7/30/95--The Unabomber could be connected to the Symbionese Liberation Army.It's all pretty tenuous, for that matter, it may just be a law enforcement leak to make the FBI look like it's closer than it is to getting its man. But the L.A. Times reported today that 48-year-old fugitive James William Kilgore is a "possible suspect" (how's that for iffy?) in the Unabomber case.
Kilgore, notes the paper, "is best known for his connections to the Symbionese Liberation Army." Readers of our bonus chapter on the Patricia Hearst kidnapping are familiar with conspiracy guru (guress?) Mae Brussell's contention that the SLA was a creation of the CIA. And if the Unabomber--that self declared "anarchist" who for the past 17 years has ben detonating his homespun explosive devices with impunity--was hooked up with the SLA...?
So what's the case for Kilgore as the man in the picture above? According to the Times, the FBI doesn't think it's much and has not been hot on the fugitive's heels, "to the frustration of some critics of the Unabom probe." His name first came up back in April in an L.A. TV news report which the FBI "repudiated," while still noting Kilgore as "someone they'd like to interview."
The ex-SLAer has been on the lam for 18 years. The Unabomber has been active for 17. Kilgore is wanted on a charge of unlawfully possessing an explosive device and supposedly his fingerprints were lifted from an SLA-manufactured pipe-bomb. He hails from Marin County. The FBI suspects that the Unabomber hangs out in the Bay Area, or in nearby Sacramento. Kilgore is the son of a lumber broker. Many of Unabomber's attacks have had "wood" themes. Kilgore supposedly fits the Unabomber's description--though that's hard to say because no one has seen him since 1976.
Suggestive parallels, but not exactly enough to stand up in court. Some of the logic connecting Kilgore to the Unabomber case in the Times article is even more tenuous. In a twist on the old "have they ever ben seen together" tack, the article offers up Sacramento homicide detective Joe Enloe noting that, "The Unabomber has been virtually invisible...all these years. And you can say the same about Kilgore."
Of course, the Unabomber himself claims not to be one guy but a group of guys, or maybe gals. He, or they, refers to himself as "the terrorist group FC," in correspondence such as what follows: a letter to the New York Times from April 22 in which FC demands that the Times print his 35,000 word anti-technology manifesto...or else.
Last minute update: On August 1 excerpts from the Unabomber' lengthy anarchist tract were published--though only about 3,000 words each--in the Times and the Washington Post. Both papers said they were still stewing over whether to print the whole booklet. As the excerpts show, the Unabomber may use rather unacceptable methods, but he's far from a nut. In fact, the piece is so well thought out that the FBI is distributing it to college professors around the country in hopes that one will recognize the Unabomber's ideas. Of course, this anarchist political philosophy is nothing new. The writings of John Zerzan in particular have covere the same ground in greater depth and detail.
Now, read the complete text of the Unabomber Manifesto
We blew up Thomas Mosser last December because he was a Burston-Marsteller executive. Among other misdeeds, Burston-Marsteller helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdez incident. But we attacked Burston-Marsteller less for its specific misdeeds than on general principles. Burston-Marsteller is about the biggest organization in the public relations field.This means that its business is the development of techniques for manipulating people's attitudes. It was for this more than for its actions in specific cases that we sent a bomb to an executive of this company.
Some news reports have made the misleading statement that we have been attacking universities or scholars. We have nothing against universities or scholars as such. All the university people whom we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields. (We consider certain areas of applied psychology, such as behavior modification, to be technical fields.) We would not want anyone to think that we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers, especially in critical fields like computers and genetics. As for the bomb planted in the Business School at the U. of Utah, that was a botched operation. We won't say how or why it was botched because we don't want to give the FBI any clues. No one was hurt by that bomb.
In our previous letter to you we called ourselves anarchists. Since "anarchist" is a vague word that has been applied to a variety of attitudes, further explanation is needed. We call ourselves anarchists because we would like, ideally, to break down all society into very small, completely autonomous units. Regrettably, we don't see any clear road to this goal, so we leave it to the indefinite future. Our more immediate goal, which we think may be attainable at some time during the next several decades, is the destruction of the worldwide industrial system. Through our bombings we hope to promote social instability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system.
The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an isolated nut. We won't waste our time arguing about whether we are nuts, but we certainly are not isolated. For security reasons we won't reveal the number of members of our group, but anyone who will read the anarchist and radical environmentalist journals will see that opposition to the industrial-technological system is widespread and growing.
Why do we announce our goals only now, though we made our first bomb some seventeen years ago? Our early bombs were too ineffectual to attract much public attention or give encouragement to those who hate the system. We found by experience that gunpowder bombs, if small enough to be carried inconspicuously, were too feeble to do much damage, so we took a couple of years off to do some experimenting. We learned how to make pipe bombs that were powerful enough, and we used these in a couple of successful bombings as well as in some unsuccessful ones.
[FBI BLACKOUT]
Since we no longer have to confine the explosive in a pipe, we are now free of limitations on the size and shape of our bombs. We are pretty sure we know how to increase the power of our explosives and reduce the number of batteries needed to set them off. And, as we've just indicated, we think we now have more effective fragmentation material. So we expect to be able to pack deadly bombs into ever smaller, lighter and more harmless looking packages. On the other hand, we believe we will be able to make bombs much bigger than any we've made before. With a briefcase-full or a suitcase-full of explosives we should be able to blow out the walls of substantial buildings.
Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it doesn't appear that the FBI is going to catch us any time soon. The FBI is a joke.
The people who are pushing all this growth and progress garbage deserve to be severely punished. But our goal is less to punish them than to propagate ideas. Anyhow we are getting tired of making bombs. It's no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain.
We have a long article, between 29,000 and 37,000 words, that we want to have published. If you can get it published according to our requirements we will permanently desist from terrorist activities. It must be published in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, or in some other widely read, nationally distributed periodical. Because of its length we suppose it will have to be serialized. Alternatively, it can be published as a small book, but the book must be well publicized and made available at a moderate price in bookstores nationwide and in at least some places abroad. Whoever agrees to publish the material will have exclusive rights to reproduce it for a period of six months and will be welcome to any profits they may make from it. After six months from the first appearance of the article or book it must become public property, so that anyone can reproduce or publish it. (If material is serialized, first installment become public property six months after appearance of first installment, second installment etc.) We must have the right to publish in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, each year for three years after the appearance of our article or book, three thousand words expanding or clarifying our material or rebutting criticisms of it.
The article will not explicitly advocate violence. There will be an unavoidable implication that we favor violence to the extent that it may be necessary, since we advocate eliminating industrial society and we ourselves have been using violence to that end.
But the article will not advocate violence explicitly, nor will it propose the overthrow of the United States Government, nor will it contain obscenity or anything else that you would be likely to regard as unacceptable for publication.
How do you know that we will keep our promise to desist from terrorism if our conditions are met? It will be to our advantage to keep our promise. We want to win acceptance for certain ideas. If we break our promise people will lose respect for us and so will be less likely to accept the ideas.
Our offer to desist from terrorism is subject to three qualifications. First: Our promise to desist will not take effect until all parts of our article or book have appeared in print. Second: If the authorities should succeed in tracking us down and an attempt is made to arrest any of us, or even to question us in connection with the bombings, we reserve the right to use violence. Third: We distinguish between terrorism and sabotage. By terrorism we mean actions motivated by a desire to influence the development of a society and intended to cause injury or death to human beings. By sabotage we mean similarly motivated actions intended to destroy property without injuring human beings. The promise we offer is to desist from terrorism. We reserve the right to engage in sabotage.
It may be just as well that failure of our early bombs discouraged us from making any public statements at that time. We were very young then and our thinking was crude.
Over the years we have given as much attention to the development of our ideas as to the development of bombs, and we now have something serious to say. And we feel that just now the time is ripe for the presentation of anti-industrial ideas.
Please see to it that the answer to our offer is well publicized in the media so that we won't miss it. Be sure to tell us where and how our material will be published and how long it will take to appear in print once we have sent in the manuscript. If the answer is satisfactory, we will finish typing the manuscript and send it to you. If the answer is unsatisfactory, we will start building our next bomb.
We encourage you to print this letter.
FC