Ted Kaczynski

Born May 22, 1942 (Evergreen Park, Illinois)

Domestic terrorist

Ted Kaczynski was an American terrorist who used his crimes to draw attention to his political views. His campaign to fight what he believed was the evil of technological progress was waged with bombs he delivered or mailed to sixteen different places across the country. Over a period of eighteen years, Kaczynski killed three people and wounded twenty-three others with his bomb devices. His primary targets were people he associated with computers and other high-tech industries.

Kaczynski believed that modern industrial civilization was destroying nature, alienating humans from one another, and manipulating people's minds and attitudes. In his writings, which became commonly known as the "Unabomber Manifesto," Kaczynski argued for the destruction of the industrial system in order to rid the world of modern technology and free humanity.

"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."

The education of a genius

Theodore John Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in the Chicago, Illinois, suburb of Evergreen Park. Wanda Theresa Dombek and Theodore Richard Kaczynski soon discovered
that their little "Teddy" was gifted with an extremely high IQ. Ted was a shy boy who spent a great deal of his childhood indoors reading science magazines with his mother. By the time his brother David was born in 1950, Ted's father sought a recreational balance by teaching his boys how to live in the outdoors.

Young Ted breezed through school, skipping two grades and showing a talent for mathematics. He graduated from Evergreen Park High School at age sixteen and immediately entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on a math scholarship. Because he was so much younger than the other students, Ted was viewed as an oddity and spent most of his time alone studying. He graduated in 1962 at the age of twenty and set off for graduate school. Ted earned a master's and a doctorate degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan over the next five years. His prizewinning dissertation (thesis) was on a pure mathematical problem about circles and equations.

Domestic Terrorism

Americans were not unfamiliar with domestic terrorism when Ted Kaczynski began his attacks on modern technology in 1978. In April 1919 a series of bombings occurred associated with the notorious Red Scare, or communist threat that had shaken the nation's security. A total of thirty-eight package bombs were mailed to a variety of government officials and business leaders that spring.

A terrorist conspiracy was widely feared when the package bombs were followed by dynamite attacks in June of 1919. Explosions occurred at the homes of prominent leaders in a coordinated attack targeting eight major U.S. cities.

Ted Kaczynski used the U.S. Postal Service to send his package bombs from 1978 to 1995. His reign of terror was followed by a new form of killing beginning in October 2001 when anthrax-laced letters were mailed to several prominent addresses. Attacks such as these usually receive wide media coverage for a perpetrator's cause and are also an effective way to spread fear and anxiety among a large population.

In many cases, terrorists call officials or the media to claim responsibility for an act and to make their demands known on how to prevent further attacks. If no one claims responsibility for an attack, it remains a mystery for authorities to solve. That mystery creates a different kind of fear and suspicion. A lone terrorist is the most difficult to identify, predict, and prevent because he or she makes no contact with other terrorists.

In 1967 Kaczynski was hired as an assistant professor in the math department at the University of California at Berkeley. After only two years he suddenly quit his teaching post despite the university's desire to keep him on the faculty. Kaczynski returned to his parents' home near Chicago and applied for a Canadian land grant. While waiting for a response he worked various jobs and began writing antitechnology essays. When Ted was denied his request for immigration to Canada he headed into the wilderness of Montana.

In 1971 Ted and his brother David purchased a small parcel of land in Florence Gulch, just eighty miles southwest of Great Falls, Montana. The untouched area had more bears than people and was a perfect place for the intensely private Kaczynski. In 1975 he built the ten-by-twelve-foot cabin that would be his home for the next twenty years.

Ted's cabin lacked electricity and plumbing but required very little money for upkeep. He kept a small garden, hunted rabbits for food, and lived the life of a hermit. Kaczynski spent most of his time in the wilderness reading, writing, and developing his thoughts. At one point in 1978 he made the effort to return to society in Chicago, but it was not a good fit. By 1979 Ted was back at his cabin in Montana. He kept in touch with his family on occasion and in 1990 heard that his father had committed suicide after being diagnosed with cancer.

Defining the "Unabom"

On May 25, 1978, Kaczynski delivered a package bomb to a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was addressed to engineering Professor E. J. Smith, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. It appeared to be an undelivered parcel returned to its sender—Professor Buckley Crist of Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois. Without questioning how it had arrived at a different institution, the finder contacted Professor Crist. Crist claimed to have no knowledge of the parcel but had it sent to him anyway. When he saw the package the following day, he noticed it hadn't been addressed in his own handwriting. This made him suspicious enough to call the campus police to investigate. A security guard was injured when he opened the package and it exploded. A year later, Kaczynski left a second bomb at the institute, which injured a graduate student who opened the package.

Kaczynski was back in Montana by mid-1979 where he worked on his manifesto (a public declaration of principles and aims, especially of a political nature) and improved his bombs. On November 15, 1979, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight, requiring an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.
Twelve people suffered from smoke inhalation. So far no one had been killed by Kaczynski's bombs.

The following year, on June 10, the president of United Airlines was injured by a bomb explosion at his home in the Chicago area. By the mid-1980s several more campuses and airlines had been targeted. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was convinced one individual was responsible for all of the bombings. Since serial bombers are mostly male, the authorities assumed it was a male in this case. They formed a task force to determine the bomber's motives in order to identify him.

The codename for the case was UNABOM, an acronym for the bomber's preference of targets, UNiversities and Airlines BOMbings. The media followed the case closely and eventually nicknamed Kaczynski the "Unabomber."

The attacks turned deadly on December 11, 1985, when a computer store owner in Sacramento, California, picked up a package outside his business and it exploded killing him. Then in February 1987 a witness spotted the Unabomber placing a bomb outside a Salt Lake City, Utah, computer store. A police sketch of the man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and dark aviator sunglasses was widely circulated. The bombings stopped for the next six years.

When the attacks began again in June 1993 several bombings left their victims injured but alive. This changed again in December 1994 when an advertising executive in New Jersey opened a package that exploded and killed him. The final murder occurred on April 24, 1995, again in Sacramento, when the president of the California Forestry Association opened a package bomb addressed to the previous president of the association.

The Freedom Club

For nearly eighteen years, the Unabomber had operated without detection. In an anonymous letter to the New York Times in June 1993, Kaczynski explained his terrorist cause and demanded the Times, or another major newspaper, publish the manifesto he had written. He identified himself as a member of the "Freedom Club" and signed the letter "FC." The letter stated that if the newspaper agreed to publish his writings, the attacks would stop. If they did not agree to his demands, the attacks would intensify.

The FBI continued to search for the identity of the bomb maker. Their only breakthrough came when the letters "FC" were found carved on pieces of metal that had survived the blasts. Aside from the letters, the only other means of identifying the attacker was his consistent use of wood in making the bombs. The wood was an unusual touch since most pipe bombs usually use threaded metal ends that can be bought in any large hardware store.

With so little to go on the authorities agreed to the Unabomber's demands to publish the entire text of his 35,000-word manifesto. On September 19, 1995, the Washington Post and the New York Times both ran the piece entitled, "Industrial Society and Its Future." It became known as the "Unabomber Manifesto" and would ultimately be the clue needed to solve the case.

David Kaczynski read the manifesto and recognized his brother's writing style. Ted Kaczynski was arrested in April 1996 at his cabin in Montana. He was indicted in Sacramento and New Jersey for five Unabomber attacks, including the three deaths. Kaczynski was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic (a severe mental disorder that can include delusions and hallucinations) but declared mentally competent to stand trial. He agreed to plead guilty on January 22, 1998, to avoid the death penalty. He received four life sentences plus thirty years in prison without the possibility of parole. Kaczynski is incarcerated in the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, for his eighteen-year crime spree.

For More Information

Books

Chase, Alton. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Educations of an AmericanTerrorist. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Fridell, Ron. Terrorism: Political Violence at Home and Abroad. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2001.

Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Violence in America: An Encyclopedia. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.

Web Sites

"Famous Nonmathematicians." Loyola College in Maryland.http://www.loyola.edu/mathsci/resources/famousnonmathematicians.htm (accessed on August 15, 2004).

"Should We Have Second Thoughts About Kacz[y]nski." American Psychological Association.http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar98/sp.html (accessed on August 15, 2004).