As of Wednesday morning, about 120 people at the remote site and at the Old Executive Office Building–where the White House mail gets sorted after being screened–had all tested negative for anthrax. More tests are underway. It turns out that the White House mail originates from the Brentwood facility in D.C. where two workers contracted anthrax and died. And the president himself? Asked twice if he had been tested, Bush would only say, “I don’t have anthrax.” The tea-leaf reading around the White House interpreted that to mean he had been either vaccinated or given Cipro.
Letters and packages addressed to the White House have never gone directly to the presidential offices and have always been X-rayed. But since the Sept. 11 attack, mail delivery has been rerouted from Brentwood to a military installation a few miles away. One question now–which the administration won’t answer for security reasons–is whether it will be irradiated to kill bacteria. “I’d like to know the answer to that one,” says one White House staffer. For now, mail delivery at the White House has stopped.
So far, most White House aides have not been tested or offered anthrax vaccines. The First Lady was offered vaccinations a few weeks ago but said she turned them down. Other precautions are under consideration, including giving the First Family only photocopies of their personal mail. (Friends may want to consider editing their private notes to the couple.)
This is not the first time that the anthrax threat had punctured the White House bubble. While a number of us work for organizations (including NEWSWEEK) that have taken new precautions with mail delivery, it wasn’t until we were en route to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shanghai last week that the anthrax story really hit home for me. The number of people exposed to anthrax by the letter sent to Senate leader Tom Daschle’s office was still unclear as we left for China. Even the president didn’t have a confirmed number. He called Vice President Dick Cheney from Marine One on his way to Andrews Air Force Base and asked him to nail down the information. When the press plane landed outside Sacramento, Calif., for a brief stop, another possible victim of the Daschle letter had been identified: an Agence France-Presse photographer who was traveling on the press plane just a few rows behind me.
The photographer had been outside Daschle’s office the day the letter was discovered, and the Senate photographers’ gallery was trying to track him down. His wife and his office had tried paging him while he was in the air. When we landed at Travis Air Force Base in California, the White House had a car waiting to whisk him off to a military hospital for testing. It was unsettling to have one of our own carted off like that. Thankfully, the tests were negative. But he didn’t know that when he got back on board the plane to Shanghai with a supply of Cipro.
While White House aides were checking up on him in China, the Chinese were checking up on us. That just added to a sense of unease that started last week. The White House staff had been told that there would almost definitely be surveillance cameras and eavesdropping devices in their rooms. Reporters assumed that the spying included them. Some went on hunting expeditions to find the devices. When one reporter’s bathroom mirror didn’t fog up right in the middle, she was convinced she’d found the camera. I took to wrapping my towel around me a bit more tightly.
On Sunday, when I was walking around the YuYuan Garden, I ran into two American guys who seemed to be pretty obviously either military or Secret Service. Let’s just say they were buff and bald. As we chatted, we noticed a Chinese man with a telephoto lens taking pictures of us from across the street. One of these fellows went over and put his arm around the photographer, which disconcerted him so much he took off.
We laughed about it, but the White House wasn’t taking the spying lightly. Back at our hotel, they had set up secure rooms for communication with Washington. The rooms contained blue zip-up tents with phones and computers inside to block prying eyes. To disrupt high-tech bugs, music was also playing (Randy Travis was the featured artist one day). When we arrived back in D.C. early Monday morning, it should have been a relief. But instead of the home front, it feels like we’ve returned to the front line.
