>> at the national gallery of rt to welcome a distinguished visitor. president and mrs. kennedy pay which to the first pub lick appearance of mona lisa, he lay nahr dodi vinci painting. the president expresses the gratification of the nation. >> mr. minister, we in the grateful for are this loan from the leading power in the world france. in view of the recent meeting at nassau, i must note further that this painting has been kept on careful french control. set on his nce even own commander in chief. i want to make it clear grateful we e are for this painting, will continue to press ahead

develop an ort to independent artistic force and power of our own. >> scores of cameramen record he event as the presidential party leads a tribute to the lady who will play host to many, many thousands in the next three weeks. the enigmatic smile acts like a agnet to art lovers and the curious. the next day, the gallery is jammed as the crowd passes by painting f ining four abreast. each has three to five seconds in front of the painting. stand there for one more glimpse for a smile that launched 1,000 arguments. the painting is being exhibited under stringent security panels and the wooden are protected from damage in a temperature humidity controlled case.

and the mona lisa, the first most aking her by far the popular hostess in washington. wants to meet the new girl in town. targeted una-bomber universities, airline, and computer stores. killing 23 and injuring others. una-bomber, how the fbi broke own rules to capture the terrorist ted kaczynski. talk about the investigation and discuss how the fbi had to change its methods to track down the elusive loaner.

>> good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. my name is greg floyd, and i am chairman and ceo of the national law enforcement officers memorial fund. i want to welcome you all here today to the newseum's witness to history, generously sponsored by our friends at target here in the front row. i will turn things over to john maine art in just a moment for the moderation of today's event, but i want to thank all of you for coming. today is just a glorious day outside, and the fact and you would want to spend an hour or two here with us, that's extra special, and i thank you for taking the time to join us. i think you are in for a fascinating discussion in a moment. i also want to thank our friends from c-span, who tend to cover many of these witness to history events. they are with us again today, and they will be sharing with us on air over the coming weeks.

for those of you who may not be familiar with the national law enforcement officers memorial fund, we were formed in 1984 by a former new york city police officer and police legend. he's the author of the legislation to establish the national law enforcement officers memorial, which was our first major initiative. we dedicated that memorial in 1991. it's it's just a couple of blocks from here in judiciary square. on the walls of that memorial are the names of 20,002 hundred 67 federal, state, local, 20,267 law enforcement professionals who have given their lives in the line of duty.

the national law enforcement officer museum will open just a few weeks from now in a place again called judiciary square, right across the street from the national memorial. in many ways, our museum already exist. we've collected more than 17,000 artifacts, fascinating artifacts of american law enforcement history that will help us tell that story. we've also produced a number of educational and public programming events, of which witness to history is part of that. this afternoon is certainly a good example. we bring together law enforcement professionals, experts who were involved in some of the most famous criminal cases in american history. today, we bring together a group of experts who worked so diligently and for so long on the unit bomber investigation, one of the longest manhunts in

american law enforcement history -- on the unabomber investigation. i would like to turn our program over to john maynard, who will moderate today's program. >> thank you, craig, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and those of you watching on c-span. welcome to the newseum, home of the unabomber's cabin. for nearly two decades beginning in 1978, and elusive criminal sent homemade bombs the targeted universities, airlines, and computer stores, killing three people and injuring 23 others. the fbi branded him the unabomber, and they were flummoxed. but about a 35,000-word manifesto written by the

unabomber proved a turning point and brought in end to his reign of terror. even before the manifesto, the investigation was hampered by complex layers of bureaucracy, pride, and individual egos. we talked to three fbi agents banned by fbi director louis free by cutting through the cumbersome procedures of the investigation and cutting free of bureaucratic restraints. the new book "unabomber," how the fbi broke its own rules to capture the terrorist ted kaczynski details the fbi's investigation for the unabomber and how these three worked together to bring him back. jim freeman was special agent in charge of the multi agency unabomber investigation and strategic management and the executive level. he began his career as a special agent with the fbi in 1964, was -- with assignments in oklahoma city, los angeles and miami and

in 1993 was assigned special agent in charge of the san francisco division. following the unabomber investigation he returned from the fbi in 1996, retired from the fbi in 1996 and joined charles schwab, as senior vp of global security. max noel served as investigator on the unabomber task force before ultimately becoming supervisor of an expanded task force and ultimately concentrating on montana. he served as fbi agent for 30 years and worked on numerous high-profile investigations including the weather underground, the disappearance of jimmy hoffa. and the patty hearst kidnapping. he retired from the fbi in 1999. terry turchie directed the unabomber federal task force between 1994, and 1998. on an operational level. following the unabomber case, became inspector and led the task force in looking for the olympic bomber eric root of. in 1999 he was named deputy

existent of the counter terrorism division of the fbi and traveled extensively overseas to investigate international terrorism in the middle east and in the former soviet union. i should note in the book jim writes that terry is the only fbi agent who got into a fight with a russian spy. he wrestled a kgb agent agent to the ground on a brooklyn subway platform in 1986. platform in 1986. please welcome our panel. [applause] >> if you are tweeting,@newseum and a national enforcement handle, let's start with you. all three of you are listed as co-authors. the book is told from your perspective. tell us how the book came together. what was your main objective for the book? >> thank you for your kind comments.

the book? >> thank you for your kind comments. i want to point out that we represent dozens of fbi agents, and atf agents and officers of the u.s. postal inspection service, who worked together for a task force for the last three years. you might imagine how many individuals and how much work went into such a project and the book came out similarly to how the investigation came about the last two years. i think i was the only volunteer ever for the unabomb task force after 15 years. and the inability to find him. i volunteered because i was in san francisco, and that's where the task force is set up. i want to take a shot at ted kaczynski. the investigation required that i look for a team that would ring to gather -- bring together a strategic plan, and terry

turchie was already in san francisco as a supervisor of national intelligence matters in the powell also agency. -- palo alto agency. i decided i wanted a different perspective, wanted to shake it up. to do something different. definitely at that time, a wall in the national television service and the division for various reasons, and i wanted to take advantage of that, a strategic plan and it came together the same way. it was a matter of the three of us representing a unique perspective in the way the case was managed, so we wrote it in that manner. we did not want to write a book that stood on its own as our own creation.

we wanted to do a definitive description of the creation -- of the investigation, which was very complex and over the years had not been appropriately described in many of the books that had been written about the case. many of the books centered on ted kaczynski. we wrote the book about the investigation. >> tell us about your reaction to this newly formed task force. >> i was stunned. i was doing well in palo alto. any of you familiar with california know that is a pretty nice place to be. that is across the street from stanford and i was settled for the rest of my career, at least i thought, until jim had this bizarre idea of solving the unabomber so i got a call one day from the assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence program in san francisco. he said i have a couple questions to ask you.

how do you feel about coming up to the city in taking over the unabomber task force? jim is putting together a different structure and is interested in doing that and my response was that is funny but thanks for the offer but no thanks. so there was a pause and he said i'm actually not joking. then i didn't know what to say. everybody tried to stay away from the corridor in the san francisco office with signs that said unabomber. no one wanted to go near it there. i think i would need a lot of time to close up everything down here and get up there. how much time do you need? probably at least a month. i thought i would get a couple weeks and he said how about a couple of hours? [laughter] nothing went right from there until i met jim freeman in the office and realized he was very serious and maybe we had a chance to do things differently. >> max, talk about your enrollment. >> i was already on the task force and i saw jim's taking

over the task force and reconfiguring and bringing terry turchie in as an opportunity to leave the task force. and go back to what i did best. [laughter] i submitted a memorandum to that effect, please let me go back and do what i was doing before which was organized crime, asian organized crime work and unfortunately terry and jim had other ideas and convinced me i needed to say. he went and saw jim freeman and he said i know he was off but he is not going. >> maybe for our younger visitors are people not familiar with the case, give us a brief overview of the unabomber. what were some of his targets and motives? >> that is what made it so difficult to identify a suspect because the unabomber became very clear early on had to be a lone wolf. he was not talking to anyone or else something would have come

to light, 16, 17 years. his early targets were against university professors, graduate students, bombs sent through the mail to specific professors as well as bombs placed in the corridor outside the computer room at the university of utah and that was repeated in other locations as well, university of california at berkeley. and then there was early on, his third bombing was against an american airlines flight, a mail bomb was placed with a rigged altimeter, barometer was used to explode at a certain altitude, i didn't ignite a fire but didn't explode. -- it did ignite a fire but did not explode. that saved the lives of all the people in their plain but even so the pilot recognized smoke was coming in to the cabin and there was an emergency landing at dulles airport, saving

people's lives. so airlines and universities were the early targets. there is a propensity for acronyms, so we did u.n. for university and a for aircraft and bomb so it became unabom and the unabomber is on moniker that stuck. >> i will ask you again, for both of you, when did you realize this was a case you had to invest in the normal protocol and the subtitle of the book is how the fbi broke its own rules? go through those rules. >> terry, why don't you start. >> we actually had a meeting, one of the first things he wanted was a strategy, i wasn't clear on what he wanted but wanted it out of the box and really something we hadn't tried before and really made the impression we want to solve this case, we were not doing this through some process, babysit

until someone else comes along. we are going to stay until we do this. i went away, talk to match and had a number of meetings over the next week and just about everybody that was already on the unabomber task force and talks about what they thought our failings were in terms of what we had overlooked before, and how we might do this in a different way, but it became apparent we needed different organization and structure and needed all the things that come with that so at the end of the week i gave him a paper that essentially said here's what i think we should do based on everybody i have talked to and their input. one, we had kind of a morale issue. a lot of people did want to get off of the unabomber task force. they worked hard and been very long time and they were tired. to deal with that it was kind of symbol. i recommended that we have people choose a partner. when you watch tv everyone has a partner but that is not the way it is in real life.

so we had a meeting. we told everybody, whether it is and fbi agents for postal inspector, how people get together, choose a partner and you will be with this person for a long long time. that way when you have a down day, your partner will have an up day and you guys are more creative working together like this so that was the biggest thing we did to make a difference in the internal mechanism of how things would operate, but then all the more complicated things made several suggestions. first, we need to have a media component in our strategy, so we actively use the media to get to the public and eventually we would have things and a specific operate, but then all the more complicated things made several suggestions. first, we need to have a media component in our strategy, so we actively use the media to get to the public and eventually we would have things and a specific message to tell the public. secondly we needed a significant analytical capability integrated into the investigation until that time we should simply -- we just simply didn't have and third, we needed to deal with the issue of profiling. again you probably watched shows

like criminal minds and that type of thing but it doesn't exactly happen in real life the way it happens on tv or a couple of hours of movies. we need to look differently so we chose different people to work with us on the profiling and we will get into that in a while but those are the essence of what we pass along to jim. that was really the sum total of many of the agents we already have the told me during these interviews. >> you mention media, a natural question for me to ask, as we were discussing earlier the fbi does traditionally play it close to the vest when it comes to the media. what was the advantage in this case for you to shift strategy to be more media friendly? >> we knew right away that we needed to have a consistent message to take to the public. and we also had to have a consistent spokesperson.

so we decided to recommend to jim that he be our spokesperson. not fbi headquarters and others, but because he would always be sitting and have the latest information we were going to be getting from the investigation. and we wanted to give a consistent message to the public. over time, what we ended up doing 1994-1996, long before we got the manifesto in 1995 was we started going to the public with one message and that message was when you think about the unabomber think about chicago 1978-1980. then think about salt lake city because between 1980 and 1982 or 1983 that seemed to be the focus of where there was a connection for the unabomber and after that time frame from 1985 and on, think of the san francisco bay area, put those three things together and eventually, i will defer to max to talk about the composite. that became a significant part

of that message. chicago, salt lake and the san francisco bay area and the composite and by 1995 we got the manifesto. when all those pieces came together we went back to the public through jim with that message, we got what we were looking for and got back to that composite because it is a fascinating story. >> the composite is the iconic picture of the van, the hooded sweat shirt, the sunglasses. >> early on in the investigation, you do a lot of monotonous tasks and reviewing the file. we didn't have a lot of leaks -- leads and reviewing the file and trying to determine if there were things that hadn't been done in the past, i was reviewing the file with regard to utah related bombings and there was one in 1987 at a computer company in salt lake city and was the only time the individual known as the unabomber was ever seen and he was seen by an employee, very

close, within three feet of him looking at him out the window as he placed a bomb beside her left front tire of her car. she was interviewed afterwards by a police artist, an artist was brought in to do a composite and she did the composite. when i reviewed the file, there was something unusual. there were five different composites by that same artist and the same witness on five different days. it was unusual for me to see that. i found this particular witness and went and interviewed her and asked her why and she said he wasn't capturing what i was trying to tell him. he kept getting the shape of the face wrong and some other things. she was very adamant. i said how can you be so adamant about that? she said i just reviewed my notes. i said what notes? there are no notes in the file from you. she said i always wondered why

they never came back and got my notes from me. they instructed me the day i signed to write down everything i signed the police would come back and no one came back so she brought her notes and she was very consistent with what she said. jim had just finished the case supervising the sac a kidnapping case in san francisco, the kidnapping of a young woman named paula class who was snatched out of her bed room at a slumber party, taken, raped and killed. they used a forensic artist to do the artist concept of the person who kidnapped and killed her. it eventually led to the identification of a guy named richard allen davis and richard allen davis if you took his mug shot and put the drawing side by side were exact.

i am not being negative but most police artist's concept in the past have been used talk to a witness and give the mobile full -- give them a look for of -- booked full of of noses and a book full of types of faces and years and they put these things together and i refer to those as mr. potato head drawings. they capture the features of a person but not really the person. she was an artist first. she was a tremendous artist and she could interview a person and draw a real lifelike picture of who the person was describing. so jim said find her. go get genie and see if we could do this. we took her to utah, interviewed her for something like four hours to get a composite and everyone thinks the life of an fbi agent sometimes is very interesting and they do exciting things and for a period of time i got the privilege of playing with her 3-year-old on the living room floor and watching the lion king and on tv. [applause] -- [laughter]

the artist's concept that resulted was a great artist's concept and if you have the opportunity to look at the two concepts it is just remarkable after seven years with tammy could describe and what genie could draw and you take ted kaczynski's official photograph and put it beside it, you see exactly the jaw line, the jutting chin that she described. that was a very unique thing and we did it in black-and-white. we didn't want people focusing on yellow hair because we were afraid he might be wearing a wig and so forth. what we found later is he was wearing a yellow wig and planting yellow hairs in to throw us off track when he didn't have blonde hair. there were all kinds of interesting things throughout the case like that. >> you mention the manifesto and i want to get to that so give us a sense in the final years of the pressure you felt to catch

this guy. i was reminded reading the book, 1993 was the oklahoma city bombing and first question, levels, was that the unabomber, talk a little bit about the pressure that you felt. >> one of the saddest things that happens is when you are all assembled and think you have a great plan and someone else gets killed and that happened to us in 1995 and it happened to us in 1994. while all of this was coming together and we thought we were making a difference. you can see the morales of people start to dip. you go home every night, we commuted from where we live in east bay to san francisco and while everyone else chose their partner, we became partners and we kept each other's morale up because in those moments on those days of course people back here because it is their job, but media as its own spin, the families and victims of the

families are on the phone or want to talk to you, and we sat down with people and what do you say? i remember dr. charles epstein lived in to be run and he was the unabomber victim in 1993 and i remember john conway, the first case agent, took me to meet them and we sat in the living room and the apprehension of going in there, one of the first families i ever met when i started doing this and we sat down. it was not at all what i expected and from that point on this is what got us through the day. they sat there and they were more worried about me and whether i was getting enough sleep than they were about what had happened to him. as we dealt with these families and victims over the years they were all that way.

in the darkest days when you expect it, they will be pretty upset, they would be sitting down with you and saying you got to make sure you stay focused and stay rested and i know we have confidence in use of it is hard to convey how you feel, but i tell you i know how i think everybody feels to date that is looking at the world and responsible for being on the frontlines of counterterrorism, you worry a lot, you work long hours, it is very difficult to put it down because we used to say and i know they still say that if you are a baseball player and bat 500, just about the greatest in the world. the fbi and the cia, we cannot afford to bat 500 and we can't afford to that 900. one person out of a hundred getting through can be not just a tragedy but going forward

could literally affect the sovereignty of our country. that is how serious the problem of terrorism became and how we took this. >> june of 1995 the unabomber sent out his manifesto. it did not go out to the new york times and washington post but scientific american and penthouse. i did not know that. tell us your reaction when you learned about the manifesto. was it a major break can you lead to complications? >> have the difficulty to catch any criminal that is not communicating makes it very difficult. once they start communicating, you have opportunity to develop. the unabomber had been quiet for seven years up until he started bombing again in 1993. in 1994 it continued and he started writing letters. that is good. he wrote a letter to the new

york times, an editor at the new york times to begin with and leading up to -- suddenly he comes forward gushing 35,000 word manifesto and this is the right direction but he also attached to that the demand, the threat to the newspapers and preceded it, follow that very closely with i am going to blow up, he was claiming to have a terrorist group behind him which we didn't believe that all, we are going to blow up an airliner out of lax if you don't publish the manifesto. that sweetened the pot and a few days later he had another letter that said i was kidding about that which we didn't think was funny at all, nor did anybody flying out of california or anywhere for a while. the manifesto came -- of course we read it in tensely and looking for any clues, we had experts we sent copies to, people that were linguistics experts, everything.

terry turchie will address how we brought that to a conclusion where we made use of the manifesto to bring public attention to it. >> when we got the manifesto, all 35,000 words, there were a number of people on the task force who thought it would be a great project to go back and try to sort what time frame was this person educated in, what could we tell about phrases, what could we tell about the books that were referenced in the manifesto. all of these things. that took us on this journey to a number of college campuses and i take you back to 1995, one thing that happened in 1985 in november was a professor in michigan, university of michigan got a bomb in the mail, professor mcconnell, a bond that was built in a three ring binder and there was a letter with it

that said this is my thesis statement on the history of science and i would like you to take a look at this and tell me what you think. kind of sponsor my thesis. professor mcconnell and his assistant opened up this binder, and it was actually a bomb that went off. so we were really fascinated in 1994. a couple of postal inspectors were fascinated by the project to focus in on this history of science. what does it mean? we did a lot of work on that and went to a lot of university campuses and talk to a lot of professors and by the time the manifesto came a lot of the information that came from knowing all the professors enabled us to go back to them and start drooling down and -- start drilling down and bring more details together about the books that were referenced in

the manifesto, the language and how it might relate to the history of science which was our first clue from this guy when he wrote that letter. we spent months trying to know and understanding and reading the manifesto and by the time we had someone step forward that could help us bring it together we had already been on those trails and we were able to pull a lot of pieces together. >> there was debate whether to publish the manifesto, the washington post ultimately did. tell us -- i believe there was a meeting, you could describe -- don't publish it but change your mind quickly. tell us about that. >> there was a meeting of the task force in san francisco. the knee-jerk reaction was there is national policy against doing business with a terrorist, acceding to terrorist demands that we had an extortion demand against newspapers and we should keep that in mind and recommend to the director of the fbi that they should not published. it took an hour to turn that decision around, to say we really should look at this from

a law-enforcement operational perspective and let washington deal with the national policy issues. if it will move the investigation forward and give us the opportunity to make an arrest doesn't fast outweigh a national policy, brought national policy? the task force members made the recommendation to me and terry turchie and i came back to washington and met with the attorney-general janet reno, and she agreed, and the next day i was amazed but when the attorney-general called in, busy people made themselves available and we had the publishers of the new york times and washington post along with their editorial staff which was very interesting. >> you want to comment? >> it was kind of funny -- we are sitting on opposite sides of the table and we fought the tension would have to do with talking about unabomber's

publication but it came down to the times and the post were sitting there, and i happened to mention that we had this scenario where we think if you published it one of the things we would do is be surveilling news stands in san francisco and other cities because our profilers tell us perhaps the unabomber will show up at one of these newsstands and get a trophy copy of the paper. i am telling this story and they're listening and finally, i said we think if the post or the times published this, we would set up on your newsstands and we found in san francisco there are only a couple places where the same day washington post is actually published or sold, we think that would be the perfect way because the new york times is everywhere, perfect way to publish it in the post and we can stand on those two places and there was some quiet and someone, i don't remember if it

was from the post or the times, said by the way, who sells more papers in san francisco, the post or the times? i had no answer, did know what i should do. so louis says go ahead, tell them. i said actually we all kind of laugh because the washington post sells nothing in san francisco and he said i wouldn't have been surprised at that. who reads the washington post? we had a good moment there but ultimately, they shared the class of publication on september 19th, the washington post published a special insert, the unabomber manifesto. we implemented our plan and again max and i were going home, had it already, all kinds of people coming in to set up these newsstands and we figured we needed so many agents to watch four or five locations because

we didn't figure we would have over 100 or 150 people show up. at 3:00 in the morning we got a call before we ever started and they told us we have already got lines around the block at these places. we have hundreds of people waiting to buy the post. we needed more agents so that is what we had to do. >> as far as the information that was there, the help of the media by publishing it and i did numerous press conferences talking about remember what we know about the unabomber, we know the geographical areas he has worked in, urging the public to come forward and there was a million-dollar reward that existed for a few years. the telephone line people were calling in, potential suspects, ex wives were reporting their

husbands, 52 or 54 brothers reported their brothers were the unabomber and of course we were looking for that one tips that would be the one that made good and that is what happened. >> that's exactly what i was going to lead to. tell us about that tip >> i want to talk about this. we got a call from an attorney who was brokering, trying to broker a deal about a client that he had and he was a washington d.c. attorney and things do not happen like they appear to have happened this attorney had a good working relationship with an fbi agent in washington d.c.. was in south carolina. contacted him in south carolina. he said i am not there, i will give you agent in d.c.

to contact, so he did and this young lady, molly flynn, met with him and got a 20 page document to beat and it was typed on an antique typewriter. we had one forensic piece of evidence we were always searching for, an antique smith corona 1935 typewriter with 2.54 spacing, the one thing that can -- connected these cases together over the years. molly got it, took it to the laboratory, they examined it and said no, it is not that typewriter so they sent it back to molly. molly was a good agent. she knew how massive this case was. this case was not a normal case. ask about the unabomber file, it was 59,000 volumes of information. that translates to 11,800,000 pages of documents and she knew that and so she called out to another supervisor on the unabomber case, told him she had this document she was sending but she didn't wanted to get

lost in all of that stuff that was coming in. she said pay attention to it because even though the typewriter isn't the same one, the ideas here are exactly the ideas in the manifesto. so joel got it and read it and got excited and took it to terry turchie and our psychologist on the task force and they got excited. terry turchie and jim freeman were going to lunch and they took it to terry turchie and he said we need to talk about this so he canceled his meeting with jim, gave a lame excuse he couldn't go with him and we went to lunch together with that document. as we were having lunch and reading the document, who walks in but jim freeman? [laughter] oh no, you know. so anyway, everyone got real excited about it. our task force you have to understand relates to a question you asked before. we had come off of the

compelling suspect that jim had determined could not be the unabomber. the task force members, a lot of them believed sincerely that it was. they worked hard, long, exhausting hours and we said we need to give them a break before we start on this again. we do a little reconnaissance, talk to jim's secretary, jim is gone for the afternoon. won't be back. terry said perfect. i can't withhold it from him so i will take it in and lay it on his desk with a little yellow flynn on it and say we need to talk about this monday morning and we go downstairs to the cafeteria at have a cup of coffee and relax and we haven't been there 15 minutes and this is the day of the pager and his pager is going off like crazy with the signal number that the boss wants to see you. he didn't go home. he came back and the minute he read it he got excited and we

went back up and carry talked to him and jim said this is the man. this is the unabomber. we are turning of the ship, 2417 actual suspects, not just people of interest but actual suspect so he was very perceptive. >> the document was 1973? >> 1971. >> there was a treatise ted kaczynski had given to his brother and his brother had kept that and when you read those pages from and said many years before and compared it to a reading of the manifesto i came to the conclusion the same person wrote it and others did as well. you can't take that to the bank. that does not get you a federal search warrant. a lot more work to be done but the gut feeling was there and we started a linguistic study and started developing common phrases as well as thoughts common to both documents as well

as letters being written by the unabomber so the no writings, -- known writings, suspect writings of ted kaczynski and comparing them as we did all potential suspects with the timeline we prepared we knew the unabomber had been in sacramento when he placed -- dropped a package in the mailbox or mailed a letter from here postmarked from there. fortunately ted kaczynski saved all his letters, saved the outside envelopes with postmarks which gave us candidates where the unabomber had to be in the cities at that time so the unabomber time line, we had the ted kaczynski time line and they started to jive very well. we never found a conflict between the two. >> once we got the document from the attorney he did tell us to his client was but he instituted an investigation all over the country and agents were sent to interface with him and meet with his client and broker the deal and in turn david kaczynski and

his wife agreed to meet with the agents and talking at the intern do take the agents to chicago and talk with the mother and get all these other letters and documents over the years and the other investigations going on. i was fortunate or unfortunate enough to be sent to short time later by a these guys to montana in february to head the investigation there when they were in the wharf and comfort of -- warmth and comfort of northern california. there were a lot of things going on, these interval parts that were going on all over the country being pulled to get there. >> i want to make sure we get the audience in the conversation. we have a staffer there with a microphone. if you have a question raise your hand and she will come to you. in the first row but i want to maybe jump forward a little bit because once you have identified

ted kaczynski and knew where he was there another race against the clock, the media, which was cbs. tell us what they had and the negotiations with them about not releasing it. >> that was an interesting time because we were under very serious time constraints. once we have focused in on the conclusion that ted kaczynski is our man, there is a lot of work to be done. investigations into stages, you identify the perpetrator and put together all the evidence that can stand up in court and prove it. when we looked at ted kaczynski and max saw him first in montana, here it is this hermit living in a 10 x 12 capt. -- captain -- cabin that had no running water, no electricity, no means of heating and other than a potbellied stove and our

laboratories told us he puts components in these bombs where he is melting aluminum so he has to have a kiln of some sort and has to be running electric power to run that. we found out later he was doing it on the potbellied stove. there were many aspects looking at ted kaczynski as a suspected didn't fit. how does this man travel, all these places, to carry bombs and place them one of the hat was a little bicycle? in winter months he is snow in. to see him in his clothes falling off of him an absolute hermit, how did this man target university professors and heads of corporations? it didn't fit and not every one of our staff believed he was a viable suspect. max was a holdout until the week before we arrested him. [laughter] you want to take that question? >> i wonder if he felt the manifesto was released, a

feeling from ted kaczynski that he was in competition with the terrorists who bombed the trade center and timothy mcveigh who had blown up the oklahoma city federal building? >> we thought that might be the case. you, in particular looked at that. >> one of the first problems we -- calls we made to our profile, the bombing of the oklahoma city federal building, she played out very quickly to as that this was something done by somebody who wants to be a mass killer as opposed to the unabomber who kills individual the from afar. those distinctions while at that time, didn't seem to be something we could make a firm conclusion on were enough to convince most people these separate bombings. theodore kaczynski put his plan in motion as mcveigh was putting his plan in motion. it was totally coincidental. that is an important question because if you think back to

after 9/11 and the terrible tragedy of the twin towers, a week later down the east coast you had the anthrax attack. there was a huge outcry and a lot of people wanted certain specific actions to take place which would have unleashed a lot of significant weapons and issues because they thought the anthrax was connected to 9/11 was all connected to saddam hussein and iraq. we found other reasons to go into iraq. these are the things that go on and if you look at the history of terrorism you see a lot of coincidences when something is happening on another track. one more example, looking at bombs on an airplane coming across the pacific at the same time theodore kaczynski was threatening to put a bomb on an airplane out of lax so the world is a significant, complicated and yet a place you have to tread caution when dealing with terrorism. >> ted kaczynski was on a bus on his way to sacramento when the oklahoma city occurred. that was a popular theory at the

time but he had no knowledge of the oklahoma city. >> i said did you feel kaczynski was in competition in that he felt he wasn't being noticed like the others who were receiving the media coverage? >> we did feel that way at a certain point in time even going back to 1993 and going back to the first world trade center bombing we did feel that way. >> he didn't even know about oklahoma city so that wasn't the competition for him. he was setting his own plan in motion. >> second question right there. >> in a case like this with all the bombings how many bombings did it take before they connected that they were all from the same bomber and 100% of your work in the task force that work or do you do anything else? >> the task force was formed, we were 100% and we had anywhere from 40 fbi agents in similar amounts of agents and inspectors working together full time, 24

hours a day seven days week, few nights, few vacations, long days and so forth. the other part of your question? >> how many bombs? before you realized they were connected? >> law enforcement in the early 1970's, late 1970's didn't even know about the existence of a serial bomber until the fourth bombing. they concluded about the third bombing and if you follow this case at all you know some of these early bombs, the unabomber started putting little metal tags stamped with the letters fc and the reason it appears he did that was law enforcement wasn't connecting the bombs that he had left and you wanted credit for them so rather than depend upon law-enforcement to connect them he started putting his little calling card in there so we would know so he would get his credit for what he was doing. >> i am retired custom's agent, worked with the fbi on many occasions especially south

florida, and you have amazing organization, investigative capability. i would like to ask a question related to mentions of sovereignty and national policy sometimes takes precedent over law-enforcement investigative priorities. we had a recurring theme in american history, the lone bomber, the lone assassin. in this case, you did an amazing job and was a lone bomber. lee harvey oswald, lone assassin, osama bin laden, the sole person who guided 9/11, we have learned on 9/11 world trade center number 7 which hasn't been discussed in the media, a 47 story building collapsed in 7 seconds at 5:20 in the afternoon, the third tower that collapsed that day. how did osama bin laden do that? are you confident there weren't explosive devices used in world trade center 7 as well as the other towers and also as we approach the 50th anniversary of the warren commission, howard hunt, former cia watergate convict confessed to being part of the plot and identified other

cia personnel as involved in the kennedy assassination before he died in 2007. mainstream media won't reported. final question would you believe lee harvey oswald was the lone assassin in that matter and should that investigation be reopened? >> we're going to stop it there. if you want to take that? >> you asked a lot. i think you kind of put your fingers on a lot of cases where many people have many questions. i would not even pretend to try to answer or give some sort of comfort to any particular position. i think i read the warren commission report and felt pretty good about it. it looked to me like they covered a lot but there are a lot of people who don't think that. i think everybody who is interested in this and interested in terrorism should go back and look at the things you mentioned and look at the cases you mentioned and they can make up their mind. i think bottom line for us as far as things like the world

trade center, we have an indictment on a number of people because of the world trade center, indictments going back to the uss cole bombing and embassy bombings and the reason i bring those up and the reason they are important you can read all of those and see a lot of interconnections between the cast of characters that led from year to year into what became 9/11. we could go all day but that is what i would suggest and should certainly appreciate your assessment. >> as the mike gets to the question at there, i'm going to go back to the unabomber. you were the first of the three to see him. once you were surrounding the cabin, what was the board to get out? >> i saw him on month before we took him into custody. i developed a good source of information, the property around him, we were trying to to get a physical description of the cabin for the search warrant affidavit or arrest warrant affidavit and the specificity of what the cabin looked like

exactly where it was located. don't go to a port and say i was a search warrant or arrest warrant in montana? that was when the jobs that jim asked me to do, i walked up along with one of his neighbors a base skid road, a number of trees too the forest above him. as we were about 40 yards away, he opened the door and then he stuck his head out and my first response is, my god, is that what we have been looking for all these years. he was a wild looking person, he had on an orange nick cap, you contraband image of the you are looking for, all these people telling us about power tools and all this stuff and here is a guy living in this little cabin, just amazed me.

with that perspective in mind, when jimmy did decision we had -- made the decision that we had to take him out of the cabin another job he had given me was to develop an arrest plan for safely getting ted kaczynski out of that cabin. one thing we promised his family was we would arrest him humanely if they cooperated with us and we wouldn't have a waco standoff or ruby ridge in which he would be killed. we had to develop a plan. in my estimation the plan was pretty simple. he had to come out of that cabin some time and all the time i was up there was coming out. he was staying in close proximity to the cabin physically. the plan had been to wait for him to go to town to get provisions, supplies or what have you as he pedaled his bicycle into town on a gravel road, we zoom in and pounce on him and taken into custody. we couldn't do that because of the demands of some people in the media who threatened to take

it to a program in the near future. we didn't know if he had capability of monitoring that program or not. we knew he didn't have electricity. we found out later he had a battery operated radio using to monitor news programs. to develop a plan to get him out of the cabin safely and in developing this force we discuss that possibility and i was confident we could trick him into coming out of the cabin without him knowing who we were and why we were there. if he got close enough to one of the three of us who approached the cabin we grabbed him and we used a ruse, we went a three of us, four service police officer in full police uniform who patrol that area, kaczynski noon -- new -- knew and who knew kaczynski, my partner who was our senior resident agent in helena, montana, john mcdaniel who looks like a big cowboy and myself. we let jerry burns of the 4 -- forest service do all the

talking and when you go on someone's private property in the mountains in particular, you are trespassing. you just don't walk on their property without permission. so jerry started hailing him as we left the trail and went onto his property and there was no response from inside the cabin and the plan had been for jerry to do the talking because they knew one another and he would introduce us as people who were from a mining company, who the surrounding property owner had leased the mining exploratory rights for the coming summer to that company. he had told ted kaczynski that he had done that in december and ted was not happy but he had assured ted he would see to it this mining company stay off of ted's property when they came up. of course he didn't know the reason ted kaczynski didn't want people around was he was experimenting with bombs and explosives and so forth. as we got to the cabin he opened

the door and jerry burns, forest service police officer said hi, mr. kaczynski, u.s. forest service, i am here with these gentlemen from the mining company and we need to see where your corner posts are so they will ensure their employees don't trespass on your land this summer when it come up here. he said my corner posts are adequately mark and jerry said they are under four feet of snow. we could go out and did around but we thought would be easier if you helped us and he said ok and he opened the door and took one step toward jerry and jerry is a sizable guy, that was his big mistake, jerry grabbed him. not very dramatic. he started wrestling and fighting, and big tom mcdaniel, a big man, wrapped him up and they struggled and i got to walk around and had the privilege every fbi agent enjoys which was taking my credentials out and saying mr. kaczynski, fbi.

he looked at my weapons staring him in the nose from six inches and completely complied. it was very not dramatic. it was very easy and simple and like we planned it, thank god. >> time for one more question. >> i wonder if you could comment more on the manifesto itself. i haven't read the full document but my and standing as it focuses a lot on the socialization and political theory and psychology behind it. i was wondering, what was the importance of the manifesto to ted kaczynski and how it relates to the bombing itself. >> well, it was a luddite philosophy against technology. it wasn't -- the philosophy itself was not unique to ted kaczynski by any means but the way he expressed it was what was unique and that helps us out in the investigation and made it recognizable. >> it was called industrial

society in the future and was like a return to living the luddite type of life with very little technology and ted kaczynski, a lot of people ask, ted kaczynski was a anger, revenge motivated. we did huge studies on trying to connect the victims in this, what was the commonality. there was no commonality. ted kaczynski selected his victims who were representational of things he didn't like. he didn't like university professors. he didn't like graduate students. he didn't like airlines. he didn't like computers and technology. he didn't like psychologists. i always call him the equal opportunity hater. he hated anything and everything that wasn't him. he would act on it. we took 22,000 pages of journals out of his cabinet. we knew exactly why he did what he did. there is no question about it. he wrote it down and he says very specifically i have a lot of hatred in me and i am doing this for no particular purpose other than revenge and a anger.

>> we actually inserted him in our book, each chapter has a quotation in ted's though words describing his motivations and his reaction to people he killed or that he didn't kill, the bonds malfunction, he expressed regret that he didn't kill them. it adds an interesting flavor to the description of the investigation. >> this was actually, though, definitely his lifelong passion, his words. when we had him as a suspect and had him arrested we went back and found he had written editorials to the chicago tribune and other papers in 1968, 1969, 1970, had we been able to go back or thought about going back and checking papers and been lucky enough to find these it looked like a manifesto. so he had been having these thoughts, and he had this kind of grand vision of the way life should be for many, many years. >> you need to understand, ted kaczynski had an iq of about

170. he graduated from high school and went to harvard when he was 16 years old. he went to the university of michigan and got his phd in mathematics in two years. from his mathematics, we know that when he was at michigan, he wrote that he was dedicating his life to going to the wilderness after he graduated and accumulated enough money to do this, going to the wilderness and beginning his campaign of terrorism and killing people he did not like. this was not something that just occurred spontaneously. he had been fomenting this idea for many, many years. copies of theling , and the gentleman will be

happy to sign copies and take further questions. thank you so much for joining us here today. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]