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Anthrax War. Bob Coen
Читать онлайн.Название Anthrax War
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781582436944
Автор произведения Bob Coen
Издательство Ingram
But that did not change the fact that Dresch had helped support his wife and four kids by completing assignments for clients spanning from Lloyd’s of London to New York wise guys waging war against the Feds’ tough RICO-racketeering statutes. He had proven his chops on more than one occasion, and earned a few headlines. It was his legwork, for example, that helped the Brooklyn District Attorney indict FBI Special Agent Lindley DeVecchio for allegedly assisting a 1992 mob hit in Bensonhurst. The sensational charges were later dismissed under unusual circumstances, but not before Dresch’s partner Angela Clemente was badly beaten in a parking lot by unknown assailants. And it was his tip that led the FBI to a cache of explosives left by the Oklahoma City bombers, presumably to execute a tenth anniversary attack in 2005. The bureau first denied finding anything, then quickly buried details about the cache, which Terry Nichols, serving time for the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, had revealed to a fellow inmate (and Dresch client), along with the news that the explosives were originally provided to Timothy McVeigh’s gang during an FBI-sting gone horribly wrong. Dresch pursued proof of the cover-up with nearly as much vigor as he had applied towards preventing a second act of terrorism.
Throughout his gumshoe voyages, Dresch balanced his oddball behavior with a very strict work ethic. For all his talk of “extirpation” and discoveries of “serious mal-, mis- and nonfeasance within the system of criminal justice,” Dresch was a factfinder, not a brainstormer. He cast a wide net for the dots he would connect, but once he did, Dresch was more intent on drawing subpoenas than conclusions. “I resist becoming an inveterate ‘conspiracy theorist,’” he once wrote to Coen, discouraging him from attributing specific motives to one or more players in their anthrax drama. “The answer may be as simple as . . . sloth, indifference, narrow self-interest.”
It was a convoluted path that led Dresch from Oklahoma City to Fort Detrick and secret germ labs abroad. But he wasn’t surprised when it passed close to his own home. Because what he labeled “the international bioweapons mafia”—a mob he considered the biggest threat to humanity in the twenty-first century—had first come to his attention in the Upper Peninsula Michigan landscape. For Stephen Dresch, the case began with a company called BioPort.
BioPort came into being in 1998, when the state-owned Michigan Biological Products Institute (MBPI) was sold at auction for $24 million. The primary investors and new owners were the Lebanese financier Ibrahim El-Hibri and his son Fuad, an international telecom magnate with German and eventually US citizenship. The El-Hibris were reported to be known as “friendly to American interests” but also, according to dicey websites, “close to the bin-Laden family.” It would be a couple more years before Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 hammered home the truth that those weren’t mutually exclusive, but already, the El-Hibris were raising many red flags.
What excited the blood of the conspiracy-mongers was the fact that this little-known facility—MBPI—held the exclusive contract to provide the US government with the anthrax vaccine, and that in addition to the physical plant, the Michigan sale included $130 million in contracts with the Department of Defense. That compelled Dresch, among others, to do some due diligence. He learned that the El-Hibris had participated in the privatization of portions of the United Kingdom’s leading biodefense facility, Porton Down, a decade earlier. As part owners of the spun-off private holdings Porton International and Porton Products, the family was a key player in the sale and distribution of all UK manufactured anthrax vaccine. This included doses sold to Saudi Arabia in a series of deals approved by the British Ministry of Defense in 1990 at a time when the US refused to sell doses to the Saudis. With the acquisition of the Michigan plant, the family had planted stakes in the only two leading anthrax vaccine producers in the West.
The El-Hibris did not have science backgrounds or biotech business experience before the Porton takeover—but were clearly canny investors. What alarmed Dresch—and he was not alone—was the troubling fact that the sale of MBPI to BioPort had transferred control of a sensitive government program to a network of companies, one of which was headquartered offshore in the Dutch Caribbean. Fuad El-Hibri himself informed Congress in 1999 that the controlling shareholder in BioPort—Intervac LLC—was partly owned by I and F Holdings NV, a Netherlands Antilles investment company owned by his father. No one on the House Committee on Government Reform asked him if El-Hibri senior had any partners in I and F Holdings. So a legitimate question was raised: Who actually owned the largest anthrax vaccine manufacturing plant in the West, if not the world? Who really knew?
Dresch began studying just how Ibrahim and Fuad El-Hibri had managed such a sweet arrangement. His attentions focused on the third key player in the BioPort deal, Admiral William J. Crowe, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a 13 percent stakeholder in Intervac, which the El-Hibris used to purchase MBPI and transform it into BioPort. A guy, Dresch surmised, who would have better luck talking the Pentagon into spending money in Michigan than even the most amenable, pro-American Lebanese or German businessmen.
Admiral Crowe, like a disproportionate number of the characters that Dresch collected files on in the 1990s, was born in Oklahoma City. He was a self-styled Anglophile who, after serving as senior military commander under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, endorsed the “draft-dodging” Bill Clinton for president. Crowe landed the British ambassador’s post from the victorious Clinton, which he held for three years before he left government to join the biotech revolution.
The anthrax vaccine peddled by Crowe’s new business partners was made mandatory for most soldiers deployed overseas by the Clinton Defense Department in 1998. This new world order earned him and BioPort the tight scrutiny of a vocal and organized lot of veterans convinced that the maladies suffered by soldiers under the catch-all diagnosis of Gulf War Syndrome were directly linked to the Michigan plant’s anthrax vaccine, which had been administered to about 150,000 troops (members of the US military) during the 1990 war.
Dr. Meryl Nass, a practitioner based in Maine, emerged as an outspoken advocate for the vets. She reported that the vaccine was linked to multiple sclerosis and lupus as well as illnesses symptomatic of Gulf War Syndrome, like memory loss, muscle and joint pain, severe fatigue and gastrointestinal disorders.
Soon after Crowe testified to Congress in 1999 that he had “never, repeat never, solicited any official of this administration” to install or promote a mandatory inoculation program, a spokesman told ABC News that the admiral hadn’t “invested a penny” in BioPort. Dresch could not resist shooting Crowe a note asking “what services have you provided to your partners . . . which warranted their granting to you” a 13 percent interest? He chided the admiral for BioPort’s tripling the cost of its vaccine in its latest military contract (from $3.50 to over $10 a dose). The challenge, typed on Jhêön & Associates letterhead, was copied to the Chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform. It was Stephen Dresch’s opening thrust in what would become a prolonged battle for transparency in the corporate universe of biodefense. And throughout his later travels and investigations, BioPort remained in his thoughts: especially when Fuad El-Hibri admitted to Congress in 1999 that he jacked the price of a single dose of the vaccine to $40 when he sold 30,000 doses to the Canadian government for its soldiers destined for the Coalition of the Willing.
Dresch already had an anthrax ax to grind. He had been hired to investigate the sudden death of an Oklahoma City associate of