polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
This was not a guy you wanted to get on the wrong side of if you were a
lower-ranking army officer.
Shoemaker also felt genuinely bad that his actions had led to an
inspection of the company. He was well placed to know how
unpleasant such visits could be: his previous assignment had been at
the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where
he’d taken over as director of biosurety, the department responsible
for securing biothreat agents used in army research, two weeks before
Bruce Ivins killed himself in July 2008. The suicide had led to the
disclosure that Ivins, an institute researcher, was the likely perpetrator
of the 2001 anthrax attacks and to an avalanche of inspections from an
alphabet soup of government agencies that had continued unabated
for two years. Shoemaker had been the officer on the receiving end of
every single one of them.
With Colonel Edgar’s encouragement, he tried to defuse the
situation by emailing CMS officials that he had never meant to imply
that Theranos had already implemented the regulatory strategy he’d
described, merely that it was considering it. He also expressed surprise
that the agency had told Theranos he was the one who requested the
inspection. The response he got brought another surprise: CMS had
told Theranos no such thing; the company already had a copy of his
correspondence with the FDA when the inspector arrived.
When he confronted Colonel Edgar with that information, Edgar
sheepishly admitted that he had been the one who’d shared his email
to Sally Hojvat with Elizabeth in what he described as an oversight. He
apologized and invited Shoemaker to come to CENTCOM
headquarters in Tampa, Florida, the following week to walk Mattis
through the regulatory issues. Shoemaker was nervous about meeting
the general face-to-face, but he accepted the invitation. He reached out
to Alberto Gutierrez to see if he could join him on the trip, figuring his
opinion would carry more weight if it was supported by someone high
up at the FDA. Although it was on short notice, Gutierrez agreed to
come along.