Unabomber
Introduction to Unabomber
Unabomber, terrorist and anarchist whose homemade bombs killed three people and wounded 23 others in 16 separate incidents in the United States from 1978 to 1995. During this period, the Unabomber received extensive attention in the news media for the ingenuity of his explosive devices; for his extreme statements of opposition to science, industry, and technology; and for his success in eluding detection and capture. In 1995 the Unabomber declared he would cease his attacks against people if the New York Times and Washington Post agreed to publish a long statement of his anarchistic principles. Believing that publication might save lives, both newspapers printed the Unabomber’s 35,000-word manifesto in September 1995. In April 1996 federal agents arrested a suspect who later confessed to the Unabomber attacks-Theodore John Kaczynski, a 53-year old Harvard University graduate and former mathematics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
Bomb attacks linked to the Unabomber date to May 1978, when a package bomb exploded on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In the next few years, an additional series of explosions in the Chicago area suggested the work of a serial bomber. This assailant’s talent for crafting elaborate explosive devices from untraceable scraps of wood, lamp cord, and metal earned him the nickname, “Junkyard Bomber.” Federal agents began to call the case “Unabom” in 1985, in reference to a broader pattern of bomb attacks clustering around targets associated with universities and airlines. Beginning with the attack in 1978, the Unabomber targeted university professors with research specializations in computer science, genetics, engineering, and psychology. Bombs tied to the Unabomber also exploded in the home of the president of United Airlines and on an American Airlines flight from Chicago. Agents safely disarmed another bomb mailed to a Boeing manufacturing facility in Auburn, Washington.
In 1985 a bomb placed by the Unabomber maimed an engineering graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly thereafter, the San Francisco Examiner received a letter that claimed responsibility for the bombing on behalf of the Freedom Club, a terrorist organization opposed to all forms of science and technology. Investigators discovered engravings of the initials FC on fragments from subsequent bombs, but never doubted that the bombings were the acts of a single individual. In December 1985 the owner of a computer store in Sacramento, California, died when a bomb hidden in a paper bag exploded. In 1987 an employee at another computer store, in Salt Lake City, Utah, saw a man place a sack under the wheel of her car in the store’s parking lot. A bomb inside the sack exploded, injuring another employee who had tried to move the sack. This sighting provided the basis for a widely circulated sketch of the Unabomber. In this sketch, he appears as a middle-aged white man with a mustache, wearing sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt.
During the 1990s, the Unabomber developed increasingly sophisticated and lethal explosive devices. In December 1994 a package bomb killed advertising executive Thomas Mosser while he stood in his kitchen in North Caldwell, New Jersey. Mosser had worked for an agency that represented Exxon. In a letter to the New York Times following this bombing, the Unabomber claimed an affinity with anarchists and radical environmentalists opposed to the “industrial-technological system.” In April 1995 another package bomb killed Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association. This incident occurred five days after an unrelated terrorist bombing killed 168 people and injured more than 500 at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
The Unabomber’s 1995 manifesto, entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” further developed ideas associated with his acts of violence. In this document, the Unabomber declared “the industrial-technological system” to be a “disaster for the human race,” primarily because it “requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved.” Many scholars dismissed the document as a stale reprise of 1960s counterculture critiques of science, technology, and industrial civilization. Some, however, such as historians Kirkpatrick Sale and Robert Wright, credited the Unabomber with a lucid intelligence. They placed his words, if not his deeds, squarely in a tradition of anti-industrial anarchism that dated back to the Luddites, craft weavers who rebelled against the introduction of power looms in early 19th-century England.
By 1995 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had spent more than $50 million in what had become the longest and most extensive search in the history of the agency. Publication of the Unabomber’s manifesto finally offered a critical breakthrough in the case, leading to the arrest of Theodore Kaczynski, who had lived for many years in a one-room plywood shack in the mountains of western Montana. The suspect’s brother, David Kaczynski, turned to the FBI after noticing similarities between the Unabomber’s manifesto and letters his brother had written over several decades.
A search of Kaczynski’s cabin revealed a trove of evidence, including a partially assembled bomb, drafts of the Unabomber manifesto, and a diary of the bombing campaign. In April 1996 a federal court indicted Theodore Kaczynski on 10 counts of illegally transporting, mailing, and using bombs. He was also charged with the two slayings in California and faced charges in New Jersey in the third bombing death. U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty.
Kaczynski’s trial began in November 1997 in Sacramento, California, but the proceedings were thrown into confusion by conflicts between Kaczynski and his defense team. Kaczynski bitterly resented his lawyers’ plans to mount a defense that portrayed him as mentally impaired. At least three psychiatrists concluded that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. In January 1998 Kaczynski averted a trial by agreeing to plead guilty to 13 federal charges in exchange for a promise that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty during his sentencing. In May 1998 the district court sentenced him to four life terms plus 30 years with no possibility of parole, and ordered him to pay $15 million in restitution. Kaczynski was sent to the “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, an ultra-high security federal prison about 140 kilometers (about 90 miles) south of Denver.” (1)
Resources
Notes and References
- Information about Unabomber in the Encarta Online Encyclopedia