Tyrone Daily Herald from Tyrone, Pennsylvania • Page 14

PAGE 12 THE DAILY HERALD, Tyrone, Thursday, April 4, 1996 Agents Move Against Former Professor Unabomber Suspect LINCOLN, Mont. (AP) A former Berkeley math professor suspected by relatives of being the Unabomber was in jail early Thursday after federal agents searched! his cabin near a mountain pass on the Continental Divide. A member of the Unabom task force, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, identified the man as Ted John Kaczynski and said he had been using many aliases. Federal agents were said to have been following him for several weeks. Bombing-making material was found in the suspect's cabin and law-enforcement officials planned to charge him today in the deadly attacks, The New York Times reported.

THEODORE KACZYNSKY Chuck O'Reilly, sheriff or Lewis and Clark County, said 20 FBI agents searched the home on the west side of Stemple Pass, between Helena and Lincoln. Late Wednesday evening, O'Reilly said, Kaczynski was driven 40 miles over winding, gravel mountain roads to Helena where he was taken to a small, windowless office the FBI maintains on the third floor of a downtown office building. Later, Kaczynski, dressed in torn black jeans and a black shirt and flanked by two FBI agents, emerged from the off ice building. He was put into a white Ford Bronco and transferred to the county jail. He had dirty, dusty, shoulder-length hair and wore a beard.

The search for the Unabomber who is thought to be responsible for three deaths and 23 injuries over nearly 18 years appeared to have no connection to the standoff between federal agents and the anti-government separatists known as Freemen near the town of Jordan, 350 miles to the east. Butch Gehring, a neighbor, said the small cabin being searched was the home of a Ted Kaczynski, described as being a resident since 1971. "He was real shy, real quiet. His conversations were Gehring said, describing Kaczynski as a hermit. "We like the looks of this guy as the Unabomber, but we don't have make-or-break evidence yet," one federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press.

"We have some writings that match up, but we don't have his tools yet. We want the irrefutable motherlode of evidence." Rick Smith, who retired just on Friday from the FBI in San Francisco, headquarters of the Una- bom task force, said the force had half a dozen good suspects in the case in recent months, and all but one of them appeared less likely to be the Unabomber as the investigation continued. The one who became more likely is the man in Montana, he said. "In this particular instance, the further we went along the more likely it was that he was a viable suspect. So I think the FBI's fairly certain they have the right man," he said.

Theodore J. Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago. After finishing Evergreen Park High School south of Chicago in three years, he attended Harvard University, graduating in 1962 when he was barely 20. He then moved to the University of Michigan, where he received a master's degree in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1967, both in mathematics.

His dissertation was titled "Boundary Functions," according to school officials. He taught as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1967-68 school year, according to Harvard and Berkeley re- The Daily Herald Serving Bellwood, Antis Snyder and Warriors Mark Twp. can and Subscribe Today! cords. He resigned in June 1969. After quitting Berkeley, Kaczynski lived in Utah in the late 1970s and early 1980s where he did odd jobs and menial labor, according to the federal official.

He bought land in Montana 10-12 years ago and has been building a cabin there since then. Members of the man's family found some old writings of his while cleaning out their home in the Chicago suburb of Lombard, where the family had moved after leaving Evergreen Park. The writings raised the family's suspicions, according to two federal officials speaking on condition of anonymity. The family approached an attorney in Washington, who called the FBI, to alert them. Federal agents later got consent to search the former Chicago residence.

Bob Daeschler, whose brother Bill bought the Lombard home from Kaczynski's mother after Kaczynski's father contracted lung cancer and committed suicide, said that the FBI and local police searched a shed behind the dwelling several weeks ago. He said he didn't know if the FBI removed anything from the shed. The Unabomber's spree began at Northwestern University outside Chicago in May 1978. Three people have" died and 23 more were injured in 15 subsequent Unabomber attacks; the most recent came April 24, 1995, when a timber industry executive was killed in Sacramento, Calif. Tine FBI has spread copies of the Unabomber's writings throughout the academic community in hopes of finding someone who recognizes the work.

Last September, The New York Times and The Washington Post published, in the Post, his treatise on the inhumanity of industrial society after Unabomber Suspect's Home The mother of Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski sold this home in Lom- brad ILL. When family members were searching some old boxes, they found clues that made them suspect him of being the Unabomber. he promised to stop planting bombs that kill people. His manifesto held that industrial society should be abolished and replaced with "small, autonomous units" of no more than 100 people. There have been no such incidents since then.

Federal agents working the Un- abomber case "have been hot to trot for about two weeks," said Salt Lake Police Sgt. Don Bell, a member of the multi-agency Una- bom task force and former homicide detective who worked the 1987 case in which a Salt Lake man was critically injured when he picked up a package left outside a computer store. That was the only time anyone ever spotted the man believed to be the Unabomber and resulted in the now-famous composite drawing showing a hooded man wearing aviator-style sunglasses. Bell has been told by other task force members that agents searched a home in Chicago, apparently belonging to the suspect's parents, where "they found some stuff" that may be related to the bombings. For three years, the San Francisco-based task force of two dozen agents from the FBI, Treasury Department and Post Office has pored over travel records, tips, interviews, lab results and case records searching for clues.

Federal agents described the Unabomber as white, male, 40ish, a killer-from-afar who is quiet, antisocial and very meticulous. He could easily buy the electrical switches he has used. Instead, he painstakingly builds them himself. His explosives are not exotic. From match heads he moved up to powders, and now uses material that could be scraped out of firecrackers.

But he likely mixes his own chemicals. The longer an explosion is contained, the fiercer trie blast. So he experiments with larger and stronger pipes to do more damage. Sometimes he carves bomb parts out of wood instead of buying easily available metal pieces. He also likes to box his videocassette-sized devices in wood sometimes using four varieties.

He seems fascinated with wood. He used to autograph his bombs, putting a metal tab with his mysterious trademark "FC" where it would survive the explosion. before he mails it, he lovingly polishes the outside. Pride of authorship, agents say. If a clean car works then a bomb should too, the thinking goes.

The victims have changed over the years. First universities 1 and professors, particularly engineering. Then aviation, directed at an American Airlines flight in 1979. (The name Unabomber comes from his early targets.) Then computer stores. In 1993, it was back to professors, including a geneticist.

In June, the Unabomber threatened in a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles International Airport. The next day, an authenticated letter sent to The New York Times said the threat was merely a prank. That scare prompted a ban on aerial snipping of mail originating in California weighing 12 ounces or more. EDITOR'S NOTE Associated Press Writer Michael J. Sniffen in Washington also contributed to this story.

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