Behind the Bastards - How The FBI Botched the 2001 Anthrax Scare (Part 1)
Episode Date: October 2, 2025Robert goes through the colorful life and backstory of future Trump administration official Steven Hatfill, who went from Rhodesian military volunteer to biological weapons expert to (innocent) suspec...t of a major terrorist attack.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Coalzo 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 to the 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.
talking about the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States.
It 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 Dashel,
some of 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 going to spend this
episode talking about his life and times because again he's a he's a fascinating person
and I think there's a lot
like on his own
we probably could do a bastard's 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
like this wasn't his fault
he was done dirty
so we're just talking about like
how both of these
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.
Is Steve our protagonist this time?
Steve is, and this is going to 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 Hatfield, because who he is and the
kind of life he leads are what makes him into the suspect for this terrorist attack, right?
And, like, is why people are, 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. Hatfield.
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So, he was born on October 24th, 1935.
in St. Louis, Missouri, like me.
He was raised in Matoon, Illinois.
He was the oldest of two kids and the only boy in his family.
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
Matun 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 want to be a fucking top gun jet pilot.
Like, nobody was 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.
That's what I'm saying.
What?
I would be too scared to be.
I would be a navigator.
I hate to say it.
Well, I mean, then I get to be the pilot, I guess.
So that's a win for me.
My vision is.
I just want you to know, I do not trust you to fly a plane.
I think I'd be a great fighter pilot.
I mean, so if you look at how many F-35s and F-22s, they're crashing these days, F-18s, you know?
I could do at least that well.
I could crash.
one of those things. The bar is low, 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 cut, he partially drops out of school.
It's less accurate to say he drops out of college because he will go back.
But he like 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 missionary hospital type deal, and it's like, hey, can I help?
And the people running this mission are Glenn and Lena Estruth.
Leinda describes the 19-year-old Steve as being something of a mystery when he showed up, quote,
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's just like a lone white kid in the Congo, so he should probably not just let him wander off.
So they take him in, and he works there.
And they taught him.
He learns, you know, the basics of hematology and parasitology.
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, right?
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?
I mean, not quite as good.
Every doctor would rather be dropping a J-DAM, you know?
We all know that.
He does have balls, though.
That part is consistent.
That part is consistent, yeah.
Yes, yeah.
I don't know.
straight to the Congo.
I don't think our friend Dr. Hoto would agree.
You don't think that I think he 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.
Fair enough.
It's like an American who grew up in the suburbs.
So he returns to the U.S. after this like year.
He spends like, 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 Hatfield tells,
and quite a few of the articles about Hatfield
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?
They're special.
They're special.
It's a, 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 fuck with whatever country that you're having a great power of conflict with, you send in the green berets.
And they spend long periods of time, you know, in the wilderness, basically.
training people had to be insurgents.
That's kind of their gig, right?
That's what the Green Berets do.
Is it like Navy SEAL adjacent?
Yeah, yeah.
It's at that level of special forces, right?
But they come in before or they're trainers.
They just do different things.
They do it.
Like the Navy SEALs are more the guys carrying out assassinations.
The Green Berets are more the guys who are trying to teach, you know,
indigenous allies how to set up trip wires in the jungle or whatever or carry out
ambushes on NVA caravans, if we're talking about Vietnam or whatever.
So Hatfield 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 going to 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 seventh special forces
group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when a back injury eventually disqualified him from serving
with an operational A team, Hatfield 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. Quote, 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, right?
That's like not making it through boot camp?
Is that what happened?
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, right?
Okay.
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?
In his mind, he was.
Yeah.
In his mind, he was, sure.
So that's a very different version of events.
And that Atlantic article also describes Hatfield's first marriage in a way that leaves out some details present in other accounts.
It sounds like a Bruce Springsteen 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 and a radiator factory, you know?
That's not not true, but when you kind of describe.
Right, but that way you lose some important context because Steve fell in love when he was in Africa with the Eshtruth's teenage daughter, Carolyn.
Now, they're close to the same age.
She's like 19.
I think she's 17 and turns 18, right?
So the age thing is not a big deal.
Yeah.
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 19-6.
And in April of 1977, her dad, Glyn, 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, Hatfield'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 Kamen, who was born.
shortly before the divorce until several years ago,
Carolyn Eschruth says.
So, basically,
I don't know that it was,
but it's just after he dies,
the marriage falls.
It may just have not been,
they meet when they're teenagers.
Maybe they were just never going to,
yeah,
I don't know what happened here.
But he leaves and he has nothing to do with his kid, right?
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 is clear to me. He's not a father of the year, 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 solved, 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 wind up being blacklisted by everyone, right?
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 to 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, right?
You just made so many references to Rhodesia that I've heard and not understood and finally
makes sense. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love Rodi. 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 become Zimbabwe. But for the last two years,
that Rhodesia exists, that's where Steve Hatfield lives,
and he attends the Godfrey-Huggan School of Medicine in Salisbury,
which I think was the capital.
So choosing to move to Rhodesia in 1978
is at minimum morally questionable, right?
Yes.
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 the racism and the brutal bushwar that they're persecuting,
which is killing huge numbers of civilians,
which means that Steve probably didn't have an issue with that, right?
The white supremacist government was clinging to power however it could,
and the state security forces were committing war crimes with reckless abandon.
Hatfield would later claim that during his time in Rhodesia,
he volunteered as a medic for the Rhodesian army
and was attached to the Celos Scouts,
which was Rhodesia's answer to the Navy SEALs, right?
This is Rhodesia's premier special forces organization,
And again, you see this repeated constantly in articles about him that, yeah, a lot of times
he'll just say he was one of the cello 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 cellos scouts and the Rhodesian military occupy a place of honor within the modern
far rights 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 U.S. in the global war on terror using
in Afghanistan and Iraq, these huge route clearance vehicles that are like 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 within it to smoke out insurgents, the modern, like, insurgent warfare handbook
gets written by Rhodesia, right?
That 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 U.S., 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 people nerding out over the Rhodesian army over that.
You get a lot of people obsessing over the Seleu Scouts in particular because after Odisha
fell in 1980, a bunch of people.
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 cult, right?
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 Salu Scouts,
are like this, they're idolized, right?
And so the fact that Hatfield 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 this unit.
Like racist special forces?
What could be better?
The most racist special forces, yes.
Like the Seleu Scouts and the SS, both use the same acronym.
them. So that's, 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, Hatfield's resume also claimed that he'd served as a
Seller Scout, though his time in the Rhodesian military overlapped with his time in the U.S.
Army. Rodeesian military records have been hard to find, but Sellus Scouts veterans told
reporters they'd never heard of Hatfield. The true circumstances of his connection with
the unit, if any, remain unclear. So I can't say he didn't, 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 and was ambushed by
Marxist insurgents, leaping from the truck, he landed on his face, badly breaking his nose.
And 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 Middy kind of character, and he would tell these
enormous, awful lies. He once told me his wife died in the Congo.
And again, he just left, they divorced.
He left her with the kid.
Her dad.
Her dad died in the Congo.
And that gives you something, too.
We're like, 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 cello scouts or something.
Yes, he did some stitches.
There's usually a degree of, like, truth that we're then exaggerating, right?
Right.
He went to Fort Bragg.
He got, did the special forces, like, tests, but he didn't quite become a green beret, right?
Like, he's kind of making ends meet in his stories a lot of the time.
But you know who always tells the truth?
Me.
For sponsors.
That's right.
That's right.
They would never pretend to have been a member of the Rhodesian military because they were it.
They served in the Rhodesian military.
All of our sponsors, former Rhodesian Special Forces.
I it should we didn't try to make it that way it's weird
your first instinct is to slander
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 yeah 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 F-150 you call it like an F-75 you know
That's like half a truck, maybe.
And they just walked out.
And they just mailed us a check.
Oh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's how you do it, people.
Neging.
Here's that.
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If I also wouldn't tame me either.
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This is a tape recorder statement.
The person being interviewed is Krista Gail Pike.
This is in regards to the death of Colleen Slimmer.
She started going off on me and I hit her.
I just hit her, I'm hit her, and hit her in here.
On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
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The state has asked for an execution date for Krista.
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How does someone prove that they deserve?
We are starting the recording now. Please state your first and last name.
Krista Pike.
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It was an unimaginable crime.
It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koeberger who killed the four University of Idaho students.
The defense are on a sinking ship.
It was clear at that point.
He was out of options.
Nearly 30 months of silence until...
Bombshell development, Brian Coburger,
appearing set to accept a plea deal
just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial
was set to start.
No trial, no testimony.
He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts,
one of burglary, and then four counts of murder.
In this final season, we returned to Moscow
with interviews from those still searching for answers.
Why did the prosecution take this?
They were holding all the cars.
How on earth could you make a deal?
What message does that send?
Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
So yeah, it's where you're.
It's worth noting because of what comes later that Hatfield'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, right?
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, 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.
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, right?
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, right?
Was this targeted, like the version that you're talking about?
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, right?
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 suspect this.
Yeah.
The pandemic almost exclusively affected cattle on what we're 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, right?
The people who died were all black Rhodesians,
and nearly all of the human beings who got exposed to animals.
anthrax in Rhodesia were black.
That is some racist bacteria.
It's a racist bacteria.
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 weapon 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 Hatfield 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,
Simington allegedly began human experimentation as early as 1975.
The CBW program experimented with a number of compounds, including warfarin, parathion, thallium, and vibro cholerae.
Dr. Samington 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 greatest successes with the use of Parathion and organophosphate used in pesticides.
In isolated locations, CBW employees soaked hundreds of articles of clothing in Parathion solutions,
afterwards drying them to eliminate the smell.
The poison clothing was then distributed to guerrilla forces through local contacts who had directly donated 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 thalium and warfarin,
as well as a deployment of cholera to contaminate water sources
known to be frequented by guerrillas.
The use of cholera and 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 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 cellu scouts actually used, like, were one of the groups that deployed anthrax
against like targeted groups of guerrillas, right?
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 to 1980, right?
Obviously they did, right?
And this is kind of, I brought it up this way because it's a good example of why Richard
Jewel got suspected in the first episode and why Hatfield 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, well,
this is the only possible thing, right?
If you just read out the facts I just read you, obviously Rhodesia caused this massive pandemic,
right?
It's the only explanation.
They were using anthrax as a weapon.
Why wouldn't they have done this, right?
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 of 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, right?
Now, there's also, 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 we're able
to continue medicating their cattle, right?
And again, why is it more black?
Well, number one, the vast majority of the country is black.
and number two, the white people are eating and spending their time farming animals
that have access to good medical care, right?
Yes, yes.
So when you, and again, this is going to be the case with when Steve Hatfield gets suspected
of if you look at one subset of the facts, obviously the guy did it.
And then if you 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 so possible Rhodesia did this.
that, like, the anthrax pandemic was, or epidemic was a purposeful one that they, like, were trying to wipe out the foods because 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.
Like, they wouldn't have been successful if they did it.
No, no.
Like, this would have gone worse because they were bad at this.
Now, I should also note, again, 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 Salu Scouts who used anthrax
and is in Rhodesia at the same time as an anthrax outbreak, again, in 2001, people are going to 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 like
why would they do that like he's not who you pick you don't need him um and there's no evidence
whatsoever that he had anything to do with the chemical and biological weapons campaign
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.
They're like, actually your Rhodesian med school is not yet here.
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 Hatfield 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, like, 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
has recruited to do a 14-month tour with South Africa's National Antarctic Expedition.
Ooh.
1980s. Yeah. So he does that. Cool. Career's going well. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds a lot better than
what he's going to wind up doing for a living. What school is he attending here? It's Cape Town.
Okay. 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.
We'll come back to that later because this is going to 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 going to say PhD, right?
So during his years as a student in South Africa, Hatfield is alleged to have run into more conflicts with his peers.
Per the Washington Post reporting, a Johannesburg newspaper reported that Hatfield had carried a gun into South African medical laboratories and boasted to colleagues that he'd trained bodyguards for white separatist Eugene Terblanc.
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.
Wow.
Yeah.
And again, I don't see any evidence that he trained bodyguards for this white separatist.
But it gives you an idea of like where his politics are, right?
If that's true, you know, can't say for certain that.
that newspaper's reporting is accurate, but that's what was reported.
Hatfield would later fill his resume with claims that he'd also gotten a medical degree in
the U.K., and in fact, there's at least some evidence that he pretended his degree was from
the U.K. 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.
That's like bold pre-internet lying.
Right, and you could so get away with this shit before that.
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.
I don't think I want you to do that either.
I think I'd be great at it.
But no one's going to let me try.
They're scared that I'd show them up.
That'd be better.
Oh, yeah.
Maybe I'll be too good.
Maybe I'm too good at surgery.
If you're the kind of guy who would just take off and go to the Congo, like, without an invitation,
you are also the kind of guy who would like just blatantly lie on your resident.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Wild.
Now, Hatfield is, you know, he did, he does some stuff in England. He's at Oxford briefly.
He works as like a cancered 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 observers 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 would
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 U.S. 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 Ph.D. in 1995. Now, he will say
that, like, when I applied for this grant, basically, I thought I was going to get the PhD, so I wrote
it down. It was before, you know, they turned me down. I don't know. Maybe it was the case
of him just, you know, thinking he was going to pass and it was fine because 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, right?
So, yeah, he spends the mid-90s.
He goes back to the O's 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 U-S-A-M-R-I-I-D, USAMR-I-D, 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 U.S. Army, and they do a lot of work in Fort Detrick, which is
where the U.S. used to host its germ weapons R&D department until we stopped admitting
that we had a germ weapon R&D department in 1969.
Officially, we stopped making germ biological weapons in 1969.
Do I think we totally stopped?
I don't know.
I don't know if I think we did.
But officially we did.
Now, Yusamrit is an extremely serious organization, and they are doing some of the most dangerous work imaginable, right?
Like, this is a thing you would need in any country, even if it was an ethical defense department, right?
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 Usamrid at headquarters
that is just kind of chilling.
The main building of Usamrid
is a dun-colored two-story monolith
that looks like a warehouse.
It is 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 and curable viruses.
A bioprotective space suit is a pressurized plastic suit that covers the entire body.
It is 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 biocontainment zones.
Usamrid was now surrounded by concrete barriers to prevent a truck bomb from cracking
open a biosafety level four suite and releasing a hot agent into the air.
So just going through the list of security, that gives you an idea of how deadly the shit
in here is, right?
Okay.
Can I catch up for a second?
These are your planet killers.
Okay, so we're in the UK and these guys are actually, right?
And we're, and these guys are actually doing.
He's moved to the U.S.
Oh, we're in the U.S.
U.S. is a U.S., like, it's the U.S.
bio-war, like biological weapons research agency.
Until we said we shut it down.
And these guys are actually doing good stuff?
No, we shut down the R&D department at Fort Ditrick, right?
So Yusamrid is based out of Fort Ditrick, too.
Fort Ditrick is where all of our scary chemical and biological weapon 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, right?
That's what Yusamrid 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 samarid 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, right?
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, right?
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, right?
That's the kind of shit you stammerits trying to figure out.
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. And it's also the line between like, well, what counts
is R&D for new, new shit, like, as opposed to R&D on how to fight it. Yeah. And it's,
there's always a, again, the degree of security in this facility is proof of the danger. Because
you have had, like in Russia, there was a horrible anthrax outbreak because one of, like a Russian
equivalent to this facility had a fucking breach and a bunch of people got sick, right? Like,
these are scary places and the consequences of things going wrong in a place like Fort Dietrich
and the Usamrid facility there is very high.
Stephen King's the stand for like focuses on I think it's basically a base that's meant to stand
in for Fort Dietrich.
I forget exactly what it's called on 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 Hatfield is doing very serious work at this point, right?
And he is qualified to do it.
Not as qualified as his resumes and see if he make him 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.
Oh, God.
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, Hatfield 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 his student 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 training 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.
Like, he's training them on that kind of stuff, right?
And this is all, you know, right around the late 90s is like the millenniums.
coming to an end, there's a couple of hoax anthrax attacks in the U.S.
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 Hatfield, he kind of picks his moment well, right?
As Americans are starting to freak out about bioterrorism, he cashes in on it.
I don't mean that in an ethical sense, just in a, he makes a good career move.
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, right?
I saw that photo.
Yeah, those photos are going to be found when he's accused of doing the anthrax attacks
that 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 Hauer, the New York City's emergency preparedness director.
Hauer was appalled.
After the presentation, he says, he called Hatfield aside and told him he had gone too far.
It was too detailed, too specific to go into a public forum.
Hatfield 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 in a wheelchair.
Like, he's really making a very easy-to-follow guide for poisoning the White House.
Here's the blueprint, 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 responsible thing to do.
You know who would never poison anyone with a wheelchair filled with anthrax?
The sponsors.
Those goodies.
Yeah, 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 uh their salisbury steak
friday package yeah the taste of abola
from the studio who brought you the piketon massacre and murder 101 this is incels
I am a loser.
If I also a woman, I wouldn't date me either.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
If I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you.
A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.
A seat of loneliness explodes.
I just hate myself.
I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.
At a deadly tipping point,
Incells will be added to the terrorism guide.
Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing 10 people.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
I will have my revenge.
This is InCels.
Listen to Season 1 of InCels on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was an unimaginable crime.
It's four consecutive live terms for Brian Koberger who killed the four University of Idaho students.
The defense are on a sinking ship.
It was clear at that point. He was out of options.
Nearly 30 months of silence until...
Bombshell development, Brian Koviger, appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.
No trial, no testimony.
He has pleaded guilty to five.
criminal counts, one of burglary, and then four counts of murder.
In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.
Why did the prosecution take this? They were holding all the cars.
How on earth could you make a deal? What message does that send?
Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a tape recorder statement.
The person being interviewed is Krista Gail Pike,
which is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer.
She just started going off on Eve and I hit her.
I just hit her and hit her and hit her and hit her.
On a cold January day in 1995,
18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slimmer
in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Since her conviction, Krista 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?
We are starting the recording now.
Please state your first and last name.
Krista Pike.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
At 19, Elena Sada believed she had found her calling.
In the new season of Sacred Scandal, we pulled back the curtain on a life built on devotion and deception.
A man of God, Marcial Masciel, looked Elena in the eye and promised her a life of purpose within the Legion of Christ.
My name is Elena Sada, and this is my story.
It's a story of how I learned to hide, to cry.
to survive and eventually how I got out.
This season on Sacred Scandal
hear the full story from the woman who lived it.
Witness the journey from devout follower
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Even the darkest secrets
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Listen to Secret Scandal,
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And we're back.
I don't think we're going to get any more Blue Apron money, Sophie.
That's okay.
That's okay.
I don't think they ever gave us any money.
It was that other company that I forget.
Hello Fresh.
Hello Fresh.
Yeah, they don't have any Ebola.
Yeah.
Ebola-free dinners.
Ebola-free.
That's right.
Hello, Fresh.
Say goodbye to Ebola.
So a lot of Hatfield 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 help create our U.S. bioweapons arsenal back when we still officially had one.
And then he retired from Usamrid and became a biow warfare consultant.
He has five secret patents on weaponized anthrax, Bill Patrick.
So Bill is like the top guy and the terrifying murder weapons business, right?
How do you get a secret patent?
It's a patent for something that's like you did it and you get the patent on it
in case anyone ever like makes it and makes money off it.
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, right?
Fair enough.
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.
Nope.
Also, this brings me to a special ad from our sponsor,
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No, listen to On Tyranny or something.
thing.
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Maybe listen to the anthrax book when you're trying to get to sleep.
Robert, you're disappointing me today.
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 his study,
he recommended Hatfield, who often did the work for free.
Hatfield drove Patrick to consulting jobs at SAIC
and traveled with him to professional conferences
and classified briefings on the weaponization process.
Hatfield 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?
Oh, no.
Normal thing to keep in your house, Patrick.
I, too, keep that, no, 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 do, 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, right?
This is the number of people who could take anthrax and turn it into a dry, powdered biological
agent, right?
Maybe 100 people tops in the whole country could have done that, right?
And we're saying he's not good enough, but he's, he's like, he may have been.
He's saying he is, but he does not have, he doesn't have the professional background.
to have done that.
He's like, Patrick showed me over dinner.
Right.
Well, 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?
Because they are close and Patrick knows how to do it.
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 he's, 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?
Got it.
And it's the kind of thing where maybe he was exaggerating a bit, again, to get jobs.
If so, this is going to bite him in the ass.
Because come 2001, when there's an anthrax attack, you don't want to be one of the 50 to 100 Americans.
You could credibly make the claim to know how to weaponize anthrax, right?
That becomes less of a positive thing once someone's done it.
That is so funny.
In 2001, Stephen 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, right?
Yes.
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, right?
Sure.
And it could fuck up his career.
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.
decision, and they turned 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 there, 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, and endangers his work with USAMRID,
endangers his whole career, right?
And this is all happening in 2001, right, right, in the run-up to 9-11.
So one of the last projects that he would start at SAIC before 9-11 was an attempt to design
a fake mobile bio-warfare production laboratory.
Now, this is one of those things where, so 9-11 hasn't happened yet, but George W. Bush is
president, right? And George W. Bush's dad invaded Iraq and didn't go all the way. And there's a lot of
argument to George W. Bush was he always going to invade Iraq? Would you have tried to do it if 9-11 hasn't
happened? Well, this is kind of a little, this is like a little beat 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, right?
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, right?
He's for sure got the same kind of bio-weapons capability that we do.
We just haven't found it yet, right?
And there's a dark humor in the fact that the U.S. government pays Steve Hatwell to design a mobile WMD production facility that Saddam Hussein did not have in order to train U.S. 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?
Oops.
And Hatfield 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 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 got to 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?
The CIA totally new.
So 9-11 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 worst.
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.
Well, fuck, I'm going to be chomping at the bit to,
figure off what happened to Stephen how he got into the Trump administration.
Yeah.
All of these things were like, yes.
Love that resume point.
Part three.
But first, want to plug your plugables?
You guys, I wrote a book.
It's a coming of age 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.
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.
Go away.
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I'm going to be the next.
