FBI Detains Suspect in Unabomber Hunt

Federal agents took a former UC Berkeley math professor into custody Wednesday at a remote cabin near the Continental Divide and held him for questioning in the case of the elusive Unabomber, who has killed three people and injured 23 others in a 17-year crusade of terror against industry, academia and the airlines.

The man, Theodore J. Kaczynski, 53, was turned in by his brother, David, after the Kaczynski family found some of his writings at their Lombard, Ill., home while they were cleaning it up for sale, FBI sources said. The writings made them think that Theodore Kaczynski might be the Unabomber.

David Kaczynski contacted a Washington attorney, who turned the writings over to the FBI, the sources said. Agents searched the suburban Chicago home where Theodore Kaczynski grew up. They became even more suspicious, the sources said, and followed him to his Montana cabin, where they detained him so that they could search it.

The agents found him lying on a cot, one source said.

“ ‘Ted,’ ” one agent was quoted as saying, “ ‘we need to talk.’ ”

Kaczynski did not resist, the source said. He was driven 40 miles over a mountain road to Helena, Mont., where he was taken in handcuffs to a small, windowless FBI office on the third floor of an office building, said Chuck O’Reilly, the sheriff of Lewis and Clark County. Law enforcement sources said Kaczynski was questioned throughout the day.

They said he would be held overnight under constant watch in a solitary cell at the Lewis and Clark County Jail on a federal affidavit charging him with possession of illegal explosives. Agents had uncovered “clear-cut evidence of bomb making,” one source said. He was scheduled to be arraigned before a federal judge in Helena at 10 a.m. MST today.

Authorities have been searching for the Unabomber since 1978, when his first attack came at Northwestern University, north of Chicago. Over the years, his targets have included professors, particularly those in engineering; then American Airlines; then a computer store in Salt Lake City; and then other professors, including a geneticist.

His most recent victim was a timber industry executive in Sacramento, killed by a bomb last April. In June, the Unabomber threatened to blow up a plane leaving Los Angeles International Airport. The next day, he wrote to the New York Times saying that the threat was a prank and promising no more deadly attacks if his writings were published.

He submitted a 35,000-word manuscript describing the what he called the inhumanity of industrial society. In September, the New York Times and the Washington Post jointly published it. There were no new incidents after that, but a San Francisco-based task force of two dozen agents from the FBI, Treasury Department and U.S. Postal Service redoubled their efforts to find him.

They pored over tips, conducted interviews, researched travel records and reviewed laboratory results and the records of other bombing cases. They described the Unabomber as a white male, about 40 years old, who killed from afar and who was quiet, antisocial and meticulous. Instead of buying switches for his bombs, he built them himself.

He carved bomb parts out of four varieties of wood and inserted a metal tab with his trademark: the initials “FC.” His usual tactic was to polish the outside of his bombs carefully, then send them through the mail. Agents came to believe that he once lived in Chicago, frequented Salt Lake City and probably moved to the San Francisco area in the 1980s.

Chicago Area Native

Kaczynski grew up in the Chicago area, graduated from Evergreen Park High School and went to Harvard. He got a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics in 1962, said Harvard public affairs director Alex Huppe. Records show he was born on May 22, 1942, Huppe said, making him only 20 years old when he graduated from Harvard.

He received a doctorate in math from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1964. He was a serious student who shunned help from professors and worked largely on his own, according to Peter Duren, who taught Kaczynski during his first year in graduate school and then served on the committee that approved his master’s thesis.

“He was one of the best students in a good graduate class,” Duren said. “He also did very original and powerful work that was very impressive.” Duren said Kaczynski was meticulous, down to very neat handwriting. He wrote explanations and proofs of theorems in far greater detail, Duren said, than most professors would consider necessary.

Duren said Kaczynski was a loner. “He behaved well to other people,” Duren said, “but he was wrapped up in the work he was doing. He was not given to wasting time or sitting around.” Duren said that most other students wanted help with their research, but Kaczynski came up with his own problems and then worked alone at solving them.

Promising Scholar

His doctoral dissertation was called “Boundary Functions.” In it he solved a problem that had stumped another of his professors, George Piranian. “It was extraordinarily difficult,” Piranian said. “He took possession of it. Ted Kaczynski just went at it. He had to use his imagination and he used devices that I never thought of--did things that would never have occurred to me.”

Piranian said the work landed Kaczynski a plum, tenure-track position at UC Berkeley. Spokeswoman Marie Felde said that a Theodore J. Kaczynski taught at the university from 1967 to 1969. She said he resigned in June 1969. Piranian said he heard that Kaczynski had resigned to go into social work.

“I think Ted had decided that math was an abstract luxury that he could not afford to work on in the presence of all the misery that was among the poor,” Piranian said. “It was the late 1960s, during the rejection of conventional values and a move to change things. Ted thought he should help by engaging in some of the worst of the problems.

“Social work was one way to do it.”

Stephen Diliberto, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Berkeley, said he remembered Kaczynski as “cool, self-confident, self-collected and maybe a little distant. . . . He seemed to have an air about him. He was no shrinking violet. He was self-possessed, confident.”

Diliberto remembered that Kaczynski had “a tall, very good-looking, blond wife, and my impression was that they had decided to split, so there were some personal things going on. During the time she was here, she worked for a short time as a secretary or as an assistant in the math department. She seemed more friendly and outgoing than he was.”

Nolan R. Wallach, a math professor at UC San Diego who was at Berkeley in the late 1960s, said that Kaczynski “told me all about everybody in that department who had been divorced, who was sleeping with whom, and so forth. . . . When he told me those things, I thought he was telling me nonsense, but they all turned out to be true. . . .

“He was a character, one of those odd characters. There were lots of them. UC Berkeley in the 1960s was a hotbed of interesting things.”

It was last summer, when the FBI persuaded the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish the Unabomber’s manuscript, that David Kaczynski became suspicious of his brother, an FBI agent said. The brother read excerpts of the manuscript, the agent said, but made no move at the time to contact authorities.

By then the family had moved from Evergreen Park to Lombard and was about to move again.

Then, about two months later, when David Kaczynski read the documents that the family found while cleaning the Lombard house before selling it, he realized that they were very similar to the Unabomber excerpts, the agent said.

For David Kaczynski, the realization was very disturbing.

“What we’ve got is a guy who is troubled,” the agent said, “who wants in the worst way not to believe what he is reading.

After David Kaczynski contacted the Washington lawyer and passed the Lombard documents along to the FBI, “we reacted right away,” the agent said, “because of the specificity of the information.”

Sheriff O’Reilly said that the FBI called him at 10 a.m. Wednesday and said “20 federal agents were searching a home south of Lincoln on Stemple Pass.” The pass goes through the Montana mountains near the Continental Divide, about 5 miles southeast of Lincoln.

“We had no knowledge whatsoever that this was coming down,” O’Reilly said. “We had no contact, we were not asked to assist.” He said that the FBI’s lack of communication was “a major failing” because residents might have reacted violently to 20 armed men moving unannounced into the area.

Kaczynski had made his home in a small cabin without running water and power in an area made famous by Montana author Norman MacLean, who wrote about a trout-rich stream called the Blackfoot River in his autobiographical novel, “A River Runs Through It.”

Neighbors said Kaczynski did not own a car and often could be seen bicycling or walking from his cabin into Lincoln. He had a beard that flowed halfway down his chest and dressed “like a bum,” said longtime Lincoln resident Bette Love.

“He was dressed very poorly,” Love said. “Ragged clothes. Very ragged. Kind of like you knew he didn’t have the money to buy a new set of clothes.”

Walt Transue, a retired Navy chief who moved to Lincoln from Atlantic City, N.J., said he knew Kaczynski by sight. “I’ve had him in my truck three times. He was just walking along, bad weather, and I’d give him a ride.

“Being a friendly town, we pick somebody up when the weather’s bad.”

Kaczynski also was known by sight to Darrell Holliday, an Air Force retiree. “I’ve seen him driving up and down the road on his bicycle. I don’t think anybody in this town really knows him, because he lives secluded up in that cabin of his.”

Kept to Himself

Residents said that Kaczynski seldom struck up conversations beyond a friendly “hello” and was never seen in the local bars. Most often, they said, he would stop at the library, pick up groceries then bicycle home again.

“The only thing I can say about him is he stayed up there by himself pretty much,” said Stan Steffen, a mechanic. “You’d see him at the post office and say, ‘Hi, Ted.’ and He’d say ‘hi’ back.”

In all, the FBI attributed 16 bombings to the Unabomber over a 17-year period.

He got his code name from law enforcement officials after his early attacks on universities and airlines. But over time, his targets became varied. They ranged from professors of computer science to a Burson-Marsteller advertising executive.

In his last bombing a year ago, forestry lobbyist Gilbert Murray was killed by a package that exploded at the office of the California Forestry Assn. in Sacramento.

Although authorities believed the bombings were the work of a single man living in Northern California, the Unabomber consistently referred to himself as a group with the initials “FC.” In one letter, he said the initials stood for “Freedom Club.”

In 1987, the Unabomber was sighted by a woman in Salt Lake City leaving a package bomb outside a computer store that injured the man who picked it up. The sighting resulted in a widely disseminated sketch of the suspect, and he did not carry out any more bombings for more than six years.

But in 1993 he resumed his terrorist activities with bombs mailed to a UC San Francisco researcher in Tiburon and a Yale University professor, injuring both of them.

Change of Tactics

Then, after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building last year, the elusive terrorist changed tactics.

In June, he threatened in a letter to the San Francisco Chornicle to blow up a jet out of Los Angeles International Airport, throwing travelers into a state of anxiety and disrupting airline traffic.

“WARNING. The terrorist group FC, called Unabomber by the FBI, is planning to blow up an airliner out of Los Angeles International Airport some time during the next six days,” he wrote.

The next day, a separate letter received by the New York Times said his threat was a hoax but airport officials maintained high security at LAX throughout the busy July 4 weekend.

Having captured the nation’s attention, the terrorist pledged to stop killing if the New York Times or Washington Post would publish a 35,000-word manifesto he had written on the ills of America’s technological society. The Unabomber set a 90-day deadline for the papers to publish the manifesto.

In addition to the newspapers, he also mailed a copy of the manifesto to UC Berkeley psychology professor Tom Tyler, who opened the package and engaged in a public dialogue with the terrorist in an effort to draw him out.

In taunting letters--one to a victim, another to a Yale computer science professor, another to the New York Times--the Unabomber called for “the destruction of the worldwide industrial system.”

After a great national debate over whether the document should be printed, the New York Times and the Washington Post jointly published the manifesto in September in a special section distributed by the Post.

In the document, the Unabomber wrote:

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.

“The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in ‘advanced’ countries.”

The Unabomber continued: “We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. . . .”

Despite the newspapers’ decision to publish, the Unabomber reserved the right to continue “non-lethal sabotage” if one of the papers did not publish three 3,000-word sequels during the next three years.

FBI officials were pleased with the publication of the manifesto, believing it could trigger the recollection of someone who has come in contact with the Unabomber over the years.

“Further widespread publication of the manuscript, we feel, is going to help our investigation,” said FBI Agent Jim R. Freeman, head of the federal Unabomber task force. “We’re basically allowing the Unabomber to speak for himself through the manuscript.”

For months, the 80-member FBI task force headquartered in San Francisco pursued more than 20,000 tips and leads generated by a toll-free hotline and the offer of a $1-million reward.

The Unabomber’s mystery was enhanced by his meticulously crafted bombs that used hand-made wood components, polished metal parts and common items such as a lamp cord that made tracing him particularly difficult.

Murphy reported from Lincoln, Paddock from San Francisco and Ostrow from Washington. Times staff writers Robin Wright, James Bornemeier and Marc Lacey in Washington; Judy Pasternak in Chicago; Elizabeth Mehren in Boston; Fredric N. Tulsky in Berkeley; Mark Gladstone and Paul Jacobs in Sacramento; and K.C. Cole, Paul Lieberman, Amy Wallace and Richard E. Meyer in Los Angeles, and Times researchers John Beckham in Chicago and Norma Kaufman in San Francisco contributed to this story.

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Trail of the Unabomber

Bombings linked to the so-called Unabomber. The FBI gave the case the code name “Unabom” because early targets were universities and airlines.

May 25-26, 1978: A package is found at a parking lot at University of Illinois at Chicago and brought to Northwestern University in Evanston because of the return address. It explodes when it is opened on May 26, injuring one person.

May 9, 1979: Bomb injures one person at Northwestern University Technological Institute.

Nov. 15, 1979: Twelve suffer smoke inhalation when bomb explodes in plane’s cargo hold during American Airlines flight, forcing an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport near Washington.

June 10, 1980: United Airlines president injured at home in Chicago area.

Oct. 8, 1981: Bomb placed in a business classroom at University of Utah in Salt Lake City. No one injured.

May 5, 1982: One person injured at Vanderbilt University in Nashville; package addressed to a professor.

July 2, 1982: Professor of electrical engineering and computer science injured in faculty lounge at University of California at Berkeley.

May 15, 1985: One person injured by bomb found in computerroom at University of California at Berkeley.

June 13, 1985: Package that was mailed to the Boeing Co. in Auburn, Wash., on May 8 is discovered and safely disarmed.

Nov. 15, 1985: Two people injured by package mailed to professor at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The professor, who was standing nearby, wasn’t hurt.

Dec. 11, 1985: Hugh Scrutton, 38, killed by bomb found near his computer rental store in Sacramento, Calif.

Feb. 20, 1987: Man injured by bomb left behind computer store in Salt Lake City.

June 22, 1993: Geneticist at UC at San Francisco injured by bomb sent to his home.

June 24, 1993: Bomb injures Yale University computer scientist in office.

Dec. 10, 1994: Advertising executive Thomas Mosser, 50, killed by bomb sent to his North Caldwell, N.J., home.

April 24, 1995: California Forestry Association President Gilbert P. Murray, 47, killed opening a mail bomb in the group’s Sacramento headquarters.

Source: Los Angeles Times