It was not a particularly auspicious night for a lecture on arcane mathematical theories. But what was said on that Valentine’s Day night in 1977, long forgotten by many of the 300 who filled a Northwestern University lecture hall, may bear the clues to solve the greatest manhunt in FBI history.
On the face of it, there could be nothing less connected than a mad bomber and Christopher Zeeman, an obscure British professor with a fancy notion.
He called it the “catastrophe theory,” and he sought to explain things such as social turmoil through mathematical equations.
Now, almost two decades later, federal agents are focusing on that lecture-and the Unabomber’s Chicago origins-in their 17-year quest to find the elusive serial bomber, whose meticulously crafted devices have killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide campaign of terror.
In one sense, the presence of FBI agents on the leafy Evanston campus shows how far the government has come in its investigation.
Across the continent, hundreds of FBI agents have pursued the Unabomber. They have deployed some of the world’s most powerful computers. They have enlisted the sharpest crime-fighting minds. And they have chased down 20,000 tips, gone door to door to machine shops and scrap yards, and interviewed thousands of suspects since the Unabomber’s first two bombs exploded at Northwestern.
At one point, the FBI interviewed at least 10,000 people with the name and initial “Nathan R.,” simply because they found a faint impression of that name on one of the Unabomber’s letters.
In another sense, though, the spectacle of FBI agents poring through old Northwestern and Niles North High School faculty lists and course catalogs shows how far the agency has to go.
Despite a Unabomber hot line that receives thousands of phone calls, a $1 million reward and a 17-year dragnet, the FBI didn’t intensify the search in Chicago until the Unabomber sent a 35,000-word, anti-technology manifesto to newspapers earlier this year.
That is why the FBI has come full circle, back to Chicago, hoping to learn how an unprepossessing, red-haired student becomes the Unabomber. Federal investigators now believe that the Unabomber had his “academic origins” in the Chicago area and perhaps even grew up here.
Trail leads to Evanston
The bombings and other evidence, including the manifesto, indicate that the Unabomber was either a student at Northwestern or attended lectures on campus between 1976 and 1980, according to federal investigators. In recent weeks, investigators have interviewed professors about Zeeman’s Valentine’s Day lecture and two others he gave on the same subject over the next two days. They also have been asked to analyze the manifesto.
Despite an impressive technological arsenal, however, the FBI has appealed for public help, as would a beat cop attempting to solve a crime on the street.
“If we are going to find the Unabomber, most likely it’s going to be through the mass media and the public,” said Terry Turchie, the senior FBI official in the San Francisco-based Unabomber task force. “Somebody out there is going to be key. We are trying to reach that person who lived in the same neighborhood (as the Unabomber), somebody who heard or saw something.”
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That is what brought three FBI agents in August to Niles North High School, a boxy, 1950s-ish, brown-brick campus off the Edens Expressway near Old Orchard Shopping Center.
In a windowless, paneled auditorium, FBI agents invited some 300 instructors who had taught in the district in the 1970s. Only about 60 showed up, scattering themselves toward the back of the room.
The agents came armed with a photograph of a wooden box, thought to be similar to one used by the Unabomber in one of his explosive devices; a profile of the Unabomber; and an obscure theory about catastrophes that they hoped would jar someone’s memory.
“The points they asked over and over were, `Could we recall any students who had sought us out about some of the issues in that paper; what might have precipitated those thoughts; and might the student have acted on those perceptions?’ ” said one Niles North teacher, who didn’t want to be identified.
Even though many volunteered names of past students, some of the teachers left the session thinking that the FBI was casting a wide net for a shred of new information.
“I did the math one time,” said a 22-year veteran of Niles North, “and it turned out I’ve experienced over 60,000 kids during my career. . . . How am I supposed to pick out one student, whether he was politically active or just a little bit crazy and say, `This could be the guy you’re looking for’? “
Over the years, leads have helped the FBI create a profile of the Unabomber, who is believed to be in his 40s, with reddish-blond hair and a thin mustache. He is believed to have at least a high school education and is able to blend into a university setting, allowing him to plant bombs without being noticed.
Putting clues together
Using the manifesto and other Unabomber letters as a road map to his movements and motives, investigators hope to pick up the trail at its beginning, then follow it across the country to northern California, where the Unabomber is believed to be living.
But they have been down this road before.
After the 1979 bombing of an American Airlines jet and a 1980 attack on United Air Lines President Percy Wood, investigators combed through the records of thousands of airline employees, looking for the bomber, and examined scores of typewriters to see whether any of them matched the typewritten note sent with the bomb that injured Wood.
Because the Unabomber often mails his bombs with stamps bearing the image of playwright Eugene O’Neill, investigators began studying up on his works to see whether the bomber was trying to send them a message. O’Neill, an ardent supporter of anarchists, wrote a play called “The Iceman Cometh,” which caught the eye of agents. Some agents speculated that the “iceman” could symbolize turning back the clock on the technological age-a key theme in the Unabomber’s manifesto. But nobody knows for sure.
After a bomb ripped through the California Forestry Association’s Sacramento headquarters last April, killing lobbyist Gilbert Murray and sending hundreds of panicked workers into the street, a dozen agents wearing blue jumpsuits, white gloves and white dust masks rushed to the scene. There, they painstakingly sifted through the rubble using screens.
Investigators used DNA technology to examine the seal on the envelope that contained the device that killed Murray. And Murray’s body was extensively X-rayed for parts of the bomb, which were later removed and examined by investigators.
The FBI has loaded more than 12 million pieces of information into its computers-including thousands of names of students who attended Northwestern, the University of Illinois at Chicago and the other universities targeted in the bombings.
In the Unabomber’s words
And now they have potentially the biggest clue of all: the Unabomber’s massive anti-technology manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which has yielded the “catastrophe theory” lead.
“With the mailing of the manuscript, the Unabomber has given us the most significant information about what he is about,” Turchie said. “What he has done is confirmed our initial feelings that his academic origins are in the Chicago area.”
The manifesto does not refer directly to the theory. But experts say it is possible to see how the bomber could have been influenced by it. Catastrophe models could convince him that a seemingly stable society, such as the technology-based civilization of the late 20th Century, could be pushed to collapse by terrorist actions of a lone revolutionary.
“We must work to heighten the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that it will break down or be weakened sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible,” the Unabomber wrote. “When the system becomes sufficiently stressed and is unstable a revolution against technology may be possible. The pattern would be similar to that of the French and Russian Revolutions.”
The bomber’s ties to Northwestern are more apparent. In the manifesto are two references to a book, “Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” co-edited by Ted Robert Gurr, a prominent Northwestern professor who was chairman of the political science department from 1977 to 1980.
Gurr, now a professor at the University of Maryland, said some ideas from the book are sprinkled into the manifesto, but he was told by federal agents that lectures in the late 1970s given as part of Northwestern’s annual Harris series were far more important in shaping the Unabomber’s militant rhetoric.
Zeeman’s talks on the catastrophe theory were part of the Harris series, sponsored by the Norman Wait Harris Foundation. The lecture series, begun in 1906, is widely publicized in Evanston and other North Shore communities, and is open to the public.
“What is in the manuscript is a whole body of ideas and some key elements of which were given in the Harris Lectures,” Gurr said. “I was told (by federal investigators) that his criticism of industrial society came out of the Harris Lectures.”
Law enforcement sources confirmed that the Zeeman lectures on the catastrophe theory are a focus of their investigation in the Chicago area.
The terror begins
Chicago’s first encounter with the Unabomber came on the afternoon of May 25, 1978, when a rectangular, brown package was found in the parking lot at UIC’s engineering building. The package was turned over to Northwestern assistant professor Buckley Crisp, who was listed in the return address. The parcel was addressed to E.J. Smith, an engineering professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
That puzzled the 37-year-old material science professor, who worked in Northwestern’s Technological Institute. Crisp had never heard of Smith.
“I looked at it and thought it was strange,” recalled Crisp, who still teaches at Northwestern. “I thought, `What is this? What am I going to do? Should I open it or show it to somebody else?’ “
Several minutes later, Crisp gave the package to Northwestern’s police department. A short time later, a bomb hidden in the package exploded, slightly injuring a security officer.
Almost exactly a year later, a 35-year-old Northwestern graduate student from Toronto was injured when a bomb hidden inside a small wooden box exploded at the Technological Institute. The device, placed on a table between two study carrels, contained thousands of match heads that ignited the explosion.
In November 1979, a mail bomb placed inside a small wood box wrapped in brown paper exploded in the cargo hold of an American Airlines jet while in flight from Chicago to Washington. Twelve passengers were treated for smoke inhalation after an emergency landing.
And in June 1980, Wood was burned and wounded when a letter bomb ripped through the kitchen of his two-story Lake Forest home. The metal pipe bomb was hidden in a hollowed-out book with a note that read, “I’m sending you this book. I think you will find it of great social significance.” The note was signed by “F.C.” Wood escaped death because he was holding the book, titled “Ice Brothers,” away from his body when the bomb exploded.
The significance of “Ice Brothers” to the bombing is unclear. The novel is about the crew of a lightly armed Coast Guard vessel that battled a German icebreaker during World War II.
Investigators later used hypnosis on a Chicago postal clerk to come up with a description of a suspect. When shown the sketch, Wood reportedly told investigators that he could not identify the man.
It was only after two similar bombs-a booby-trap device placed at the University of Utah in 1981 and a second bomb sent from Utah that exploded at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University-that law enforcement officials concluded that they were dealing with a serial bomber.
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The initials “F.C.” were carved into both devices, as they were on the bomb that injured Wood. But the FBI had no idea what “F.C.” meant and why the bombs seemed to be targeting primarily university professors and airline officials. Because of those targets, the FBI nicknamed their suspect the Unabomber-“un” for university and “a” for airlines.
Later, the Unabomber explained that “F.C.” stands for “Freedom Club,” a revolutionary organization. Authorities are certain, however, that the Unabomber is acting alone.
From 1982 to 1987, the Unabomber struck seven more times, including twice at the University of California at Berkeley. The Unabomber’s first homicide came in 1985, when a bomb hidden in construction debris outside a computer store killed a computer salesman.
A similar bomb exploded outside Caam’s Computer store in Salt Lake City in 1987, injuring one person. A witness to the attack gave the FBI its first and only description of the elusive bomber.
`We had frightened him.’
A woman peering through a window saw a man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses place a device on the ground shortly before it exploded.
But then, just when investigators thought they were getting close to the Unabomber, he stopped planting bombs. Investigators could only guess what had happened.
“Everyone mused that he blew himself up,” recalled Salt Lake City police Sgt. Don Bell, a member of that city’s Unabomber task force. “I personally think that we had frightened him. . . . We had gotten close, and he was frightened.”
But the Unabomber surfaced again in June 1993, when he mailed bombs that injured two professors, one at the University of California at San Francisco and the other at Yale University.
Last year, New Jersey advertising executive Thomas Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent to his home. The Unabomber’s latest attack-in April 1995-killed Murray, the timber-industry lobbyist.
As the Unabomber’s devices have become more deadly, the urgency of the federal search for him has intensified. At the same time, the bomber himself has become contemptuous of the FBI’s nationwide manhunt, calling the agency a “joke” in a recent letter.
He has even taunted the FBI in the return address on a letter he sent earlier this year to the San Francisco Chronicle. After learning of the FBI’s speculation about the Unabomber’s penchant for using wood parts in his bombs, he listed the return address as “Fredrick Benjamin Isaac Wood”-or FBI Wood.
All of this has angered-and motivated-investigators. And though investigators believe that they are getting closer to apprehending the Unabomber, authorities thought they were close before-and were wrong.
In his spacious corner office in the Dirksen Federal Building, decorated with a framed photo of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and other FBI memorabilia, Chicago FBI chief Brian Carroll and two of his top deputies talked about the emotional ups and downs in the search for the bomber who has haunted the FBI.
Carroll recalled a singular moment last summer when FBI officials thought they had finally found their man. It was during the World Cup soccer tournament in Chicago when the city was packed with people from around the world. Carroll excitedly told how they had dispatched several agents to tail the suspect. How they followed him for three days and nights.
The agents finally moved in.
Carroll shook his head and hunched over his desk.
“We really thought that this was it,” he said, disappointment thick in his voice. “He had as much to do with the Unabomber as you or I.”