It began just days after 9/11 when anthrax letters sent to media and government offices in Florida, New York and Washington DC spread fear and panic across the US and beyond.

When, after a couple of months of media frenzy and headlines, the anthrax story disappeared from public consciousness and the FBI’s investigation appeared to be going nowhere, as an investigative journalist I began to wonder why and started looking into it myself.

This was the start of my journey down what my dying friend the Private Eye Dresch would call “the rabbit path” – a convoluted web of connections, alliances and deadly secrets at the heart of the new Bio-Terror Industrial Complex.