The Manifesto

Last fall, I flew up to the University of Michigan to visit a library. Hi, we have an appointment at the Special Collections Research Center. The second floor, you go pass out computers, you walk into an elevator, and you take that to six. Okay, great. The Special Collections Research Center is where the University houses some of its rarest and most unusual items. It's not much to look at. A single reading room, modern, utilitarian. The morning we arrived, there was a guy there very carefully turning the pages of a 400-year-old book of maps, detailing the precise choreography of battles that had occurred in the Belgian region of Flanders. And this fellow, the Shradali-Ajonde-Barran, was an important maker of maps. I find these kind of archives oddly thrilling. Handling one of a kind manuscripts, noticing the smudge marks of some historically significant person, going through them is like a treasure hunt. There's no Dewey Decimal System, no detailed guide. Select a table where you want to be, and we have brought down the collection for you. We'll bring out one box at a time, do you just want to start at the beginning and go straight through? No, we don't. I was there to look at the collected papers of Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, one of the most notorious domestic terrorists in American history. Kaczynski killed three people, tried to kill many more, and has been likened on numerous occasions to the devil. But he's also been compared to the radical abolitionist John Brown and the transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau, which has led to this strange archive, where a major American research institution houses the collected written works of an unrepentant murderer, and treats his papers just as carefully as if he were some Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Kaczynski has steadfastly refused interview requests from the media for the past two decades. He told one journalist that he would only be talking to, quote, "100% committed far-out, rabid, anti-tech radicals." I wrote him. I never heard back. But as I sat in the reading room, that didn't seem to matter much. There was so much already here. One of the librarians brought in the Kaczynski papers one box at a time. There are 79 of them. Kaczynski donated much of the stuff himself after his arrest, and the archive is annotated throughout with handwritten post-it notes, guiding the researcher through the thousands upon thousands of pages. It's like he's talking directly to you. This was probably with some of my other writings on technology problem in Attic, one note reads. There's one folder with the scraps the Ted had tacked above his desk at the time of his arrest, including a postcard showing a buck in a snow-bound forest above the woods. In wilderness is the preservation of the world. Inside another folder, there are drawings that come with a warning from Ted. Some of this material is obscene. Like a sketch of a naked Dianisian bow hunter reclining with a female partner. It could have been drawn by the horniest kid in your middle school. One of the most striking things about looking through Kaczynski's papers is how much it complicates the story of him single-mindedly pursuing a decade's long master plan. In the middle of his bombing campaign, he strikes up a long correspondence with a Mexican immigrant laborer, seeks advice on building root sellers, contemplates reenrolling in college. There's even a welfare application that Ted filled out. At the time, he was the subject of a nationwide manhunt, and yet he included very specific directions should anyone in the government reviewing his application need to find him. Approximately 3.7 miles from Lincoln, Montana on Stemple Pass Road. Find mailbox with my name. Turn east on dirt road. Find Somil. From Somil, can see barn. Follow road that goes past barn. My cabin is the last cabin of the gulch. Kaczynski also explained the unusual circumstances that led to that point in his life, where he would consider seeking government assistance. I have advanced degrees in mathematics, but these degrees are useless to me in seeking employment for the following reasons. 22 years ago, I quit my job as an assistant professor of mathematics and went to live in the mountains, where I supported myself hunting, gathering wild foods, gardening, and occasional temporary unskilled jobs that provided the little money I needed. He said that after two decades of that life, he was "now considering getting civilized again and becoming a responsible member of society." That didn't happen, but reading those words gave me the same feeling I had at every turn while reporting this podcast. That this story was full of so many alternate paths, so many strange turns and characters whose stories are largely unknown. It came to involve not only the federal agents who chased him, and the victims left in his wake, but everyone, from the most powerful decision makers in Washington, to a group of dungeons and dragons fanatics in Chicago, to a man who lived for years in a hole in the high desert. And it all came to a head in the summer of 1995, 17 years after Ted's first bomb, in a piece of writing that you definitely don't need to travel to the Special Collections Research Center to find. This is Project Unibomb, an Apple original podcast produced by Pineapple Street Studios. I'm Eric Benson. This is episode 1, The Manifesto. [Music] Thursday, June 29, 1995. It's a grey morning in Washington, D.C., a little cold for early summer. Don Graham leaves his house in Cleveland Park and arrives at the offices of the Washington Post before 9 a.m. His family has owned the post for three generations. Now it's his paper. He's the publisher and CEO. I came to work and had a call from the chief of staff to the director of the FBI. Louis Free was FBI director at the time. And his chief of staff was a man I had never heard of named Bob Bucknam. Bob called me and said, "If you go down to your mail room, you will find a package addressed to someone at the Washington Post. We believe it is from the person called the Unibomb, and I said, "Hold the phone." I called Len Downey, the editor of the paper. Len Downey wasn't surprised by what Graham told him. We had been warned by the FBI that the New York Times had gotten such a package and so the building was on alert. Downey had been at the post for over three decades, working his way up from summer intern to executive editor. Along the way, he oversaw Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as the Watergate scandal was unfolding. But this was new even for him. Downey's office had a glass wall facing the newsroom. It was basically the exposed nerve center of the paper. All the reporters and editors could see in. Did everyone in the newsroom pretty quickly find out about this? Yes. That's what happens in newsrooms. A pin drops in one corner of the newsroom, everybody goes to see what happened. I think we were just all talking about it. And of course, I was immediately assigning somebody to cover the story. That week, the Unibomb was already the biggest story in the world, and he hadn't even set off a bomb. A couple days earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle had received a short letter that read, "The terrorist group FC, called Unibomber by the FBI, is planning to blow up an airliner out of Los Angeles International Airport sometime during the next six days." The government says there is a credible threat for the passenger jet may be bugged. The Unibomber targeted an airliner once before. In 1979, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of an American Airlines jet, forcing an emergency landing at Washington's Dulles International Airport. 12 people were injured. The LAX threat sent the world spinning. All airmail was grounded today in the state of California. We're focusing on parcels. I don't think we have the manpower to look at every single piece of mail by any means. LAX was a mess. Bags got extra screening. Flights were delayed. Police asked passengers to show their IDs, which, believe it or not, in 1995 was an extreme security measure. "You don't have to try to be that we are requiring that your bag be physically searched." But then, that night, the Unibomber took the whole thing back. Another letter from the Unibomber arrived, this time to the New York Times. He said the LAX threat was a prank, intended to "remind them who we are." "Now he has seen he can toy with the entire nation." "If indeed all he wants is attention that terrorists kill are known as the Unibomber must be happy tonight." So on that gray Thursday morning, when Graham and Downey realize there is a package from the Unibomber in their mail room, the only thing that's clear is the Unibomber is in charge, and he's relishing that fact. Inside of that package, there isn't a bomb. Instead, they find a 56-page single-space essay entitled "Industrial Society and Its Future." The FBI immediately came over, and a whole bunch of FBI agents, everybody in the newsroom was there. was sort of unalert to something going on in the building that might be dangerous. And they took the manifesto away. A few hours later, the FBI brought back a copy for the post. Soon Zyraks' manifestos were on the desks of the key decision-makers in the building. I think we had it immediately set into type somehow, so that we would have other copies of it, and so we could print the whole thing if we ever needed to. I got a copy. I started to read it, and I said to myself, "Jesus." Don Graham was in his office at the post. The manifesto spread out on his desk. If you work in a senior role in a newspaper, you get one or two of these letters every month, which is a long essay by somebody who usually is fixated on his own criminal case, or the evil is, "Wife is doing to him or an unjust verdict from a judge," and it's usually written very clearly. But I read this, and I said, "Well, I've appeared to me to be the writings of somebody who had all the answers to everything in the world." It was clear that this was a very smart but very disturbed person. Len Downey was pouring over his copy, too. There were historical analogies that I could see in there. The whole manifesto, obviously, was anti-technology, and I recognized a lot of those arguments. But it also was very difficult to read. It was sort of stream of consciousness in his writing. The New York Times had received the same package. That was immediately pre-internet time. And newspapers were at the height of their profitability, their circulation, and their influence in the newspaper. The newspapers with the National Cloud, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, really helped set the agenda for news coverage throughout the media, and broadcast networks and the local television stations tend to follow the lead of the newspapers. And as a result, we realized that we had a great deal of influence. The Unibomber offered these two major news outlets at Devil's Bargain. Publish a manifesto, info, in one or both of the papers, and he'd stop killing people. If the Post and the Times declined to publish, then the bombings and the deaths would continue. He gave them three months to decide. Do you remember what your initial thought was about the question that you had to face? Which was, "Do we give into this guy's demands and publish this?" Did you have an initial gut feeling one way or the other? My God, what are we going to decide? There was clearly one argument for not printing any of it. Which was, "Would we be setting some kind of a precedent?" We don't print things because somebody forces us to, "Okay, we might save somebody's life, but would we set some kind of precedent we would regret?" But what was the precedent? You spent 18 years sending bombs through the mail, killing three people, and injuring 21 of the FBI didn't have a clue where you were, and now you wanted to publish a 35,000-word political essay. The bombings began in 1978, but for a long time almost no one paid attention. The first bomb was initially mistaken for a firecracker and didn't even make the news. The third bomb, the one he placed on an American Airlines jet, got the FBI's attention, but failed to cause much damage. But he continued, "Send bombs to professors, place them in university science buildings, targeted a Boeing assembly plant. His techniques improved. Several victims were maimed. One was killed." And by June of 1995, when Don Graham was thinking about what precedent he'd be setting by printing this 35,000-word manifesto in the Washington Post, the Unibomber was a clear and present danger. In the past seven months, the Unibomber had killed two people. Thomas Moser, the advertising executive, was killed in his kitchen while his family was in the house. Then a logging industry lobbyist named Gilbert Murray opened a suspicious package in his office's reception area in Sacramento. The latest victim, Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, killed by a bomb that officials believe was sent by the Unibomber, the most elusive terrorist bomber in U.S. history. Investigators now say many clues point to an obsession with wood. All the bombs have wooden parts, and the names of trees have often appeared in addresses. A previous victim had a last name, wood. Two months after Murray was murdered, the manifesto arrived in the mailrooms of the times in the post. It begins, "The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those who live in advanced countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering, in the third world to physical suffering as well, and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world." The Unibomber said the cure wasn't some kind of better, sane, or more sustainable economic and social system. No future advancement could cure our elements. Instead, he called for a revolution against technological progress and the social order that it had enabled. "Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society," he wrote. Building a new society would be the work of another day, but he imagined its brought out lines. It would be a world where, quote, "most people will live close to nature, living as peasants, or herdsmen, or fishermen, or hunters." What were the Washington Post and the New York Times going to do with this thing? Don Graham called up Arthur Salzberger Jr., the publisher of the Times, and together they came to an agreement. "What I said to him and he said to me was, "We're normally rivals on news stories. We cannot be rivals on this, we cannot let this guy play us off one against the other. We have to have a united response." The Post and the Times started running news stories about the manifesto, accompanied by excerpts of the Unibombers' writing, to give the world some insight into the mind behind the bombings. There were his diagnoses of where we had gone wrong. The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. There were his fears for how it could get worse. The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. And there were his tray out of sci-fi predictions for what the future might look like. Due to improved techniques, the elites will have greater control over the masses. And because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless, they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. But running these excerpts wasn't the same as giving into the Unibombers demands and publishing his manifesto. In full, unedited, unanitated. That felt like something different. Graham asked Downey if there was any editorial reason to run the manifesto as a news story. Downey's answer was quick. No way. But Graham knew he wasn't going to get off the hook that easily. And so he did something way out of the ordinary for a newsman. He called the FBI for advice. It would be more normal that we would be in a meeting where the head of the FBI was saying, "For God's sake, don't print that story." But in this case, we wanted their advice because there was no reason we would comply with the Unibombers request except public safety. As the summer went on in the deadline crept closer, Graham and Downey were in constant communication with the FBI. I do remember some officials saying, "What a difficult decision you have. We don't know how you're going to make this decision." They themselves were divided over whether it was a good idea to publish the manifesto, whether or not you can believe the Unibomber. Whether or not the FBI should be in a position of advising a newspaper to give into terrorist demands, then they shared our dilemma. The more Downey and Graham talked to the FBI, the more they learned about the case, and how 17 years into the investigation, the FBI was still stumped. They thought it was a young person. They thought it could be somebody in Bay Area. Nobody knew a damn thing about him. One person had seen him in a parking lot and had a fuzzy idea of what he looked like, but what he looked like was a guy with a hood over his head and sunglasses on his face. I heard all kinds of scuttle butt about what a dreary, unending fruitless chase this was that they were never going to catch this guy. Kathy Puckett was a behavioral analyst in the FBI's San Francisco office where the Unibom Task Force was headquartered. A lot of agents were working on the case, they're not by choice. Well, basically everybody wanted to stay away from it. Stay away from the case. It was like this. I remember one of the secretaries, the SAC's secretary said that she had a friend who was transferring into the division and she was doing everything she could. This was a new agent coming in. She was doing everything she could to make sure that she didn't get assigned a unibom because it was just a black hole. Once you got in, you were never out. The FBI had worked a pehazy profile of the guy. Maybe late 30s to early 40s and a meticulous dresser. Maybe a guy who had first become enraptured with anti-tech ideology in Chicago in the late 1970s. Likely someone residing somewhere in Northern California. There were so few physical clues left behind, no fingerprints, no DNA samples, that in early 1995, the case was basically where it had been since the beginning. There was nothing to do except chase tiny slivers of leads. We could get old case files again and hope something new would come pouring out. Even knowing all this, Kathy wanted in. You wanted to go into the black hole. It isn't that I wanted to go to the black hole. I didn't think that it was unsolvable. When the manifesto arrived, it justified Kathy's choice, at least to her. Because for Kathy, the manifesto wasn't a conundrum. It was a clue. Something real that could help her understand this guy. He sounded much older. He was making a lot of cultural references and things that he seemed like somebody more educated, probably who had an university education. But it was more than that. The document felt personal, not just scholarly and political. There's a lot of talk about technology and computers and how these are leading to the death of the human race and the tragedy and disaster. But he's talking about how kids are manipulated and controlled by their parents. I said, "He's telling us about him and he doesn't even realize it." Now the interesting thing was that there were a lot of people who thought that the manifesto was total bullshit and that it was a red herring. Didn't meet anything. He was just manipulating law enforcement and the times and everybody else. You didn't feel that way. Well no, why would you feel that way? I mean, a lot of people who made that decision hadn't even given it a read. Why would you make a judgment that something meant nothing if you hadn't even looked at it? A lot of people got excited, none of which was me. Kisnell was one of the senior agents on the Unibom Task Force. He and Kathy were two of the most important agents in the final chapter of the search for the Unibomber. Their personalities and backgrounds were utterly different. Kathy marched against the Vietnam War, spent the 70s in Bell bottoms, joined the FBI's counterintelligence division where she chased Soviet spies and thought from time to time about leaving the Bureau to become a therapist. Max had wanted to fight in Vietnam, but ended up joining the FBI instead. He became a firearms trainer and street agent, infiltrated gangs, locked up mobsters, chased 70s radicals, earned a tough guy nickname from his fellow agents. Mad Max. And Mad Max and spy chasing touchy-feely Kathy saw the manifesto in diametrically opposed ways. To Kathy, it was a window into a man's mind and soul. To Max, it was only useful for the physical evidence it provided. The most interesting thing to me was it was typed on a Smith Corona 1925 to 30 typewriter with Pica-style type with 2.54 spacing. So that was what I got out of it. So when it came down to weighing in on the question of whether to publish the manifesto, Max had a crystal clear opinion. I was against publishing it. I had the traditional view in mind. Namely, you don't give into the demands of terrorists. In this case, why would you? The only thing that mattered was the typeface. Kathy saw it differently. I was very firm in saying, look, we've looked at these words in depth now for weeks. And I said not only is he very, very fixed in his ideas. He has said and written these things to other people before. He had to have expressed this. He's a unique writer. He's a unique guy. He has some interesting ways of saying things. Somebody has to know by looking at these words who this guy is. And that's why I recommended the publication. These two views came to a head in San Francisco. While the Washington Post was trying to figure out what it would do, FBI director Louis Free asked the Univom Task Force for its own recommendation. One of the agents on the Task Force, Max, Kathy, several others held a meeting in late August to decide what to tell the FBI director. At first, Max's view went out. Most of the other agents in the meeting agreed with him. But Kathy kept making her case. And slowly, other agents started to see what she was seeing. That the manifesto was the best lead the investigation it ever had. Even Max would come around, kind of. Once it was presented properly and thought through properly, I supported it. I was not real. Enthused about it. But, you know, I listened to Kathy. In mid-September, with a Univomers 3 Month deadline looming, there was one final meeting at FBI headquarters. On one side of the table were the top decision-makers at the Times and the Post, including Lennon and the other side of the long table were free and Reno surrounded by FBI people, maybe just as department people. Louis Free, the FBI director and Janet Reno, the attorney general of the United States. Everyone waited for Reno to weigh in. She had listened to the Univom Task Force and the FBI director, then made her own decision. She looked at the five newspaper men sitting across from her. And she said, "We would recommend that you print this. We think there is a compelling public safety reason to print it. If you don't print it, there is a likelihood that somebody's going to get killed. You know, this guy has killed people, and there's no reason to think he wouldn't kill others." The owners and editors of the Post and the Times left the meeting and headed to a coffee shop nearby to talk it through. Yeah, we just, we picked the first place we saw. It seems like a very sensitive national security conversation to be having in a public shop. It was empty. It was that time of day. It wasn't too. It wasn't morning and it wasn't lunchtime. They sit down and what Lennon remembers is the sense that the Times wasn't all that sure about following Reno's advice. They seem to be very reluctant to do so. And that's my distinct memories that they just did not want to do this. Because we all knew that there would be criticism of the newspapers for publishing it, for giving it into the Univommer. And I think they wanted to avoid that. Arthur Salisberger, Jr., by the way, says the Times wasn't ambivalent about going forward, that they knew it was the right thing to do. But everyone agreed only one newspaper should publish the manifesto. Don Graham remembers, it just made sense for that to be his paper, not the Times. Printing it in the Washington Post, we had 800,000 daily circulation that Times had a million in change, so it would cost less money, and it would have 200,000 fewer copies of the goddamn thing. So Arthur Salisberger and Don Graham, the publishers of the two biggest newspapers in the country, agreed that they would co-publish a terrorist manifesto. It would appear as a special insert inside the Tuesday, September 19th, 1995 edition of the Washington Post. Both papers ran front page stories explaining the circumstances. The bureau suspected that the Univommer was located in the Bay Area, because several of the bombs had been mailed from there. On the morning of the 19th, they would stake out newsstands, in case the Univommer showed up to buy a copy himself. And even if that operation didn't pan out, there was always the chance that his Kathy Pucket believed someone out there might recognize the Univommer's writing as the voice of someone they knew. I've heard people describe what the Univommer did to the Post and the Times as blackmail. And did it feel like after that decision it made, did it feel like you had given in to blackmail? No. And I never thought of blackmail so much as coercion. I mean, blackmail is minor compared to what the Univommer was saying. Univommer was going to kill people. Tuesday, September 19th, the Washington Post hits the newsstands, industrial society and its future inside every copy nationwide. There's an outcry, which the Post and the Times could see coming from a mile away. How dare you cave to a terrorist and give him this platform. But also, the publication of the manifesto does exactly what the Univommer wants. It starts a conversation. America is wrestling with his ideas. What exactly is the Univommer saying? What does that say about us? It's in Time Magazine, the New Yorker, even the pages of the Washington Post itself. He reflected a sort of odd current that's in our culture just in the past few years, but also goes back for a century, a hatred of technology. Even before the manifesto, it was clear that he didn't like computers. He seemed to be targeting people who had something to do with computers. This is the science writer James Glick talking to TV host Charlie Rose. Fun fact, Glick is apparently the inspiration for the character Jeff Goldblum plays in the movie Jurassic Park, the guy who warns about runaway technology by saying, "You're scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think of they shud." There are a lot of people who aren't making bombs, who share some of those sentiments. We all notice that there are ways in which computers maybe dehumanize us or seem to make our lives drier. So you're saying that his animosity technology is a view that's shared by a lot of people? In a way, yeah, it's shared by all of us. We all look around and we see that automobiles have ruined some parts of human life that used to be much more pleasant. And technology brought us the atomic bomb and gave us the power to destroy our planet. And yeah, it's not just cars or nuclear bombs or even genetically engineered dinosaurs. 1995 is right at the start of a conversation we're still having. The Washington Post didn't even have a full website when it published the manifesto. But it got one less than a year later, which wasn't surprising. Internet use was expanding rapidly. Cellphones are becoming part of many people's daily lives. A lot of people saw all of this as a cause for celebration. Our new tools with democratized society give anyone almost limitless access to human knowledge. Help us stay connected and find new communities. The James Glicks of the World saw a slightly more complicated picture. On Charlie Rose, he said he actually liked technology. I mean, I'm a little embarrassed to admit it. But I'm very much. Are you a pro tech? Yeah, of course. Well, I write a column about technology and I try to write about good things that technology does. And I certainly believe that on balance, it's made our lives better. But Glick thought there were trade-offs and tough decisions about how to integrate new technologies into our lives. The Unibomor, of course, was singularly uninterested in this discussion. He was an extremist. He wasn't interested in nuance or compromise. His view was simplistic and fueled by rage against all aspects of the modern world. In the manifesto, he attacks political correctness. He mocks feminists. He says the American education system is transforming our happy, playful children into dour computer nerds. He says leftists. Hate America. They hate Western civilization. They hate white males. They hate rationality. While at the same time saying he thinks conservatives are fools. And there was something about it. That particular combination of anti-tech argument and wide-ranging disdain. That struck a philosophy professor named Linda Patrick. In the late summer of 1995, she was vacationing in Paris. This was a month or so before the whole manifesto was published. But she was able to read the stories about the essay and the international herald Tribune. Which was owned by the New York Times in the Washington Post. The more quotes from the manifesto she read, the more she thought, "I know who this is." Late that August, her husband David came to join her from their home in Schenectady, New York. When he arrived and saw her waiting at the terminal, he could tell that something was weighing on her. We took a cab from the airport to the apartment she had rented. And, you know, she couldn't restrain herself completely. She said, "David, there's something I've got to talk to you about. It's something terrible." David was jet lagged and Linda told him it could wait. He took a nap. And then when he got up, the two of them went out for a walk. We were kind of alone on that part of the street. And Linda said that this sounded like my brother's ideology. And she wondered if the Unabama might be my brother. And my first reaction was, "Oh, thank God. It's nothing real. It's just, you know, Ted can't possibly be the Unabama." Ted Kaczynski. David's older brother. David and Linda spent the next two weeks trying to have a vacation together, doing the things you do in Paris, eating well, visiting Notre Dame and the Louvre. At night, they'd go back to their apartment and talk. And it gave me a real long time to talk a lot about Ted, to air some feelings about Ted. But at that point, I was pretty darn convinced that he couldn't be responsible for these things because I'd never seen him violent. You know, usually people who are violently anti-social begin at a much younger age. And maybe part of it was denial. I just didn't want to believe it. Not long after they got home to Schenectady, the manifesto was published in its entirety. By the end of the day, it was on the internet. And Linda said, Dave, I really think we should try to find that manifesto. Let's go to the library and see if we could find it. And finally, we found the first six pages online. They sit down in front of a computer at the library at Union College. We're Linda taught. And I'm all set. I'm going to look at that screen and I read the first page. Maybe probably wouldn't take more than that. I'm going to turn to Linda and say, see, I could definitely tell you it's not him. Instead, oh my gosh, my heart started to sink. David was going to have a choice to make. But I remember walking out and I tell her, I think there might be one chance in a thousand that Ted had written it. And then she said, David, one chance in a thousand. I mean, that's significant. Maybe we need to look into this more deeply. This season on Project Unibomb. There was this sound that sounded like a fighter jet going over, so just a massive screech. And the next thing I knew was like 22 feet back. I still think there is more than a shadow of a doubt that there was somebody connected with our group, who knew what our group was doing and was tailoring the bombs to implicate us. I remember asking mom one time, you know, what's wrong with Ted? They treated him as if he was a damaged person. I finally said to the ATF agents, look, if we wanted to kill people, there would be much better ways to do it than a matchstick bomb. Pretty much every divorced woman turned her former husband in as the Unibomber. Any choice we made could lead to somebody's death. Have you heard the term in cell? Oh, yeah. Do you think Kazinsky was in cell? All of a sudden the door to the cabin opened, and this while looking individual, stuck his head and shoulders out of the cabin, and I remember thinking to myself, "My God, that's what we've been looking for all these years." [Music] Project Unibomb is an Apple original podcast produced by Pineapple Street Studios. It's produced by our senior producer, Jonathan M. Hevar, and me, I'm Eric Benson. Our producers are Elliot Adler and Melissa Slotter, edited by Joel Lovell and Maddie Sprung Kaiser. Our fact checker is Sarah Ivery. The episodes were mixed by Davie Sumner, Jason Richards, Elliot Adler, and Jonathan M. Hevar. Studio recording by Brian Standover at the Texas Monthly Studio. Our artwork is by Guillem Casasus, music by Mark Orton and John Hancock. Additional music by Eric Phillips and Jeff Baxter. Legal services for Pineapple Street by Bianca Grimshaw at Granderson Day Rocher. Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky are the executive producers at Pineapple Street. Thanks for listening. 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