FEDS HOLD EX-PROF
MAN MAY BE UNABOMBER

NEWS

A member of the Unabom task force identified the man as Ted John Kaczynski and said he had been using many aliases. Federal agents were said to have been following him for several weeks.

Kaczynski was taken into custody so that he would not interfere with the search of his home, but he was not placed under arrest, a federal law enforcement official said.

Chuck O'Reilly, sheriff of Lewis and Clark County, said 20 FBI agents searched the home on the west side of Stemple Pass, between Helena and Lincoln.

Late Wednesday evening, O'Reilly said, Kaczynski was driven 40 miles over winding, gravel mountain roads to Helena where he was taken to a small, windowless office the FBI maintains on the third floor of a downtown office building.

Kaczynski was seen getting off an elevator in handcuffs.

It was not immediately known whether Kaczynski would be held overnight and whether charges would be filed against him.

A source close to the investigation said late Wednesday that the FBI was concerned because agents had not found what they hoped to find in the cabin. The source said the FBI was bringing in a specialist to try to determine whether some materials that were found could be used in bomb making.

The search for the Unabomber - who is thought to be responsible for three deaths and 23 injuries over nearly 18 years - appeared to have no connection to the standoff between federal agents and the anti-government separatists known as Freemen near the town of Jordan, 350 miles to the east.

Butch Gehring, a neighbor, said the small cabin being searched was the home of a Ted Kaczynski, described as being a resident since 1971.

``He was real shy, real quiet. His conversations were short,'' Gehring said, describing Kaczynski as a hermit.

``We like the looks of this guy as the Unabomber, but we don't have make-or-break evidence yet,'' one federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press. ``We have some writings that match up, but we don't have his tools yet. We want the irrefutable motherlode of evidence.''

Rick Smith, who retired just on Friday from the FBI in San Francisco, headquarters of the Unabom task force, said the force had half a dozen good suspects in the case in recent months, and all but one of them appeared less likely to be the Unabomber as the investigation continued.

The one who became more likely is the man in Montana, he said. ``In this particular instance, the further we went along the more likely it was that he was a viable suspect. So I think the FBI's fairly certain they have the right man,'' he said.

Theodore J. Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago. After finishing Evergreen Park High School south of Chicago in three years, he attended Harvard University, graduating in 1962 when he was barely 20.

He then moved to the University of Michigan, where he received a master's degree in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1967, both in mathematics. His dissertation was titled Boundary Functions, according to school officials.

He taught as an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1967-68 school year, according to Harvard and Berkeley records. He resigned in June 1969.

After quitting Berkeley, Kaczynski lived in Utah in the late 1970s and early 1980s where he did odd jobs and menial labor, according to the federal official. He bought land in Montana 10-12 years ago and has been building a cabin there since then.

Members of the man's family found some old writings of his while cleaning out their home in the Chicago suburb of Lombard, where the family had moved after leaving Evergreen Park. The writings raised the family's suspicions, according to two federal officials.

The family approached an attorney in Washington, who called the FBI, to alert them. Federal agents later got consent to search the former Chicago residence.

Bob Daeschler, whose brother Bill bought the Lombard home from Kaczynski's mother after Kaczynski's father contracted lung cancer and committed suicide, said that the FBI and local police searched a shed behind the dwelling several weeks ago. He said he didn't know if the FBI removed anything from the shed.

The Unabomber's spree began at Northwestern University outside Chicago in May 1978. Three people have died and 23 more were injured in 15 subsequent Unabomber attacks; the most recent came April 24, 1995, when a timber industry executive was killed in Sacramento, Calif.

The FBI has spread copies of the Unabomber's writings throughout the academic community in hopes of finding someone who recognizes the work.

Last September, The New York Times and The Washington Post published, in the Post, his 35,000-word treatise on the inhumanity of industrial society after he promised to stop planting bombs that kill people.

His manifesto held that industrial society should be abolished and replaced with ``small, autonomous units'' of no more than 100 people.

There have been no such incidents since then.

Federal agents working the Unabomber case ``have been hot to trot for about two weeks,'' said Salt Lake police Sgt. Don Bell, a member of the multi-agency Unabom task force and former homicide detective who worked the 1987 case in which a Salt Lake man was critically injured when he picked up a package left outside a computer store.

That was the only time anyone ever spotted the man believed to be the Unabomber and resulted in the now-famous composite drawing showing a hooded man wearing aviator-style sunglasses.

Bell has been told by other task force members that agents searched a home in Chicago, apparently belonging to the suspect's parents, where ``they found some stuff'' that may be related to the bombings.

For three years, the San Francisco-based task force of two dozen agents from the FBI, Treasury Department and Post Office has pored over travel records, tips, interviews, lab results and case records searching for clues.

Federal agents described the Unabomber as white, male, 40ish, a killer-from-afar who is quiet, antisocial and very meticulous. He could easily buy the electrical switches he has used. Instead, he painstakingly builds them himself. His explosives are not exotic. From match heads he moved up to powders, and now uses material that could be scraped out of firecrackers. But he likely mixes his own chemicals.

The longer an explosion is contained, the fiercer the blast. So he experiments with larger and stronger pipes to do more damage.

Sometimes he carves bomb parts out of wood instead of buying easily available metal pieces. He also likes to box his videocassette-sized devices in wood - sometimes using four varieties. He seems fascinated with wood.

He used to autograph his bombs, putting a metal tab with his mysterious trademark ``FC'' where it would survive the explosion.

Before he mails it, he lovingly polishes the outside. Pride of authorship, agents say. If a clean car works better, then a bomb should too, the thinking goes.

MAP: Lincoln, Mont.

KNIGHT-RIDDER TRIBUNE

* ASSOCIATED PRESS writer Michael J. Sniffen in Washington also contributed to this story.