tions, and nearly all of them were branded with an
inscription reading “FC.” By the mid-1990’s, the
Unabomber had also begun to send letters to media
outlets, former victims, and potential future victims,
expressing fragments of his anarchist, antitechnol-
ogy, and radical environmentalist philosophy and
making threats about future attacks. These letters
were also signed “FC.”
Manifesto, Arrest, and Incarceration The Una-
bomber’s communications with the public reached
their peak when his lengthy manifesto,Industrial So-
ciety and Its Future, was published simultaneously by
The New York TimesandThe Washington Postin Sep-
tember of 1995, with both papers citing public safety
as the reason they agreed to publish. The manifesto
was supposed to have been written by a group calling
itself the Freedom Club—explaining, finally, the
mysterious “FC” inscription found on many bombs
and letters—and throughout it uses the plural “we,”
though few now dispute that Kaczynski always
worked alone. The rambling, 35,000-word docu-
ment laid out the objections of the “group” to many
forms of modern authority and to various techno-
logical advances dating back to the Industrial Revo-
lution and called for social revolution in the name of
the environment. The manifesto explains the bomb-
ings by claiming that “they” had to kill people in or-
der to get the public to pay attention to their philos-
ophy and demands.
Upon the manifesto’s publication, Theodore
Kaczynski’s brother David recognized both the
prose style and the philosophy inIndustrial Society
and Its Futureand began to suspect that his reclusive
brother might, in fact, be the mysterious Una-
bomber. David contacted the FBI, samples of corre-
spondence between the brothers were analyzed, and
a likely match was found. Theodore Kaczynski was
arrested on April 3, 1996, in the remote shack in
Montana where he had been living in isolation since
the early 1970’s. Bomb-making materials and an
original copy of the manifesto, taken from the cabin
at the time, were among the voluminous evidence
collected for use in his trial. Though he had claimed
he would end his bombing campaign if his mani-
festo was published in a major newspaper, it ap-
peared that he was still engaged in bomb making at
the time of his arrest.
In preparation for a trial, jury selection took
place and a psychological examination was per-
formed to determine Kaczynski’s mental fitness.
The trial, however, never got past the initial stages, as
Kaczynski eventually agreed to change his plea to
guilty in order to avoid the possibility of the death
penalty. In 1998, he began serving four consecutive
life sentences without possibility of parole in federal
supermax prison in Colorado.
Impact Over a period of eighteen years, the Una-
bomber was responsible for at least sixteen bombs,
resulting in twenty-three injuries and three deaths. It
was in the early and mid-1990’s, however, that he be-
came a household name, partly because his attacks
increased dramatically in number and deadliness,
and partly because they targeted the privileged and
usually sheltered worlds of high technology and aca-
demia. Though Kaczynski has continued to write
sporadically while incarcerated, his notoriety was
not enough to keep him or his ideas in the spotlight;
his name faded from prominence fairly soon after
he began serving his sentence.
Further Reading
Chase, Alston.Harvard and the Unabomber: The Educa-
tion of an American Terrorist.New York: W. W.
Norton, 2003. Explores the development of
Kaczynski’s anti-industrialist philosophy, focus-
ing on the role his Harvard education played in
that development.
F. C .The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its
Future.Berkeley, Calif.: Jolly Roger Press, 1995.
The full text of Kaczynski’s manifesto, explaining
his philosophy and the need for violent action to
overturn the system.
Mello, Michael.The United States of America Versus The-
odore John Kaczynski: Ethics, Power, and the Invention
of the Unabomber.New York: Context Books, 1999.
Mello focuses on the legal proceedings in the
Unabomber case and, more than most authors,
gives credence to Kaczynski’s position as a social
critic.
Janet E. GardnerSee also Crime; McVeigh, Timothy; Militia move-
ment; Montana Freemen standoff; Oklahoma City
bombing; Olympic Park bombing; Ruby Ridge
shoot-out; Terrorism.880 Unabomber capture The Nineties in America