Robert Graysmith - Unabomber: A Desire to Kill

Books by Robert Graysmith

Zodiac

The Sleeping Lady

Auto Focus*

Unabomber

The Bell Tower

Zodiac Unmasked

Amerithrax*

The Laughing Gorilla

The Girl in Alfred Hitchcocks Shower

Black Fire

Audio Books

Zodiac

Zodiac Unmasked

Black Fire

* at end of book .

UNABOMBER: A Desire to Kill

A Monkeys Paw Publishing, Inc. book / published in arrangement with the author.

PRINTING HISTORY

Regnery edition published 1997

Berkley edition published 1998

Monkeys Paw edition published 2021

Copyright 1997, 1998, 2021 by Robert Graysmith.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review.

Maps and illustrations by Robert Graysmith

Cover design by Aaron Smith

ISBN: 978-1-7365800-0-4

Monkeys Paw Publishing, Inc.

Los Angeles, CA

www.monkeyspawpublishing.com

The "Monkey Paw" design is a trademark of Monkey's Paw Publishing, Inc.

v1.01

For Aaron

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Penny Wallace for sixteen years of constant inspiration, my best and always friend. I am especially indebted to Shane Salerno, Detective Robert Bell, Mark Potter of the San Francisco Bomb Squad, and George and Carol Blowars, the nicest couple in Lincoln. Special thanks for help in the preparation of this book belong to Erica Rogers, David Dortman, Marja Walker, Jennifer Azar; Harry Crocker; Greg Muellei; Patricia Bozell, Christopher Briggs, Jed Donahue, Sandy Callender; and Karen Zach Peck.

Finally, I owe sincere thanks to Richard Vigilante, a fine and sensitive editor, and to Alfred Regnery for asking the most important question a publisher ever put to meWhat is the moral core of this book?

INTRODUCTION

FOOTSTEPS OF FIRE TRACED THE SNOW along the Great Divide. In pursuit, the FBI padded behind, hounds after the fox. But at each shadowed spot that touched upon the wilderness, around each bend of jagged rock, their quarry vanished as completely as if he had never been. FC was the man everyone saw, few recalled, and no one knew.

A complicated and fractured individual, his goal was simplicity itself. All FC desired was to change the world, to slay technology and arrogant science, to plunge America back into the wildernessto usher in his own Age of Wood. His desire was to kill. A certified genius, in these pursuits he was inexhaustible.

Endlessly, the Bureau tracked the most elusive criminal they had ever encountered. It took the longest, most complex and costly (over sixty million dollars and still climbing) manhunt in the nations history more than seventeen years to play itself out under the Big Sky of Montana at the door of a secluded cabin.

Why couldnt the combined might of three powerful federal agencies and the consolidated intellect and experience of numerous local and state police forces crack this enigma? In the case of monolithic agencies, the timeless human failings of envy, pride, and sloth all played their part. As usual one agency failed to cooperate with another, or so the other said. Important information was not passed on, tribal chieftains protected their kingdoms, men anxious for glory set out to make certain they got credit for bringing down FC, or the Unabomber as he became known. But these human failings impede all big investigations, including successful ones. Mistakes were made, but in the end the problem with the hunt was the prey.

He was a shadow barely seen and never heardor many shadows. The FBI file actually contemplated that the prey might be not one man but many complex individuals. He was a chameleon eluding the police because he kept his own counsel and each day became something new. It was hard to fault the authoritiesthere had never been anything like him before. The Unabomber himself was not one but many bombers. The Junkyard Bomber, fashioning his deadly devices from abandoned household junklamp cord and fishing wire, used screws and scrap woodcame first. Then there was the Airline Bomber, who sought to bring down a jetliner filled with screaming passengers through the simple workings of a household barometer.

The University Bomber targeted brilliant professors at UC Berkeley, but left his devices as cunning lures to those curious or gullible enough to disturb them. He was the Good Samaritan Bomber, disguising his bombs to look like road obstacles and drawing those goodhearted individuals to remove them in order to protect others. The first man to do this died horribly. He was The New York Times Bomber, selecting his targets specifically from those leaders in computer science and genetics recently profiled in that newspaper. And finally he was UNABOM, the man no one could stop. In the end the FBI was no closer to catching him than in the beginning. Only their final and desperate strategy, to encourage the bomber to explain himself and to finally involve the public in the chase, would prove the Unabombers undoing.

Though I fought against writing about such a famous case, it drew me into its web. Had there ever been a story this good? As powerful? A brothers anguish at his terrible decision against family loyalty, another mans chilling loneliness, the smashed lives and ruined careers, and amidst it all the howling winds of Gods Country, the cloistered life of the university, and the golden sun light of the Continental Divide. A story biblical in proportions ran with currents as deep as the Blackfoot River as it rushed nearby that lonely shack. The cabin, a little wooden box, had been fashioned after Thoreaus dwelling at Walden Pond. The Hermit quoted Thoreau and set out to live by his tenets, but somehow got it all twisted.

He got a lot of terror out of a cabin that had no electricity or running water. The Unabomber spread fear from coast to coast, striking at airlines, universities, computer stores, geneticists, Nobel recipients, great scholars and psychologists, computer geniuses, and people whod either crossed his path or crossed him. All were targeted in the bombers mind, with a logic of overwhelming clarity. But his logic overwhelmed his pursuers, who could find no motive, not even the motive of a madman, and finding no motive, perceiving no mind, they could never, never find the man.

Surely he was mad; but just as surely he was a genius. The bomber was so rare a genius that even his madness never exposed him.

The story of the Unabomber is THE great mystery story, one not only for our time but one for the next century. There has never been anyone like him before, probably never will be again. He was the last person anyone would expecta Thoreau with bloodstained hands.

Probably I will never erase those images from my minda mountain cabin gone walking, the seemingly dull-witted town Hermit, a gold mine that brings pollution to a beautiful river, and, of course, the Professor, ripped from the pages of Joseph Conrads novel The Secret Agent . He strides, legs moving like the opening and closing of scissors, head down and brooding, dreaming of the perfect detonator. But the strongest image is of those beautiful carved wooden boxes. Inside are cunningly-fashioned devices built from societys discards. How could such lovely little wooden boxes hold so much tragedy, fear, and death? How could any man have packed all that suffering inside a tiny box?

PROLOGUE