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Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War
Random House
June 2011
On Sale: June 7, 2011
464 pages
ISBN: 0553807757
EAN: 9780553807752
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
For the first time, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David
Willman tells the whole gripping story of the hunt for the
anthrax killer who terrorized the country in the dark days
that followed the September 11th attacks. Letters sent
surreptitiously from a mailbox in New Jersey to media and
political figures in New York, Florida, and Washington D.C.
killed five people and infected seventeen others. For years,
the case remained officially unsolved—and it consumed the
FBI and became a rallying point for launching the Iraq War.
Far from Baghdad, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, stood Bruce
Ivins: an accomplished microbiologist at work on patenting a
next-generation anthrax vaccine. Ivins, it turned out, also
was a man the FBI consulted frequently to learn the science
behind the attacks. The Mirage Man reveals how
this seemingly harmless if eccentric scientist hid a
sinister secret life from his closest associates and family,
and how the trail of genetic and circumstantial evidence led
inexorably to him. Along the way, Willman exposes the faulty
investigative work that led to the public smearing of the
wrong man, Steven Hatfill, a scientist specializing in
biowarfare preparedness whose life was upended by media
stakeouts and op-ed-page witch hunts. Engrossing
and unsparing, The Mirage Man is a portrait of a
deeply troubled scientist who for more than twenty years had
unlimited access to the U.S. Army’s stocks of deadly
anthrax. It is also the story of a struggle for control
within the FBI investigation, the missteps of an overzealous
press, and how a cadre of government officials disregarded
scientific data while spinning the letter attacks into a
basis for war. As The Mirage Man makes clear, America
must, at last, come to terms with the lessons to be learned
from what Bruce Ivins wrought. The nation’s security
depends on it.
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