Alarming cost of false alarms, anthrax hoaxes

BOSTON — A security camera recorded the man wearing dark sunglasses and a hooded sweat shirt as he walked by Boston's Symphony Hall Feb. 9 and dropped a cardboard tube marked "Anthrax Beware" at the door.

Emergency medical crews raced to the site, firefighters cordoned off the area, police halted traffic and life froze to an anxious halt until a hazmat team signaled the all-clear: The tube was empty.

In the 7 ½ years since America's worst bioterror attack — when letters laced with anthrax spores killed five people, closed Congress and the Supreme Court and crippled mail service for months — U.S. agencies have spent more than $50 billion to beef up biological defenses.

No other anthrax attacks have occurred.

But a flood of hoaxes and false alarms have raised the cost considerably through lost work, evacuations, decontamination efforts, first responders' time and the emotional distress of the victims.

That, experts say, is often the hoaxsters' goal.

"It's easy, it's cheap and very few perpetrators get caught," said Leonard Cole, a political scientist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., who studies bioterrorism. "People do it for a sense of power."

Among the recent targets:

• Nearly all 50 governors' offices

• About 100 U.S. embassies

• 52 banks

• 36 news organizations

• Ticket booths at Disneyland

• Mormon temples in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles

• Town halls in Batavia, Ohio, and Ellenville, N.Y.

• A funeral home and a day-care center in Ocala, Fla.

• A sheriff's office in Eagle, Colo.

• Homes in Ely River, N.M.

The FBI has investigated about 1,000 such "white-powder events" as possible terrorist threats since the start of 2007, spokesman Richard Kolko said. The bureau responds if a letter contains a written threat or is mailed to a federal official.

In one recent case, emergency crews cleared and sealed a Department of Homeland Security office in Washington, D.C., after a senior official, who had received a package at home containing white powder and a dead fish, brought it to work for inspection.

The contents proved harmless, a spokeswoman said.

Other cases are more worrisome.

The FBI is trying to figure out who mailed about 150 letters late last year that contained powder and threatening notes. The envelopes were sent from the Dallas area to U.S. embassies abroad and most governors.

One letter was addressed to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who left office two years ago. When it arrived in Boston, someone marked "return to sender" on the envelope and popped it back in the mail. The return address was the FBI office in El Paso, Texas.

White powder spilled out when an FBI clerk there opened it Feb. 12. Officials emptied the Federal Justice Center, sending more than 300 FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency and other law-enforcement personnel home. The powder was baking soda, said Mark White, an FBI spokesman in Dallas.

The Justice Department was able to bring criminal charges in two other high-profile cases.

Richard Goyette, 47, pleaded not guilty Thursday in Amarillo, Texas, to charges of mailing 65 threatening letters to banks and other financial institutions in October. The envelopes contained white powder and a warning the recipient would die within 10 days.

According to prosecutors, Goyette was distraught after losing $63,525 when regulators seized Washington Mutual and placed it in receivership. The FBI said it traced him through angry e-mails that he sent to the banks.

The powder was identified as calcium carbonate, which is used in antacids and blackboard chalk.

In the second case, a federal grand jury in Sacramento, Calif., indicted Marc Keyser, 66, in November for allegedly mailing 120 hoax letters to newspapers, a member of Congress, a McDonald's, a Starbucks and other targets.

Each contained a CD labeled "Anthrax Shock and Awe Terror," and a small packet of granular material bearing a biohazard symbol and the words "Anthrax Sample," the FBI said. The substance was harmless.

Keyser's home address was on several mailings.

In the past two fiscal years, records show, U.S. postal inspectors responded to more than 5,800 reports of letters and packages containing suspicious substances. Only a few-dozen cases have resulted in arrests.

Scientists disagree over whether the nation is more vulnerable to an anthrax attack today than it was in 2001. (The FBI blames that attack on Bruce Ivins, an anthrax researcher at a federal biodefense facility who committed suicide.)

The U.S. Postal Service in 2003 installed devices to check for airborne pathogens or poisons at the nation's 271 mail-processing and distribution centers. They have yet to detect a threat, said Peter Rendina, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.

But the boom in biodefense spending carries a danger. Some experts fear that a tenfold increase in laboratories authorized to work with dangerous bio-agents increases the risk of leaks.

More than 7,200 scientists are approved to work with anthrax, far more than in the past, creating security dangers.