Sixteen bombs, seventeen years, three people killed and more than twenty injured - and not one device left anything that could be traced. No fingerprints, no fibres that led anywhere, batteries stripped, parts that looked like roadside junk.
This is a cabin, ten feet by twelve, taken apart in Montana and put back together inside Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington. Everything in it was evidence. The man who built it mailed or placed sixteen bombs over seventeen years, killed three people and injured nearly two dozen, and left nothing on any device that could be traced back to him. What identified him was not evidence.
It was writing. In nineteen ninety-five he offered to stop bombing if a newspaper would print a thirty-five thousand word essay, and the Bureau, after arguing about it, asked the newspapers to print it, hoping somebody would know the voice. Somebody did. His brother's family recognised it, and gave the Bureau letters to compare.
The cabin then produced forty thousand more handwritten pages, and in a small envelope, his own account of every one of the sixteen crimes. This film is in two halves. First, how the Bureau's own people say the case was worked, in their words. Then what the federal courts spent the next fifteen years doing with the pages they took out of that cabin: who owned them, what had to be cut out of them before anyone else could read them, and what they were finally worth to the people he maimed.
The voices are the Bureau's own. Terry Turchie took over the UNABOM task force in nineteen ninety-four; Kathleen Puckett was the agent asked to build a new portrait of the bomber. The Bureau recorded them in twenty twenty-one and published the recording and its transcript. Steve Lewis, FBI: April 3, 1996.
Two FBI agents and a U.S. Forest Service police officer knock on the door of a 10-by-12-foot cabin secluded in the Montana mountains. They’re at the home of Theodore Kaczynski— the man who had become known to the world as the Unabomber. That knock was nearly 20 years in the making: The investigation into Kaczynski had started back in 1978, after he’d left the first of his homemade explosive devices in a parking lot near the University of Illinois in Chicago.
To catch the brilliant recluse who had been disciplined about leaving few clues, the FBI had to rethink its investigative strategies, lean on the media in a new way, and turn to the public for help. It’s been 25 years since the arrest of the man who mailed and placed 16 bombs— three of them deadly. To mark this anniversary, our host, Kristen Fletcher, revisited the case with the FBI leader who helped get those agents to that cabin door and the special agent who got inside the mind of a deadly terrorist. I’m Steve Lewis, and this is Inside the FBI.
The name is an acronym the Bureau gave the case in nineteen seventy-nine. University and airline bombing. The first device was found in a car park at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus on the twenty-fifth of May, nineteen seventy-eight, addressed, stamped, and left on the ground. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: By 1993, some people thought the Unabomber was dead.
He had placed his last bomb in February 1987 in the parking lot of a Salt Lake City computer store. That day, an employee watched a man leave an item near some of the parked cars. The bomber noticed the woman watching him from the window, but he calmly walked away. Minutes later, the store owner’s son pulled into the lot and picked up the item, which looked like boards with nails protruding from the top.
It exploded on contact—sending him to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. That bomb was similar to one left in the parking lot of computer store in Sacramento, California, 15 months earlier. That bomb had killed the store’s owner. After the Salt Lake City bomb, though, six years went by—and nothing.
Perhaps the Unabomber had died or simply decided to stop. But then, on June 22, 1993, a geneticist at the University of California opened a package in his kitchen— and a bomb exploded. Two days later, a prominent computer scientist from Yale lost several fingers to another mailed bomb. Not only was the Unabomber alive, but his campaign of violence was growing more intense.
Several months later, in the early spring of 1994, Special Agent Terry Turchie was happily sitting at a desk in the FBI’s Palo Alto office. He had a view of Stanford’s campus and a portfolio of national security These are pages from the case file itself, released by the Bureau. Laboratory reports on recovered fragments, task force summaries, teletypes between San Francisco and headquarters. The specimens are numbered rather than named, because for seventeen years that is all anyone had: numbered pieces of other people's furniture and scrap wood.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: investigations. Then came an offer from FBI Headquarters that Turchie could not, in fact, refuse: Take over the UNABOM task force. Here’s Turchie recounting that conversation: Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: He said, “When do you think you can be here? How quickly can you get up to San Francisco from Palo Alto?”— which was in the South Bay.
So I said, “Well, Ed, I have a number of things to wrap up, of course, so how about a couple weeks?” And he said, “How about this afternoon at about 2 or 3 o’clock?” And that was pretty much the end of my time in Palo Alto and the beginning of my time on UNABOM. And that 45-minute drive to San Francisco that afternoon was a really long drive. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: Turchie said some good work had already been done on the case. The Bureau had formed the UNABOM task force in 1993 to bring together all of the investigating agencies— including ATF and the Postal Inspection Service— but progress had stalled.
And after nearly a year of examining the bombings— some of which were 10 or 15 years prior— many of the investigators and analysts were looking to move along. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: So, the challenge was time, and the challenge was figuring out how to keep people focused on this case when
Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: their morale was kind of starting to drop pretty considerably. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: Turchie knew he was going to need a new approach. But let’s start with what they did know in 1994. First, the Unabomber was called the Unabomber because universities— that’s the U-N— and airlines— the A— were the early targets of his bombs.
Turchie recounts what he saw in the investigation, so far spanning 16 years and 14 bombs. He begins with the first known UNABOM device. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: The May 1978 bomb was interesting because it was found at the University of Chicago Circle Campus and it had $10 in uncanceled stamps, but it was not mailed. It was just left by a car.
That kind of stood out. The third bomb was interesting because it had been placed on an airplane. Most people don’t realize that almost immediately in the Unabomber’s career, he could have brought down an airplane and killed many people. But that third bomb, which was on that plane in 1979 flying from Chicago to Washington, D.C., simply malfunctioned and didn’t work right.
So that became important to us as well. The fourth bombing was also in the Chicago area. It was mailed to the president of United Airlines at the time, Percy Wood. It was mailed to his house, and it was preceded by a letter.
By 1985, there were four bombs, and they included a mail bomb from Salt Lake to a professor James McConnell at the University of Michigan. The third device was carried aboard American Airlines flight four four four from Chicago to Washington on the fifteenth of November, nineteen seventy-nine. It filled the luggage compartment with smoke and did not work as it was meant to. The aircraft landed.
That is the whole of the margin. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: He was a psychologist. And like the Percy Wood bomb, this bomb was built into a hollowed-out three-ring notebook. And there was a letter, though, with the bomb— this time with the package— and it was a request of Professor McConnell to review a student’s so-called master’s thesis in a topic called the history of science.
This would become so important to us that— I didn't know it, of course, then, but as I was reading all this— that a few months later, it would become one of the discoveries that would start us off on a number of investigative projects that had to do with writing. The fourth and final bomb, of course, in 1985, was the bomb that killed Hugh Scrutton, the owner of Rentech Computer Store in Sacramento, in December of 1985. By 1987, he shows up again at another kind of strip mall computer store called CAAMS, On the twentieth of February, nineteen eighty-seven, an employee of a computer store in Salt Lake City watched a man put something down beside a parked car. He noticed her watching, and walked away.
That account is where the drawing comes from - the hood and the aviator sunglasses. He never placed another device by hand. Everything after it came in the post. FBI photographs: the cabin, the man, and shrapnel from the Salt Lake City bomb.
Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: only this time it’s in Salt Lake City. And once again, kind of a major UNABOM event. The subject is seen by a witness inside the CAAMS store. And this is where the artist rendition comes from— the composite drawing showing the man in the gray hooded sweatshirt and the aviator sunglasses.
After being seen and leaving that bomb also next to a wheel of a car, the bomber dropped out of sight for six years and just kind of disappeared. We heard nothing from him until 1993. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: That’s when the case came alive again, with those two mailed bombs. Turchie made some changes to the task force in consultation with the head of the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: They were going to engage in a deep reinvestigation of each bombing— a process he knew would be long and would feel fruitless and frustrating at times. So he asked everyone to choose another member of the task force to partner with. His thinking was that they could bounce ideas off each other and keep one another’s spirits up. They hired an outside computer consultant to clean up and compile all the data they had into a single database.
That would allow them to better review suspects referred through the tip line. They created a document called UNABOM Known Facts, Fiction, and Theory. And during a regular cycle of meetings, they assessed and reassessed this document— adding and deleting from it as theories were developed, dismissed, and re-evaluated. And they grew the team, often relying on new agents and other personnel who they trained on their own.
Each member was included in every detail of the investigation— regardless of their role. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: Every FBI employee— not just FBI agents— every FBI employee working on this case needs to be at these meetings, and everybody’s opinion counts. So, in other words, we were asking everyone to be highly involved in every aspect of this investigation as far as being in a position to render an opinion or give their ideas and thoughts. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: Central to the re-investigation in Turchie’s mind was to take a fresh look at the bomber himself.
Turchie wanted an updated profile, and he felt Special Agent Kathleen Puckett— who’d been on his counterintelligence squad and was now working toward a Ph.D. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: in clinical psychology—was the person to do it. Here's Kathleen Puckett on the difficulty of creating an extensive portrait of the suspect she described as the most careful serial bomber anyone had ever seen. Kathleen Puckett, FBI: This guy left practically no way to trace back any evidence that was left at the scene— parts of the bombs, components, anything else.
He was a real cipher. The profiling unit usually has a lot of evidence at a scene to review to come up with a profile of an unknown offender. In this case, they had no latent fingerprints, no hair and fibers that led anywhere, not even— even, in some of these devices along the way, the batteries were even stripped. You couldn’t even trace the batteries back to where they were purchased or acquired.
And a lot of the wood and different things looked just like junk that was picked up by the side of the road. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: With the reinvestigation of each crime, however, Kristen Fletcher, FBI: the task force began to piece together more of the bomber’s background. The first device tied to the Unabomer, which had been found in that parking lot in 1978, had clearly been meant for the mail. It was addressed and stamped, and there was a mailbox not far away.
So why was it left on the ground? It was during one of those task force meetings that Turchie threw out the idea that maybe the bomb just wouldn’t fit in the mailbox. To test the theory, they recreated the dimensions of the device and consulted postal records on the size of the mailbox that was at the site in 1978. Sure enough, it would not have fit.
Puckett and Turchie said that small detail— and a closer look at the other early bombings— helped the task force determine that the bomber knew the Chicago area well. They figured he may have lived there and used it as his base early in his bombing campaign. The team also reexamined the few cover letters that had preceded or been attached Kristen Fletcher, FBI: to some of the bombing devices. Given the Unabomber’s caution about leaving physical evidence, those letters were a rare source of needed clues.
One mentioned a book called Ice Brothers that the team went back and read— trying to suss out what messages may have been in the text of the book. He also mentioned a somewhat obscure field of study, called the history of science, in the letter attached to another bomb. It turned out only a few universities offered the history of science as a course of study; Harvard and Princeton were among the few. Puckett said they got another rare glimpse into the mind of the bomber when he started communicating more directly— in 1993, he sent a letter to The New York Times.
Kathleen Puckett, FBI: The letter said, essentially: We are an anarchist group; we are the anarchist group FC. And, you know, by the time you receive this, something significant will have occurred. And then what fascinated me was the statement, “If nothing goes wrong.” And I thought, “Okay, this is the caution. This is the very careful preparation.
He’s older. He’s more speculative. He’s more, he's less— he's more controlled than we initially might have thought he was.” Kristen Fletcher, FBI: Despite what he’d written, they knew the bomber was not part of a group. Then six years of nothing, and in June nineteen ninety-three two packages, two days apart: a geneticist at the University of California, opened in his kitchen; a computer scientist from Yale, who lost several fingers.
In December nineteen ninety-four a package killed an advertising executive at his home in New Jersey. In April nineteen ninety-five another killed the president of the California Forestry Association at his desk in Sacramento. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: No group could stay that tight, that undetectable, for so many years. As 1994 drew to a close, Turchie said the task force was making progress and was feeling more positive as the pieces came together.
But then the investigation hit its low point. In December 1994, a powerful bomb killed an advertising executive in his New Jersey home. His wife and toddler had just left the house when the bomb detonated. In April 1995, another strong device killed the president of the California Forestry Association.
Kathleen Puckett said so much of the focus of the past investigative work had been on trying to find clues by looking at the victims. Were they linked to the bomber? Were they linked to each other? Puckett saw something else.
Kathleen Puckett, FBI: None of the victims knew each other. None of them had anything in common. None of them had been to school together or had a fraternity membership or, you know, worked in business or anything like that. Very, very disparate.
And we thought, you know, he’s picking these people up out things he’s reading. He's not—he doesn’t know any of these people. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: His focus, she believed, was on the deadliness of his bombs— they had grown more sophisticated and dangerous over time. And on his secrecy.
After he was seen in 1987, he disappeared for a number of years and never placed another bomb. The rest were all sent in the mail. Puckett's conclusion was that the victims were not the pattern. They had nothing in common and he did not know any of them.
He was taking them out of what he read. The pattern was the writing.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: He would do anything to avoid being caught. In the summer of 1995, the Unabomber reached out to the media again, this time with an offer: Publish his writings, and he won’t bomb again. He sent several publications a dense, long essay called Industrial Society and Its Future. His manifesto.
The question now in front of the UNABOM Task Force: Do we publish this? The first conclusion was no—we don’t give in to terrorists. There would be no exchange of publication for a thin hope that the violence would stop. But eventually, the UNABOM Task Force changed its mind.
After consulting with FBI leadership and the attorney general’s office, they decided to ask the newspapers to publish it. The reasons were twofold. First, Kathleen Puckett was all but certain that the promise to stop bombing was hollow. She did not believe the Unabomber would stop—or could.
Second, the manifesto, with its unique ideas and very particular phrasing, spelling, and word choices, was going to look familiar to someone. And the writing would help flesh out the other things the task force had learned Kristen Fletcher, FBI: and begun to push out to the public through media announcements. Here’s Turchie again on how they focused the public’s attention after a long string of bombings. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: By now we're telling people it’s not, like, as random as it looks.
The Unabomber had familiarity and a nexus. Chicago, '78 to '80. Salt Lake City, '81 to '82, maybe as late as '85. San Francisco Bay area, from '85 on.
Cory Hall, UC Berkley. That’s a big factor in this. Think of all that, and now look at this composite. Look at this man in 1987 with the gray hooded sweatshirt and the aviator sunglasses.
By the time the manifesto came, the public was actually focused and compartmentalized on this message. So we had now a huge piece to add to this. Somebody would recognize this. Because, first of all, the writings were very passionate, and it was obvious— and Kathy made a big appeal on this in one of our meetings— that there’s no question this man really believes in what he’s writing here.
So, he probably held these beliefs his entire life. And so that became the basis to now put that into the mix. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: The team hoped it was enough. The essay ran as a special section of the Washington Post on the nineteenth of September, nineteen ninety-five.
Over the next five months more than fifty thousand people called the tip line. One call mattered. A lawyer acting for David Kaczynski's family said his client recognised the writing, and sent an essay his brother Ted had written years before. Ted Kaczynski was UNABOM suspect number two thousand four hundred and sixteen.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: That someone would put it all together. Terry Turchie laughs as he recounts a briefing on the case he did for Attorney General Janet Reno. She asked him, “How will you know the Unabomber when you see him from the thousands of other people you get calls on?” To which Turchie somewhat sheepishly responded, “I think we’ll know it when we see it.” And then he held his breath until the attorney general looked back at him and said, “I believe that, too.” The manifesto was published as a special section within the September 19, 1995, edition of The Washington Post. Between publication date and February 1996, well over 50,000 people called the UNABOM tip line.
Only one call ended up being significant. A lawyer representing the family of David Kaczynski called the FBI’s Washington Field Office to say his client recognized some of the writing in the manifesto. He sent an essay his client’s brother, Ted, had written. There were enough similarities in the writing to get the immediate attention of agents.
Ted Kaczynski was UNABOM suspect number 2,416. Born in Chicago, he was a brilliant mathematician who started at Harvard at 16. He went onto get his Ph.D. and taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1971, he bought a small piece of land in Lincoln, Montana, where he moved and began living largely off the land. What the comparison produced was not proof. It was enough for a search warrant. On the third of April, nineteen ninety-six, two agents and a Forest Service officer went up to the cabin with that warrant and nothing else, and with the real possibility that a man this careful had left them nothing to find.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: As the UNABOM task force members learned more about Kaczynski— from his family and from reviewing more of his papers and files and records— they became more and more certain they had the right guy. But on April 3, 1996, they knocked on the door of his Montana cabin with only a search warrant. They would need more evidence to arrest him. And there was a real fear that he was so careful, so smart, so determined to cover his tracks, that they would find no physical evidence to tie him to the crimes.
But Turchie said a quick glance into the cabin that day made it clear that the tiny space was a literal bomb-making factory. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: What was really interesting is on the shelf across the back of the cabin— and this is what struck us when we looked in there— there were these containers, and they were labeled. And one was labeled with the chemical compound for potassium chlorate. And there was sodium chloride—that had its chemical compound labeled number.
There was sugar and zinc and aluminum and lead and silver oxide— all these compounds had shown up in various UNABOM devices. All of them, according to Pat and Don, our explosives guys, could be used to make explosive mixtures. And that wasn’t all. There were other items on the shelves that were literally bomb components.
And they were in, like, Quaker oatmeal cans and things like that. But they consisted of things like pieces of metal and plastic pipe and C-cell Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: batteries and electrical wire. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: They arrested Kaczynski for possessing explosive materials and continued the search over the next several days. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: By the time we were finished the first 24 hours, we had to stop the search because there was a live bomb under his bed, wrapped and essentially ready to mail, except it did not have any address or indicator of where the victim might be or who the victim could be.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: Kathleen Puckett had been right—the Unabomber did not plan to stop. The cabin also held extensive writings that included diary entries on all of his crimes. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: There was a small manila envelope. And in that envelope there were admissions and confessions to all 16 UNABOM crimes in detail.
In some selected notes, he said: I finally was ready to begin my bombing campaign in May of 1978. I had everything ready. I did a great job. I get on the bus.
I go to Illinois. I cover myself. Nobody knows I’m there. I get out there and my bomb doesn’t fit in the mailbox.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: Theodore Kaczynski eventually agreed to plead guilty to all charges. As of this recording, he is 78 years old, serving life in prison with no possibility of parole. He was arrested the next day on a warrant issued in Helena, Montana. The charge on it is not murder.
It is possession of a firearm components from which a destructive device such as a bomb can be readily assembled not registered to him. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: It was a long road, but the work Turchie and his task force did paid off— and with the help of an aware and informed public, they stopped a killer. Terry Turchie, UNABOM task force: And that is the lesson, really, that came out of UNABOM. The way that we organized, and the fact that we never gave up.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: To learn more about the case, visit fbi.gov/unabomber. We have a video of a reconstruction of the Unabomber’s cabin and more details on the case. Also,
He pleaded guilty in January nineteen ninety-eight to all charges. The agreement that spared him the death penalty carries a restitution order of fifteen million and twenty-six thousand dollars. Against it, the government recovered seven thousand and twenty-five dollars by selling his interest in the Montana land. Everything else taken from the cabin stayed in federal custody: the tools and the chemicals, the typewriters, the clothes, and the paper.
Seven years after the plea, he asked for the paper back, and in June two thousand five that request was argued in front of three judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The court recorded it. This is that recording.
Good morning, Your Honor, John Balazs. On behalf of Ted Kaczynski, I'm sharing my time with Chris Durbin, who represents amici. I'm going to handle the property issues and the First Amendment issues as it relates to Mr. Kaczynski right to disseminate information.
Mr. Durbin is going to handle the issue of the originals versus the copies, as well as the First Amendment rights of other individuals. The issues here Do you wish to reserve any time for rebuttal because the sheet says that you're taking 12 and he's taking Yes, and I wish to reserve two minutes and Mr. Durbin wishes to reserve one minute if that's possible So you've got ten minutes Thank you The issues at the core here are relatively simple and straightforward but they're very important not only to Mr.
Kaczynski but as well to a lot of similarly situated defendants in the sense that they have property that is seized by the government, but at the end of their criminal case they may have a fine or restitution order and what disposition of that property takes place. The general law, the basic principle, is clear that when the case is over and the property is no longer used for evidence or possibly used for evidence, The lawyer speaking for him is John Balazs. The government's position, argued by an assistant United States attorney, was that the property was covered by the restitution lien, and that its value outside the case was negligible and that the government intended to buy it itself, at a price it would work out, rather than sell it to the public. it's returned to the defendant unless the government has an overriding interest in it.
In this case, the overriding interest that they've asserted is that they have a restitution lien that covers all of Mr. Kaczynski property either at this time or futurely required. that is not sufficient to override Mr. Kaczynski interest in the property for the primary reason is because they are not using any of the property to obtain restitution in order to pay the victims.
Under the government's proposal, the victims will obtain no money whatsoever from any of Mr. Kaczynski property. and that is true under the case law as well as under the statute section 3613C that talks about restitution liens as well as the cases Mills, Lavin and Duncan cited in the government's brief all refer to using property selling property that would be returned money that would go to the victims And all three of those cases cited by the government involved actual cash that the government seized, applied to the restitution order, and presumably the money was returned to the victims. Well, there was a plea agreement here, right?
Yes. And the plea said something about not profiting from the crime, And this is a very famous talent here. So what is the relevance of that? The plea agreement, I believe, supports our position.
The plea agreement states, there's a provision in it that states that if Mr. Kaczynski receives any money in terms of any interviews, writings, any artifacts, any memorabilia, that he is to return that money over to the government in order to satisfy the restitution order, presumably, again, to go to the victims. Correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that, and this may be a question that goes to your co-counselor, amici.
Tell me who it is. My understanding is that Mr. Kaczynski has a copy of some or all of the materials that he wants back. Is that correct?
It's true. Apparently his contention is there are some of the pages that were badly copied or have been damaged or whatever. Yeah, let me just flesh out the question, finish out the question, and that to the extent there's a gap between what he has and what the government has, the government is willing to make copies or allow copies to be made so that Mr. Kaczynski or his counsel will have a full and complete copy of what's in the government's possession.
Is that right? They've said that, yes. And is there any indication that they don't intend to do that if asked? No.
But there's a big practical problem. There's two problems. One is the importance of the originals versus the copies. But second, there's approximately, we believe, about 7,000 to 8,000 pages of documents at issue, over 1,000 pages of his journals, and thousands of other pages of other writings, letters, correspondence to family and friends, as well as letters and correspondence from other families and friends.
When this issue started getting rolling, Mr. Kaczynski asked his counsel, the Federal Defender's Office, for a copy of all the materials they had received from the government. These materials were given to him, given to an agent for him, in a large number already at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library. Mr.
Kaczynski believes there's a large number that is still missing. There's a large number that are illegible or cut off in some way. It is impracticable in this situation for Mr. Kaczynski to compare the originals to the copies to determine if everything is there because he's not able in his prison cell to review that large quantity of documents.
It's really impracticable for me. It's your office that has this stuff, right? Well, I'm now a solo private practitioner. The Federal Defender's Office has this stuff.
Okay, the FPD has these copies, right? I spoke with a legal assistant at the Federal Defender's Office. They told me that when Mr. Kaczynski asked for it, they made the decision to give him what they had of these documents in terms of the stuff that was seized from his cabin.
Why can't either you or the FPD or whoever his counsel happens to be assist him in the process of making his set of copies complete? We can do that, but it's going to take an extraordinarily amount of time to do that. A large number of documents are at the University of Michigan library. They are understaffed.
They said they don't really have the time and the situation to take that kind of task under hand. It would be difficult for a court of law. But they would be happy to have the originals? They would like the originals.
They don't have the staff to determine whether a set of copies is complete, but they do have the staff to collate the originals? Well, yes, if they're given a complete set of the originals, they could put all the originals materials together and available for the public. But to compare their boxes of materials that they have now to a complete set, I mean, it would be very difficult, very time-consuming to do. It could take, you know, weeks.
MS. But, counsel, I guess what I don't understand, and I must be missing something, What does anybody want to do with these materials? What do researchers, historians want to study them? The historians and researchers want to study them.
So that, it seems to me, would be a good reason for keeping them where they are. Right now, they're in some, the original documents are in some FBI storage room. No one has access to them. The copies, some subset of the entire set, were given to Mr.
Kaczynski and some are at the University of Michigan Library. The copies? The copies. And what is the, what's the FBI, the government, as far as this record shows, What's the government going to do with the originals?
Keep them in storage. Make them available to historians? Is there any record on that? The government has never stated that they would make the originals available to historians, researchers, et cetera.
Okay. Do you want to? I do want to, at least maybe in the minute or two left before I save time for rebuttal, talk about the idea that Mr. Kaczynski, the government's idea and the district court's idea, somehow profits from having his property returned to him or his papers sent to the University of Michigan Library.
I think the paramount value here of importance should be to get the highest value of restitution to the victims. Mr. Kaczynski does not profit in any monetary sense. He does not receive any money.
If he did receive any money, it would have to be returned over to the victims to pay for restitution. The cases the government cite are really non-analogous because they involve situations where someone who, a killer, is trying to collect on life insurance policies or something, proceeds in that sense. So in that sense, they are directly profiting from the crime. But in this case, Mr.
Kaczynski in no way does profit from the crime. And also the cases cited by the government, in fact, allow for the proceeds of crime, if in any sense it could be considered proceeds of a crime, to use their celebrity value rather than their pre-crime value. They are allowed to be applied towards restitution, And both in Lavin and Duncan, they did that. And I will save my remaining time.
Thank you. Mr. Durbin. Good morning, Your Honors.
May it please the Court, Chris Durbin for amici Parties, the Freedom to Read Foundation, and the Society of American Archivists. Your Honors, I was going to start with the First Amendment contours of the public's right of interest, but given the panel's questions, I'd like to turn right away to the issue of the value of the originals and the value of the government turning over the originals to the University of Michigan Library. Now, this all ties in with the restitutionary interest that the government has asserted but essentially ignored over the last several years. And the question is really whether the record demonstrates an intent by the government to make these materials available and to preserve them in accordance with archival standards if they do simply retain the materials.
I submit the record demonstrates no such intent. Well, your position is that they ought to be preserved. Indeed. Yeah.
That they ought to be both. There's two goals here. One is preservation in accordance with archival standards. The second is full public access so that scholars and members of the public that are interested can study these original materials in a way that doesn't impinge on their rights to do so.
Now, in addition to the inaction that the government has demonstrated over the last several years in not making any moves towards satisfying the restitutionary order in place here, you also have their arguments both below and on appeal to demonstrate that their motivation for their action is not related to the restitutionary interest but to a punitive interest, both a desire to prevent this undocumented psychic benefit to Mr. Kaczynski but also a simple distaste for Mr. Kaczynski attempt to reach an audience. Below, for example, the government argued that Kaczynski simply wants to justify what he's done in social protest.
They've argued that... See, that kind of interest can be satisfied by copies as well as originals. Well, the message of social protest, as far as the words on the page, could conceivably be satisfied by the simple words on the page of a photocopy. But the information to which the public has a right of access, writ large, is not simply just the words on the page.
It's the contextual aspects and three-dimensional aspects of the documents, the paper used, the type of ink, the condition and age of the paper itself, bindings, loose leaves, all of these sorts of contextual and environmental clues that to the trained researcher and scholar provide insights into the environment and the age and the conditions under which these words were written. And given, you know, certainly what Mr. Kaczynski done is reprehensible, but it's hard to deny that as a historical figure there's at least some historical interest here. And given that, the conditions in which he wrote much of his materials in this tiny one-room cabin in Montana, it's hard for anybody to say that over time the provenance of those documents will hold no interest for scholars and historians.
And to the extent that there is a question about whether there will be a historical or scholarly interest in these original documents over time, the First Amendment would have that determination be made by the public and by scholars and by researchers rather than the government in this case. And accordingly, amici's concern here is that the stated restitutionary interest that the government has relied on is just a pretext for both a distaste for Kaczynski attempt to reach an audience and an attempt to deny this psychic benefit that has no reasonable relation to the restitution order. Now, as to the public's First Amendment rights itself, of course, that's drawn from a number of straightforward First Amendment rights. And this Court and the Supreme Court have consistently recognized where government action impinges on the individual rights of litigants, there's nearly always a corresponding public right of access to that information that's correspondingly impinged.
And in this case, while John Balazs is able to argue Mr. Kaczynski First Amendment rights to publish and to express his ideas, the public's corresponding rights to access of that information is similarly impinged here. I guess as I listen to you, I can see why an original is more valuable. So I'm not sure I can see why the First Amendment interest in an original is so much greater.
The interest in the ink and the paper and things like that are usually directed at determining whether something is an original, because as an original, it has real value. And that's why we look at the ink and the paper and so on. And that kind of value strikes me more as a property interest than it does a First Amendment interest. Your Honor, it depends on how you define the information to which the public has a right of access.
Certainly in paintings, the original is, there's a First Amendment value in an original, I imagine, other than a print. The question, though, is whether there's a significant distinction to be made between an original of, at least generically whether there's a distinction made between an original of a piece of art and of a historic document millions of Americans every year could go online and see a reasonable facsimile of the Declaration of Independence but there's a reason why they travel to the National Archives to see the original that's just a piece of paper one of the originals there are several there's presidential libraries where original papers of presidents are housed as well and while anybody could get a photocopy of it there's a provenance and an aura of the original that adds value that constitutes information to which the public has a right of access. If the materials were ordered returned to Mr. Kaczynski, is there any limit on what he could do with them?
In other words, could Mr. Kaczynski take them and simply hold on to them in his prison cell or in some storage facility? Tread them. It seems that if Mr.
Kaczynski were to receive the originals back to him, that would remove the element of state action that really implicates the First Amendment here. The reason why, amici, you're interested in this case, though, primarily, is that Mr. Kaczynski has evidence and intent to provide these original materials to the library where they'll be made available. Now, certainly, they will be Mr.
Kaczynski property, and in the event that he takes them back, he would be able to do with them as he pleases. No binding and forcible restraint on their use. We would, as a Miki, we would certainly do our best to make sure and implore on him the importance of these, at least as regards the public's right to evaluate them for historical or scholarly input. But again, the primary concern here is the government action of sitting on these in spite of strong interest in a restitution order.
Okay, thank you. You have three minutes left. Thank you, Your Honor. Good morning, Your Honors.
May it please the Court. My name is Ana Maria Martel. I'm an assistant United States attorney, and I'm here representing the United States and the victims of Mr. Kaczynski crimes.
And as the Court has noted, there is no First Amendment issue here, Your Honors. The United States has consistently told, gave all of these documents to Mr. Kaczynski defense counsel in the criminal case. When they pointed out to us that some of those documents are improperly copied or maybe some pages are missing, I have consistently told John Balazs, come and copy anything you want.
If John Balazs or Mr. Kaczynski or the federal defenders or the University of Michigan want to come and copy them, they may come and copy them. So we are in no way trying, in fact, as counsel admitted, Mr. Kaczynski has already given many of those copies to the library.
He has generated a lot of correspondence in writing since he has been incarcerated, and we have not, the United States has not in any way tried to limit his freedom of expression or the limit of people's interest. Getting copies of these things. That's right. Well, I just am mystified about what you want to do with them.
Your Honor, we have a restitution lien. We're not just talking about documents here. Do you want to sell this stuff? I know, there's stuff from the cabin, I understand.
There's everything from the cabin. There's bomb-making materials. There's used clothing. What the United States wants to do is what secured creditors do.
We want to redeem. We basically want to sell them and give the proceeds to the – We want to sell the proceeds, and we want to do this in a commercially reasonable way of doing it. But you've told us repeatedly that these things have no value. Mr.
Kaczynski and his attorney have told us that they have no value. No, no, no, no, no. You, the United States government, has consistently taken the position in this litigation that these items have no value. We have taken the position that their extrinsic value is negligible.
And that is what the court found. In fact, in terms of a measurement of value, your theory is that they ought to be looked at pre-notoriety, right? Correct. Yes, Your Honor.
But you want to sell them for notoriety value. No, we don't. Well, then what? No, no, no.
Let me explain, Your Honors, and I think you will have less trouble than Mr. Ballast had with this. The court below is sitting as a court of equity. There is a very longstanding principle of American and English jurisprudence that criminals may not profit from their crimes.
Mr. Kaczynski certainly understood this, and in his motion, in his Rule 41 motion, he said, if you pay my debt to someone else, you are giving me the money. We said, fine, this is his property. Let's look at his property as if this were John Doe's property.
What is this property worth? If we sold it at a garage sale, we would get very little for this property. Okay? Mr.
Kaczynski, because he's an infamous criminal, is not entitled to have this property sold with great fanfare as the memorabilia of the Unabomber. What the judges kept returning to is the arithmetic of that. If the property is worth nothing, nothing reaches the victims. If it is worth something, it is only worth it because of who wrote it.
The government's answer was that a criminal may not profit from his crimes; the bench's answer was that paying his debt with his own property is not profit, and that refusing to sell it keeps money away from the people it was meant for.
Well, then how are you going to draw down the... That's exactly the issue, Your Honor. As a secure... There's an answer to this.
Article 9, Section 504 of the Uniform Commercial Code tells secured creditors how they may dispose of collateral in their possession when there is an outstanding debt that is in default. And this is the situation that we have here. If I understand you correctly, what you want to do is have some sort of a sale, secured creditor sale, and specify that it's worthless. No, we want to have a private sale, and we want to pay something.
Initially, we were going to give him a credit, and then they were correct. They pointed out if all he gets is a credit, there's no benefit to his victims. So we will pay money, and this is how we're going to measure how much we will. Do you put it on eBay?
No, no, no, no, no. What we're going to do is we're going to, the United States is going to figure out how much it would cost us to hold a garage sale. Somebody would have to be paid to hold this garage sale, to organize all these materials. We will figure out the time and cost to the United States.
We will also figure out the time and cost to the United States of holding it as a sale under the Federal Debt Collection Procedure Act, and whichever amount is greater, we will pay to the clerk of the court for the benefit of Kaczynski victims. Now, once the property is ours, there's all these allegations that we're going to do terrible things to us. There's nothing on the record to that effect. And if your court, if the court, yes.
I just didn't catch that. You're going to have this sale. You're going to figure out how much. You're not going to actually have this sale.
We're going to do a private sale, Your Honor. Yeah. Section, Article 9, Section 504 of the Uniform Commercial Code allows private sales if the value of the property is known. In this case, what we said to the magistrate judge and to the district court below is tell us how much this stuff is worth.
Tell us how much it's worth, and we will pay that. You know how you tell how much a celebrity value item is worth? You sell it in an auction. You can't tell what it's worth without that.
But you can't do that in a court of equity, Your Honors. He is a criminal. He doesn't get the money. The victims get the money.
But, Your Honor, his debt is paid down. Let me quote to you what Mr. Kaczynski himself said on that issue. If your honors would look at the supplemental excerpts on the record at page 103, Mr.
Kaczynski is discussing selling his property. He admitted that his property was of negligible value if it did not have a celebrity premium. and Kaczynski quoted Black Law's dictionary that a party who has a debt paid for him is in the same position as though the money were paid to him directly. And if the United States were to sell this at a celebrity auction and pay down his debt, his restitution debt, the money would in fact be benefiting Kaczynski.
That means if you had confiscated four billion bars of gold from him, you couldn't sell it for the benefit of the victims because it would reduce his restitution debt. And therefore he would profit. Four billion bars of gold have intrinsic value. This stuff has intrinsic value.
And he would profit when you sold them. That's the argument you just made. He would profit if he gets a celebrity premium. He does not profit any more than if, when he sold the land, the land in Montana, he valued in his CJA application at between $6,000 and $7,500.
This makes absolutely no sense. Skaczynski sold the land after his conviction. You are reducing his debt either way. Yeah.
He is profiting by the way you define profit. Now, he's got such a huge restitution debt that he's never going to get out from under it. All you're doing is keeping victims from getting money. Counsel, let me ask a little differently.
In what little spare time I have, I like to read about history and psychology. It would seem to me that this material has a great deal of value, not like gold bullion, but to historians and psychologists to see what was in that little cabin and what he wrote, how he wrote it, the scribbles, what's on it, all this. I don't understand why the government, since you don't want to sell it at celebrity value and reduce his debt because you say that's a profit, why the government wishes to lock this away in a safe someplace and do nothing with it. Your Honor, if the United States has this property in its possession, we can control that it's not stolen, that it's not misused.
That doesn't mean that scholars... I'm not necessarily saying that you can't keep it locked up in a safe someplace. I'm just saying why would you want to do that when there are people who may be able to contribute to the fund of human knowledge and understanding of desperate psychological problems by examining this stuff? But why is the court assuming that if the United States keeps it, these scholars will not be able to examine it?
Can I ask this question? What's the government's restitution plan, and where would I go to find it? I'm sorry? What is the government's restitution plan, and where would the court go to find it?
The restitution plan, Your Honor? Yes. But in terms of being written someplace? Yeah.
You've described what you want to do. Have you set down anywhere in writing or otherwise what the government's plan is? In other words, we plan to have a private sale in a month, five months, five years, 15 years. We're going to do it in this method, that method.
Where is that plan? That plan is not in writing, Your Honor. Does it exist? It does.
Where, in your head? In discussions in my office. And the reason we have not taken more concrete action is because Mr. Ballast asked us not to do anything while the issue was pending.
Once the district court decided for us what the value of the property was, we were free then to proceed to execute on a restitution lien. We have not done so. We will follow the steps that creditors follow. We will let Mr.
Kaczynski know how much we're paying for his property, and when we're purchasing it, we will then deliver a check to the clerk of the court, and the property will be turned over to the FBI. There is nothing. I know the court is troubled by this, but there is nothing on the record that shows that if it is turned over to the FBI and it becomes possession of the United States, it will be kept from scholars. Taxpayer, I'm a little bit offended.
In other words, what you're going to, instead of selling this so that some private buyer pays money in that can be used to restore to the victims, the government's going to buy this and just spend some taxpayer's money to give to the victims. I don't understand this. Your Honor, there is, the United States is very concerned about the equity in this matter. And equity says that he may not profit.
Victims don't get compensation. Your Honor, some of the victims do not want this stuff to be sold at celebrity value. Is that in the record? No, it's not, Your Honor.
Were you asked during the proceedings before the magistrate judge or before the district court to provide a restitution plan? No, I was not. We're following very standard commercial practice. Right, like it's a used car.
But unlike a used car, Your Honor, it will go to the FBI, and the FBI knows how to handle these materials. The case that they relied on below, the Black Hills case, which involved bones of dinosaurs, that dinosaur is on display today and available to scholars and to the public, and the court, the Eighth Circuit, found that it belonged to the United States. So there is an assumption here that we're going to do something terrible, and I don't think there's anything on the record that justifies that assumption. Thank you.
There's nothing on the record to suggest what you are going to do. Because that was not part of the Rule 41 motion. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Just a couple of very brief points, Your Honors. What is on the record as far as the government's intention? All we have are their arguments below and on appeal that they don't like the idea of Kaczynski justifying his crimes in social protests, that they don't like the idea of his, quote, message of hate and violence seen in the light of day.
They don't think, based on extra record speculation, that the victims want these things published. Well, in a prior appeal in this case, it may be instructive that this court said that releasing a psychological profile of Kaczynski to the public would aid the interests of justice by informing the public about Kaczynski motivations for these crimes. It would seem that original source materials of Kaczynski conceived of and executed at the time that he was committing these crimes would at least hold a modicum of similar appeal for the public. Secondly, as to the restitutionary value, the government has consistently argued that the papers themselves, at least, are valueless and that they're concerned with the sensationalism that they think might attend a public auction of these for quote-unquote celebrity value.
If those are really the two concerns here, it would seem the donation of these materials to a scholarly facility like the University of Michigan would work no harm to a restitutionary interest that they state can't be satisfied by these papers and would avoid the sensationalism that would attend a public trial. And finally, the restitution statute here was passed and noted in the Mills case that, first of all, the restitutionary interest should work no constitutional harm, and second, that the materials ought be kept only if needed to justify the restitutionary interest. They've not shown that's the case, sir. Thank you, Your Honor.
Very briefly. Two brief points. First of all, this is the first time today after numerous briefs before the magistrate judge in the district court that the government has ever said they have any restitution plan, any intention to actually give money to the victims. With respect to that plan, the accepted regular practice is to follow the procedures for enforcing tax liens, as the magistrate judge suggested in his order, which is to make the property available to the highest bidder either at auction or sealed bids, which would provide the most amount of money to the victims for restitution, if that's the real interest.
The statute specifically says that if the property does not have enough value to receive more than the cost of the auction or the procedure, that you can't even levy on the property or the property's return to the person. And just finally, Mr. Kaczynski, over a number of years, has continually expressed his intention to get these papers out. So I don't think there's a real concern that if the court does order all his property returned to him, even though I think he has a right to do with it as he wants, that he will do anything other than present it to either the University of Michigan Library or some other appropriate library or university.
Okay. Thank you, Counsel. The case just argued is submitted. That concludes the Court's calendar for this morning, and the Court stands adjourned.
The court ruled a month later. It sent the case back and told the government to put a plan in writing: dispose of the property in a commercially reasonable manner calculated to maximise the return to the victims and their families. Kaczynski and the victims were to be allowed to comment on it. The victims filed their comment in July two thousand six.
They did not object to the sale. They asked for four classes of writing to be cut out of it first: anything identifying a victim or describing their injuries; anything identifying an intended future victim; every diagram and schematic of bomb-making and the experiments behind it; and anything that instructed a reader how to commit crimes. The Victims' Statement Concerning Auction of Defendant's Property, 7 July 2006. The Bureau could do it quickly because it had already built an electronic database of his writings, with subject indices, for the trial.
Under sixty days, it estimated. What had been built to convict him was now used to decide which of his sentences the public was allowed to buy. The plan for the sale, adopted by the district court, 10 August 2006. Exhibits: the photographs and writings to be sold, 4 August 2006.
The sale took another four years to arrange, most of it spent on a question he kept raising: whether the copy he was given was complete and legible, and how he was to check it against the originals from a cell. The court eventually took his own second proposal the government would keep an unredacted copy for a year so missing pages could be replaced. Orders on redaction, copies and the sale, E.D. Cal., 2010.
On the third of November, two thousand ten, the United States reported that the redaction was finished and that six boxes of documents had been delivered to the auctioneer. The sale ran on the internet in the spring of two thousand eleven. The Ninth Circuit recorded the result in a later order: two hundred and thirty-two thousand, two hundred and forty-six dollars, for the victims. The restitution order it was paying down was fifteen million and twenty-six thousand.
U.S. Marshals Service: the property sold to pay the victims, photographed as evidence. In May two thousand eleven he asked the court to stop the government disposing of the rest of the evidence the property lists, the chemical analyses, the powders and mixtures, his coded writings - because, he said, they would show whether cyanide was ever found in his cabin. The motion was denied.
Amended Order Denying Motion for Retention of Evidence, 23 May 2011.
The cabin was not sold. The Bureau kept it, and in twenty twenty rebuilt it inside its own headquarters, in a room with a floor plan drawn from the search photographs. The case also rebuilt part of the Bureau. The task force had put criminal investigators and counterintelligence people in the same room, and that mixture became the template for the counterterrorism division set up in two thousand.
The thing it was built to find - one person, no group, no communications to intercept - is what the Bureau now calls the lone offender. Steve Lewis, FBI: Previously on Inside the FBI, we looked back at the investigation that led to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber— one of the nation’s most notorious domestic terrorists. When the FBI closed the UNABOM case in 1996, it didn’t tuck it away in a closet. The investigation taught us lessons that are still evident in today’s FBI.
The UNABOM task force brought together personnel from counterintelligence and criminal investigations, a successful combination that helped inform the makeup of the FBI’s dedicated counterterrorism unit when it was created in 2000. The Unabomber also helped the FBI better understand the lone offender— a threat that has continued to grow in the decades since his arrest. On today’s episode, we’ll discuss the current counterterrorism landscape and how the FBI is always working to stay ahead of the threat. I’m Steve Lewis, and this is Inside the FBI.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: For many of us, the word terrorism calls up memories of specific events. We think about the Unabomber’s mailed explosives. We remember that gaping hole in the federal building in Oklahoma City. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: We replay those images of the World Trade Center’s collapsing.
And then what you see after one of these tragedies is the response— the investigation. Jill Sanborn was the assistant director of the Counterterrorism Division and recently took on the role as the executive assistant director of the National Security Branch. She says that investigating events like those after they happen is something the FBI is very good at. Jill Sanborn, FBI: Everybody knows that we’re the premier law enforcement agency in the country, if not the world, and we can put any of the puzzles back together after an attack.
We can figure out who did it and take that case to court. We’ve done it and shown our success in the time and time and time again. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: But what you don’t see is how the FBI works the threat every single day to prevent violence. Sanborn says that means never focusing on one threat at the expense of another and never, ever getting complacent.
Jill Sanborn, FBI: What the American people need to rely on us for is what are we doing to prevent the next attack, and I think that’s really important because that requires not only an embracement of intelligence, but it also requires us to be imaginative and creative and challenge ourselves. We all come up with analytical assessments that maybe were true yesterday that are different than today, and we all have ways in which we think terrorists could attack, but they could get creative in their thoughts and plans. And we need to be equally as creative. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: For those of us who are not counterterrorism experts, the threat from foreign terror groups is perhaps an easier one to understand.
Foreign terrorism has its roots overseas. It is inspired, funded, or directed by groups the U.S. government has identified as foreign terrorist organizations. Domestic terrorism can feel harder to define.
And it can leave us puzzled about why one crime is ruled domestic terrorism and another isn’t. So, we asked Jill Sanborn to help clarify that for us. Jill Sanborn, FBI: First, I’d start by saying domestic terrorism is defined by statute. So, it’s not the FBI’s definition of domestic terrorism, but actually the U.S.
Code. It’s not always that clear cut whether this is a domestic terrorism act or not. Particularly, if an individual dies in an attack, there may always be questions about why someone mobilized to violence on the day they chose to mobilize. But that’s another reason it’s so important that we, we here at the FBI, focus on the act or threat of violence, because that’s actually what we have to work to prevent in the future.
Kristen Fletcher, FBI: The statute Sanborn references is part of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. It says essentially this: Domestic terrorism means activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that violate our criminal laws. But those acts must also appear to be aimed at intimidating or influencing a civilian government or population.
Sanborn stresses that the intent of the violence is really important. But that intent is also what makes domestic terrorism more challenging for the Bureau. Because we don’t police belief—any belief. Jill Sanborn, FBI: So, I think when people think about free speech and then how the FBI stays ahead of the threat and protects us from threats of violence is really important, because the FBI has a dual-headed mission.
And a lot of people don’t probably understand that. They understand that our mission is to protect America and the American people, but equal is our mission to uphold the Constitution. Not one is more important than the other, but they’re both important at the same time. So, dual and simultaneous, is what we like to say.
Seventeen years of it came down to a document. Not the bombs, not the components, not the seventeen years of laboratory work on numbered fragments. The writing identified him, the writing convicted him, and the writing was what was left to sell. Kristen Fletcher, FBI: be sure to listen to part two of this series as we dig into how the UNABOM case has affected the FBI’s counterterrorism work, what the terrorism threat looks like today, and how the FBI is working to prevent future attacks.
Special thanks to Terry Turchie— the former deputy assistant director of the FBI Counterterrorism Division— and Kathleen Puckett, who was a founding member of the FBI National Security Division’s Behavioral Analysis Program. Both are now retired from the FBI. This has been a production of Inside the FBI. I’m Kristen Fletcher with the Office of Public Affairs.
Thanks for listening.
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