it was amazing how many people thought that they knew the unabomber. people will say, oh, well, it was easy. his brother told you who it was. well, what most people don t understand is, 60 other brothers told us with equal fervency that it was their brother that was the unabomber. phones ring constantly in the san francisco fbi s unabomb war room, some with tips, some duds. ninety-nine percent of the responses are false leads, unfortunately. there s only going to be one call that s going to be the right one. while they were waiting for a call back, david found an essay that his brother wrote decades earlier. it had an incredibly uncanny resemblance to the manifesto. i took it to our fbi laboratory, and i was almost immediately told that the typewriting didn t match. they examined it and said, nope, it s not the typewritite. therefore, it can t be the unabomber. molly wouldn t give up. she called the task force directly. i said, i think you re really going to want t
there was never any particle evidence. in fact, he planted evidence to mislead investigators. he would actually wear disguises when he went anywhere, to pick up a piece that was going to become a component in his bomb. i had only really seen that in foreign counterintelligence because spies have to be careful. they have tradecraft, and this guy was making up his own tradecraft. but, while he was doing that, he overlooked one very serious aspect of this, and that was the behavioral part. you can remove forensic clues, but you can t remove who you are. it was obvious that he was a reader and a writer. his grammar, his syntax, vocabulary was someone who was educated. one of the immediate things we had noticed, when we started working on unabomb as a task force, were all of those bombs that were placed in universities, university of chicago, at northwestern university and university of california, berkeley, not mailed to them, placed, so someone felt very comfortable being in tho