article

Theodore John (Ted) Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), best known as the Unabomber, is an American mathematician turned hermit who mailed bombs to several universities and airlines during the late 1970s through the early 1990s, killing three persons and wounding twenty-nine. In Industrial Society and Its Future, commonly called the "Unabomber Manifesto", he argued that his actions were necessary in order to fight against the subjugation caused and facilitated by technological progress. He was the target of the most expensive manhunt in the FBI's history.

Before his identity was known, the FBI referred to him as the UNABOM (from "university and airline bomber"). Variants appeared when the media started using the code name, including Unabomer, Unibomber, and Unabomber.

Early life and mathematical career

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Ted Kaczynski was an intellectually gifted child, known to be extremely shy and aloof. While an infant, Kaczynski had a severe allergic reaction to medication. He was in hospital for several weeks and allowed only infrequent visits from his parents, who were barred from holding their child. The once happy baby reportedly was never the same. According to his mother, he initially cried incessantly and would plead for her comfort. Afterwards he became increasingly withdrawn and unresponsive to human contact, developing "an institutionalized look". By all accounts Kaczynski's parents were warm and loving towards both him and younger brother David.

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, but Kaczynski's academic performance throughout his early life was nothing less than stellar. Kaczynski described this skipping a grade as a pivotal event in his life. He remembers not fitting in with the older children and being the subject of considerable verbal abuse and teasing from them. He did not describe having any close friends during that period of time.

Friends and neighbors noticed the boy's intellectual gifts, but thought his social skills were severely lacking: "I would see him coming in the alley. He'd always walk by without saying hello. Just nothing," said Dr LeRoy Weinberg, a former Kaczynski neighbor. "Ted is a brilliant boy, but he was most unsociable ... This kid didn't play. No, no. He was an old man before his time."

He attended high school at Evergreen Park Community High school. He did well overall from an academic standpoint but reports some difficulty with mathematics in his sophomore year. He was subsequently placed in a more advanced math class and mastered the material, then skipped the 11th grade. As the result, he completed his high school education two years early, although this did require him to take a summer school course in English. During the latter years of high school 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.

While a student at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in psychological experiments. Kaczynski is mentioned in an article about a long-ignored personality profile of Adolf Hitler, written by Dr Henry A. Murray, who worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS.) during World War II. It says: "Dr Murray himself was a controversial figure. Having returned to Harvard after the war, he was involved in psychological experiments in 1959–1962 in which a stress test similar to one the OSS had used to assess recruits was administered to student volunteers. Among them was the young Theodore J Kaczynski, a precocious student at Harvard who later became known as the Unabomber. Lawyers for Mr Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty in 1998 to letter bomb attacks that killed three people and wounded 28 others, traced some of his emotional instability and fear of mind control to those tests."

In 1962 Kaczynski graduated from Harvard. After graduation, he attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, earning a master's degree and a PhD in mathematics. Kaczynski began a research career at Michigan, though he made few friends. One of his professors at Michigan, George Piranian, said: "It is not enough to say he was smart." He earned his PhD 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, 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 the attempt at persuasion by 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

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 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. Fortunately, 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. (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 trigger, 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 DC. 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 Douglas disagreed. He claimed the bombs were much too sophisticated and that the bomber was most likely an academic. Profiling was a new investigative tool at the time and Douglas's theory was largely ignored. After Kaczynski's arrest, the FBI came under much criticism. It was pointed out that if they had only checked into the "disgruntled academic" theory, they could have easily caught the suspect many years earlier.

The first serious injury occurred in 1985, when a Berkeley graduate student lost four fingers and vision in one eye. Captain John 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 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 and developer of Linda, a distributed programming system. Gelernter has written a book on the subject, Surviving the Unabomber. 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 another 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 B. 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.Link to Court TV

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 over 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. Eventually, the pamphlet was indeed published by the New York Times and the Washington Post on September 19 1995, with the hope that somebody would recognize his writing style (as indeed happened; see below). Bob Guccione of Penthouse Magazine volunteered to publish it in his magazine as well but was turned down.

The main argument of Industrial Society and Its Future is that technological progress is undesirable and must be stopped in order to free people from the unnatural demands that future technology will inevitably make over the whole planet. He saw the dominance of the great majority of people either by machines in themselves or by a tiny elite using the advanced technology of the future as inevitable unless technology itself is rejected. He stated that the only alternative to technological subjugation in the near future was to completely reject all technology as an ideological first principle. This would involve arguing for a return to a life close to nature and in which the "power process", a psychological need he described as the ability to solve one's own problems and have power over one's life, is fulfilled. Kaczynski argued that it was necessary to cause a "complete social collapse" in order to prevent a politically correct technology-dominated society from taking away the freedom of the great majority to experience the power process, thus enslaving humanity, with individuals having the freedom of domestic animals in a society dominated by machines in themselves or controlled by an elite social class or a mixture of the two. He didn't say that all activists must reject technology in practice, but that they must do so in theory.

With its critique of technological society, the manifesto is seen by some as a Neo-Luddist tract, sharing some ideas with other contemporary anti-technological writers such as John Zerzan, Fredy Perlman, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford and Derrick Jensen (though its scope is broad, as Kaczynski also devoted large sections to criticizing "leftists" and "oversocialized types") and the problems of political correctness as a dominant ideology. The manifesto has been discussed seriously because of the nature of the issues the Unabomber was addressing. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, quoted Ray Kurzweil quoting Kaczynski in his April 2000 Wired magazine article on the dangers of technology, "Why the future doesn't need us", as an example of dystopian concerns that deserved a response, even though a friend of his, David Gelernter, had been seriously injured by Kaczynski, as Joy found his stark vision of technological domination as compelling and needing a response from intelligent thinkers. Selective quotation from the manifesto has been used to attack more mainstream environmentalists by painting them as similar to Kaczynski, as in 1999 when a widely publicized Web page [http://web.archive.org/web/20041103092934/ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ken_crossman/Gore.htm compared statements by Kaczynski with Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance, pointing out ostensible similarities between statements in the two works.

Paragraphs 204 and 205 of the FBI affidavit for a search and arrest warrant for Kaczynski state that other experts believed the manifesto was written by a different suspect in the case. - - "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." title

Arrest and court proceedings

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 Kaczynski 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. In addition, the family received guarantees, which were later betrayed, that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty against Ted. 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 novel The Secret Agent (1907) provided a rationale for the bombing of professors and science. After Ted Kaczynski's arrest it was discovered that, like the protagonist-professor Verloc 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. 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.

The early hunt for the Unabomer in America portrayed a perpetrator far different from the eventual suspect. The Unabom 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.

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, part 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 collection is expected to grow. 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 recently 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.

See also

Bibliography

Works Written by The Unabomber

  • The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future (ISBN 159986990X)
  • Theodore Kaczynski (writing anonymously), Manifesto. New York Times and Washington Post (Special Insert), Sep. 19, 1995

Works Written by Kaczynski

  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1967. Boundary Functions dissertation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1964. Another proof of Wedderburn's theorem. Am. Math. Month. 71:652-653.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1964. Distributivity and (-1)x = -x. Am. Math. Month. 71:689.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1965. Boundary functions for functions defined in a disk. J. Math. and Mech. 14(4):589-612.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1965. Distributivity and (-1)x = -x solution by Bilyeau, R.G.. Am. Math. Month. 72:677-678.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1966. On a boundary property of continuous functions. Michigan Math. J. 13:313-320.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1968. Note on a problem of Alan Sutcliffe. Math. Mag. 41:84-86.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1969. The set of curvilinear convergence of a continuous function defined in the interior of a cube. Proc. Am. Math. Soc. 23:323-327.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1969. Boundary functions and sets of curvilinear convergence for continuous functions. Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 141:107-125.
  • T.J. Kaczynski, 1969. Boundary functions for bounded harmonic functions. Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 137:203-209.
  • T Kaczynski, Homotopy theory of condensing maps and non-linear problems. This one may be a different T. Kaczynski.

Works Written About Kaczynski and the Unabomber

  • Ron Arnold, Ecoterror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature : The World of the Unabomber, 1997, ISBN 0939571188
  • Alston Chase. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist , extended from the Atlantic article, about the Murray psychological experiment, ISBN 0393020029
  • Alston Chase, A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism, 2004, ISBN 0393325563
  • Douglas and Olshaker, Unabomber: On the Trail of America's Most-Wanted Serial Killer , 1996, Pocket Books, ISBN 0671004115
  • James A. Fox, et al, Technophobe - The Unabomber Years: The Ultimate Sourcebook of Facts,...., 1997, Dove Books, ISBN 0787111597
  • David Gelernter, Surviving the Unabomber, 1997, ISBN 0684839121
  • Robert Graysmith, Unabomber : Desire to Kill, 1997, ISBN 0895263971
  • Michael Mello, The United States of America versus Theodore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power and the Invention of the Unabomber, 1999, ISBN 1893956016
  • Jay Nash, Terrorism in the 20th Century: A Narrative Encyclopedia from the Anarchists, Through the Weathermen, to the Unabomber, 1998, ISBN 0871318555
  • Jill Smolowe, et al, Mad Genius : Odyssey, Pursuit & Capture of the Unabomber Suspect, 1996, ISBN 0446604593
  • Chris Waits, Dave Shors, Unabomber: The Secret Life of Ted Kaczynski, 1999, ISBN 1560371315

External links

Published works

Other links

American terrorists | Imprisoned anarchists | People imprisoned for terrorism | American mathematicians | 1942 births | Living people

Theodore Kaczynski | Theodore Kaczynski | Ted Kaczynski | Unabomber | 유나바머 | Theodore Kaczynski | טד קזינסקי | Theodore Kaczynski | Theodore Kaczynski | Theodore Kaczynski | Unabomber | Theodore Kaczynski | Unabombaren | Качинський Теодор

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Theodore Kaczynski".

Home Page • arts • business • computers • games • health • hospitals • home • kids & teens • news • physicians • recreation• reference • regional • science • shopping • society • sports • world