UK Telegraph article

[Jorn Barger]

ISSUE 1625 Saturday 6 November 1999
Brotherly bond blown apart

For 18 years, the 'Unabomber' terrorised America with lethal parcel
bombs. Stephen Dubner talks to Ted Kaczynski and the brother who turned
him in, and pieces together a chilling tale of sibling rivalry and
alienation

THERE is probably never a good time to ask: "Do you consider yourself
insane?" But when the time comes, Ted Kaczynski responds without
hesitation. "I'm confident that I am sane personally," he says.

He is sitting on a concrete stool in a concrete booth with windows made
of reinforced glass. When he was first led in, his wrists were
handcuffed behind his back. Facing forward, he squatted down so a guard
could remove his cuffs though a slot low in the door. This is how
things are done at the federal "Supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado,
where he has been since last spring and may well remain for the rest of
his life.

His voice is nasal, full of flat Chicago vowels. He is 57, his hair and
beard trimmed short, and his upbeat manner hardly resembles that of the
man who three years ago was marched out of his tiny Montana cabin and
into infamy. He makes constant eye contact, laughs easily and often. He
is, for the most part, affable, polite and sincere. It would be all too
easy to forget that he posted or delivered at least 16 parcel bombs and
then logged the results with the glee of a little boy tearing the wings
off a fly.

Over the course of 18 years, the "Unabomber" killed three people and
wounded 23 more. His manifesto was brutally simple: "The Industrial
Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human
race." In the Unabomber's mind, society was in desperate need of a
brave and brazen saviour who wouldn't let murder stand in his way.

Kaczynski readily admits that the life of such a notorious prisoner has
its advantages. He lives on "Celebrity Row", a group of eight cells
protected from the prison's general population. "The food here, believe
it or not, is pretty good," he says. "The other celebrity prisoners are
not what you would think of as criminal types. I mean, they don't seem
to be very angry people. They're considerate of others. Some of them
are quite intelligent."

Among them, he says, are Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World
Trade Center bombing, and Timothy McVeigh, responsible for blowing up
the federal government building in Oklahoma in 1995, killing 168
people. Kaczynski says McVeigh lent him one of the most interesting
books he has read lately, Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the
FBI Crime Lab. "I mean, I knew from my own experience that they were
crooked and incompetent," Kaczynski says, shaking his head and
laughing. "But according to this book, they're even worse than what I
thought."

When he was arrested, Kaczynski was widely assumed to be insane. But he
will not tolerate being called, as he puts it, "a nut" or "a sicko". He
says he pleaded guilty last year only to stop his lawyers from arguing
that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, as diagnosed by court-appointed
psychiatrists.

He has written a book Truth Versus Lies (to be published by Context
Books in New York), and its chief aim is to assert his sanity. The book
is also Kaczynski's counter-attack against his brother, David. It was
David who turned Ted in, at the urging of his wife, Linda.

After Ted's arrest, David was instantly lauded as a sort of moral
superhero for sacrificing his beloved if troubled brother. Not
surprisingly, Ted has a different interpretation. Beneath David's love
for him, Ted argues, lay "jealousy over the fact that our parents
valued me more highly. It's quite true that he is troubled by guilt
over what he's done, but I think [it] is outweighed by his satisfaction
at having finally gotten revenge on big brother."

Contacting the FBI, he says, was only the beginning of his brother's
betrayal. By arguing that Ted should not be sentenced to death due to
mental illness, David committed a dual sin: labelling Ted crazy and
dooming him to an utterly unnatural existence. "He knows that I would
unhesitatingly choose death over incarceration."

I ask Ted what he would have done had their roles been reversed, had
Ted suspected David of being the Unabomber."I would have kept it to
myself," he says.

"Is that what you feel he should have done?"

"Yeah."

And what would he say to David if he were in the room now? "Nothing. I
just wouldn't talk to him. I would just turn my back and wouldn't talk
to him."

David, 50, who lives in upstate New York and works as a counsellor at a
teenage-runaway shelter, says he still loves his brother. He has
written to him repeatedly, offering at least one apology, but Ted has
not answered. In order to gain forgiveness, Ted writes in his book,
David must renounce the "lies" he has told about Ted, leave his wife
and remove himself from modern society. "If he does not redeem
himself," Ted adds, "then as far as I am concerned he is the lowest
sort of scum, and the sooner he dies, the better."

Yet David's feelings for Ted once bordered on worship. He was
particularly smitten by Ted's belief that modern man was being
corrupted by society in general and technology in particular. "Knowing
him as I do," Ted writes, "I am certain that if Dave had known of the
Unabomber before 1989 [the year David moved in with his future wife,
Linda] he would have regarded him as a hero."

David adamantly disputes this - he deplores violence, he says - but he
doesn't seem surprised to hear Ted say it. "I think every person is a
mystery, and it's strange to me that a person I grew up with and was
very close with remains one of the biggest mysteries of all."

Ted and David's parents, Wanda and Theodore R. Kaczynski, were atheists
- working-class intellectuals who valued education and dearly wanted
their sons to succeed on a higher plane.

Ted proved to be exceptionally bright from an early age. He was
generally happy, he writes, until he was about 11. That was when he
jumped the first of two years at school, which led to his entering
Harvard at the age of 16. There he was painfully awkward in the company
of his older classmates. At home he sulked, and his parents, he says,
raged against his anti-social behavior, calling him "sick" and "a
creep."

David Kaczynski, seven years younger, had an easier time of things. He,
too, was bright, but he was far more adept socially. The brothers got
along fairly well, although Ted admits to taking out his teenage
frustrations on David. Nevertheless, it was Ted whom David most
admired, especially as Ted began to speak about abandoning civilisation
to live in the wilderness.

The boys' father often took them on hikes outside Chicago, and Ted read
extensively about nature, wondering what it might be like to live
beyond the reach of the modern world. At Harvard, Ted felt socially
isolated from other students, but there was an even greater unease in
Ted's life; he suffered from what he calls "acute sexual starvation".
As an adolescent, he recalls, "my attempts to make advances to girls
had such humiliating results that for many years afterward, even until
after the the age of 30, I found it excruciatingly difficult, almost
impossible, to make advances to women."

In the face of such constant sadness and humiliation, Ted Kaczynski
decided he would live out his life alone in the wilderness. When he was
arrested in 1995 he had been living in the the Montana mountains for 25
years.

When asked about the fondest memories he holds of David, Ted cites a
day in the early 1970s when, he recalls, they took their baseball
gloves to a park. "We were throwing that ball as hard as we could, and
as far as we could . . . And so we were making these running, leaping
catches. We made more fantastic catches that day than I think we did in
all the rest of our years together."

Their bond now was perhaps as strong as it would ever be. They were a
pair of anti-careerist Ivy League graduates united by their love of the
outdoors - and also, frankly, by their failure at romantic love. David
had been only slightly more successful with women than Ted. He had
already decided that there was only one woman he could ever love - her
name was Linda - and though they had a few dates during college, things
did not work out as planned.

Ted often spent the night at David's apartment, which he had moved to
after leaving university. One day, while David was not at home, Ted
came across some letters from Linda, whom Ted had never heard David
mention. "The letters were not very informative," he writes, "but they
did make this much clear about Dave's relationship with Linda: he had a
long-term crush on her; his relationship to her was servile."

David had never given up on Linda, not even when she had married
another man. Faced with this, David left his apartment and slipped off
to the wilderness - interestingly, not to Ted's Montana mountain area
but to the Big Bend desert region of western Texas. He had $40,000 in
savings and, like Ted, a vague plan to spend the rest of his years
alone. He chose to live in a fortified hole in the ground called a pit
house, with no plumbing or electricity.

David and Ted wrote to each other frequently, and in September 1989,
David wrote to Ted to say he was leaving the desert to live with Linda.
Ted replied: "I can pretty well guess who the dominant member of that
couple is going to be. It's just disgusting. Let me know your neck size
- I'd like to get you a dog collar next Christmas." He then signed off
with a typically manipulative flourish: "But remember, you still have
my love and loyalty, and if you're ever in serious need of my help, you
can call on me."

It is tempting to interpret Ted's anger as a reaction not specifically
against Linda - he had never met her - but against his acolyte's
attainment of something be had spent his life without: a woman.

The following summer, David and Linda were married. Ted did not attend.
Two months later, their father became ill with lung cancer. Driving
home from the hospital after radiation treatment, David and his father
had a long talk. That night Theodore R. Kaczynski gave David his gold
watch; the next day he shot himself.

Ted did not attend his father's funeral. By this point Linda, having
read Ted's letters to David, forbade David ever to let Ted into their
house. She took some of his letters to a psychiatrist, who judged Ted
to be paranoid and possibly dangerous. She and David inquired about
having him institutionalised, but were told that it would be impossible
unless Ted were to volunteer. Or unless he had committed acts of
violence.

It was Linda who first raised the possibility that Ted might be the
Unabomber. In September 1995, when the Washington Post and the New York
Times published the Unabomber's "manifesto", she cajoled David into
reading it. After negotiating with the FBI and deliberating with Linda,
David told the authorities where they would find his brother. Before
his discovery that Ted was the Unabomber, "ethical questions weren't
that important to me", says David. "But now I have all kinds of
questions about other things. I thought I knew the difference between
right and wrong."

Asked whether he feels guilty for having turned Ted in, David says,
"Guilt suggests a very clear conviction of wrong-doing, and certainly I
don't feel that I did wrong. On the other hand, there are tremendously
complicated feelings not just about the decision itself, but a lifetime
of a relationship in which one brother failed to help protect another."
Even now, he hopes Ted will one day agree to see him, but when asked
whether he has envisioned their reconciliation, he grows quiet. "No, I
don't think it would be helpful," he says after a time. "The future
never meets us in the ways we imagine."

His brother Ted enjoys a certain amount of attention these days. He
receives mail from sympathisers and admirers. He has accepted an offer
to donate his personal papers to a major university's library of
anarchist materials. Talking to him, one is struck not by the burning
anger that characterised his Unabomber campaign, but by a satisfaction
that the world, at long last, is treating him like a valuable human
being. His spirits certainly don't seem as low as might be expected.
"Well, obviously I'm not optimistic about life in general," he says.
"If I were, then maybe you would have a case for concluding that I was
mentally ill.

"Let me try to explain it this way," he continues. "When I was living
in the woods, there was sort of an undertone, an underlying feeling
that things were basically right with my life. That is, I might have a
bad day, I might screw something up, I might break my axe handle and do
something else and everything would go wrong. But I was able to fall
back on the fact that I was a free man in the mountains, surrounded by
forests and wild animals and so forth.

"Here, it's the other way round. I'm not depressed or downcast, and I
have things I can do that I consider productive, like working on
getting out this book. And yet the knowledge that I'm locked up here
and likely to remain so for the rest of my life - it ruins it. And I
don't want to live long. I would rather get the death penalty than
spend the rest of my life in prison."

To be given the death penalty, Kaczynski will first have to gain a
retrial, which he knows is improbable. At a new trial, he would
represent himself, but he won't discuss the strategy he might employ.
What seems most likely is for him to argue that, essentially, desperate
disease requires a desperate cure. "Let me put it this way," Kaczynski
says. "I don't know if violence is ever the best solution, but there
are certain circumstances in which it may be the only solution."

To anarchists who advocate violence, Kaczynski has become a hero. He is
flattered but notes that "a lot of these people are just irrational".
What Kaczynski wants is a true movement - "people who are reasonably
rational and self-controlled and are seriously dedicated to getting rid
of the technological system. And if I could be a catalyst for the
formation of such a movement, I would like to do that."

Ted Kaczynksi, king of the anarchists: it is a measure of his
self-importance, and cruelty, that he envisions such a role as his
reward for blowing people up.Towards the end of our interview, I ask
him what he would say to reassure people if, against all odds, he
should get out of prison. He laughs at the question. "Just let them
worry," he says.

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