He was a mathematical genius who vanished into the wilderness... and became one of America’s most notorious terrorists.
In this episode, we'll explore the life of the Unabomber, the manifesto that finally exposed him, and the manhunt that lasted 17 years.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Unabomber.
[00:00:27] It's a story of genius, terrorism, isolation, technology, mathematics, and the most expensive manhunt in FBI history.
[00:00:39] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:45] The 19th of September, 1995, was a busy day for American newsstands.
[00:00:53] From the early morning, up and down the country, queues snaked around the block as people waited in line for their chance to read what promised to be a bombshell story.
[00:01:08] The Washington Post and the New York Times had announced that they were going to publish, in full, the manifesto of a terrorist killer known only as The Unabomber, a name that came from the FBI’s internal code ‘UNABOM’, short for university and airline bombings..
[00:01:32] This decision to publish was unusual for several reasons.
[00:01:37] Firstly, newspapers don’t tend to publish terrorist manifestos. The US government has a stated policy of not cooperating with terrorists, and so agreeing to publish one’s manifesto was unusual, to say the least.
[00:01:56] Secondly, the manifesto was 35,000 words long. Not exactly coffee shop reading.
[00:02:04] Thirdly, this manifesto was the first time the general public had heard anything from the Unabomber. For 17 years he had been sending anonymous bombs, and this was the first time not just the public, but also the authorities, would understand why.
[00:02:29] The agreement to publish the manifesto, made with the full approval of the FBI, was a sign of desperation. Whoever the Unabomber was, he had managed to elude the authorities for the best part of two decades. His bombing campaign had started in 1978, and had continued, off and on, until 1995, killing 3 people and injuring an additional 23.
[00:03:02] And for the duration of the campaign, he had never made any requests, not a single demand, nor had he officially claimed responsibility for any of the attacks.
[00:03:16] To state the obvious, this is very unusual; typically a terrorist, or a terrorist group, will put forward demands, or at least they will come forward and claim responsibility for an attack, to try to pressurise a government into taking a particular action.
[00:03:35] The Unabomber had done none of those things.
[00:03:39] Until now.
[00:03:41] Earlier that year, earlier in 1995, he had written a letter to The New York Times promising to stop the bombings if either the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto.
[00:03:58] When this request was taken to the FBI, it was carefully considered.
[00:04:03] Sure, the United States does not cooperate with terrorists.
[00:04:08] But this wasn’t exactly an impossible demand to agree to; he wasn’t asking for prisoners to be released or for any major change to government policy. All he wanted was for his views to be published in a major newspaper.
[00:04:26] What’s more, after 17 years and thousands of false leads, the FBI was at something of a loss. The bomber had taken meticulous care to cover his tracks, all sorts of psychological profiles had proven to be fruitless, and despite spending today’s equivalent of more than $100 million on the investigation, they were no closer to finding him.
[00:04:56] So the publication of the manifesto was a gamble—one last attempt to provoke a reaction, to coax the killer into making a mistake, or to encourage someone, anyone, to recognise the voice behind the words.
[00:05:14] Perhaps, just perhaps, someone might read this manifesto and something might click; a professor reading the style of a former student or a parent recognising their child’s voice from the page.
[00:05:30] If it didn’t work, well, this would be highly embarrassing for the FBI, but they had run out of other options.
[00:05:41] The manifesto began with the now famous line: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
[00:05:53] And over the next 35,000 words or so, it went on to spell out its author’s worldview, and it was a worldview unlike anything most readers had ever seen printed in a daily newspaper.
[00:06:09] It was bleak, uncompromising, and fiercely argued.
[00:06:16] The anonymous author—who signed his letters as “FC”, short for Freedom Club—he believed that modern technological society was not simply flawed, but fundamentally incompatible with human freedom.
[00:06:34] Technology, he argued, did not liberate us; it enslaved us.
[00:06:40] The more complex our systems became, the more dependent we grew on them, and the more powerless the individual became in the face of governments, corporations, and machines.
[00:06:54] This wasn’t the disjointed ramblings you might expect from a mad serial killer. It was disturbingly rational. Logical. Eloquent.
[00:07:08] This was clearly the work of a brilliant mind. Yes, someone prepared to kill, a murderer. But it was logically set out, touched on political theory, sociology, psychology, and history, and it displayed a truly encyclopedic knowledge.
[00:07:29] The Unabomber was extraordinary in the literal sense of the word.
[00:07:35] The manifesto was published, and, true to his word, the bombings stopped. The FBI and the government had honoured their side of the deal, and the Unabomber honoured his.
[00:07:51] As the authorities hoped, the phones started ringing off the hook. Every lead was followed up on, but it came to nothing.
[00:08:02] However, in the small town of Schenectady, New York, one man read the manifesto and a terrible, sinking feeling came over him.
[00:08:15] His name was David Kaczynski, and he had been persuaded to read the manifesto by his wife, Linda.
[00:08:24] See, David had an older brother, Theodore, or Ted, for short.
[00:08:31] Linda had never met Ted, but she had heard all about him. The two brothers had been very close, and although David hadn’t seen Ted for a long time, they had kept in touch by letter.
[00:08:48] Ted, so David believed, was living as a recluse in an isolated cabin in the wilds of Montana, cut off from the modern world.
[00:09:00] From what Linda had heard about her brother-in-law, well, it sounded quite similar to what she had read in the press about the Unabomber.
[00:09:11] “Just read the manifesto”, she told her husband. “For me”.
[00:09:16] Reluctantly, David Kaczynski picked up the newspaper.
[00:09:20] Almost immediately, he recognised the voice, the intense, almost obsessive way of arguing, the deep-seated hatred of technology, even certain specific and unusual expressions and turns of phrase that he knew his brother used.
[00:09:40] His worst fears were confirmed; to David Kaczynski, it was undeniable that the author of the Unabomber’s Manifesto and his older brother, Ted, were the same person.
[00:09:54] Instead of immediately going to the FBI, he decided to first hire a private investigator, then a lawyer. He didn’t want to go straight to the authorities; he knew his brother might be in a fragile mental state, and he didn’t want a raid resulting in him getting shot.
[00:10:16] The private investigator compared writing samples, samples of Ted’s letters to his brother with the Unabomber’s manifesto. She determined that it was highly likely to be a match.
[00:10:30] Early in 1996, David presented the information to the FBI, but demanded assurances that it would be an anonymous tip-off; the last thing he wanted was for his brother to know that it was him.
[00:10:47] See, Ted and David had been very close, so close, in fact, that David still found it almost impossible to believe that the boy that he had grown up with—a shy, brilliant child who had once spent hours teaching him maths puzzles—that this boy could be responsible for such cold-blooded violence.
[00:11:09] So to understand why this was so painful, and what might have caused Ted Kaczynski to behave in this way, we need to go back to his early life.
[00:11:21] He was born in Chicago in 1942 into what seemed, from the outside, like a perfectly ordinary, hard-working, Polish American family.
[00:11:34] His parents ran a small sausage factory; they were not wealthy, but they put a high value on education and they quickly realised that their eldest son was not like other children.
[00:11:48] He was off-the-charts intelligent.
[00:11:52] By the age of six, Ted was doing complex arithmetic in his head.
[00:11:58] By eight, he was reading advanced scientific material for fun.
[00:12:03] By ten, he had scored so highly on an IQ test, getting a mark of 167, that psychologists recommended he skip not just one year of school, but two.
[00:12:17] This decision would shape the rest of his life.
[00:12:22] Skipping grades might have made academic sense, but socially it was a disaster.
[00:12:29] Ted was smaller, younger, and far more sensitive than the older boys in his new class. He struggled to fit in, struggled to make new friends, and began to retreat into the one world in which he felt safe: mathematics.
[00:12:48] His teachers described him as “quiet”, “withdrawn”, even “timid”. But in maths class he came alive. Numbers somehow made sense when people did not.
[00:13:05] When he was just sixteen years old, he was encouraged to apply to, and was accepted into Harvard, becoming one of the youngest students ever admitted.
[00:13:17] For most families this would have been a dream come true.
[00:13:22] But for Ted, who was still very much a child on an emotional level, Harvard was not a dream. It was overwhelming, isolating, and sometimes traumatic.
[00:13:37] During his first year, he participated in a now-infamous psychological study run by a Harvard professor named Henry Murray. This study involved long, aggressive interrogation sessions designed to break down the participants’ beliefs. Kaczynski would later describe it as deeply humiliating, and subsequent commentators have suggested that it left lasting psychological scars on the young man.
[00:14:12] From Harvard he moved on to graduate studies, eventually earning a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan when he was only 25 years old.
[00:14:23] His thesis was so advanced that, according to someone on his dissertation panel, "maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."
[00:14:36] It seemed to his professors that he was destined to become one of the great American mathematicians of his generation.
[00:14:45] And yet, in 1969, something extraordinary happened.
[00:14:51] At the age of 27, after accepting a prestigious teaching position at Berkeley, Ted Kaczynski suddenly resigned. He walked away from a seemingly secure academic career, from a life that most people would consider incredibly successful.
[00:15:12] And he simply disappeared, or at least withdrew completely from society.
[00:15:20] He moved to a patch of remote land outside the tiny town of Lincoln, Montana, where he built, with his own hands, a tiny wooden cabin. No electricity. No running water. No telephone. No car. No neighbours. Just trees, mountains, and silence.
[00:15:43] It was here, in the solitude of the Montana woods, that Ted believed he could finally think clearly. Here, he would be free from the modern world he feared and hated. Here, he could live entirely independently, growing vegetables, trapping animals, reading philosophy, and writing page after page of notes on the dangers of technology.
[00:16:12] But this isolation did not calm him; it radicalised him.
[00:16:19] He watched the forests around him being cut down by developers; he saw aircraft flying overhead, he heard the distant hum of industrial progress, and grew convinced that technology was spreading like a disease.
[00:16:36] In his journals he wrote that the modern world was “robbing people of their freedom”, that industrial society was “crushing the human spirit”.
[00:16:47] By the mid-1970s, Ted Kaczynski had transformed from a gifted mathematician into an ideological extremist.
[00:16:58] And in 1978, he made a decision that would change everything.
[00:17:05] He built a bomb.
[00:17:08] It was hand-crafted from metal tubing, wood, batteries, and homemade components, it was placed in a parcel and left in a hallway at Northwestern University.
[00:17:21] When it exploded, injuring a security officer, his 17-year campaign of violence had begun.
[00:17:30] Over the next decade and a half he mailed or delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs, each designed to maim or kill, each carefully constructed to leave almost no usable forensic evidence.
[00:17:49] And his methods were meticulous.
[00:17:53] He sanded off fingerprints.
[00:17:55] He used handmade wooden parts to avoid traceability.
[00:18:00] He built explosive components from scratch.
[00:18:03] He included false clues, misleading markings, fake initials, random pieces of metal or hair he had found in public bathrooms, all intended to confuse investigators.
[00:18:18] Some bombs were disguised as parcels, others as pieces of scientific equipment.
[00:18:26] One of his early devices was planted on an American Airlines flight, causing smoke to fill the cabin and nearly forcing an emergency landing.
[00:18:36] Another killed a computer store owner in Sacramento. Another left a university professor permanently disabled.
[00:18:45] The authorities at first couldn’t figure out the connection between these people. Professors, airline executives, computer store owners, there seemed to be nothing linking them.
[00:19:00] The connection was technology; these were people Kaczynski believed were responsible for advancing the technological society he so despised.
[00:19:12] When it became clear that this was the work of a sophisticated terrorist, the FBI launched what would become the longest and most expensive manhunt in its history. And yet, for years, they had nothing.
[00:19:29] No suspect. No motive. No pattern they could reliably identify.
[00:19:36] To the authorities, the Unabomber was not simply dangerous; he was invisible.
[00:19:44] And it probably would have stayed that way if not for the publication of the manifesto, and the moment David Kaczynski recognised the voice of his brother.
[00:19:56] Now, when the FBI received the tip, they were initially skeptical.
[00:20:03] They had received thousands of similar leads over the years—tips from people suspecting neighbours, colleagues, or even family members—and all had been dead ends.
[00:20:16] But this one was different.
[00:20:19] The FBI had a number of letters and documents written by the Unabomber, and when they compared them to the old letters and academic papers written by Ted Kaczynski, the similarities were striking.
[00:20:35] They used a technique called forensic linguistics, which is the study of language in a legal context, and the experts noted identical usages of certain uncommon words and specific, idiosyncratic grammatical constructions.
[00:20:54] With mounting evidence, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Ted Kaczynski's cabin in Montana. They knew that they had to catch him red-handed; other than the similarities in writing styles, they had nothing concrete linking him to the crimes. The cabin was their last hope.
[00:21:17] On April 3, 1996, a team of FBI agents arrived on the scene.
[00:21:25] Posing as forestry workers, they knocked on the door. A dishevelled but importantly unarmed Kaczynski opened, and was swiftly arrested.
[00:21:38] And a search of the cabin revealed everything the FBI was looking for.
[00:21:44] They found a wealth of evidence, including four fully constructed and ready-to-mail bombs, and the original, handwritten draft of the 35,000-word manifesto.
[00:21:57] Alongside this, there were detailed journals containing the formula and process for every single one of the 16 bombings the Unabomber had carried out.
[00:22:09] These weren’t written in plain English, though. Kaczynski had encrypted them using an incredibly sophisticated system of codes, but fortunately for the authorities, the ciphers, the codes to decipher the system, were also found in the cabin.
[00:22:28] Ted Kaczynski was arrested. The man who had been the subject of the most complex, long-running, and expensive investigation in US history was finally in custody.
[00:22:41] But the story doesn't end there. The trial, and the ultimate fate of this boy-genius-turned-terrorist, would raise profound questions about responsibility, mental health, and the very nature of modern society.
[00:23:00] Ted Kaczynski never denied being The Unabomber, but his legal defense was complicated.
[00:23:08] His lawyers wanted to argue that he was mentally ill and therefore not responsible for his actions. They wanted him to plead "not guilty by reason of insanity."
[00:23:22] In other words, he was crazy.
[00:23:25] Kaczynski, however, fiercely objected to this strategy.
[00:23:31] He saw himself not as a madman, but as a rational revolutionary.
[00:23:38] To be declared insane would invalidate his manifesto and his entire political philosophy, and the entire reason he had embarked on his bombing campaign was for his views to be taken seriously.
[00:23:54] He was so determined that he eventually tried to fire his own defense team and represent himself in court.
[00:24:02] In the end, he avoided a potentially lengthy and highly publicised trial by accepting a plea bargain.
[00:24:10] On January 22, 1998, Ted Kaczynski pleaded guilty to all charges. In exchange for avoiding the death penalty, he was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
[00:24:29] He was transferred to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where he lived out the remainder of his days, much of it in solitary confinement, before finally killing himself in June of 2023, at the age of 81.
[00:24:45] And there is another twist to this story.
[00:24:49] His bombing spree started in 1978, in a world we might today consider relatively free from technology.
[00:25:00] Today, where technology is infinitely more entrenched in every aspect of our lives than 50 years ago, his anti-technology message is able to spread ever further and faster, and is reaching more people than ever before.
[00:25:16] Whether it’s simply that his manifesto is easily accessible online, or that people are making TikToks about “Uncle Ted was right”, his worldview and philosophy is becoming more and more well-known through the very technology he sought to destroy.
[00:25:35] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on The Unabomber.
[00:25:39] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:25:43] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:25:46] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:26:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Unabomber.
[00:00:27] It's a story of genius, terrorism, isolation, technology, mathematics, and the most expensive manhunt in FBI history.
[00:00:39] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:45] The 19th of September, 1995, was a busy day for American newsstands.
[00:00:53] From the early morning, up and down the country, queues snaked around the block as people waited in line for their chance to read what promised to be a bombshell story.
[00:01:08] The Washington Post and the New York Times had announced that they were going to publish, in full, the manifesto of a terrorist killer known only as The Unabomber, a name that came from the FBI’s internal code ‘UNABOM’, short for university and airline bombings..
[00:01:32] This decision to publish was unusual for several reasons.
[00:01:37] Firstly, newspapers don’t tend to publish terrorist manifestos. The US government has a stated policy of not cooperating with terrorists, and so agreeing to publish one’s manifesto was unusual, to say the least.
[00:01:56] Secondly, the manifesto was 35,000 words long. Not exactly coffee shop reading.
[00:02:04] Thirdly, this manifesto was the first time the general public had heard anything from the Unabomber. For 17 years he had been sending anonymous bombs, and this was the first time not just the public, but also the authorities, would understand why.
[00:02:29] The agreement to publish the manifesto, made with the full approval of the FBI, was a sign of desperation. Whoever the Unabomber was, he had managed to elude the authorities for the best part of two decades. His bombing campaign had started in 1978, and had continued, off and on, until 1995, killing 3 people and injuring an additional 23.
[00:03:02] And for the duration of the campaign, he had never made any requests, not a single demand, nor had he officially claimed responsibility for any of the attacks.
[00:03:16] To state the obvious, this is very unusual; typically a terrorist, or a terrorist group, will put forward demands, or at least they will come forward and claim responsibility for an attack, to try to pressurise a government into taking a particular action.
[00:03:35] The Unabomber had done none of those things.
[00:03:39] Until now.
[00:03:41] Earlier that year, earlier in 1995, he had written a letter to The New York Times promising to stop the bombings if either the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto.
[00:03:58] When this request was taken to the FBI, it was carefully considered.
[00:04:03] Sure, the United States does not cooperate with terrorists.
[00:04:08] But this wasn’t exactly an impossible demand to agree to; he wasn’t asking for prisoners to be released or for any major change to government policy. All he wanted was for his views to be published in a major newspaper.
[00:04:26] What’s more, after 17 years and thousands of false leads, the FBI was at something of a loss. The bomber had taken meticulous care to cover his tracks, all sorts of psychological profiles had proven to be fruitless, and despite spending today’s equivalent of more than $100 million on the investigation, they were no closer to finding him.
[00:04:56] So the publication of the manifesto was a gamble—one last attempt to provoke a reaction, to coax the killer into making a mistake, or to encourage someone, anyone, to recognise the voice behind the words.
[00:05:14] Perhaps, just perhaps, someone might read this manifesto and something might click; a professor reading the style of a former student or a parent recognising their child’s voice from the page.
[00:05:30] If it didn’t work, well, this would be highly embarrassing for the FBI, but they had run out of other options.
[00:05:41] The manifesto began with the now famous line: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
[00:05:53] And over the next 35,000 words or so, it went on to spell out its author’s worldview, and it was a worldview unlike anything most readers had ever seen printed in a daily newspaper.
[00:06:09] It was bleak, uncompromising, and fiercely argued.
[00:06:16] The anonymous author—who signed his letters as “FC”, short for Freedom Club—he believed that modern technological society was not simply flawed, but fundamentally incompatible with human freedom.
[00:06:34] Technology, he argued, did not liberate us; it enslaved us.
[00:06:40] The more complex our systems became, the more dependent we grew on them, and the more powerless the individual became in the face of governments, corporations, and machines.
[00:06:54] This wasn’t the disjointed ramblings you might expect from a mad serial killer. It was disturbingly rational. Logical. Eloquent.
[00:07:08] This was clearly the work of a brilliant mind. Yes, someone prepared to kill, a murderer. But it was logically set out, touched on political theory, sociology, psychology, and history, and it displayed a truly encyclopedic knowledge.
[00:07:29] The Unabomber was extraordinary in the literal sense of the word.
[00:07:35] The manifesto was published, and, true to his word, the bombings stopped. The FBI and the government had honoured their side of the deal, and the Unabomber honoured his.
[00:07:51] As the authorities hoped, the phones started ringing off the hook. Every lead was followed up on, but it came to nothing.
[00:08:02] However, in the small town of Schenectady, New York, one man read the manifesto and a terrible, sinking feeling came over him.
[00:08:15] His name was David Kaczynski, and he had been persuaded to read the manifesto by his wife, Linda.
[00:08:24] See, David had an older brother, Theodore, or Ted, for short.
[00:08:31] Linda had never met Ted, but she had heard all about him. The two brothers had been very close, and although David hadn’t seen Ted for a long time, they had kept in touch by letter.
[00:08:48] Ted, so David believed, was living as a recluse in an isolated cabin in the wilds of Montana, cut off from the modern world.
[00:09:00] From what Linda had heard about her brother-in-law, well, it sounded quite similar to what she had read in the press about the Unabomber.
[00:09:11] “Just read the manifesto”, she told her husband. “For me”.
[00:09:16] Reluctantly, David Kaczynski picked up the newspaper.
[00:09:20] Almost immediately, he recognised the voice, the intense, almost obsessive way of arguing, the deep-seated hatred of technology, even certain specific and unusual expressions and turns of phrase that he knew his brother used.
[00:09:40] His worst fears were confirmed; to David Kaczynski, it was undeniable that the author of the Unabomber’s Manifesto and his older brother, Ted, were the same person.
[00:09:54] Instead of immediately going to the FBI, he decided to first hire a private investigator, then a lawyer. He didn’t want to go straight to the authorities; he knew his brother might be in a fragile mental state, and he didn’t want a raid resulting in him getting shot.
[00:10:16] The private investigator compared writing samples, samples of Ted’s letters to his brother with the Unabomber’s manifesto. She determined that it was highly likely to be a match.
[00:10:30] Early in 1996, David presented the information to the FBI, but demanded assurances that it would be an anonymous tip-off; the last thing he wanted was for his brother to know that it was him.
[00:10:47] See, Ted and David had been very close, so close, in fact, that David still found it almost impossible to believe that the boy that he had grown up with—a shy, brilliant child who had once spent hours teaching him maths puzzles—that this boy could be responsible for such cold-blooded violence.
[00:11:09] So to understand why this was so painful, and what might have caused Ted Kaczynski to behave in this way, we need to go back to his early life.
[00:11:21] He was born in Chicago in 1942 into what seemed, from the outside, like a perfectly ordinary, hard-working, Polish American family.
[00:11:34] His parents ran a small sausage factory; they were not wealthy, but they put a high value on education and they quickly realised that their eldest son was not like other children.
[00:11:48] He was off-the-charts intelligent.
[00:11:52] By the age of six, Ted was doing complex arithmetic in his head.
[00:11:58] By eight, he was reading advanced scientific material for fun.
[00:12:03] By ten, he had scored so highly on an IQ test, getting a mark of 167, that psychologists recommended he skip not just one year of school, but two.
[00:12:17] This decision would shape the rest of his life.
[00:12:22] Skipping grades might have made academic sense, but socially it was a disaster.
[00:12:29] Ted was smaller, younger, and far more sensitive than the older boys in his new class. He struggled to fit in, struggled to make new friends, and began to retreat into the one world in which he felt safe: mathematics.
[00:12:48] His teachers described him as “quiet”, “withdrawn”, even “timid”. But in maths class he came alive. Numbers somehow made sense when people did not.
[00:13:05] When he was just sixteen years old, he was encouraged to apply to, and was accepted into Harvard, becoming one of the youngest students ever admitted.
[00:13:17] For most families this would have been a dream come true.
[00:13:22] But for Ted, who was still very much a child on an emotional level, Harvard was not a dream. It was overwhelming, isolating, and sometimes traumatic.
[00:13:37] During his first year, he participated in a now-infamous psychological study run by a Harvard professor named Henry Murray. This study involved long, aggressive interrogation sessions designed to break down the participants’ beliefs. Kaczynski would later describe it as deeply humiliating, and subsequent commentators have suggested that it left lasting psychological scars on the young man.
[00:14:12] From Harvard he moved on to graduate studies, eventually earning a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan when he was only 25 years old.
[00:14:23] His thesis was so advanced that, according to someone on his dissertation panel, "maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."
[00:14:36] It seemed to his professors that he was destined to become one of the great American mathematicians of his generation.
[00:14:45] And yet, in 1969, something extraordinary happened.
[00:14:51] At the age of 27, after accepting a prestigious teaching position at Berkeley, Ted Kaczynski suddenly resigned. He walked away from a seemingly secure academic career, from a life that most people would consider incredibly successful.
[00:15:12] And he simply disappeared, or at least withdrew completely from society.
[00:15:20] He moved to a patch of remote land outside the tiny town of Lincoln, Montana, where he built, with his own hands, a tiny wooden cabin. No electricity. No running water. No telephone. No car. No neighbours. Just trees, mountains, and silence.
[00:15:43] It was here, in the solitude of the Montana woods, that Ted believed he could finally think clearly. Here, he would be free from the modern world he feared and hated. Here, he could live entirely independently, growing vegetables, trapping animals, reading philosophy, and writing page after page of notes on the dangers of technology.
[00:16:12] But this isolation did not calm him; it radicalised him.
[00:16:19] He watched the forests around him being cut down by developers; he saw aircraft flying overhead, he heard the distant hum of industrial progress, and grew convinced that technology was spreading like a disease.
[00:16:36] In his journals he wrote that the modern world was “robbing people of their freedom”, that industrial society was “crushing the human spirit”.
[00:16:47] By the mid-1970s, Ted Kaczynski had transformed from a gifted mathematician into an ideological extremist.
[00:16:58] And in 1978, he made a decision that would change everything.
[00:17:05] He built a bomb.
[00:17:08] It was hand-crafted from metal tubing, wood, batteries, and homemade components, it was placed in a parcel and left in a hallway at Northwestern University.
[00:17:21] When it exploded, injuring a security officer, his 17-year campaign of violence had begun.
[00:17:30] Over the next decade and a half he mailed or delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs, each designed to maim or kill, each carefully constructed to leave almost no usable forensic evidence.
[00:17:49] And his methods were meticulous.
[00:17:53] He sanded off fingerprints.
[00:17:55] He used handmade wooden parts to avoid traceability.
[00:18:00] He built explosive components from scratch.
[00:18:03] He included false clues, misleading markings, fake initials, random pieces of metal or hair he had found in public bathrooms, all intended to confuse investigators.
[00:18:18] Some bombs were disguised as parcels, others as pieces of scientific equipment.
[00:18:26] One of his early devices was planted on an American Airlines flight, causing smoke to fill the cabin and nearly forcing an emergency landing.
[00:18:36] Another killed a computer store owner in Sacramento. Another left a university professor permanently disabled.
[00:18:45] The authorities at first couldn’t figure out the connection between these people. Professors, airline executives, computer store owners, there seemed to be nothing linking them.
[00:19:00] The connection was technology; these were people Kaczynski believed were responsible for advancing the technological society he so despised.
[00:19:12] When it became clear that this was the work of a sophisticated terrorist, the FBI launched what would become the longest and most expensive manhunt in its history. And yet, for years, they had nothing.
[00:19:29] No suspect. No motive. No pattern they could reliably identify.
[00:19:36] To the authorities, the Unabomber was not simply dangerous; he was invisible.
[00:19:44] And it probably would have stayed that way if not for the publication of the manifesto, and the moment David Kaczynski recognised the voice of his brother.
[00:19:56] Now, when the FBI received the tip, they were initially skeptical.
[00:20:03] They had received thousands of similar leads over the years—tips from people suspecting neighbours, colleagues, or even family members—and all had been dead ends.
[00:20:16] But this one was different.
[00:20:19] The FBI had a number of letters and documents written by the Unabomber, and when they compared them to the old letters and academic papers written by Ted Kaczynski, the similarities were striking.
[00:20:35] They used a technique called forensic linguistics, which is the study of language in a legal context, and the experts noted identical usages of certain uncommon words and specific, idiosyncratic grammatical constructions.
[00:20:54] With mounting evidence, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Ted Kaczynski's cabin in Montana. They knew that they had to catch him red-handed; other than the similarities in writing styles, they had nothing concrete linking him to the crimes. The cabin was their last hope.
[00:21:17] On April 3, 1996, a team of FBI agents arrived on the scene.
[00:21:25] Posing as forestry workers, they knocked on the door. A dishevelled but importantly unarmed Kaczynski opened, and was swiftly arrested.
[00:21:38] And a search of the cabin revealed everything the FBI was looking for.
[00:21:44] They found a wealth of evidence, including four fully constructed and ready-to-mail bombs, and the original, handwritten draft of the 35,000-word manifesto.
[00:21:57] Alongside this, there were detailed journals containing the formula and process for every single one of the 16 bombings the Unabomber had carried out.
[00:22:09] These weren’t written in plain English, though. Kaczynski had encrypted them using an incredibly sophisticated system of codes, but fortunately for the authorities, the ciphers, the codes to decipher the system, were also found in the cabin.
[00:22:28] Ted Kaczynski was arrested. The man who had been the subject of the most complex, long-running, and expensive investigation in US history was finally in custody.
[00:22:41] But the story doesn't end there. The trial, and the ultimate fate of this boy-genius-turned-terrorist, would raise profound questions about responsibility, mental health, and the very nature of modern society.
[00:23:00] Ted Kaczynski never denied being The Unabomber, but his legal defense was complicated.
[00:23:08] His lawyers wanted to argue that he was mentally ill and therefore not responsible for his actions. They wanted him to plead "not guilty by reason of insanity."
[00:23:22] In other words, he was crazy.
[00:23:25] Kaczynski, however, fiercely objected to this strategy.
[00:23:31] He saw himself not as a madman, but as a rational revolutionary.
[00:23:38] To be declared insane would invalidate his manifesto and his entire political philosophy, and the entire reason he had embarked on his bombing campaign was for his views to be taken seriously.
[00:23:54] He was so determined that he eventually tried to fire his own defense team and represent himself in court.
[00:24:02] In the end, he avoided a potentially lengthy and highly publicised trial by accepting a plea bargain.
[00:24:10] On January 22, 1998, Ted Kaczynski pleaded guilty to all charges. In exchange for avoiding the death penalty, he was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
[00:24:29] He was transferred to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where he lived out the remainder of his days, much of it in solitary confinement, before finally killing himself in June of 2023, at the age of 81.
[00:24:45] And there is another twist to this story.
[00:24:49] His bombing spree started in 1978, in a world we might today consider relatively free from technology.
[00:25:00] Today, where technology is infinitely more entrenched in every aspect of our lives than 50 years ago, his anti-technology message is able to spread ever further and faster, and is reaching more people than ever before.
[00:25:16] Whether it’s simply that his manifesto is easily accessible online, or that people are making TikToks about “Uncle Ted was right”, his worldview and philosophy is becoming more and more well-known through the very technology he sought to destroy.
[00:25:35] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on The Unabomber.
[00:25:39] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:25:43] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:25:46] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:26:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about The Unabomber.
[00:00:27] It's a story of genius, terrorism, isolation, technology, mathematics, and the most expensive manhunt in FBI history.
[00:00:39] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:00:45] The 19th of September, 1995, was a busy day for American newsstands.
[00:00:53] From the early morning, up and down the country, queues snaked around the block as people waited in line for their chance to read what promised to be a bombshell story.
[00:01:08] The Washington Post and the New York Times had announced that they were going to publish, in full, the manifesto of a terrorist killer known only as The Unabomber, a name that came from the FBI’s internal code ‘UNABOM’, short for university and airline bombings..
[00:01:32] This decision to publish was unusual for several reasons.
[00:01:37] Firstly, newspapers don’t tend to publish terrorist manifestos. The US government has a stated policy of not cooperating with terrorists, and so agreeing to publish one’s manifesto was unusual, to say the least.
[00:01:56] Secondly, the manifesto was 35,000 words long. Not exactly coffee shop reading.
[00:02:04] Thirdly, this manifesto was the first time the general public had heard anything from the Unabomber. For 17 years he had been sending anonymous bombs, and this was the first time not just the public, but also the authorities, would understand why.
[00:02:29] The agreement to publish the manifesto, made with the full approval of the FBI, was a sign of desperation. Whoever the Unabomber was, he had managed to elude the authorities for the best part of two decades. His bombing campaign had started in 1978, and had continued, off and on, until 1995, killing 3 people and injuring an additional 23.
[00:03:02] And for the duration of the campaign, he had never made any requests, not a single demand, nor had he officially claimed responsibility for any of the attacks.
[00:03:16] To state the obvious, this is very unusual; typically a terrorist, or a terrorist group, will put forward demands, or at least they will come forward and claim responsibility for an attack, to try to pressurise a government into taking a particular action.
[00:03:35] The Unabomber had done none of those things.
[00:03:39] Until now.
[00:03:41] Earlier that year, earlier in 1995, he had written a letter to The New York Times promising to stop the bombings if either the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto.
[00:03:58] When this request was taken to the FBI, it was carefully considered.
[00:04:03] Sure, the United States does not cooperate with terrorists.
[00:04:08] But this wasn’t exactly an impossible demand to agree to; he wasn’t asking for prisoners to be released or for any major change to government policy. All he wanted was for his views to be published in a major newspaper.
[00:04:26] What’s more, after 17 years and thousands of false leads, the FBI was at something of a loss. The bomber had taken meticulous care to cover his tracks, all sorts of psychological profiles had proven to be fruitless, and despite spending today’s equivalent of more than $100 million on the investigation, they were no closer to finding him.
[00:04:56] So the publication of the manifesto was a gamble—one last attempt to provoke a reaction, to coax the killer into making a mistake, or to encourage someone, anyone, to recognise the voice behind the words.
[00:05:14] Perhaps, just perhaps, someone might read this manifesto and something might click; a professor reading the style of a former student or a parent recognising their child’s voice from the page.
[00:05:30] If it didn’t work, well, this would be highly embarrassing for the FBI, but they had run out of other options.
[00:05:41] The manifesto began with the now famous line: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
[00:05:53] And over the next 35,000 words or so, it went on to spell out its author’s worldview, and it was a worldview unlike anything most readers had ever seen printed in a daily newspaper.
[00:06:09] It was bleak, uncompromising, and fiercely argued.
[00:06:16] The anonymous author—who signed his letters as “FC”, short for Freedom Club—he believed that modern technological society was not simply flawed, but fundamentally incompatible with human freedom.
[00:06:34] Technology, he argued, did not liberate us; it enslaved us.
[00:06:40] The more complex our systems became, the more dependent we grew on them, and the more powerless the individual became in the face of governments, corporations, and machines.
[00:06:54] This wasn’t the disjointed ramblings you might expect from a mad serial killer. It was disturbingly rational. Logical. Eloquent.
[00:07:08] This was clearly the work of a brilliant mind. Yes, someone prepared to kill, a murderer. But it was logically set out, touched on political theory, sociology, psychology, and history, and it displayed a truly encyclopedic knowledge.
[00:07:29] The Unabomber was extraordinary in the literal sense of the word.
[00:07:35] The manifesto was published, and, true to his word, the bombings stopped. The FBI and the government had honoured their side of the deal, and the Unabomber honoured his.
[00:07:51] As the authorities hoped, the phones started ringing off the hook. Every lead was followed up on, but it came to nothing.
[00:08:02] However, in the small town of Schenectady, New York, one man read the manifesto and a terrible, sinking feeling came over him.
[00:08:15] His name was David Kaczynski, and he had been persuaded to read the manifesto by his wife, Linda.
[00:08:24] See, David had an older brother, Theodore, or Ted, for short.
[00:08:31] Linda had never met Ted, but she had heard all about him. The two brothers had been very close, and although David hadn’t seen Ted for a long time, they had kept in touch by letter.
[00:08:48] Ted, so David believed, was living as a recluse in an isolated cabin in the wilds of Montana, cut off from the modern world.
[00:09:00] From what Linda had heard about her brother-in-law, well, it sounded quite similar to what she had read in the press about the Unabomber.
[00:09:11] “Just read the manifesto”, she told her husband. “For me”.
[00:09:16] Reluctantly, David Kaczynski picked up the newspaper.
[00:09:20] Almost immediately, he recognised the voice, the intense, almost obsessive way of arguing, the deep-seated hatred of technology, even certain specific and unusual expressions and turns of phrase that he knew his brother used.
[00:09:40] His worst fears were confirmed; to David Kaczynski, it was undeniable that the author of the Unabomber’s Manifesto and his older brother, Ted, were the same person.
[00:09:54] Instead of immediately going to the FBI, he decided to first hire a private investigator, then a lawyer. He didn’t want to go straight to the authorities; he knew his brother might be in a fragile mental state, and he didn’t want a raid resulting in him getting shot.
[00:10:16] The private investigator compared writing samples, samples of Ted’s letters to his brother with the Unabomber’s manifesto. She determined that it was highly likely to be a match.
[00:10:30] Early in 1996, David presented the information to the FBI, but demanded assurances that it would be an anonymous tip-off; the last thing he wanted was for his brother to know that it was him.
[00:10:47] See, Ted and David had been very close, so close, in fact, that David still found it almost impossible to believe that the boy that he had grown up with—a shy, brilliant child who had once spent hours teaching him maths puzzles—that this boy could be responsible for such cold-blooded violence.
[00:11:09] So to understand why this was so painful, and what might have caused Ted Kaczynski to behave in this way, we need to go back to his early life.
[00:11:21] He was born in Chicago in 1942 into what seemed, from the outside, like a perfectly ordinary, hard-working, Polish American family.
[00:11:34] His parents ran a small sausage factory; they were not wealthy, but they put a high value on education and they quickly realised that their eldest son was not like other children.
[00:11:48] He was off-the-charts intelligent.
[00:11:52] By the age of six, Ted was doing complex arithmetic in his head.
[00:11:58] By eight, he was reading advanced scientific material for fun.
[00:12:03] By ten, he had scored so highly on an IQ test, getting a mark of 167, that psychologists recommended he skip not just one year of school, but two.
[00:12:17] This decision would shape the rest of his life.
[00:12:22] Skipping grades might have made academic sense, but socially it was a disaster.
[00:12:29] Ted was smaller, younger, and far more sensitive than the older boys in his new class. He struggled to fit in, struggled to make new friends, and began to retreat into the one world in which he felt safe: mathematics.
[00:12:48] His teachers described him as “quiet”, “withdrawn”, even “timid”. But in maths class he came alive. Numbers somehow made sense when people did not.
[00:13:05] When he was just sixteen years old, he was encouraged to apply to, and was accepted into Harvard, becoming one of the youngest students ever admitted.
[00:13:17] For most families this would have been a dream come true.
[00:13:22] But for Ted, who was still very much a child on an emotional level, Harvard was not a dream. It was overwhelming, isolating, and sometimes traumatic.
[00:13:37] During his first year, he participated in a now-infamous psychological study run by a Harvard professor named Henry Murray. This study involved long, aggressive interrogation sessions designed to break down the participants’ beliefs. Kaczynski would later describe it as deeply humiliating, and subsequent commentators have suggested that it left lasting psychological scars on the young man.
[00:14:12] From Harvard he moved on to graduate studies, eventually earning a PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan when he was only 25 years old.
[00:14:23] His thesis was so advanced that, according to someone on his dissertation panel, "maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."
[00:14:36] It seemed to his professors that he was destined to become one of the great American mathematicians of his generation.
[00:14:45] And yet, in 1969, something extraordinary happened.
[00:14:51] At the age of 27, after accepting a prestigious teaching position at Berkeley, Ted Kaczynski suddenly resigned. He walked away from a seemingly secure academic career, from a life that most people would consider incredibly successful.
[00:15:12] And he simply disappeared, or at least withdrew completely from society.
[00:15:20] He moved to a patch of remote land outside the tiny town of Lincoln, Montana, where he built, with his own hands, a tiny wooden cabin. No electricity. No running water. No telephone. No car. No neighbours. Just trees, mountains, and silence.
[00:15:43] It was here, in the solitude of the Montana woods, that Ted believed he could finally think clearly. Here, he would be free from the modern world he feared and hated. Here, he could live entirely independently, growing vegetables, trapping animals, reading philosophy, and writing page after page of notes on the dangers of technology.
[00:16:12] But this isolation did not calm him; it radicalised him.
[00:16:19] He watched the forests around him being cut down by developers; he saw aircraft flying overhead, he heard the distant hum of industrial progress, and grew convinced that technology was spreading like a disease.
[00:16:36] In his journals he wrote that the modern world was “robbing people of their freedom”, that industrial society was “crushing the human spirit”.
[00:16:47] By the mid-1970s, Ted Kaczynski had transformed from a gifted mathematician into an ideological extremist.
[00:16:58] And in 1978, he made a decision that would change everything.
[00:17:05] He built a bomb.
[00:17:08] It was hand-crafted from metal tubing, wood, batteries, and homemade components, it was placed in a parcel and left in a hallway at Northwestern University.
[00:17:21] When it exploded, injuring a security officer, his 17-year campaign of violence had begun.
[00:17:30] Over the next decade and a half he mailed or delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs, each designed to maim or kill, each carefully constructed to leave almost no usable forensic evidence.
[00:17:49] And his methods were meticulous.
[00:17:53] He sanded off fingerprints.
[00:17:55] He used handmade wooden parts to avoid traceability.
[00:18:00] He built explosive components from scratch.
[00:18:03] He included false clues, misleading markings, fake initials, random pieces of metal or hair he had found in public bathrooms, all intended to confuse investigators.
[00:18:18] Some bombs were disguised as parcels, others as pieces of scientific equipment.
[00:18:26] One of his early devices was planted on an American Airlines flight, causing smoke to fill the cabin and nearly forcing an emergency landing.
[00:18:36] Another killed a computer store owner in Sacramento. Another left a university professor permanently disabled.
[00:18:45] The authorities at first couldn’t figure out the connection between these people. Professors, airline executives, computer store owners, there seemed to be nothing linking them.
[00:19:00] The connection was technology; these were people Kaczynski believed were responsible for advancing the technological society he so despised.
[00:19:12] When it became clear that this was the work of a sophisticated terrorist, the FBI launched what would become the longest and most expensive manhunt in its history. And yet, for years, they had nothing.
[00:19:29] No suspect. No motive. No pattern they could reliably identify.
[00:19:36] To the authorities, the Unabomber was not simply dangerous; he was invisible.
[00:19:44] And it probably would have stayed that way if not for the publication of the manifesto, and the moment David Kaczynski recognised the voice of his brother.
[00:19:56] Now, when the FBI received the tip, they were initially skeptical.
[00:20:03] They had received thousands of similar leads over the years—tips from people suspecting neighbours, colleagues, or even family members—and all had been dead ends.
[00:20:16] But this one was different.
[00:20:19] The FBI had a number of letters and documents written by the Unabomber, and when they compared them to the old letters and academic papers written by Ted Kaczynski, the similarities were striking.
[00:20:35] They used a technique called forensic linguistics, which is the study of language in a legal context, and the experts noted identical usages of certain uncommon words and specific, idiosyncratic grammatical constructions.
[00:20:54] With mounting evidence, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Ted Kaczynski's cabin in Montana. They knew that they had to catch him red-handed; other than the similarities in writing styles, they had nothing concrete linking him to the crimes. The cabin was their last hope.
[00:21:17] On April 3, 1996, a team of FBI agents arrived on the scene.
[00:21:25] Posing as forestry workers, they knocked on the door. A dishevelled but importantly unarmed Kaczynski opened, and was swiftly arrested.
[00:21:38] And a search of the cabin revealed everything the FBI was looking for.
[00:21:44] They found a wealth of evidence, including four fully constructed and ready-to-mail bombs, and the original, handwritten draft of the 35,000-word manifesto.
[00:21:57] Alongside this, there were detailed journals containing the formula and process for every single one of the 16 bombings the Unabomber had carried out.
[00:22:09] These weren’t written in plain English, though. Kaczynski had encrypted them using an incredibly sophisticated system of codes, but fortunately for the authorities, the ciphers, the codes to decipher the system, were also found in the cabin.
[00:22:28] Ted Kaczynski was arrested. The man who had been the subject of the most complex, long-running, and expensive investigation in US history was finally in custody.
[00:22:41] But the story doesn't end there. The trial, and the ultimate fate of this boy-genius-turned-terrorist, would raise profound questions about responsibility, mental health, and the very nature of modern society.
[00:23:00] Ted Kaczynski never denied being The Unabomber, but his legal defense was complicated.
[00:23:08] His lawyers wanted to argue that he was mentally ill and therefore not responsible for his actions. They wanted him to plead "not guilty by reason of insanity."
[00:23:22] In other words, he was crazy.
[00:23:25] Kaczynski, however, fiercely objected to this strategy.
[00:23:31] He saw himself not as a madman, but as a rational revolutionary.
[00:23:38] To be declared insane would invalidate his manifesto and his entire political philosophy, and the entire reason he had embarked on his bombing campaign was for his views to be taken seriously.
[00:23:54] He was so determined that he eventually tried to fire his own defense team and represent himself in court.
[00:24:02] In the end, he avoided a potentially lengthy and highly publicised trial by accepting a plea bargain.
[00:24:10] On January 22, 1998, Ted Kaczynski pleaded guilty to all charges. In exchange for avoiding the death penalty, he was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
[00:24:29] He was transferred to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where he lived out the remainder of his days, much of it in solitary confinement, before finally killing himself in June of 2023, at the age of 81.
[00:24:45] And there is another twist to this story.
[00:24:49] His bombing spree started in 1978, in a world we might today consider relatively free from technology.
[00:25:00] Today, where technology is infinitely more entrenched in every aspect of our lives than 50 years ago, his anti-technology message is able to spread ever further and faster, and is reaching more people than ever before.
[00:25:16] Whether it’s simply that his manifesto is easily accessible online, or that people are making TikToks about “Uncle Ted was right”, his worldview and philosophy is becoming more and more well-known through the very technology he sought to destroy.
[00:25:35] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on The Unabomber.
[00:25:39] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:25:43] As always, I'd love to know what you thought of this episode.
[00:25:46] For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:25:55] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:26:00] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
