For some reason The New American decided to run with a long story mostly written by Steven Hatfill, filled with a litany of insults toward me. Since I have been smeared, I am happy to respond. Wondering why The New American decided to run this piece, and I’m wondering if they will now issue an apology? I admit I did not finish reading it, so if there is anything missing that I need to straighten out, let me know.

I have known about Mr. Hatfill since 2002, when I was asked by my colleague Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg to review his resume, since I knew a lot about both anthrax and Rhodesia. She was later in communication with Nicholas Kristof at The NY Times, who wrote a series of stories about a “Mr. X”—later revealed to be Mr. Hatfill.

Let me give you the punchline first. I determined that Hatfill had multiple lies on his resume. However, I also determined that he had never worked with anthrax and would have been incapable of producing any anthrax for the anthrax letters. Anthrax is a bacterium and Hatfill had been a virology guy. I had done my own investigation of the anthrax letters case and determined that the FBI was deliberately mismanaging the investigation, and that a number of patsies had already been set up. I have always opined that Hatfill was not the anthrax letters perp.

Later, Hatfill’s attorneys subpoenaed me as a witness in his case against the New York Times, 20 years ago. I just learned from reading what Hatfill wrote in The New American that he believes my investigation of Rhodesia’s huge anthrax epidemic (10,000 human cases, published in 1992) is what led to him being named by AG Ashcroft as a person of interest in the anthrax letters case, ten years later. Really? How could that be? How could a ten year old paper that never mentioned him lead authorities to Hatfill in 2002?

I would guess it was Hatfill’s personality combined with his drinking: volatile, angry, a braggart, that made a lot of people dislike him and suspect him of the crime. For example, I was told by one of his Rhodesian classmates that he pulled a gun on a professor at the Rhodesian med school he attended, after flunking the professor’s course. He was widely disliked there.

The story I heard about why Barbara became interested in Hatfill was that several former colleagues of Hatfill had provided his name to the FBI and to her as the possible perpetrator. While the FBI chased other suspects but neither caught the perp nor investigated Hatfill, apparently Barbara went to the NYT.

Hatfill was set up to be a patsy for the anthrax letters case. The Greendale return address on some of the anthrax letters echoes Greendale, a section of Harare, where Hatfill attended medical school. There were several other coincidences linking the letters to Hatfill. Copycat letters that did not contain anthrax were supposedly mailed from the UK while Hatfill was there, and from Malaysia, where Hatfill’s then-girlfriend was from.

I know of several other doctors and scientists who also appear to have been set up to be potential patsies. There was a former Fort Detrick anthrax scientist who allegedly drank himself to death, an ER doctor from NJ, an Egyptian former Fort Detrick virologist and 2 Pakistani brothers who were doctors in the Philadelphia area— all of whom had some clues linking them to the case. All were investigated and harassed by the FBI. Only Hatfill fought back. [He was eventually awarded $5.8 million or $4.6 million by the courts as compensation for his harassment by DOJ.]

Then there was my friend Bruce Ivins, the top anthrax vaccine researcher at Fort Detrick, who committed suicide when the FBI told him he would be charged with the anthrax letters crime and they would seek the death penalty. Ivins too had been mercilessly harassed by the corrupt FBI. I was told by his colleagues that the FBI was harassing several other scientists at Detrick, desperate to pin the crime on a patsy and finally close the case before a new President was elected, and Ivins was the first to be broken by the FBI.

The day the story came out that the FBI had found the anthrax killer was August 1, 2008. Luckily for the FBI, Ivins had died from a Tylenol overdose 4 days earlier. Wouldn’t you know it, suddenly my google blog went offline that same morning. Luckily I got a friend to pull strings at google and get it back online.

I was able to blog extensively about the case that day and the following days, helping to throw a wrench into the FBI’s plans for a swift ending to 7 years of their most expensive and badly managed case ever.

_____________________

With that background, let’s look at Mr. Hatfill. He went to Rhodesia and got into med school there, somehow. He then claimed many additional degrees (3 masters degrees and a PhD) and claimed he did a pathology residency. He had to repeat a year of med school. He made a host of other claims that may or may not be true. He claimed to be a bodyguard for Eugene TerreBlanche, a notorious civilian (fascist) white supremacist in South Africa, where Hatfill retreated after med school. He also claimed to serve in the South African Defence Forces. Another story included being a member of the Selous Scouts, the most notorious group in Rhodesia’s military, famed for its brutality. He also claimed to be in two US military units.

The Guardian exposed a number of his lies in 2003. I am not sure why Hatfill thinks he can still get away with the same tall tales.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/01/anthrax.usa

Hatfill did not merely lie. He also forged. He carried around a forged PhD certificate

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2002/10/09/former-army-scientist-forged-phd-certificate-school-says/

Below is a portion of Hatfill’s Wikipedia page. Note the extensively documented bibliography that identifies many of his lies and fake degrees. Even Hatfill’s own attorney admitted he had forged a PhD diploma.

Hatfill was enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army from 1975 to 1977.^{[14][page needed]} (In 1999, during an interview with a journalist, he claimed to have been a “captain in the U.S. Special Forces“, but a subsequent investigation revealed that, according to the Army, he had never served with the Special Forces.^[15]) Following his Army discharge, Hatfill qualified and worked as a medical laboratory technician, but soon resolved to become a doctor. He worked as a medical missionary in Kapanga, Zaire, under a mentor, Dr. Glenn Eschtruth, who was murdered there in 1977. A brief marriage, from 1976 to 1978, to Eschtruth’s daughter, Caroline Ruth Eschtruth, produced one daughter.

If he graduated college in 1975 at age 21, then went to the Congo and then Rhodesia, starting med school in 1978, where is there time to be in the Army as a private (you sign up for at least 3 years) or join the Special Forces? And there is certainly no time to make rank as a Captain.

Medical education

In 1978, Hatfill settled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and entered the Godfrey Huggins Medical School^[16] at the University of Rhodesia in Salisbury (now Harare). (His claimed military associations during this period included assistance as a medic with the Selous Scouts and membership in the Rhodesian SAS, but according to one journalist^{[14][page needed]} the regimental association of the latter is “adamant Hatfill never belonged to the unit”.) After failing in 1983, he graduated in 1984 with an M ChB degree and, from 1984 to 1985, completed a one-year internship at a small rural hospital in South Africa‘s North West Province. The South African government recruited him to be a medical officer on a 14-month tour of duty, from 1986 to 1988, in Antarctica with the South African National Antarctic Expedition (SANAE). In 1988, he completed a master’s degree in microbiology at the University of Cape Town. Two years later, he worked toward a second master’s degree—in medical biochemistry and radiation biology—at the University of Stellenbosch, while employed as a medical technician

[If he was a fully qualified doctor, why was he working as a medical technician?—Nass]

in the university’s clinical haematology lab. A three-year haematological pathology residency at Stellenbosch from 1991 to 1993 followed. Hatfill also conducted research toward a Ph.D. between 1992 and 1995—under the supervision of microbiology professor Ralph Kirby at Rhodes University—on the treatment of leukemia with thalidomide.^{[14][page needed]}

Hatfill submitted his Ph.D. thesis for examination to Rhodes University in January 1995, but it failed in November.^{[14][page needed]} Hatfill later claimed to have completed a Ph.D. degree in “molecular cell biology“ at Rhodes, as well as a post-doctoral fellowship (1994–95) at the University of Oxford in England and three master’s degrees (in microbial genetics, medical biochemistry, and experimental pathology, respectively). Some of these credentials have been seriously questioned or disputed. During a later investigation, officials at Rhodes maintained that their institution had never awarded him a Ph.D.^[17] In 2007, Hatfill’s lawyer Tom Connolly^[18] – in his lawsuit against former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI – admitted that his client had “[p]uffed on his resume,” falsely claiming he had earned a PhD and had “[f]orged a diploma” for the PhD.^[19]: 4

… He was appointed an adjunct assistant professor of emergency medicine at the George Washington University Medical Center in 2010.^[11] In 2011, he added additional affiliations at GW in “Clinical Research and Leadership” and “Microbiology, Immunology, and Tropical Medicine”.^[61] (His BA degree and one MS degree — but not his other previously claimed medical degrees — appear on the GW Faculty Directory.^[62])

It remains uncertain whether Mr. Hatfill actually completed a medical residency, which is required to practice medicine in the US. Hatfill has never had a medical license in the United States. As far as being a member of the Royal College of Physicians as claimed—although Hatfill says that just required paying a fee, he is lying again. It requires passing a highly competitive examination. When my late husband took the exam, the pass rate was only 3%. I would be surprised if Hatfill even attempted the exam.

I don’t need to go on. Mr. Hatfill wins the prize for hubris—but that is about the only prize he will ever win. His story about the coup against Secretary Kennedy and the people Hatfill has named and shamed—well, I’d say that being shamed by Hatfill is in fact a badge of honor. Hopefully everyone reading this will have realized that paying attention to the fantasies spun by Hatfill will only get you into trouble.

Apologies are in order: you know who you are.