Ted Kaczynski

"Unabomber" redirects here. For other uses, see Unabomber (disambiguation).

Theodore John Kaczynski
File:Ted-kaczynski-court.jpg
Born	May 22, 1942 Evergreen, Illinois, United States

Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber, is an American anarchist best known for his campaign of mail bombings. Kaczynski became infamous for having sent bombs to several universities and airlines from the late 1970s through early 1990s, killing three and wounding 23.

In Industrial Society and Its Future (commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto") he argued that his actions were a necessary (although extreme) ruse by which to attract attention to what he believed were the dangers of modern technology. Kaczynski did this in the hope that it would inspire others to fight against what he considered subjugation facilitated by technological progress. The Unabomber was the target of the most expensive manhunt in the FBI's history.

For his actions, which he at one point classified as terrorism to the police, Kaczynski was charged with numerous federal offenses stemming from his mail bombing campaign. To avoid the death penalty, Kaczynski entered into a plea agreement, under which he pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Kaczynski's moniker as the Unabomber developed as a result of an FBI codename. Before his real identity was known, the FBI used the handle "UNABOM" ("university and airline bomber"), which resulted in variants such as Unabomer, Unibomber, and Unabomber when the media started using the name.

Early life and mathematical career

Kaczynski was born in Chicago to second-generation Polish Americans Theodore Richard Kaczynski and Wanda Theresa Dombek.

Kaczynski attended kindergarten and grades one through four at Sherman Elementary school in Chicago. He attended fifth through eighth grade at Evergreen Park Central school. As the result of testing conducted in the fifth grade, it was determined that he could skip the sixth grade and enroll with the seventh-grade class. According to various accounts, testing showed him to have a high IQ and, by his account, his parents were told he was a genius. He claims that his IQ was in the 160-to-170 range. Testing supposedly conducted at that time has not been made available for review. Kaczynski described skipping this grade as a pivotal event in his life. He remembers not fitting in with the older children and being subjected to verbal abuse and teasing from them.

He attended high school at Evergreen Park Community High School. He did well academically but reported some difficulty with mathematics in his sophomore year. He was subsequently placed in a more advanced math class and mastered the material, and then skipped the 11th grade. As a result, he completed his high-school education two years early, although this did necessitate a summer-school course in English. He was encouraged to apply to Harvard, and was subsequently accepted as a student, beginning in the fall of 1958. He was 16 years old.

File:Ted-kaczynski-yearbook.jpg

Yearbook photo of Kaczynski

At Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a several-year personality study conducted by Dr. Henry A. Murray, an expert on stress interviews. Murray, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II and mentions Kaczynski in a long-ignored personality profile of Adolf Hitler, was himself a controversial figure. Having returned to Harvard after the war, he organized psychological experiments in 1959–1962. A centerpiece of the study was a stress test similar to one the OSS had used to assess recruits.

According to an article by Alston Chase for the June 2000 Atlantic Monthly, students in the study were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student . Instead, they were subjected to the stress test, an extremely stressful and prolonged psychological attack by an anonymous attorney. During the test, students were strapped into a chair and connected to electrodes that monitored their physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a one-way mirror. The "debate" was filmed and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them at various times later in the study. The stress test deeply affected not only Kaczynski but the other students subjects well. According to Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest that he was emotionally stable at the start of the study. Lawyers for Mr. Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty in 1998 to letter-bomb attacks that killed three people and wounded 29 others, attributed some of his emotional instability and fear of mind control to his participation in this study.

In 1962, Kaczynski graduated from Harvard. After graduation, he attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, earning a master's degree and a Ph.D. in mathematics. Kaczynski began a research career at Michigan but made few friends. One of his professors at Michigan, George Piranian, said: "It is not enough to say he was smart." He earned his Ph.D. by solving, in less than a year, a math problem that Piranian had been unable to solve. Kaczynski's specialty was a branch of complex analysis known as geometric function theory. "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 people in the country understood or appreciated it," said Maxwell O. Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski's dissertation committee. In 1967, Kaczynski received a $100 prize recognizing his dissertation, entitled "Boundary Functions," as the school's best in math that year. At Michigan he held a National Science Foundation fellowship, he taught undergraduates for three years, and published two articles related to his dissertation in mathematical journals. After he left Michigan, he published four more papers.

In the fall of 1967, Kaczynski was hired as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. Kaczynski's aloofness and reserve made students rate him poorly. Despite pleas from the department staff, Kaczynski resigned without explanation in 1969. Calvin Moore, vice chairman of the department in 1968, said that given Kaczynski's "impressive" thesis and record of publications, "he could have advanced up the ranks and been a senior member of the faculty today."

After resigning his position at Berkeley, he held no permanent employment. He lived a simple life in a remote shack on very little money, occasionally worked odd jobs, and received some financial support from his family. In 1978, he worked briefly with his father and brother at a foam-rubber factory.

Bombings

File:Unabomber-sketch.png

The infamous forensic sketch by Jeanne Boylan

The first mail bomb was sent in late May 1978 to Professor Buckley Crist at Northwestern University. The package was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with Crist's return address. The package was "returned" to Crist. However, when Crist received the package, he noticed that it had not been addressed in his own handwriting. Suspicious of a package he had not sent, he contacted campus policeman Terry Marker. Marker opened the package, and it exploded. The injury was slight, mostly because the bomb was poorly constructed. Marker's left hand was sufficiently damaged to send him to Evanston Hospital. The bomb was made of bits and pieces of metal that could have come from a home workshop. It was based on a piece of metal pipe about an inch in diameter and nine inches long. Curiously, the bomb contained smokeless explosive powders, and the box and the plugs that sealed the pipe ends were hand crafted of wood. In comparison, most pipe bombs usually use threaded metal ends that can be bought in any large hardware store. Wooden ends don't have the strength to allow a large pressure to build within the pipe. This is partly why the bomb did not have the effect Kaczynski intended. The primitive trigger device the bomb employed was a nail tensioned by rubber bands designed to slam into six common match heads when the box was opened. The match heads would immediately burst into flame and ignite the explosive powders (when the trigger hit the match heads, only three ignited). A more efficient technique, later employed by Kaczynski, would be to use batteries and heat-filament wire to ignite the explosives faster and more effectively.

The initial 1978 bombing was followed by bombs to airline officials, and in 1979 a bomb was placed in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C. The bomb began smoking and the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing. Many of the passengers were treated for smoke inhalation. Only a faulty timing mechanism prevented the bomb from exploding. Authorities said it had enough firepower to "obliterate the plane." As bombing an airliner is a federal crime in the United States, the FBI became involved after this incident and came up with the code name UNABOM (UNiversity Airline BOMber). They also called the suspect the Junkyard Bomber because of the material he used. The FBI at first thought the culprit was a disgruntled airline mechanic. FBI Agent John E. Douglas disagreed. He claimed the bombs were much too sophisticated and that the bomber was most likely an academic. However, Douglas's theory was generally disregarded.

The first serious injury occurred in 1985, when John Hauser, a Berkeley graduate student and Captain in the Air Force, lost four fingers and vision in one eye. Captain Hauser had applied for astronaut training and only a few days after his injury he learned he had been accepted. The bombs were all hand-crafted and were made with some wooden parts. Inside the bombs, certain parts carried the inscription "FC" — at one point reported to stand for "Fuck Computers" but later found to mean "Freedom Club." A California computer-store owner, Hugh Scrutton, 38, was killed by a nail- and splinter-loaded bomb lying in his parking lot in 1985. A similar attack against a computer store occurred in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 20, 1987.

After a six-year break, Kaczynski struck again in 1993, mailing a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer-science professor at Yale University, the developer of Linda, a distributed programming system, and one of the founders of Mirror Worlds Technologies, a software firm that attempted to implement his ideas. Another bomb in the same year maimed the geneticist Charles Epstein. Kaczynski wrote a letter to The New York Times claiming that his "group," called FC, was responsible for the attacks.

In 1994, advertising executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent to his North Caldwell, New Jersey, home. In a letter, Kaczynski attempted to justify the killing by pointing out that the public-relations field is in the business of developing techniques for manipulating people's attitudes. This was followed by the 1995 murder of California Forestry Association president Gilbert Murray in Sacramento, California.

In all, 16 bombs that injured 29 and killed three were attributed to Kaczynski. While the devices varied widely through the years, all but the first few contained the initials "FC". Latent fingerprints on some of the devices did not match the fingerprints found on letters attributed to Kaczynski. As stated in the FBI affidavit :

"203. Latent fingerprints attributable to devices mailed and/or placed by the UNABOM subject were compared to those found on the letters attributed to Theodore Kaczynski. According to the FBI Laboratory, no forensic correlation exists between those samples."

One of Kaczynski’s tactics was leaving false clues in every single bomb. He would make them hard to find, so as to purposely mislead investigators into thinking they had a clue. First and foremost of the clues was a metal plate stamped with the initials “FC” hidden somewhere (usually in the pipe end cap) in each and every bomb. Another clue was in a letter to the CIA, “accidentally” revealing that he lived in the Sierra Mountains. In actuality he lived near a mountain range in Montana. The police spent days scouring much of the Sierras. The next false trail he left was a note in a bomb that failed to go off, saying: "Wu – It works! I told you it would. –RV". A more obvious clue was the Eugene O’Neill $1 stamps used to send his boxes. One of his bombs was sent embedded in a copy of Sloan Wilson’s novel Ice Brothers.

Manifesto

In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters, some to his former victims, outlining his goals and demanding that his 35,000-word paper Industrial Society and Its Future (commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto") be printed verbatim by a major newspaper; he stated that he would then end his bombing campaign. There was a great deal of controversy as to whether it should be done. A further letter threatening to kill more people was sent, and the US Justice Department recommended publication out of concern for public safety. The pamphlet was then published by the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 19 1995, with the hope that someone would recognize the writing style. Bob Guccione of Penthouse volunteered to publish it as well, but he was turned down.

Industrial Society and Its Future begins with Kaczynski's assertion that the "Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."[1] In his opening and closing chapters, Kaczynski condemns "leftism" and "leftists" as "anti-individualistic" and "pro-collectivist," "because, deep inside, [the leftist] feels like a loser."[2] The "leftism" described in the document is contrasted with "non-leftism," and is diametrically opposed to what the document envisions as "anarchy": "power... on an individual or small-group basis."[3] His "anarchy" would leave people "able to control the circumstances of their own lives," the anarchist opposed to technology "because it makes small groups dependent on large organizations."

Throughout the text, Kaczynski capitalizes entire words in order to show emphasis. He always refers to himself as either "we" or "FC" (Freedom Club), though he appears to have acted alone. Also, the Manifesto contains several spelling errors, which can either be original or attributed to the newspaper that has printed it.

He states that the only alternative to technological subjugation is the rejection of technology and return to a life close to nature in which the "power process," a psychological need he describes as the ability to solve one's own problems and have power over one's life, is fulfilled. In technological-industrial society, Kaczynski suggests, humanity has far greater power, but humans have far less power, in that as the number of cooperating humans in any given society increases, individuals inexorably comprise tinier and tinier fractions of the decision-making population. The overwhelming need for the power process causes modern society to be filled with endlessly multiplying "surrogate activities" which are essentially meaningless, including almost everything modern humans do for business or pleasure: artistic endeavor, professional advancement, the accrual of wealth, "an excessive amount of sex", all of this activity is "artificial" because it does not satisfy any "biological needs".[4]

These processes of technological advancement and industrialization, says Kaczynski, have been refining themselves for centuries, and will eventually culminate in the domination of the great majority of people either by "the machines" themselves or by a tiny elite using the advanced technology of the future. He posits that society will likely genetically engineer and drug people to accept more and more "empty" surrogate activities, creating a world in which "human beings may be happy... but they most certainly will not be free."[5] In this world, "[people] will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals."

Having predicted the breakdown of society due its incompatability with individual happiness, Kaczynski alludes to his desire to "harness the energies of the True Believer to a revolution," and concludes by observing that "the most dangerous leftists of all... avoid irritating displays of aggressiveness and refrain from advertising their leftism, but work quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist values..."[6]

As a critique of technological society, the Manifesto echoed contemporary critics of technology and industrialization, such as John Zerzan, Fredy Perlman, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Derrick Jensen. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, quoted Ray Kurzweil quoting Kaczynski in a Wired magazine article on the dangers of technology, agreeing that the Manifesto was a "dystopian vision" that warranted a response, even though his friend David Gelernter had been seriously injured by Kaczynski.

In early 1996, former FBI hostage negotiator Clint van Zandt was contacted by a Washington, D.C. attorney who asked that he make a comparison of the Manifesto to type-written copies of hand-written letters that a client had allegedly received from his brother. van Zandt's analysis determined that there was a conclusive match between vocabulary and style in the unauthenticated letters and the manifesto, which had been in public circulation for just under half a year. Based on this conclusion, David Kaczynski pointed the FBI to the cabin of his older brother, Ted, who was a paranoid schizophrenic, a man estranged from his family, and who lived as a reclusive hermit in Montana. Book

Paragraphs 204 and 205 of the FBI search and arrest warrant for Kaczynski state that many FBI experts believed the Manifesto had been written by "another individual, not Theodore Kaczynski."[7] As stated in the affidavit, the FBI was seriously conflicted over whether Kaczynski was the UNABOMer or the author of the manifesto:

"204. Your affiant is aware that other individuals have conducted analyses of the UNABOM Manuscript __ determined that the Manuscript was written by another individual, not Theodore Kaczynski, who had also been a suspect in the investigation.

"205. Numerous other opinions from experts have been provided as to the identity of the UNABOM subject. None of those opinions named Theodore Kaczynski as a possible author."[8]

Arrest and court proceedings

File:Ted-kaczynski-mugshot.jpg

Mugshot of Kacynski after 1996 arrest

Kaczynski's younger brother David recognized Ted's writing style from the published manifesto and notified authorities. After a team of forensic linguists compared text samples provided by Kaczynski's brother and mother with the Unabomber's writings and determined they had been written by the same person, officers were sent to arrest Kaczynski on April 3, 1996, at his remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. David had once admired and emulated his elder brother, but had later decided to leave the survivalist lifestyle behind. David had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that in particular his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was later leaked, prompting an unsuccessful internal investigation by the FBI. David donated the reward money, less his legal expenses, to families of his brother's victims.

In January 1995, a graduate student in English at Brigham Young University noticed that Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent provided a rationale for the bombing of professors and science. After Ted Kaczynski's arrest it was discovered that, like the character known simply as "The Professor" in the novel, Kaczynski had given up a teaching position at a university to pursue a career as a solitary hermit. Investigators further learned that Kaczynski grew up with a copy of the book in his home and had read it more than a dozen times, and had used the pseudonyms "Conrad" or "Konrad" at times when he traveled to distribute his bomb-packages.

Kaczynski's lawyers, headed by Montana state defender Anthony Gallagher, attempted to enter an insanity defense, which he rejected. A court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia, but declared him competent to stand trial. Ted's family explained that he had always "shut down" emotionally when placed in confrontational situations. This handicap is not only a sign of the disorder that allegedly caused him to commit crimes, but it is also an indicator of Ted's inability to defend himself or to credibly name any co-conspirators or abettors that may have existed. On January 7, 1998, Kaczynski attempted to hang himself. He avoided the death penalty by pleading guilty on January 22, 1998, but later attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, arguing it was involuntary. Judge Garland Burrell denied his request, and that denial was affirmed by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. None of the evidence developed against Ted Kaczynski, a paranoid schizophrenic, has ever been cross-examined in an American court of justice.

The early hunt for the Unabomber in America portrayed a perpetrator far different from the eventual suspect. The Unabomber Manifesto consistently uses "we" and "our" throughout, and at one point in 1993 investigators sought an individual whose first name was "Nathan." However, when the case was finally presented to the public, authorities denied that there was ever anyone other than Kaczynski involved in the crimes. No explanation was ever presented as to why Kaczynski targeted the airplane and the specific victims he selected, and why he chose to place other devices where they would randomly kill and maim.

On August 10, 2006, Judge Garland Burrell Jr. ordered that personal items seized in 1996 from Theodore Kaczynski's Montana cabin — books, tools, clothing, etc. — should be sold at a "reasonably advertised Internet auction." Items the government considers to be bomb-making materials, such as writings that contain diagrams and "recipes" for bombs, are excluded from the sale. The auctioneer will pay the cost and will keep up to 10% of the sale price, and the rest of the proceeds must be applied to the $15 million in restitution that Burrell ordered Kaczynski to pay his victims.

Life in prison

Kaczynski is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in ADX Florence, the Federal ADX Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

The Labadie Collection, parts of the University of Michigan's Special Collection Library, is housing Kaczynski's correspondence from over 400 people since his arrest in April 1996, some of his carbon-copied replies as well as some legal documents, publications, and clippings. The names of most correspondents will be kept sealed until 2049.

He has been active as a writer in prison. A scholarly letter by Kaczynski on a book review by István Deák appeared in the New York Review of Books.

In a letter dated October 7, 2005 Kaczynski offered to donate two rare books to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University's Evanston Campus, which was the location of the first two attacks. The recipient, David Easterbrook, turned the letter over to the university's archives. Northwestern rejected the offer, citing that the library already owned the volumes in English and did not desire duplicates.

See also

• Anarcho-primitivism, Kaczynski's political doctrine which claims that technological-industrial society is inherently wasteful and suppressive of human nature, and must be brought down;
• Hugo de Garis, an academic technologist who makes much the same predictions about the future as Kaczynski, but supports such a future nevertheless (he sees people like Kaczynski and himself possibly becoming opposing sides in a major war over such a scenario, paralleling Kaczynski's line of thought about a struggle between anarchists and technophiles for the future of human dignity);
• John Zerzan, a major Anarcho-Primitivist philosopher who defended Kaczynski's writings and was a confidant to him during his trial;
• Green Anarchy, an Anarchist magazine that has published some of Kaczynski's writings including his short story Ship of Fools;
• Jason McQuinn, editor of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed who wrote the essay One, Two, Three, Many Unabombers in which he defended Kaczynski;
• Italian Unabomber, an unknown person or group who is conducting bombings in Italy;
• Das Netz, a German film that explores the actions of the Unabomber in relation to art, technology, and LSD.
• List of Polish Americans.

Bibliography

Works Written by The Unabomber

• The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future (ISBN 1-59986-990-X)
• Theodore Kaczynski (writing anonymously), Manifesto. New York Times and Washington Post (Special Insert), Sep. 19, 1995

Works Written by Kaczynski

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1967). Boundary Functions [doctoral dissertation]. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1964). "Another proof of Wedderburn's theorem". American Mathematical Monthly. 71: 652–653.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1964). "Advanced problem 5210". American Mathematical Monthly. 71: 689.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1965). "Boundary functions for functions defined in a disk". Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics. 14 (4): 589–612. doi:10.1512/iumj.1965.14.14039. MR0176080.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1965). "Distributivity and (-1)x = -x (solution to advanced problem 5210)". American Mathematical Monthly. 72: 677–678.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1966). "On a boundary property of continuous functions". Michigan Mathematical Journal. 13: 313–320. MR0210900.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1968). "Note on a problem of Alan Sutcliffe". Mathematics Magazine. 41: 84–86. MR0228409.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1969). "The set of curvilinear convergence of a continuous function defined in the interior of a cube". Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 23: 323–327.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1969). "Boundary functions for bounded harmonic functions". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 137: 203–209. MR0236393.

• Kaczynski, T. J. (1969). "Boundary functions and sets of curvilinear convergence for continuous functions". Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 141: 107–125. MR0243078.

Works Written About Kaczynski and the Unabomber

• Ron Arnold, Ecoterror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature : The World of the Unabomber, 1997, ISBN 0-939571-18-8
• Alston Chase. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist , extended from the Atlantic article, about the Murray psychological experiment, ISBN 0-393-02002-9
• Alston Chase, A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism, 2004, ISBN 0-393-32556-3
• Douglas and Olshaker, Unabomber: On the Trail of America's Most-Wanted Serial Killer , 1996, Pocket Books, ISBN 0-671-00411-5
• James A. Fox, et al, Technophobe - The Unabomber Years: The Ultimate Sourcebook of Facts,...., 1997, Dove Books, ISBN 0-7871-1159-7
• David Gelernter, Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber, 1997, ISBN 0-684-83912-1
• Robert Graysmith, Unabomber : Desire to Kill, 1997, ISBN 0-89526-397-1
• Michael Mello, The United States of America versus Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber, 1999, ISBN 1-893956-01-6
• Jay Nash, Terrorism in the 20th Century: A Narrative Encyclopedia from the Anarchists, Through the Weathermen, to the Unabomber, 1998, ISBN 0-87131-855-5
• Jill Smolowe, et al, Mad Genius : Odyssey, Pursuit & Capture of the Unabomber Suspect, 1996, ISBN 0-446-60459-3
• Chris Waits, Dave Shors, Unabomber: The Secret Life of Ted Kaczynski, 1999, ISBN 1-56037-131-5
• Steven D. Levitt, Steven J. Dubner, "Freakonomics", 2005, ISBN-13: 978-0-141-03008-1 Pg141-142, 191
• Swedish rock band Mando Diao named Kaczynski in a song on their 2006 album Ode to Ochrasy, Killer Kaczynski.
• Italian band Kirlian Camera released a song titled Kaczynski Code on their 2006 album Coroner's Sun. The title refers to the code which Kaczynski wrote his notes in.

External links

Published works

• Bullough, John, Published Works of Theodore Kaczynski (his mathematical papers)
• Industrial Society and its Future: The Unabomber Manifesto (from Wikisource)
• Ship of fools
• Hit Where It Hurts
• Psychological Evaluation of Theodore Kaczynski.

Other links

• Dubner, Stephen J., "I Don't Want To Live Long" (detailed magazine article)
• Joseph Conrad. The Secret Agent at Project Gutenberg
• Kaczynski, David, "The death penalty up close and personal"
• Ottley, Ted, "All about the Unabomber"
• Interview with Kaczynski
• Rotten Library's Unabomber Article
• Forensic Evaluation
• Series of articles
• Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator Record for Prisoner 04475-046 (Kaczynski, Theodore)
• About Kaczynski's diaries: 1, 2.