Twenty years after I roamed the halls of Congress during my Congressional Fellowship year, I suddenly found myself back at the Capitol researching my new book on the 2001 anthrax attacks, The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed (HarperCollins). Once again, the contacts and insights I gained as an APSA fellow (class of 1981–1982) proved invaluable.

The book reconstructs how the federal government handled—or better said, mishandled—the first bioterror attack involving anthrax on American soil, a deadly bioterror dress rehearsal that left five dead and 10,000 more on antibiotic treatment for possible exposure to a lethal germ. It deals in great detail with the two anthrax-packed letters sent to the Capitol Hill offices of Sen. Tom Daschle and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the prompt medical response offered to Hill staffers, and the bitter national debate that erupted over the issue of disparate medical treatment for the blue-collar workers who were exposed at the nearby Brentwood postal distribution center. Distressingly, it concludes that on the verge of possible war with Iraq and fears of new bioterror assaults, agencies at the local, state, and federal level remain frighteningly ill-prepared to deal with bioterrorism. The problems are not fixable simply by the huge infusion of preparedness funding promised by the Bush administration. They demand quick, nimble thinking and flexibility by agencies at every level of government—qualities that are often so hard to find in entrenched bureaucracies.

Of course, there are exceptions, as evidenced in the office of Sen. Patrick Leahy. When the first anthrax letters surfaced in October, Leahy's top staffers began to think hard about the possible implications of a madman trying to win attention by using the U.S. mail to distribute anthrax. “Who would be next?”, they wondered.

Pondering these awful realities, chief of staff Luke Albee and office manager Clara Kircher made a command decision. Until futher notice, they suspended mail delivery to the office. Instead, the office's top staffers—not the lowly interns—would pick up the mail and sort through it—carefully weeding out the essential items and holding anything suspicious for authorities. Albee did not want to risk having an innocent college student open a lethal time bomb.

As it turned out, Albee's instinct was correct. A letter intended for Leahy had been mailed by the anthrax killer on the same day as a similar letter was mailed to Daschle's Hart Building office. At the Brentwood mail distribution center, the zipcode on the Leahy letter was misread by mechanical sorters, and instead of coming to Capitol Hill, it was routed to a distant State Department mailroom in Virginia. It became one of the thousands of pieces of mail quarantined after the Daschle letter was opened and chaos erupted on Capitol Hill. The anthrax packed into the Leahy letter was highly lethal, exposing a State Department mailroom worker to inhalation anthrax.

Leahy later told me that he considered Albee a hero in light of the preemptive actions he took to protect the staff. This was a decision that involved no bioterror funding, no expensive preparedness drills—just common sense and good communcation. But if and when America suffers another bioterror attack, it will be public servants like Albee who help limit the human toll.

Marilyn W. Thompson

Assistant Managing Editor for Investigations

The Washington Post