host]

Brian Coburger has agreed to plead guilty.

[Incels Podcast Host]

No trial, no testimony.

[Sacred Scandal Podcast Host]

The defense are on the sinking ship. This isn't the justice you wanted, but this is justice.

[Incels Podcast Host]

Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sacred Scandal Podcast Host]

Sacred Scandal is back, the hit true crime podcast that uncovers hidden truths and shattered faith. For 19 years, Elena Sada was a nun for the Legion of Christ. This season she's telling her story.

[Elena Sada]

When I first joined the Legion of Christ, I felt chosen. I was 19 years old when Marcia Almaser, the leader of the Legionaries, looked me in the eye and told me I had a calling.

[Sacred Scandal Podcast Host]

Surviving meant hiding. Escaping. Took courage. Risking everything to tell her truth. Listen to Sacred Scandal, the Many secrets of Martial maciel on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Narrator (Unrestorable Podcast)]

On a cold January day in 1995, 18 year old Christa pike killed 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee. Since her conviction, Christa has been sitting on Death Row. How does someone prove that they deserve to live?

[Brandon]

We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name. Christa Pike.

[Narrator (Unrestorable Podcast)]

Listen to unrestorable Season 2 proof of life on the iHeartrade iHeartradio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast.