This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Our understanding of the world is filled with shadows. Snatches of half-remembered news and rumour lurk there — curious, unexplained and uncategorised. Did that happen? How did it happen? Because of whom?
I am always glad to find a podcast that can aim a little light into these areas, clearing up mysteries and deepening knowledge. Last month, one series cast its gaze towards a mystery that has skulked in the darkness for almost 25 years.
In the aftermath of 9/11, as anger and paranoia understandably raged, American media and political offices began receiving letters containing anthrax spores. Several people died — a photojournalist, two postal service employees and two people whose exposure to anthrax is a mystery. Many others were infected. It felt as if a new front had opened up in a horrific terrorist campaign against the USA.
In Aftermath: Hunt for the Anthrax Killer, from CBC Podcasts, documentary filmmaker Jeremiah Crowell and colleagues explore the surreal events of the following weeks, delving into how detectives, scientists and politicians investigated the wave of bioterror attacks.
9/11 had been about as sensational as an event could be, with hijacked passenger jets being smashed into some of the most iconic buildings in the world. The attacks caused immediate terror.
When people began falling victim to a mysterious illness, though, it was not immediately clear what had caused their symptoms. Even when it was revealed to be anthrax poisoning, it was very much unclear where the anthrax had come from.
Anthrax hit Florida, and New York, and Washington DC — reaching some of the more celebrated institutions in the USA. “An unknown, amorphous, formidable enemy” appeared to be operating with impunity.
But elements of the response left much to be desired. As Crowell reveals, in his dry and analytical style, there was a lot of institutional opportunism which inflamed and misled American society.
A New York Post columnist was infected, with her symptoms including a lesion on her finger. She was asked to write a column about her experience. Her editors, she says, inserted references to noted “loser” Osama bin Laden, as well as a photo of her “giving the finger to bioterrorists” — but bin Laden had had nothing to do with the attacks.
The government used “Amerithrax”, as it became known, to rush through the authoritarian PATRIOT Act. US politicians suggested or implied that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the attacks — disingenuously bolstering their case for an invasion.
The FBI, meanwhile, hounded an innocent bioweapons expert, Steven Hatfill, who later earned millions of dollars from legal settlements.
This is all disturbing, but it is worth pausing for a spot of introspection. It is easy to lament hysteria and opportunism when listening to podcasts — or reading books or watching documentaries — about past events. The passage of time makes sages of us all. Whether we can recognise hysteria and opportunism when events are happening is another question. I for one found it easier to sneer at post-9/11 sins and errors than I did to recognise sins and errors, say, during the pandemic.
We should not allow the quasi-omniscient perspective of the documentarian’s analysis to foster complacence. We are not necessarily smarter than the people who come before us. We are just chronologically privileged.
The investigation into “Amerithrax” dragged on for years. Finally, the FBI pointed the finger at Bruce Ivins — a troubled microbiologist and biodefence researcher. As the FBI considered criminal charges, Ivins killed himself, leaving a note for his wife that said “let me sleep”.
There was certainly evidence against Ivins, such as genetic data linking the anthrax spores to a flask under his control, as well as his own unstable behaviour.
Still, scientists and journalists — including Henry H. Heine, a scientific colleague of Ivins, and Gerald Posner, an author whose book Case Closed, which argues that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole killer of JFK, demonstrates no commitment to conspiratorialism — argued that the case against Ivins had not been proven.
The converging material and psychological evidence detailed in the last episode of Aftermath, make a compelling case that Ivins was a guilty man, with his obsessiveness and paranoia making forensic data easier to understand. Still, there is an eerie absence of definitive proof. Repeated institutional failures also leave a sour aftertaste of cynicism.
At the end of the series, Crowell asks why “Amerithrax” has sunk into the background of the Western consciousness — despite the plausibility of other, perhaps worse attacks occurring in the future.
The lack of a prosecution robbed us of closure, he concludes, and the different bogus claims of the authorities left people confused to the point of ambivalence. “The story got murky,” says Crowell, “And then it just faded.”
Perhaps shadows are an inevitable feature of our historical memory, haunted by doubt and ignorance. Political opportunism and dishonesty, as well as organisational incompetence, make it more difficult to trust the data before our eyes, which directs us back towards the shadows again. Or we simply look away.
