Theodore Kaczynski

]

He attended high school at Evergreen Park Community High School. Kaczynski did well academically, but found the mathematics too simple during his sophomore year. He was subsequently placed in a more advanced math class. Kaczynski quickly mastered the material, and skipped the eleventh grade. With the help of a summer school course for English, he completed his high school education two years early. He was encouraged to apply to Harvard University, and was subsequently accepted as a student beginning in Fall 1958 at the age of 16. While at Harvard, Kaczynski was taught by famed logician Willard Quine, scoring at the top of Quine's class with a 98.9% final grade. He also participated in a multiple-year personality study conducted by Dr. Henry Murray, an expert on stress interviews.

Students in Murray's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored study, dubbed MKULTRA, were told they would be debating personal philosophy with a fellow student. Instead, they were subjected to the stress test, which was 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 two-way mirror. This was filmed, and students' expressions of impotent rage were played back to them several times later in the study. According to Chase, Kaczynski's records from that period suggest he was emotionally stable when the study began. Kaczynski's lawyers attributed some of his emotional instability and dislike of mind control to his participation in this study.] Maxwell Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski's dissertation committee, also commented on his thesis by noting, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 people in the country understood or appreciated it." In 1967, Kaczynski won the University of Michigan's $100 Sumner B. Myers Prize, which recognized his dissertation as the school's best in mathematics that year.]

The bomb was made of metal that could have come from a home workshop. The primary component was a piece of metal pipe, about ]

After a six-year break, Kaczynski struck again in 1993, mailing a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University. Though critically injured, he eventually recovered. Another bomb mailed in the same weekend was sent to the home of geneticist Charles Epstein from University of California, San Francisco, who lost multiple fingers upon opening it. Kaczynski then called Gelernter's brother, Joel Gelernter, a behavioral geneticist, and threatened " [y] ou are next". Geneticist Phillip Sharp at Massachusetts Institute of Technology also received a threatening letter two years later.] This was followed by the 1995 murder of Gilbert Murray, president of the timber industry lobbying group California Forestry Association, by a mail bomb actually addressed to previous president William Dennison, who had retired.

In all, 16 bombs—which injured 23 people 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:

One of Kaczynski's tactics was leaving false clues in every bomb. He would make them hard to find so as to purposely mislead investigators into thinking they had a clue. The first clue was a metal plate stamped with the initials "FC" hidden somewhere (usually in the pipe end cap) in every bomb. One false clue he left was a note in a bomb that failed to go off that said, "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. [] Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, and Derrick Jensen. Its idea of the "disruption of the power process" similarly echoed social critics emphasizing the lack of meaningful work as a primary cause of social problems, including Mumford, Paul Goodman, and Eric Hoffer (whom Kaczynski explicitly references). [F.C. 1995, §The danger of leftism] The general theme was also addressed by Aldous Huxley in his dystopian novel "Brave New World", which Kaczynski references. [F.C. 1995, §Human suffering] The ideas of "oversocialization" and "surrogate activities" recall Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" and his theories of rationalization and sublimation (the latter term being used three times in the manifesto, twice in quotes, to describe surrogate activities). []

After the manifesto was published, the FBI received over a thousand calls a day for months in response to the offer of a $1 million reward for information leading to the identity of the Unabomber. There were also large numbers of letters mailed to the UNABOM Task Force that purported to be from the Unabomber, and thousands of suspect leads were sifted through. While the FBI was occupied with new leads, David Kaczynski first hired private investigator Susan Swanson in Chicago to investigate Ted's activities discreetly. The Kaczynski brothers had become estranged in 1990, and David had not seen Ted for ten years. David later hired Washington, D.C. attorney Tony Bisceglie to organize evidence acquired by Swanson and make contact with the FBI, given the likely difficulty in attracting the FBI's attention. He wanted to protect his brother from the danger of an FBI raid, like Ruby Ridge or the Waco Siege, since he knew Ted would not take kindly to being contacted by the FBI and would likely react irrationally or violently.] He had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was leaked to CBS News in early April 1996. CBS anchorman Dan Rather called FBI director Louis Freeh, who requested 24 hours before CBS broke the story on the evening news. The FBI scrambled to finish the search warrant and have it issued by a federal judge in Montana; afterwards, an internal leak investigation was conducted by the FBI, but the source of the leak was never identified. David donated the reward money, less his expenses, to families of his brother's victims.

In January 1995, Milt Jones, a graduate student in English at Brigham Young University working with English professor Dallin D. Oaks, noticed that Joseph Conrad's 1907 novel "The Secret Agent" provided a rationale for the bombing of professors and scientists. After 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 lifestyle as a naturalist. Investigators further learned that Kaczynski grew up with a copy of the book somewhere in his home and had during interrogation admitted to have read it more than a dozen times. He also allegedly had used the pseudonyms "Conrad" or "Konrad" at times when he traveled to distribute his bomb packages. []

A federal court indicted Kaczynski in April 1996, on 10 counts of illegally transporting, mailing, and using bombs. He was also charged with killing two people in California and a third person in New Jersey.] However, when the case was finally presented to the public, authorities denied that there was ever anyone other than Kaczynski involved in the crimes. Explanations were later presented as to why Kaczynski targeted some of the victims he selected.

On August 10, 2006, Judge Garland Burrell Jr. ordered that personal items seized in 1996 from Kaczynski's Montana cabin 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. []

ee also

* Anarcho-primitivism, an anarchist movement encompassing many of Kaczynski's views
* CLODO, a 1980s group of neo-Luddite saboteurs from France
* "Green Anarchy", an anarchist magazine that published some of Kaczynski's writings, including the "Ship of Fools" short story
* Hugo de Garis, an academic technologist who predicts a future war over the preservation of human nature
* Jacques Ellul, author of "The Technological Society", a major influence of the Unabomber Manifesto
* John Zerzan, an anarcho-primitivist philosopher who defended Kaczynski's writings and was a confidant to him during his trial
* Unabomber for President, a political campaign which aimed to elect the Unabomber in the United States presidential election, 1996

Notes

References

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External links

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* [http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/tjk/tjk.html Published Works of Theodore Kaczynski] at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Persondata
NAME = Kaczynski, Theodore John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES = the Unabomber
SHORT DESCRIPTION = American terrorist
DATE OF BIRTH = May 22, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH = Chicago, Illinois, United States
DATE OF DEATH =
PLACE OF DEATH =