UNABOMBER: BROTHER OF SUSPECT GOES PUBLIC, TELLS OF HIS DISCOVERY

* REALIZING HE MIGHT HAVE AIDED THE UNABOMBER, `WAS REALLY CHILLING'

NEWS

David Kaczynski said, at first, he had resisted his wife's suggestions last summer that Ted might be the Unabomber. When she prodded him to read the Unabomber's 35,000-word manifesto on the Internet, he sat, in shock, before a computer screen.

Dismay turned to anger, David said, when he and his wife, Linda Patrik, realized they might have unwittingly helped finance two of the Unabomber's deadly attacks by agreeing to requests Ted made for money, $1,000 in 1994 and $2,000 in 1995, each about two months before a bombing. ``It was really chilling,'' David said.

David would not say whether he believes his brother is guilty, during the six-hour interview on Tuesday. But he said that his belief that he had acted properly had been confirmed by events since February, when he provided Ted's identity to the government.

He said he was speaking out now in the hope that a fuller understanding would humanize a figure whom he said had been erroneously depicted as an evil genius who had lashed out at the technological world he abhorred.

``If he did attack people and kill people, that was wrong,' David said. `But by the same token, I feel it would be very wrong if he were killed in the name of some notion or principle of justice.'

` ... Ted has been a disturbed person for a long time and he's gotten more disturbed. It serves no one's interest to put him to death, and certainly, it would be an incredible anguish for our family if that were to happen.''

So far, Ted Kaczynski, a Harvard-trained mathematician who was arrested on April 3, has not been charged with any Unabom crimes. He is being held in a Montana jail on federal charges of possessing explosive components. But based on the trove of evidence discovered in Kaczynski's mountain cabin, law-enforcement officials said, federal prosecutors are preparing to charge him in the nearly 18-year string of package bombings, which killed three people and injured 23 others.

David said he had been closer than anyone to his brother until Ted angrily spurned him in 1989 for deciding to get married.

David said he had been profoundly influenced by Ted's uncompromising intellect, his love of wild places, his compassion for children, even what he described as his brother's startling moments of kindness.

David, a 46-year-old social worker from Schenectady, N.Y., cast new light on his 54-year-old brother's personality, mental problems, and troubled relationships, on the evolution of his ideas, and on the sources of money that allowed him to travel around the country.

But David said part of his brother's mind remained obscure even to him, partly because of Ted's private nature and the disparity in their ages. ``He's quite a mystery to me,'' he said.

And finally, Davidstruggled with a dilemma: whether to turn in his brother. When he told Ted that he wanted to see him, Ted ``wrote back that the very suggestion made him feel awful and made him feel angry,'' David said.

David said he decided he needed to alert authorities in the hopes of saving lives.