Case Has Driven ATF ‘Up The Wall’

WASHINGTON — With each new explosion, investigators painstakingly reconstructed the Unabomber’s bombs, piecing together scattered bits of flashlight batteries, lamp cords, matchsticks and the lovingly carved wooden components that would ultimately be recognized as his signature.

They ran off on tangents. Once, they scurried after a mysterious message — “Call Nathan R wed 7 pm” — that had been imprinted, invisibly, on one of his communiques. The FBI scoured drivers licenses and phone books, tracking down some 12,000 Nathan Rs across the land

They tried to gather DNA samples from stamps the Unabomber may have licked. They stored 22 million pieces of information in computer databases, including countless students who had been refused grants. They raided the house of a Colorado Springs man who, neighbors complained, darkened all his windows — one of hundreds of wrongly targeted folks who were not dangerous, just weird.

They even posted a message on the Internet about his modus operandi. “We want to cover all our bases,” an FBI spokesman said at the time.

For the thousands of local, state and federal law enforcement authorities who worked on the Unabom case since the first explosion in Chicago 1978, the investigation was for the most part a lengthy exercise in frustration, lurching from one false start to the next. Thousands of leads were pursued. All turned up dry.

“He’s been driving us up the wall for 18 years,” said Bob Holland, a retired explosives expert for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Department who worked on the case for 11 years.

Some years, such as 1987, when the only known sighting of the bomber in Salt Lake City led to the widely circulated drawing of the mustachioed, hooded suspect — investigators felt they were tantalizingly close. Authorities carted that picture around to countless places, hoping to turn up a clue. They found nothing.

Other years, including the six the bomber was dormant, from 1987 to 1993, the Unabomber seemed as cruel and distant as ever; back then. Holland said, the going theory was that the Unabomber was in prison, or maybe dead.

“God Almighty,” said Pete Smerick, a former FBI behavioral scientist who helped draft the psychological profile of the killer, “you’ve got a country of 250 million people and unless the person does something that really attracts your attention, you’re following a lot of false leads.”

In the end, if the suspect in Montana turns out to be the Unabomber, the best lead will have come from the killer himself — the 35,000-page manifesto that, law enforcement authorities say, prompted a Chicago man to turn in his own brother.

Experts say the FBI was wise in persuading newspapers to print the volume; it was, says Mr. Smerick, their only shot at having someone connect the writings to the suspect they could not find on their own. If the suspect, Theodore John Kaczynksi, is ultimately charged with being the Unabomber, Mr. Smerick said, it will mean that “his ego finally got the better of him.”

Mr. Kaczynksi, a 53-year-old graduate of Harvard University and former assistant math professor at University of California, Berkley, was charged Thursday with possessing a partly made bomb.

Christopher Ronay, a former explosives expert at the FBI who was one of the lead agents on the case, once described the Unabomber as “one of the most creative and elusive serial bombers ever encountered.”

He fashioned his bombs from scratch, blending four varieties of wood and using common items such as lampcords, items that made him particularly difficult to trace. He made switches by hand instead of buying them in stores. Metal parts were lovingly polished.

“A tremendous amount of patience was involved in building one of his devices,” says Mr. Holland, the retired ATF agent. “It’s a shame he didn’t have the same amount of patience with society, isn’t it?”

In retrospect, the patterns that would come to distinguish the Unabomber were evident from the very beginning. But back then, in May 1978, there was no such thing as the Unabomber. In his earliest incarnation, the Unabomber had no name at all. Then the FBI dubbed him Junkyard Bomber, later switching the name to Unabomber because it appeared he was targeting universities.

He made his debut on May 26, 1978, when a security guard was wounded after opening a package found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois.

The Unabomber was most active in the early 1980s, striking eight times in the first half of that decade — four times in 1985 alone. All the bombs bore his identifying marks, but by 1985, Mr. Ronay wrote, he had improved on his device with “a new explosive filler — a more powerful ammonium nitrate mixture capable of producing a more lethal explosion.”

On Dec. 11 of that year, the Unabomber claimed his first life.

The Unabomber’s 11^th bomb was disguised as a road hazard, constructed using wooden boards and nails. It was left in a parking lot behind a computer rental store in Sacramento, Calif. When computer dealer Hugh Campbell Scrutton reached down to pick up the package, it exploded, killing him.

The trail grew cold. Then, in 1987, authorities got what they thought was going to be their big break, when, for the first and only time, somebody saw the Unabomber.

The date was Feb. 20. A woman looking through a window spotted a white man in a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses carrying some wooden boards in a laundry bag. As he put the bag down in the parking lot behind the Caams Computer Store, the woman banged on the window, motioning for him to move the unusual package. He looked at her, and then walked away. Less than an hour later, the bomb exploded, injuring the store’s owner, Gary Wright.

It was from that sighting that an artist drew a composite of the Unabomber, a drawing that Mr. Holland said was circulated all over the world.

this time, investigators from the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit had developed a profile of the Unabomber. He would be a white man, in his mid-30s to early 40s, who probably spent his formative years in Chicago, where the initial incidents occurred. He would have at least a high school education, with the possibility of some college or trade school.

The next six years were slow ones. It was not until 1993, when the Unabomber resurfaced, that, Mr. Smerick said, “we kind of resurrected our case.”

That year, the killer struck twice, mailing two bombs from Sacramento. One blew off the fingers of a geneticist at University of California, San Francisco. The other injured the fingers and abdomen of a computer scientist at Yale University.

He also sent a note to the New York Times warning of those bombings; Mr. Smerick said he and seven or eight other agents from the FBI’s behavioral science lab in Quantico, Va., pored meticulously over that note and other missives from the Unabomber, spending hours trying to read clues into his syntax and writing style.

“His sentence structure was very good,” Mr. Smerick said. “He could string together long sentences and paragraphs. There was a clear thought process. It wasn’t the type of letter that you would get and say, ‘This is a nut case.’”

It was not until last June, when the Unabomber sent his 35,000-page manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post, that a much more detailed picture of the suspect emerged as a highly educated man who was enraged at society’s technological advances.

“When he produced that manuscript,” said Mr. Smerick, who by that time had retired, “he gave my colleagues an opportunity of really studying him based upon his own words and thoughts.”

Yet all that careful scrutiny failed to produce an arrest. Then the FBI encouraged the newspapers to print the manifesto. Both the papers and the agency were criticized by those who said they were catering to the Unabomber.

But with the arrest of Theodore Kaczynksi, whose brother became suspicious when he found similar writings at the family’s Lombard, Ill., home, the publication of the manifesto may have been the smartest attack on the Unabomber in 18 years.