Unabomber capture

The Event Apprehension of the perpetrator of a series of mail bomb attacks in the United States between 1978 and 1996

Date April 3, 1996

Place A cabin outside Lincoln, Montana

Until he was identified and arrested in 1996, the Unabomber was responsible for a series of high-profile terrorist bombings, most often targeting researchers in high-technology fields, including engineering, genetics, and computer science.

Though he first gained notoriety many years earlier, the most active period for the Unabomber, eventually identified as Theodore Kaczynski, was during the 1990’s. In his early life, Kaczynski showed great promise as a mathematician, but in 1969 he left a budding academic career to begin living as a semi-recluse. Nearly a decade later, he began the terrorist campaign that would make him infamous and culminate in the discovery of his identity and his subsequent arrest.

Terrorist Bombings

In 1978, Kaczynski sent the first in a series of mail bombs targeting specific but highly idiosyncratic recipients. By 1980, four bombs had detonated in academic institutions and airlines, earning the unidentified terrorist the name Unabomber, based on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) handle for its case: UNABOMB, for “University and Airline Bomber.” These early explosives were fairly crude, cobbled together from wood and bits of metal, and they caused only relatively minor damages and injuries. Sporadic bombings continued for the next several years, and by the middle of the 1980’s, employees of computer stores had also become targets, confirming investigators’ suspicions that the perpetrator was engaged in a campaign against technology. Also by this point, the bombs had become more sophisticated and begun to inflict serious injuries and even one death.

For several years after 1987, it appeared that the Unabomber had ceased his activities, but in 1993 he resurfaced with broader aims, more frequent bombings, and deadlier results. While he continued to target and injure university employees, particularly in high-tech fields, his bombs also killed a public relations executive in 1994 and a forestry official in 1995. Many of the bombs bore false clues, designed to keep the authorities off-kilter in their investigations, and nearly all of them were branded with an inscription reading “FC.” By the mid-1990’s, the Unabomber had also begun to send letters to media outlets, former victims, and potential future victims, expressing fragments of his anarchist, antitechnology, and radical environmentalist philosophy and making threats about future attacks. These letters were also signed “FC.”

Manifesto, Arrest, and Incarceration

The Unabomber’s communications with the public reached their peak when his lengthy manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, was published simultaneously by The New York Times and The Washington Post in September of 1995, with both papers citing public safety as the reason they agreed to publish. The manifesto was supposed to have been written by a group calling itself the Freedom Club—explaining, finally, the mysterious “FC” inscription found on many bombs and letters—and throughout it uses the plural “we,” though few now dispute that Kaczynski always worked alone. The rambling, 35,000-word document laid out the objections of the “group” to many forms of modern authority and to various technological advances dating back to the Industrial Revolution and called for social revolution in the name of the environment. The manifesto explains the bombings by claiming that “they” had to kill people in order to get the public to pay attention to their philosophy and demands.

Upon the manifesto’s publication, Theodore Kaczynski’s brother David recognized both the prose style and the philosophy in Industrial Society and Its Future and began to suspect that his reclusive brother might, in fact, be the mysterious Unabomber. David contacted the FBI, samples of correspondence between the brothers were analyzed, and a likely match was found. Theodore Kaczynski was arrested on April 3, 1996, in the remote shack in Montana where he had been living in isolation since the early 1970’s. Bomb-making materials and an original copy of the manifesto, taken from the cabin at the time, were among the voluminous evidence collected for use in his trial. Though he had claimed he would end his bombing campaign if his manifesto was published in a major newspaper, it appeared that he was still engaged in bomb making at the time of his arrest.

In preparation for a trial, jury selection took place and a psychological examination was performed to determine Kaczynski’s mental fitness. The trial, however, never got past the initial stages, as Kaczynski eventually agreed to change his plea to guilty in order to avoid the possibility of the death penalty. In 1998, he began serving four consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole in federal supermax prison in Colorado.

Impact

Over a period of eighteen years, the Unabomber was responsible for at least sixteen bombs, resulting in twenty-three injuries and three deaths. It was in the early and mid-1990’s, however, that he became a household name, partly because his attacks increased dramatically in number and deadliness, and partly because they targeted the privileged and usually sheltered worlds of high technology and academia. Though Kaczynski has continued to write sporadically while incarcerated, his notoriety was not enough to keep him or his ideas in the spotlight; his name faded from prominence fairly soon after he began serving his sentence.

Bibliography

Chase, Alston. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. Explores the development of Kaczynski’s anti-industrialist philosophy, focusing on the role his Harvard education played in that development.

F. C. The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future. Berkeley, Calif.: Jolly Roger Press, 1995. The full text of Kaczynski’s manifesto, explaining his philosophy and the need for violent action to overturn the system.

Mello, Michael. The United States of America Versus Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power, and the Invention of the Unabomber. New York: Context Books, 1999. Mello focuses on the legal proceedings in the Unabomber case and, more than most authors, gives credence to Kaczynski’s position as a social critic.