The Mirage Man: Bruce Ivins, the Anthrax Attacks, and America's Rush to War

For the first time Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist David Willman tells the whole gripping story of the hunt for the anthrax killer who terrorized the country in the dark days that followed the September 11th attacks. Letters sent surreptitiously from a mailbox in New Jersey to media and political figures in New York Florida and Washington D.C. killed five people and infected seventeen others. For years the case remained officially unsolvedand it consumed the FBI and became a rallying point for launching the Iraq War. Far from Baghdad at Fort Detrick Maryland stood Bruce Ivins: an accomplished microbiologist at work on patenting a next-generation anthrax vaccine. Ivins it turned out also was a man the FBI consulted frequently to learn the science behind the attacks.The Mirage Man reveals how this seemingly harmless if eccentric scientist hid a sinister secret life from his closest associates and family and how the trail of genetic and circumstantia