Posted on 10/06/2007 3:48:58 AM PDT by ZacandPook
Widow wants answers
By EMILY J. MINOR Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 06, 2007
W hen she looks back - and how can you not? - it all makes so much sense.
The tubes and the masks and the FBI agents.
Video: See an exclusive interview with Maureen Stevens.
The worried doctors and the sneaky reporters and the room where they told her the ending.
"I should have known," Maureen Stevens says now.
But back then, things like masks and tubes and a box of tissues on a meeting room table just didn't click.
Now, of course, it all makes sense.
It was six years ago Friday that Robert Stevens, the lovable, affable, kind man that Maureen Stevens adored, died from breathing in anthrax. And while anniversary dates like these come and go in our lives, Stevens, 65, pretty, soft-spoken and still brokenhearted, doesn't need a date on a wall calendar to remember that her husband was murdered the first week of October 2001.
It's the week that started out so beautifully in the leafy green nooks and crannies of Charlotte, N.C. - visiting their son - and ended in that room, the room with the chairs and the table and the water and the tissues, for the grief that would come.
"Water and tissues," she says again. "I should have known."
Those were just a few of the clues that passed by Maureen Stevens during that short week, the one that seemed to last forever.
But time is a funny thing and - along with healing her heart, just a little - it tends to make some things more clear.
Some things about Robert.
The way he was talking nonsense. The way he practically collapsed into the hospital wheelchair. The way she did not want to leave him.
Victim list expands
The fall and early winter of 2001 was one of those surreal times in American history that the country just kind of muddled through. The attacks of Sept. 11 had left us shocked and anxious, and in the weeks that followed we hung nervously - and in most cases, foolishly - to every airplane mishap, every stray package, every olive-skinned man who looked like he wasn't from Nebraska.
Then the anthrax scare ratcheted up the nation's nerves by about 2,000 percent.
Before his death, Stevens was a photo editor at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton. The company published such supermarket favorites as The National Enquirer - Stevens actually worked for The Sun - at its sprawling office complex. Investigators combed the AMI building, protected by white suits, headgear with breathing tubes and green latex gloves that looked as if they could have been bought at a hardware store in outer space.
Eventually, AMI left the building for good.
In South Florida, though, there was another surreal twist. Federal investigators began to realize that several of the Sept. 11 terrorists had lived here, even learning to fly at area airports. The government's "spot map" of key terrorist locations overlapped with our homes and our offices and our schools. For weeks, investigators thought the two - Sept. 11 and the anthrax - were connected.
Meanwhile, Stevens would not be the last to die.
Two postal workers at the Brentwood facility outside Washington - Joseph P. Curseen and Thomas L. Morris Jr. - died Oct. 22 after apparently becoming contaminated at work. Curseen was 47; Morris, 55.
And while more than two weeks passed between Stevens' death and the death of those two postal workers, the 17 days in between were one bizarre scare after another.
A look back:
Oct. 15, they found anthrax in a letter sent to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D. The Capitol was shut down. No important government work. No tours. No visits to the nation's capital by the safety patrol kids of Palm Beach County, the first time the trip - a rite of passage for fifth-graders here - had ever been canceled.
Then letters began to appear at major news agencies in New York City. Among those affected: Tom Brokaw's assistant at NBC News. The baby boy of an ABC news producer. Dan Rather's assistant at CBS. An editorial page clerk at The New York Post.
All of them took medication and survived.
The fourth death was in New York. Kathy T. Nguyen, 61, a stockroom worker at Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, died from anthrax Oct. 31.
And then there was Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford, Conn.
Lundgren died after she opened a letter inside her home that apparently had been contaminated somewhere along the way. She died Nov. 21, the day before Thanksgiving.
By this time, there had been 30 anthrax cases nationwide, five of them fatal.
And no matter where these stories appeared - People magazine, The New York Times, Washington Post, The Columbus Dispatch - Bob Stevens' name was always at the end of the list.
Six years later, it's still there.
Bob Stevens, 63, photo editor at American Media's Sun tabloid. Died Oct. 5.
A lifetime of joy
They met on a blind date, and Maureen Stevens was so unenthusiastic about the prospect, she didn't even dress up.
"Neither of us wanted to go," she says.
She was 30, working in an antique store in a little town outside London. He was doing freelance photography. Back then, he handled the high-end cosmetic photos for big-name advertising clients. They went to a pub called the Shepherd's Hut and, at night's end, when they both knew they'd found something nice - even without fancy clothes - he asked to see her again.
Of course, she said.
She tore a small slip of paper from her address book and wrote down her telephone number for him.
They were both private and unassuming, each once divorced, and they liked to read and travel and laugh. They got married Oct. 18, 1974, and the next day he left for America, where he had a new job with The National Enquirer in Lantana. Maureen Stevens followed soon after.
At his job for the supermarket tabloid, it was Stevens who would take a picture of, say, Cher or Prince or even O.J. and doctor it up a bit, make the star look just a touch better. Bob Stevens was great at this tabloid technique, and he loved his job and the people who made that nutty newsroom go round.
But he also loved his family. He liked to go fishing. He liked to work with wood. He was a sci-fi fan, even taking what little spare time he had to write a novel of his own.
He was both a perfectionist and the life of the party.
A lovely twist, really.
"Robert was just an all-around nice person," his wife says.
Eventually, as their lives here became more and more grounded with the house and friends and the four children and then the grandchildren, he liked to make the little ones laugh.
Humor was his forte.
Even today, the grandkids tell the story about the time Granddad took the bucket of earthworms, spread out the newspaper on Grandmother's good dining room table and dumped the whole caboodle all over the place.
What fun to have him in trouble instead of them!
"I love talking about him," Maureen Stevens said this week during her first one-on-one interview with The Palm Beach Post. "I love looking at photographs of Robert."
She added: "This will not be forgotten. I will not forget what happened to him. I just won't."
And, of course, she will not forget that first date. Who would?
The small pub. Their instant connection.
The little slip of paper she tore from her address book that night so she could write down her telephone number.
After his death - after Robert Stevens' horrible, wretched death - she found that slip of paper in her dead husband's wallet.
He'd tucked it away and saved it.
"Robert was a bit of a romantic," she says in her lovely British accent. "He really was."
They thought it was flu
This is not the way it's supposed to be, not by a long shot.
He's supposed to be here, with her.
He's supposed to make the trips back to England to visit family.
He's supposed to be in his wood shop, the one with all the new tools they were going to buy him, making something lovely for inside the house.
Instead, here she is, sitting in her lawyer's office, very much alone, talking about her husband's murder - the box of tissues within easy reach.
"It's never easy," she says about doing the interview. "I have a lot of anger in me because I'd like a few answers.
"Answers would be nice."
Investigators now think Robert Stevens was contaminated before the couple left for North Carolina that fall. He'd felt punky during their visit, but they thought it was the flu. On the way home, the Monday of the week he died, Stevens felt so ill that he got behind the wheel and drove with exceptional fortitude, apparently pulling himself together just long enough to make it home.
Back in South Florida, they turned in early the night they got back because they both felt like they were coming down with something.
Maureen Stevens awoke in the middle of the night and found him wandering the house.
It was odd. She knew that right off.
He was stumbling, speaking in gibberish, barely lucid. When they got to JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, she found a wheelchair and sat him in it.
It was really the last interaction between them.
The next 48 hours elapsed in that kind of slow-motion surreal blur that happens when personal disaster strikes. She began to gather the kids, one of whom was overseas at the time. First the doctors thought it was pneumonia. Then meningitis, because of the cloudy spinal fluid.
On Thursday, Dr. Jean Malecki - the county health department director, who would become a dependable source of truth for her - called her at the house in suburban Lantana. Maureen Stevens had gone home for a short rest.
We think it's anthrax, Malecki told her.
"That floored me," Maureen Stevens said. "I didn't know a lot about it, but I knew it wasn't good."
Newspaper photographers took pictures - click, click, click - of the handwritten note she'd taped to the front door telling the kids where she was. There were top-level officials everywhere: deputies, FBI, officials from the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At their home, reporters scared away her daughter, who on Friday afternoon took refuge at a friend's house about 20 minutes away.
"We couldn't go home," Maureen Stevens said.
It was then, of course, that the family got the hospital page.
Hurry, they said.
When they got to JFK, she and the kids were ushered to the private room - the room with the table and the water and the boxes of tissues.
He was dead, they said.
He'd inhaled the anthrax too deeply into his lungs.
In the days and weeks that followed, others at the AMI building, including mailroom worker Ernesto Blanco, who almost died from anthrax, were put on Cipro, the strong antibiotic used to treat anthrax.
Maureen Stevens never took it.
"I didn't see the use," she said.
If she had been exposed, she figured, she'd already be dead. Just like him.
Maureen Stevens still lives in the same house near Lantana that they bought all those years ago.
The anthrax, they know now, was on a letter that Stevens had apparently brought to his desk at the AMI building. He had trouble reading small print, so they imagine he'd held the letter close to his face.
As the months went on, Maureen Stevens hired an attorney, a good one, and together they're plodding through her case, which was filed in federal court.
It boils down to this.
Attorney Richard Schuler is alleging that the strain of anthrax that killed Stevens was the Ames strain, which can be traced to Fort Dietrich, the Army's biowarfare defense lab outside Washington.
Government lawyers have nickel-and-dimed Schuler's legal team, he says, stalling with motion after motion. But he thinks it will eventually get to court, and a fairly important piece of the case should be heard before the Florida Supreme Court early next year. That ruling will help set the pace for Maureen Stevens' lawsuit.
And then, maybe, she will get her chance.
Schuler claims the security at Fort Dietrich was so poor - it was vastly and noticeably improved after the 2001 anthrax scare, he says - that anyone could have walked out with anthrax.
You don't need a lot to commit murder.
Schuler says he's deposed a man who worked there who said that when he quit, he could have put anthrax in the box with his personal belongings. No problem.
Top guys in the field, from a noted handwriting expert to a key anthrax guy, have been told not to discuss the government's investigation. In court, Schuler will do this questioning using subpoenas.
That's what Maureen Stevens wants.
Some answers to her questions.
The kids are grown and scattered. She has still has her quiet pastimes. She likes to read. She gardens. She enjoys movies and crosswords and she goes to church. Her friends are the same source of strength they've always been.
"My husband was killed in a horrible way," Maureen Stevens said this week. "He was murdered. And nobody's that interested.
"Well, I am."
Every day of every year, six years running. No calendar needed.
I hope to go to Chimney Rock tomorrow where Mr. Stevens visited on his vacation. From the right vantage point, I’m told you can see 75 miles through the smokies.
http://www.anthraxandalqaeda.com
btt
” anthrax - Widow wants answers “
So do I....
In a world where Natalie Halloway and OJ are perennial ad-nauseum stories, how did the first biowar attack ever drop out of the public eye??
Enquiring minds want to *know*.....
Biographer Draper in Dead Certain reports that on October 4, 2001, Bush teared up during a speech at the State Department thanking them for their hard work after 9/11. Back at the White House, Bush motioned Fleischer into the Oval Office. “A Boca Raton tabloid editor had checked into a Florida hospital yesterday, Bush told Fleischer. Anthrax. The veil of resoluteness fell away from the president. His shoulders were hunched. Fleischer had never seen him more upset. Neither man said a word — neither had to: This was it, the second wave.”
At a White House press conference on December 17, 2001, Ari Fleischer said: “There is nothing that has been final that has been concluded. But the evidence is increasingly looking like it was a domestic source. But, again, this remains something that is not final, nor totally conclusive yet. ...I can just report to you the information that I’ve heard. I can’t give you the scientific reasons behind it. But you can assume that they’re based on investigative and scientific means.” He emphasized: “There’s a big difference between the source of it and who sent it, because the two do not have to be tied.”
It was more than a happy coincidence for Ayman Zawahiri and Mohammed Islambouli, the senior Egyptian militant in a cell with KSM planning the attacks on the US, that an active supporter of the Taliban was a US biodefense insider. Al-Timimi worked in the same building as famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey. The former USAMRIID over the years would do a lot of research with the “Ames strain” of anthrax. Al-Timimi was a current associate and former student of Bin Laden’s spiritual advisor, dissident Saudi Sheik al-Hawali. He was a microbiology graduate student in a program jointly sponsored by George Mason University and the American Type Culture Collection (”ATCC”).
The theme of a summer camp sponsored by the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA) in 1994 was, “Living the Shahadah in America.” This is what Sheikh Ali was teaching kids at the 1st Annual IANA Summer Camp at Frederic, MD, July 2-4, 1994:
“Reflections on the Meaning of Our Testimony of Faith: ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah” by Ali Al-Timimi.
***
“6 Wage Jihad in the Path of Allah
...
Allah — ta’ala— has said: “Slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them (captive) and beseige them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush.” (The Qur’an 9:5) Fight those who believe not in Allah and the Last Day and do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and practice not the true religion (Islam), being of those who have been given the Scripture (the Jews and the Christians) — until they pay tribute readily and have been brought low. (The Qur’an 9:29)
The Prophet .. has said:
I am commanded to fight mankind till they testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, establish the prayers and pay the charity. When they do that they will keep their lives and their property safe from me.”
Ali Al-Timimi’s mentor, Bilal Philips, in one interview explained:
“[US Army Sergeant Ali Mohammed] used to coordinate with US intelligence. And, when Croatia closed its borders to Arab volunteers, there were a group of black Americans who completed their training and knew Islam through me. [Ali Mohammed] contacted Shaykh Umar Abd-al-Rahman and offered to use this group for sabotage acts inside the United States. The offer was made on the telephone, which apparently was tapped by US intelligence. Shaykh Umar replied by saying: ‘”Avoid civilian targets.’ “
The blind sheik’s representative, US Post Office employee Sattar, in October 2000, was taking a different approach. Working with the head of the Egyptian Islamic Group Taha, he drafted a fatwa in Abdel-Rahman’s name urging that jews be killed wherever they could be found. He asked the spokesman for the Vanguards of Conquest, the military wing of the Egyptian islamic Jihad, to distribute it on his website and to the media.
The post office employee was no longer heeding the koranic prohibition on killing innocents.
Tenet provides an unclassified summary:
“The most startling revelation from this intelligence success story was that the anthrax program had been developed in parallel to 9/11 planning. As best as we could determine, al-Zawahiri’s project had been wrapped up in the summer of 2001, when the al-Qaida deputy, along with Hambali, were briefed over a week by Sufaat on the progress he had made to isolate anthrax. The entire operation had been managed at the top of al-Qai’da with strict compartmentalization. Having completed this phase of his work, Sufaat fled Afghanistan in December 2001 and was captured by authorities trying to sneak back into Malaysia. Rauf Ahmad was detained by Pakistani authorities in December 2001. Our hope was that these and our many other actions had neutralized the anthrax threat, at least temporarily.”
- George Tenet, in At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, at 278-279 (April 30, 2007)
Flag. And I agree with this widow - I too want answers.
Something that has baffled me is the lack of follow-on attacks following the models of the anthrax episode and the DC snipers —
Disruption and panic - way out of proportion to assets expended - that, if turned into a campaign, could bring down our government....
I’m not convinced yet that we have an accurate picture of the Islamists’ real strategic thinking.....
The mailer’s use of “Greendale School” as the return address for the letters to the Senators is also revealing. A May 2001 letter that Zawahiri sent to Egyptian Islamic Jihad members abroad establish that Zawahiri used “school” as a code word for the Egyptian militant islamists. Green symbolizes Islam and was the Prophet Mohammed’s color. By Greendale School, the anthrax perp was being cute, just as Yazid Sufaat was being cute in naming his lab Green Laboratory Medicine. “Dale” means “river valley.” Greendale likely refers to green river valley — i.e., Cairo’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad or the Islamic Group. The mailer probably is announcing that the anthrax is from either Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Islamic Group or Jihad-al Qaeda, which is actually the full name of the group after the merger of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. At the Darunta complex where jihadis trained, recruits would wear green uniforms, except for Friday when they were washed. In a Hadith the Messenger of Allah explains that the souls of the martyrs are in the hearts of green birds that fly wherever they please in the Paradise. The “4th grade” in the return address “4th Grade, Greendale School, is American slang for “sergeant” — the rank of the head of Al Qaeda’s military commander Mohammed Atef, who along with Zawahiri had overseen Project Zabadi, Al Qaeda’s biochemical program.
The business-size sheet of stationery containing the anthrax to the National Enquirer was decorated with pink and blue clouds around the edges. In admitting that he had taken over supervising the development of anthrax for use against the US upon Atef’s death (in November 2001), KSM separately noted that “I was the Media Operations Director for Al-Sahab or ‘The Clouds,’ under Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri.”
They don't think strategically, they think fantasy/religously.
Helluva lil’ thread.
First, I think the lack of follow-up to the DC snipers indicates it was not Al Qaeda related, but two loners out to make a statement.
My guess with regard to anthrax was that a limited supply was produced and an underling (who was not capable of producing more) took the inventory and sent it out after 9/11 to create more fear and panic.
Those that produced the material were either scooped up by the government or left the country.
This is just my opinion.
It is a great illustration of why the military calls this asymetrical warfare...war between two very different groups.
The Islamists cannot muster a large campaign against us. They also do not engage in serial attacks (same thing over and over again).
Instead, the Islamists attack with anthrax one day, with explosives the next day and then with rocket attacks the next day. In this way, you don't know what to defend against and continuously act out of fear rather than from strength.
Bush has wisely understood this and has taken the fight to them in Iraq and Afghanistan. This keeps the Islamists off-balance, making attacks against us more difficult to plan and execute.
bttt
The website you provided is an anti-Israel, Pro-Ron Paul, UFO promoting, tinfoil site. Not exactly trustworthy.
Besides, the scope of people they claim to be microbiologists is very broad. You could do the same thing with structural engineers and come up with a similar list worldwide....could those be related to the collapse of the WTC? (cue spooky music)
The “Ames strain” anthrax was isolated from a 1930’s outbreak in Ames, Iowa. It appears to be a “standard” bug that is used the world over for research, and has been for a long time.
Whereever you are, you work with “Ames” anthrax if you work with the bug at all.
Began to realize??? Excuse me, but if they'd "realized" their duty to America we would never have had 9/11. Initial visa info was lied about and visas had expired but they never lifted a eye brow.
Precisely. Just another reason why conservatives are in such an uproar over our lax immigration policies and the lack of political will to do anything about it.
Totally untrue, of course. Everyone should know that by now.
The so-called "Ames strain" came from a dead cow found in Texas in 1980. In 1981, USAMRIID was looking for new anthrax strains to analyze and they sent around a request to various labs asking for samples. References: The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Iowa State Daily.
Texas A&M had stored samples of the strain that killed that cow in 1980. The cow had been vaccinated for anthrax but died anyway. They sent a sample to USAMRIID, but instead of paying for the shipping charges themselves to ship something to a government agency, they used a PREPAID label from the USDA labs in Ames, Iowa, a different government agency.
As a result of that label, the strain became known as "The Ames Strain," even though it had never gone to Ames. But, as we all know, there are people who want to believe that somehow Iowa State University got a sample of Ames from Texas, and they use the fact that there is no postmark on the package to show that it cannot be proven that the sample didn't somehow first go to Ames. It cannot be proven that it didn't happen, so they are free to believe it DID happen.
Back in 2001, the Ames strain was thought to have been restricted to only a few labs (10 to 20), but later it was learned that because it was "the gold standard" for anthrax testing, scientists in some of those labs had sent samples to acquaintences at other labs without documenting such transfers. So, no one knows how many labs actually have a sample of the Ames strain.
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