Number 22:

          Unabomber Finally Blows It

          Check out the latest Unabomber stuff!

          Then find out how meticulous this guy really is!

          Smart Bomber

          Photos of Ted Kaczynski circa 1958, 1959, 1962, 1994, 1996

          4/6/96 -- If cabin-dwelling mountain hermit Ted Kaczynski really is the "terrorist group FC," as the Unabomber christened himself in his missives to the media, he offers an interesting lesson in how to elude the FBI: stay put. The literate bomber who, allegedly, turns out to be hermitlike, if not hermetic, ex-math professor Theodore John Kaczynski, lived in the same Montana shack for 25 years. For darn near the last 18 of those years, the Unabomber has been blowing up stuff and, rather unfortunately, people that he considers representative of techno-evil industrial society. Until just a few months ago, the feds were pretty well stumped as to who or where the bomber might be.

          The FBI had the Unabomber pegged as highly educated and Kazcynski fit that bill. He enrolled in Harvard at the age of 16, graduated before he turned 20 and was a rising star on U.C. Berkeley’s math faculty at the age of 25. He left Berkeley abrubtly and under vague circumstances. Some press accounts quote colleagues recalling Kaczynski saying he wanted to pursue “social causes,” though no one could recall which causes (blowin’ up stuff may or may not count as a "cause.")

          And though he lived alone in the woods and was, it appears, not exactly a party animal (though he killed and ate animals, which is close), he couldn’t exactly be said to be living underground. He was reasonably well-known in Lincoln, Montana, though no one claims to know him very well. He’d hang out at the town library and venture in for supplies at local shops every now and then. While his solitary lifestyle, living off his garden and off of deer and porcupines he’d shoot with a .22, must have afforded him a great deal of freedom from prying eyes, it also makes how this indigent Harvard-grad-turned-Grizzly-Adams-emulator managed to scoot all over the country mailing bombs from the Bay Area and planting them in person (in the case which led to the famous Unabomber sketch) behind a Utah computer store.

          Kaczynski is proving to be a strange criminal, but one aspect of his nascent case that is hardly strange is the flow of leaked information from law enforcement authorities to the media. The government is building its case against Kaczynski in the media, pretty much par for the course. Among the leaked info; the FBI’s alleged discovery and defusion of a live bomb in Kaczynski’s cabin along with loads of chemicals that could be used to make bombs, books on bomb-building and "meticulous" (that word’s getting used a lot) notes on building explosives. None of those incriminating items were ever spied by anyone else who dropped by Kaczsynski’s mountain shanty, including a census-taker and a fellow hunter named Glen Williams who describes himself as the closest thing Kaczynski had to a friend.

          According to Williams, who was interviewed by the Boston Herald newspaper, Kaczynski left his property for more than a few days just one time, in the mid-1980s. Of course, this "friend" may have memories that are less than perfect and probably wasn’t hanging with Kaczynski around the clock, but if his recollection is accurate, that would leave the alleged bomber little time to pull off his trips to the Bay Area.

          The FBI has also leaked that a typewriter found in Kaczynski’s cabin "appears" to be the one used to type the now-famous "Unabomber Manifesto." How they performed such a quick job of analyzing the typewriter’s imprints -- an intricate forensic process -- has not been explained. The feds also say that Kaczynski forayed 50 miles to a Helena hotel "at least 25 times; four of the stays roughly coincided with five bombings blamed on the Unabomber," according to AP. The bombs weren’t mailed from Helena, however (at least they weren’t postmarked there) so the connection between Kazscynski’s hotel stays and the bombings beyond mere temporal coincidence has yet to be clarified. And what about the other 21 times he stayed at the hotel that did not "roughly coincide" with Unabomber attacks?

          We haven’t the slightest idea whether Kaczynski really is the feared author of the best anarcho-luddite diatribe ever to appear in the New York Times and Washington Post (namely, Industrial Society and its Future), though from what’s been reported in the press the prognosis for 53-year-old essayist and alleged serial murderer is not a happy one. But the FBI still has to come up with answers to some pretty tough questions. A few key queries, as phrased by the Boston Globe would include, "how a reclusive former professor living without electricity, a car or a telephone in one of the remotest parts America could track his intended bombing victims, gather ingredients to make sophisticated explosives, then shuttle them off in envelopes that generally bore West Coast postmarks."

          Apt points, all. The Associated Press today quoted U.S. News and World Report as reporting that Kaczynski’s family sent him "thousands of dollars" over the years, which would explain how he could afford to travel -- but not how he’d keep up on current events to the point where he could choose his targets as selectively as he obviously did. Kaczynski himself reportedly told the few people who he talked about such things with that he subsusted in $300 per annum. Over 25 years that adds up to $7,500, which qualifies, nominally, as "thousands," but really isn’t enough to finance cross-country sojourns.

          One speculation that hasn’t appeared too widely in the press, but has made its way into the Unabomber-devoted Internet newsgroup alt.fan.unabomber is that Ted the K had an accomplice. Reportedly, he purchased his Montana property with his somewhat more outgoing brother, David, the guy who ultimately dimed out the alleged Unabomber. David Kaczynski had lived in a back-to-nature cabin himself, in Texas, until afew years ago when he moved to Schenectady, New York (near Albany) to get hitched to his high school sweetheart. That of course is not at all to imply that David Kaczynski is Unabomber II -- far from it -- but the possibility of an accomplice certainly can’t be ruled out (in his letters to the media, the Unabomber always referred to himself as a "group," which may well have been nothing more than a lame attempt to throw investigators off the track, but who knows?).

          There are, of course, plenty of developments to come, but before signing off to await them, we should touch on one speculation sure to become quickly popular on the conspiracy circuit. That is the possibility, unlikely though it may be, that Kazcynski is a fall guy for some sort of weird conspiracy to drive a nail into tree-spiking environmentalist havoc-wreakers like Earth First!. ABC News reported on April 5 that Kaczynski showed up at an EF meeting at the University of Montana in Missoula in 1994. According to ABC he went on the FBI’s list of suspects at the time. A so-called "hit list" published in a radical environmental newspaper called "Live Wild or Die" may have been the Unabomber’s lsource for finding victims, investigators believe -- though the list was published in 1990 and just four of the bomber’s 16 attacks have come since then.

          In May of 1990 Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Daryl Cherney were injured by a pipe bomb in their car. The FBI blamed the bombing on the two Earth First!ers themselves, but never established any evidence to back up that claim and never brought any charges. Earth First! for its part charged that the FBI was trying to frame and discredit the environmental "direct action" group, best known for its program of placing metal spikes in trees to prevent loggers from cutting them down. Or worse, that the bombing was an assassination attempt by the FBI.

          On the Other Hand . . .

          Read our previous Unabomber blast

          4/13/96--Though the feds haven't actually tied him to any bombings yet Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski's case isn't exactly going his way, at least in the press. According to the New York Times and the other major news outlets, federal investigators located an “original” copy of the Unabomber Manifesto in his tiny Montana cabin.

          That would appear to seal it, as far as circumstantial evidence goes. Of course, no one in the media has yet reported seeing this manuscript for themselves. All of the reports are based on an unnamed federal source or sources.

          Kaczynski still has not been officially accused of anything other than owning materials that could be used to make bombs. Not officially anyway. All of the accusations so far have come in the media, with the cooperation of anonymous leakers presumably inside the FBI’s investigation.

          Recall that just two days after Kaczynski’s arrest, the Associated Press (along with most other major news outlets) reported that a manual typewriter found in the mountain man’s tiny shack “appears to be the one the Unabomber used to type his letters and his grand manifesto about the evils of technology, a federal official said.”

          Regardless of whether a “federal official” said it, that damning assertion -- especially coming so quickly -- should have raised at least a certain amount of incredulity. Sure enough, the New York Times reported today that “sophisticated tests conducted on two typewriters found early in the search of the Montana cabin had led them to discount the likelihood that either machine had been used to type the Unabom manifesto.”

          Oh.

          Apparently, it must come as a surprise to the Times and its fellow big media outlets that “sophisticated tests” are in fact required to determine whether a particular document came from a particular typewriter. You can’t just eyeball it.

          Lo and behold, the feds found a third typewriter near where they found the Unabomber manuscript. “Officials said Friday that they were relieved that preliminary tests had confirmed that the type on the third machine matched the typewriting of the manuscripts,” the Times reported.

          What is the nature of these “preliminary tests?” The Times doesn’t say. While on the one hand, it looks like the FBI's got their man, it's still worth bearing in mind the shaky reliability of media reports and the government's -- for all of its hand wringing over the constant leaks to the media -- knowledge that building a solid case in the press is important to keeping the case solid in court -- and to making the FBI look good.

          On April 8 most dailies, following the lead of Times reporter David Johnston, ran stories saying that Kaczynski had been spotted by a hotel manager in Sacramento around the times that two bombs were mailed from the California capital. But faced with a media request to open some sealed files on the case, the FBI asserted that releasing such evidence in public could “taint” witnesses. The FBI cited, as an example, the hotel manager who identified Kaczynski. When interviewed earlier by the G-men, it turns out, he could not ID a photo of the suspected Unabomber. After the press stories appeared the FBI went back to the man and found that “he had no records” to support the assertions quoted in the press and he “told the FBI he had no records of hotel stays.”

          The Los Angeles Times buried the hotel manager’s recantation deep inside a story asserting that the FBI had found a “hooded sweatshirt and aviator sunglasses” that look like the ones worn by the culprit in the famous Unabomber sketch. Now there’s evidence!

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