communities in parallel. but if there's anything this journey across australia has showed me it's that there is so much here worth fighting for the great barrier reef isn't the only reef suffering from climate change? >> the national oceanic and atmospheric association recently now it's wearing a mask, global bleaching event, which means more than half the world's coral reefs across 54 countries and territories are being affected by the woman waters. thanks for watching the whole story. i'll see you next sunday

this was a mysterious illness that caught everybody's attention. highly lethal, and it started to spread, people died. this was on the heels of 9/11. it was chaos. we didn't know what was going to happen next. we knew it was intentional but we didn't know who was doing it. [theme music] welcome to how it really happened. i'm jesse l. martin. a suspicious letter arrives in the mail. inside the envelope, a white powder. the fbi responds because today, thoughts immediately

turned to terrorism. that fear was born out of an attack in september 2001. just one week after the tragedy of 9/11, powder-laced letters began to make their way through the us postal system. the potential of murder by mail gripped the country with fear and launched one of the largest investigations in fbi history. this is how it really happened. [music playing] [people screaming] get out! get out! look out! look out! look out!

today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. it was something that the imagination didn't capture. that is about as frightening a scene as you will ever see. i spent that entire day in the presidential bunker, trying to ground every civilian aircraft which had suddenly become a missile. terrorism is about disruption and creating fear, and it just woke us up to a very different world. [siren wailing in distance] the entire country was in shock. we were all kind of in that situation where we didn't know what was going to happen next. the first thing we thought of as the knowledge that when

there's one attack, you need to be prepared for a second event, so-called reload, or a completely different event. so while you're concentrating on what's going on over here, a clever terrorist will figure out how to do something over here. it looked as if a threat was going to pop out of a door at any moment, that it might come from anywhere, that it might be any kind of attack. that was very much present for us every single day after september 11. [ominous music] my husband was in his friend's wedding. i was sitting by myself in the back of the church, and i had had this huge blister on my finger. i just thought it was a bug bite. and all of a sudden, it ruptured. it was like white bubbly stuff just spilled out all onto my skirt. and then it turned black, like jet black.

the inside was dry. it was the strangest looking wound. i remember showing people at work and they were like, wow, that doesn't look right. and they kept spreading around my finger. and i started to feel like i had the flu. when i went to a walk-in type of clinic and they thought it was a spider bite. then i went to new york university hospital and a surgeon came in to look at it after the doctor had looked at it, and they couldn't figure out what it was. i didn't think it was like germ warfare. and it was the first victim, but we didn't know there were other victims to come. [waves crashing] at 9 o'clock in the morning, i'm giving a lecture across the street from my office to doctors and nurses and paramedics on bioterrorism. and i got a phone call.

the phone call was from a dr. larry bush, who actually was a comrade of mine. he worked at the same hospital, infectious disease expert. so larry says, jean, close your door, make sure there's nobody else in the room. and he told me that he was the consultant on the case of a patient, mr. robert stevens. he had been admitted during the evening. he said to me, it looks like meningitis. there's a 63-year-old man who presented with signs and symptoms of meningitis. he was confused, having fever, and was vomiting. but it just didn't fit the picture of what is going on here. he had been a healthy person and he came in with no particular medical history. and in the beginning, it was a complete mystery. i went over to the hospital and interviewed ms. maureen stevens. she gave us a love story, a remarkable love story of this man that she just adored

and the children they had. he liked to fish and hike, he ate all kinds of different things, he worked at ami, the national enquirer, and the star, and mirror. these tabloids that you see when you're checking out at the supermarket, and bob stevens was a photo editor. his job was to take photos and add them to the stories. the first set of symptoms was that he felt awful, and it seems like the flu. in the middle of the night, early morning hours, he's gasping for breath. maureen drove him up to the emergency room. when he was brought to the emergency room at jfk hospital, he was not breathing properly and he had to be intubated and ventilated. so no one ever spoke to him.

they go through all the battery of the tests and dr. larry bush is looking at bob stevens' spinal fluid and he's not liking what he's seeing. when that doctor saw the microscope appearance of what was going on in the spinal fluid of the patient, he sounded the alarm. and that's how it started. [audio logo]

the case of bob stevens was such a mystery to the emergency room personnel because it made no sense. the patient, a 63-year-old photographer, showed up at john f. kennedy memorial hospital confused, vomiting, and running a fever. they didn't know why he was sick. now, larry bush was very attentive to bioterrorism alerts. he just knew that something was not right. so we discussed this and i said, given the situation we're having today, we have to consider this as a possibility. this could be anthrax. so we had bob stevens' spinal fluid sent to the cdc for analysis. and the cdc identified the sample from bob stevens as anthrax.

the centers for disease control has just confirmed the diagnosis of anthrax in a patient in a florida hospital. that was really the day 1 for us, october 4. most people knew nothing about anthrax before 2001. anthrax has been called the "poor man's nuclear bomb." it is only a few microns in size and has the capability to kill millions. anthrax is actually the disease. bacillus anthracis is the, we'll call it the microbe that causes the disease. so people use them interchangeably. anthrax is a spore-forming bacterium, easy to make, easy to weaponize. and the ability to grow up anthrax in the laboratory, turn it into spores, and then distribute those spores as a biological weapon, it can be devastating. but anthrax does exist in nature.

anthrax is a very uncommon human disease in the united states. it's primarily a disease of grazing animal, cattle. you might see a farmer in a certain situation might be exposed to that. but you don't typically see people working at like the national enquirer being exposed to anthrax. anthrax comes in a lot of different disease forms. there's cutaneous anthrax, meaning it's infected in the skin. and that usually presents with a very unattractive scab and scar, usually black. the second form is gastrointestinal, which would be more likely if you ingested something that was contaminated with anthrax spores. but inhalational anthrax is the form that's used for biological weapons because that's the most deadly form of anthrax. because the infection that it creates in your lung

system is very toxic and really shuts down your ability to breathe. and bob stevens was very quickly identified as a pulmonary or inhalational case. a florida man is hospitalized infected with anthrax. i think it was 1976, was the last inhalational anthrax victim seen in the us. i don't know if there are any doctors in the us who had seen an anthrax patient. first priority is really to investigate why, where, when, how. the pressing issue now is determining where the anthrax came from. we interviewed the wife at length for many, many hours. i asked her to try do your best going back to time, place, person. where he went, where he ate, where he played, who he was with, and give me descriptions. he ate all kinds of different things,

and he could have gotten it from eating goat, and he did buy goat from a delicatessen down the road from where he lived. during the time that mr. stevens was incubating, he was traveling up to north carolina to visit his daughter. he had done a hike in the woods. he had drank some water out of a spring there. could he had gotten it from spring water? there had been anthrax historically in north carolina. so it wouldn't be impossible. that's just really unusual. you can't completely rule out that thought. but context is everything. and in the context of 9/11 and what we were looking for, we had to on the side of assuming that this represented something intentional. the people who flew those planes on 9/11 learned how to fly in our county. where sharecroppers would use their planes to fertilize their crops.

mr. robert stevens, he lived an hour from one of those airports. yesterday, the fbi issued a nationwide alert indicating the possibility of attacks using crop-dusting aircraft to distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction as potential threats to americans. and i went there and actually saw white powder all over the place. so it didn't take too much to put two and two together that this could be a spot where something like this could occur. you're still open to the possibility of this being bioterrorism? we're open to-- we're open to the possibility of anything. we contacted the people who worked at the ami building. one of the co-workers of mr. stevens recalled that an envelope had been received in the office a few weeks before he was ill. the letter had come in addressed to j-lo.

and so one of mr. steven's friends brought the letter in to show him. and mr. stevens, he opens the ladder up and the envelope had some powder in it and some of the powder spilled on the keyboard. when we examined ami building, we took a swab and we swipe it along the keyboard. we put it in a little device, clicked it sent it off, and it was positive. and the minute they found that, they knew that this was a bioterrorism attack. [ominous music] [audio logo]

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] the bad news came out. robert stevens died of anthrax. a florida man infected with an extremely rare and lethal form of anthrax has died. earlier this afternoon, he suffered a cardiac arrest and passed away. he never regained consciousness from the time he enters the emergency room.

i was always as national security advisor the kind of first line to the president with information. and i remember first mentioning it to the chief of staff, to andy card, who went with me, to tell the president that there had been these attacks. i said, people are dying. and the first thing out of his mouth was, "is it al-qaeda?" and i said, mr. president, we have no way of knowing that right now. federal investigators are working to find the cause of a deadly anthrax infection in florida as co-workers of the victim wait and worry. all that night, we contacted the people who worked or were on contract at the ami building. the building was shut down and the process of sampling began to see if there were any spores that had landed anywhere. but we also sampled people's noses.

the nose was the sniffer of the spores. not only did each of the employees have to be tested, all of their children have to be tested. we were leaving no stone unturned. we didn't want people to die. by tomorrow, the fbi should be done collecting samples at the building where traces of anthrax were found on a computer keyboard. robert stevens, who worked there, died of anthrax last week. but that wasn't the end of the story because we had to figure out, well, how did it get there? we traced the spores back to the mailroom. ernesto blanco worked in the mail room sorting the mail. and so they tested mr. blanco, and lo and behold, his nasal swab was positive. and that's how we knew within 5 days it was in the mail. i always credit dr. brad perkins, who is one of the lead cdc investigative officers because brad, he literally traced backwards

from that mailroom throughout the postal system, the vehicles that move the mail, the local postal facility, and so on and so forth. a very small amount of anthrax was found in a post office sorting facility in boca that served the ami building. we didn't know what other letters could have been sent, where that particular letter could also have gone. do you think this is some sort of thing against you and what you publish? i think this is attack against america and that it could happen to anybody. [ominous music] i was hired at nightly news a month before 9/11. i was opening the mail as a desk assistant for tom brokaw. we received love letters, we received hate mail. it ran the gamut.

but i came across this letter that looked a bit different. i opened it, you know, it said, 9/11, death to israel, allah is great. this is really creepy. and i saw this brown substance that looked like it was a cross between brown sugar and sand. and i took the substance, i dumped it in the trash, folded up the letter, put it back in the stack of mail, gave the stack of mail to tom's assistant. 10 days later, when i woke up and my glands were enormous. i basically had no neck and i had a really high fever. and it was like a super intense flu but in a totally different way. because i had lesions all over my legs. they look like dark bug bites. i'm freaked out. that time span and the next week or so is when bob stevens opened his letter. [ominous music]

when i came back to work, we learned that tom's assistant was also ill and had been out of the office. and i mentioned that there had been a letter that i came in contact with. folks started to put the pieces together. this morning, we received a positive test for cutaneous anthrax for one of our colleagues who works on nightly news. so i'm back at work. i just had a black lesion removed on my finger. i have this little funny-looking cast on the tip of my finger. and there are tv monitors playing news throughout the newsroom. and the nbc case broke. an nbc nightly news employee has tested positive for a skin anthrax infection. they were going over all of the symptoms, and i just slowly turned around and looked at the television,

and my heart just sunk to my stomach. it was terrifying. i was like, oh my god, i have this. it's anthrax. excuse me. [ominous music]

it really happened. just weeks after the terror attacks on 9/11 while our country was still reeling, another threat.

this time, by a silent killer. letters containing deadly anthrax are being sent to media outlets around the country. but why? by whom? and where would the terrorists strike next? the news story started to break that i had anthrax. there is a case of cutaneous anthrax. the woman diagnosed with it works at the new york post. at the time, i did the arts and entertainment calendar, so i got tons of press releases. and in the same bins, we would also get the letters to the editor. the new york post editor received a letter, but it was never opened. it was a sealed letter, and they found it sealed. yet three of us got sick which just goes to show you the potency of this chemical. in the beginning, i think there was a sense that if the mail wasn't opened, it wasn't dangerous. obviously, a lot of us were wrong in what we thought.

i mean this was a whole, whole new world, and a scary one. the president was briefed every morning on what was happening. we knew that these letters were arriving at news outlets. america has now confirmed several different cases of anthrax exposure. yet another case of possible anthrax exposure. this one at abc news. the cbs news employee who's an assistant to anchorman dan rather has tested positive for anthrax. and that meant that we had multiple outbreaks happening simultaneously. and there was going to be more to come. i'm wolf blitzer reporting tonight from washington, where anthrax has now hit capitol hill. on the morning of october 15, i came to my office and was told immediately upon arriving that an intern had opened an envelope

that exploded in the office. and they thought it was anthrax and we were in a crisis. it had at the top "9-11," 9, dash, 1-1, reference to what had happened 3 weeks before. and then it said, "allah is great. death to israel. we have this anthrax. take penacilin." penicillin was misspelled. they called the capitol police. the capitol police, they had field what we call tickets. they're like a covid home test. they tested the powder. the tickets turned a double line of bright red, meaning positive. at 10:30 this morning, we had a staffer for senator daschle open up a letter. it was found to contain a powdery substance and it tested positive for anthrax. the staff who were exposed, everybody was confined to the room because they were all contaminated. the decision was made to evacuate the entire hart senate office building almost immediately

because the assumption was that the anthrax would get into the ventilation system and contaminate others as well. we had to shut down the building, an extremely daunting task. we then learned other senators had been targeted, including senator leahy. it appears that the letter sent to me may contain enough spores to kill well over 100,000 people. a letter like that could hold certainly billions of spores. and a billion spores could kill hundreds of thousands of people if distributed properly. it was pure chaos. i just talked to leader daschle. his office received a letter and it had anthrax in it. i saw the news report about daschle's letter. we knew that it had to come through our building. all of the official mail, mail that went to congress, the supreme court

would come through brentwood. so we knew that this possibility that we're in trouble. brentwood was open 24 hours a day. that moves thousands and thousands of letters through the system on a minute by minute basis. and it never stopped. thomas morris worked in the government mail section. joseph curseen. joseph worked directly on the machine that processed daschle's letter. those letter sorting machines, the lsm 17, those rollers go like 35 miles an hour. they're pressurized machines. all these letters that come through here drop some particles. those envelopes leaked spores, and that's what happened at the brentwood postal office. the daschle letter and the leahy letter came through on the 12th. the 18th, mr. curseen and mr. morris are starting to feel sick.

my name is thomas l. morris, jr. i work for the postal service. i'm having difficulty breathing. i suspect that i might have been exposed to anthrax. i think it was almost an imperceptible moment when your suspected fears began to look more and more like reality. [ominous music]

first, it was members of the media, then members of congress, and now it's us postal workers here in washington, caught in the evil web of anthrax. i came to work and everybody's wondering what's going on and we learn mr. curseen and mr. morris died. it was an extreme sense of sadness. there was fear because you didn't know whether you were next. and the fbi launched what was maybe their most expensive and largest criminal investigation ever. it was major case 184 known as "amerithrax."

this became the bureau's number one crime to solve. to date, we have 14 confirmed cases of anthrax. it was immediately the priority for the office of homeland security. we are aggressively pursuing every conceivable lead to find and bring to justice those responsible for these terrorist acts. we were seeing threats in every shadow. and over the next month and a half, we would learn of a potential smallpox attack. we would learn that the white house detectors had detected botulinum toxin. and as the vice president put it to the president, anyone who was exposed was going to die. and there was serious discussion about the mail. what do we do about mail? everywhere that these letters went, they left a trail of anthrax.

and those spores started going around, other letters got contaminated. some of those letters were headed out around the world. when do you shut down a given postal facility? those were some of the really toughest decisions because there's a big downside to shutting down the us postal system. it basically shuts down our economy. we used to call it a weapon of economic disruption, even though postal didn't shut down the mail system, they did some procedures that effectively slowed it down dramatically. we had truckloads, tractor trailer loads full of quarantine mail. on the other hand, it's tragic to lose postal workers from something that had we understood better what was happening with these envelopes, we would have been able to prevent. at this point, we've got to follow the trail back to whoever sent this. and we sent the letters down to the behavioral analysis units for analysis. i think the assumption was that this was most likely foreign because of the messages that had been sent to many, including me.

it was deliberately designed, the wording, to make us look at the al-qaeda group as the perpetrators. given the events of 9/11, some assume the anthrax scare is connected to osama bin laden. but what if it's not? we dropped that theory because the profilers down in quantico, the behavioral analysis agents said this is all intentional. what you should be looking for is what we call lone wolf. somebody very astute scientifically. fbi behavioral analysts believe it's most likely one person sent the anthrax-laced letters. they think it's a male individual with some scientific expertise and capacity. the person who picks his targets carefully. the profilers are usually right. we had to find this person making bio weapons. so evidence was taken to paul keim's lab. this high security lab is one of the only places in the world where genetic fingerprinting of anthrax bacteria is being done. paul keim had an identification system

for anthrax, which was his own. he had invented it. if a person started using anthrax as a weapon, we could identify it. we could trace it back. it's a fingerprint, the bacterial fingerprint. and that could really give you clues used to solve a crime. we started analyzing the anthrax. we started running the dna fingerprint against our database. and in all of the letter cases, it came back and lined up with this one particular type of anthrax known as the ames strain. well, we knew the ames strain really well. we had the ames strain in my laboratory. it was a strain that was widely used for experimental purposes. when you're trying to develop a vaccine, you've got to have live anthrax to do it. and the ames strain was the go-to strain in those days for testing your vaccines. everybody who had access to anthrax from all the different laboratories across the united states was on the potential suspect list. investigators are convinced the anthrax used in the attacks

was produced in the us but that doesn't tell investigators who sent it. the fbi bob mueller came into the oval and said, mr. president, we think it might be a domestic source. i can't say it was comforting, the idea that you had a domestic terrorist out there was not comforting but it did take it in a different direction. a domestic individual, a scientist, that's who we should be looking for. and we all looked at each other and we started to look at people we knew. [ominous music]

lighting every soccer match at shell energy stadium. we're moving forward with the houston dash. because we're moving forward with everybody. shell. powering progress. and they're all coming? those who are still with us, yes. grandpa! what's this? your wings. light 'em up! gentlemen, it's a beautiful... ...day to fly. lighting every soccer match at shell energy stadium.

we're moving forward with the houston dash. because we're moving forward with everybody. shell. powering progress. there is somebody out there who is trying to murder americans by sending anthrax in the mail. the ames strain from an investigative point of view is sort of a lucky break in some ways because it was more likely came from a laboratory. so all we had to do is find those who had access because anybody who has access is a suspect. access to ames, that was the key. i sent out subpoenas to all the laboratories that maintain anthrax. once we figured out where the ames strain was, then what they did was they subpoenaed the actual samples. so we can test it against the stuff in the envelopes. by the time we were done, we collected 1,056 different samples of ames.

by may of '04, we had eight matches out of 1,056. eight of those matched the spores in the envelopes. and they were from the us army laboratory in frederick, maryland, fort detrick. our country started a program in the '50s to grow anthrax and produce weapons. and that was done at in frederick, maryland at fort detrick. the united states abandoned its bioweapons program under the leadership of richard nixon. so fort detrick switched gears from biological warfare development to biological threat agent research, which included developing anthrax vaccines. sources say a scientific examination showed the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks originated here at the fort detrick army lab in maryland. they all focused down on one flask which was the rmr 1029 flask that was being maintained by a scientist named

bruce ivins for his research on anthrax vaccines. bruce ivins is a heroic figure in biodefense. bruce ivins sent this photo of himself investigating anthrax to friends and colleagues shortly after the anthrax attacks, attacks which the government says can be traced back genetically to a flask in ivins' lab over which he had sole control. bruce ivins was born and raised in lebanon, ohio. bruce was a talented scientific mind, i think, from a very early age and was recognized as such. and ultimately went to the university of cincinnati for his undergraduate degree and his phd. he was hired at fort detrick as a microbiologist to start working with anthrax inside usamriid, the united states army medical research institute for infectious diseases, to help put the united states in a better position

to defeat a bioterrorism attack. on the surface, bruce ivins was a sort of a bubbling personality, known as a sort of a centric sort. and in the environment up there at fort detrick, i mean, that kind of personality was welcomed because they're dealing with pretty serious stuff. i've been working with bruce since 1998. bruce was very smart, a very smart guy but had a number of little quirks. bruce had been called in for more than one interview. he was anxious to help identify, especially people he didn't like, as the mailer. i was an addictions counselor. bruce ivins, he was in the group. he blamed literally every single one of his other coworkers for the attack.

he would say, well, yeah, i'm the foremost expert on anthrax and i could see why they thought it might be me, but it's not. it isn't me. it isn't me. ivins is not the only person who works at usamriid so you have to eliminate people, you have to look at even their access to the lab. each laboratory had a magnetic reader, so you card in and you card out. and the security office kept those records. right before each of the two mailings that we knew about, ivins had changed his pattern of working in the laboratory. and before each mailing, he had spent a lot of time in the middle of the night inside those laboratories. he had never done that before. so then the agents went in to interrogate him further. and we began to see that, yeah, this image that we had of him was only a surface level thing. in fact, bruce did have a dark side. he had fixations that lasted for years.

he had a fixation with kappa kappa gamma, a woman's sorority. when he was in grad school, he was turned down for a date by one of the kappa kappa gamma sisters. he hated that sorority. when he was interviewed, he admitted burglarizing several kappa kappa gamma sorority houses. but it's not an interest, it's an obsession. he admitted it. that all started to point to him as the strong candidate. and of course, he is the one who we know that created rmr 1029. there was no one who had greater access to it, greater unfettered access to it than bruce ivins. they think it's him. he was starting to definitely realize that we were looking at him now. he was so paranoid at that point. he thought my office was bugged. he thought the group room was bugged. he thought the telephones were bugged. he was just so worried that the whole world was out to get him.

he was having difficulties at home and difficulties at work, drinking heavily and taking medication. and he was unraveling. i was sitting in my office, and the receptionist came running into my office, and she said something's really wrong with dr. ivins. bruce just started in with this tirade. and he had this look on his face that was something i'd never seen. and he just went on this rant about the fbi and how everybody wronged him. and he started talking about roaming the streets of frederick, trying to find somebody to hurt. and everybody was just silent. and then he started going off about the fbi was about to indict him on capital murder, and he wasn't going down.

he was going to go out in a blaze of glory. he talked about having weapons. he said he was going to go to work the next day and take everybody out. i knew we had to report it, so i called the police. she realized that she was under obligation to report this to the authorities. patient-therapist privilege no longer held because he had explicitly made death threats. i know if i hadn't made that phone call, other people would have died. his whole life was kind of coming down all at once and that was kind of the beginning of the end. there are stunning new developments tonight in the investigation into the deadly anthrax attacks 7 years ago. the main suspect in the case, army scientist bruce ivins, committed suicide. bruce committed suicide as the fbi was moving in on him.

he took a lot of secrets with him. i don't think we know it conclusively, but what we believe now is that the person who mailed these anthrax weapons was convinced that people were ignoring the real threat that bioterror can present. and so his attitude was, i'll prove to them how much fear and concern and threat that it really is. during the summer of '01, the pentagon began to wind down on the anthrax research at that point. what can he do to undo that, he create a shock and awe bioterrorism event. if the goal was to get the government to think about the risk and how much to invest, that was achieved. billions and billions of dollars of money went into this area. so maybe that was the cause but we'll never know. biggest investigation in the fbi's history probably, not to go to court and to be able to show the public

that we did solve it. we found out who did it and he or she is very unrewarding. and as a detective, you do feel cheated. the bad guy wants his day in court, his or her day in court, so do we. so 22 people were known to have been infected with disease related to this series of letters. five of those people died. but everyone was affected. everyone in the country was frightened. all the horror of those times, i think my brain doesn't want to go there. i still don't know what to make of it. brentwood was the place where we went and we laughed and we joked. it was like family, you know. i've never stepped foot back in that building. there are a lot of people who have not. i mean, i have ptsd still in many ways, tears

and anxiety and frustration. i just want to make sure that it never happens again. [ominous music] in february 2010, nearly 9 years after the anthrax attacks, the fbi closed the case. they named dr. bruce ivins as solely responsible for the letters that killed five people, including a 61-year-old new york city hospital employee and a 94-year-old widow in connecticut. 17 more people were included in the government's list of victims, but a later study asserted that dozens more were affected by incidental infection. since the attacks, the brentwood mail facility has been renamed the curseen-morris mail processing and distribution center in honor of the two postal workers who died. i'm jesse l. martin. thanks for watching. good night.