The domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber
The malign influence of Ted Kaczynski went beyond the people he killed and maimed from 1978 to 1995. A Harvard-educated math prodigy, he became a domestic terrorist, responsible for more bombing attacks than anyone else in U.S. history. The effort to stop him was the country’s longest and most expensive manhunt. And he forced the publication of his 35,000-word manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, an anti-technology screed that won him a cult following and inspired similar attacks. In 1995, he vowed to blow up a plane unless The New York Times and The Washington Post agreed to publish the tract; under pressure from federal authorities, they did. Pretending to be part of a militant group rather than a lone wolf, in the missive he defended the attacks that left three dead and 23 injured, claiming he “had to kill people” to get his message out.
Kaczynski was raised in the Chicago area by parents who “emphasized academic excellence” above all else, said The Washington
Post. “Socially awkward,” he scored above 165 on IQ tests, skipped two grades, and was admitted to Harvard at age 16. But “his isolation deepened” on campus, where he was one of 22 students subjected to a manipulative psychological study under Project MK-Ultra, the CIA experiment with mind control. Kaczynski got a Ph.D. in geometry at the University of Michigan, with a dissertation said “to be comprehensible by 10 to 12 people in the country,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). He taught briefly at Berkeley before moving to Montana in 1971, where he went off-grid to prep his terrorist attacks. The first two bombs hit two people at Northwestern University in 1978; the following year, he planted a smoke-sputtering bomb on an airplane that sickened 12 passengers. The FBI called the attacker UNABOM, for University and Airline Bomber.
During his “frightening, slow-motion” 18-year rampage, said the Los Angeles Times, Kaczynski “fed investigators false clues, taunting them like a comic-book villain.” He was ultimately betrayed “by his own words.” His brother and sister-in-law noticed similarities between the manifesto and the “long, rambling letters” he sent them. They went to the FBI, and in April 1996, authorities raided his shack, finding a giant stash of bomb-making material. A court psychologist diagnosed Kaczynski with paranoid schizophrenia but found him competent to stand trial. He pleaded guilty to murder in 1998 and received eight life sentences, serving most of his time in a federal supermax prison in Colorado. He was found dead of apparent suicide at the North Carolina prison medical center he was moved to in 2021.
Kaczynski’s crimes “enjoyed an afterlife few would have predicted in the 1990s,” said The New York Times. Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik lifted whole passages from the Unabomber manifesto for his own before committing his 2011 massacre. And Kaczynski’s ideas were later echoed by anarchists, eco-terrorists, and other fringe figures. But to his victims, the attacks will never be anything but senseless, said CNN. “There’s never closure,” said Charles Epstein, who lost three fingers and much of his hearing in a 1993 mail-bomb attack that also left him with abdominal injuries. “Every time I look at my hand, it’s still there.”