Jim Freeman spent 32 years as an FBI Special Agent, rising to Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's San Francisco field office. In the final two years of the 17-year hunt for the Unabomber, Freeman took direct control of the UNABOM Task Force — reporting straight to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno.

This episode centers on the case's most consequential turning point: the decision to publish Ted Kaczynski's 35,000-word manifesto in the New York Times and Washington Post. Freeman walks through the internal FBI debate over whether publishing would help catch a killer or simply give him what he wanted, and the moment Reno and Freeh personally authorized the risk.

From there, Freeman recounts how Kaczynski's own brother, David, recognized the language in the manifesto — and how that tip led investigators to a remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. What followed was a 40-day covert operation, culminating in Kaczynski's arrest by agents who, until hours before, weren't convinced the reclusive hermit in the woods could really be the man they'd been hunting for nearly two decades.

It's a story about a calculated gamble that worked — and about the ordinary caution, doubt, and bureaucracy that almost got in the way of catching one of the most notorious domestic terrorists in American history.

Part 1 ends the moment Kaczynski is finally in custody. In Part 2, Freeman takes us inside the cabin itself — and the evidence that sealed the case.

New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at citizensbehindthebadge.org.

Ted opens the door just a crack.

He looks out and the

police officer says, "Hi, Ted.

I'm sorry, but I'll get here so early in

the morning when I got these gentlemen

from a mining company that are going to

survey the property.

We need to find your property markers on

posts at the corners of your property."

Ted says, "Well, they're out there.

They can just go.

Oh, look."

Police officer said, "No,

they're covered with snow.

We need you to come out and help."

By this time, Ted had opened his door and

he had stepped out on the

front little porch there.

He said, "Well, let me get my coat."

And so he turns around to go back in and

they boom, they grab him.

For 17 years, the FBI

chased the Unabomber.

This is the man who finally caught him.

I think this case is one of the most

famous cases ever in the United States.

The FBI spent some 17 years analyzing

Kaczynski and the

Unabomber about what he built.

But what I found interesting, Jim, is

that the way he got

caught is by what he said.

There seems to be a lot of controversy

about the manifesto.

I want to ask you about the manifesto

because it looks like you were one of the

key proponents of releasing and

publishing the manifesto, but there was

pushback from some powers that be at DOJ

and FBI and certainly the two

publications that he had requested.

I would love to know

the story behind that.

That was a risky, heroic move on your

part that could have failed.

Did you ever consider what might have

happened if that had backfired on you?

Oh, many times.

It definitely is what

would keep you awake at night.

But you talk about that

his is what let him down.

That's what got me into

the case because I had,

by coincidence, just to go back a little

bit, the Unabomber began in 1978 at the

same time I went to Miami in a

Miami office.

I was following his activities from afar

and hoping I would never ever have to

have the case in my division.

Some years later, in 1993,

I came to San Francisco and he had just

done two bombings in kind of awakening of

the Unabomber after six years, laying low

after an eyewitness had

spotted him up in Utah.

It was

a concern to me that a lot of my agents

were having to work on the case, yet we

had a task force here that was being

directed out of Washington.

I was okay that for a while because we

had activities going.

I came in, took over the San Francisco

office, and we had the Polly Klaas

kidnapping at that time,

and all felt it was busy.

When I resolved itself,

the next year in 1994,

I paid more attention to the case because

my agents were working.

We had three historical bombings here

before 1993, two of which were at the

University of California

in Berkeley, which was odd.

It was

about that time that I decided my men are

working on the case, my men and women are

working on the case more and more.

These temporary agents that are here in

the task force are trying to go home

because they got

their families and things.

I decided to

to work the case, direct the case, if

Director Louis Free would hear of that.

One day I called him accidentally.

I guess it was on April Fool's Day.

I didn't know that, but at the time I

didn't pay attention.

I volunteered for a

case, like you said, that was

kind of a loser case because for 17

years, well at that time 15 years,

there were a lot of-- Yeah,

and so, but it was his words that caused

me to say, I think we can catch this guy

because he wrote a letter to the New York

Times, an editor at the New York Times,

at the exact same time that he had mailed

two bombs from Sacramento and one blew up

in my hometown now Tiburon,

a doctor,

geneticist's home, and he survived that,

but it was really a bad

medical situation for him.

A couple days later, the second bomb went

off at the University of

Yale University in Connecticut.

It was the Unabomber announcing himself

back to the world, you know, on back

after six years and he had better bombs.

Suddenly, he broke his silence.

And all of a sudden, he's writing a

letter to the largest

newspaper and he's throwing out,

saying that he's with an anarchist group,

FC, and asked the

FBI, they know about FC.

So he's just going

from total silence to now

he's bringing about everything and

bringing the FBI up.

And I think, you know, I've known people,

criminals, bombers, et cetera, that talk

to the media, get a message out, and

they're in prison today

because they make a mistake.

You know, I think he's making a mistake

that's going to have

paid for down the line.

What if the manifesto had been published?

Because apparently you had to struggle to

get the New York Times

and the Pokes to publish it.

They didn't want to do it.

They said, "We don't want

anything to do with this.

This would look like aiding the police."

How did you convince them finally to

publish his manifesto?

Well, actually, we had to convince our

own agents of that

first because, you know,

he had built a

case here that

was basically, "I'm going to kill people.

It's publisher Parrish.

Either we publish my manifesto or I'm

going to blow up a plane that's leaving

Los Angeles International

Airport within the next six days."

And he had already, years

before, tried to blow up a plane.

He put a bomb in a mail package of board

an American Airlines flight

from Chicago to Washington, D.C.

He had

rigged up an altimeter from a barometer

that would blow up at a certain altitude.

That worked.

The bomb fizzled and

created a fire and a hold.

An emergency landing is what saved the

passengers and crew.

But you had to take guys seriously.

This already attempted mass murder.

Now he's threatening.

That's extortion.

Policy of the US government was, "You

don't yield to terrorist demands or else

you'll get nothing but

terrorist demands after that."

So nobody wanted to do it.

And we had a long meeting among our task

force agents and I just let them talk and

talk and nobody wanted to do it.

And our recommendation was to go back to

Director Free that we have

other means to solve this case.

This is not the way to go.

But then the agents, after they told me

that, and then before we called the Free,

they had a change of heart.

Terry Turchie was my agent that was

managing day-to-day

operations of the task force and all.

He came to me in my office and he says,

"Tim, we want to change our mind here.

We think that somebody will actually

recognize the words that

are in this manifesto."

Because every one of us that had read it,

we had also at this

time, of course, his brother,

when he was able to read the manifesto,

he recognized the words too.

So we were true and correct on the right

track in saying somebody, whether it's a

professor, a college professor, a

roommate, family member.

We didn't know a family

member, but thank goodness.

Let me ask, did the brother see the

manifesto before it was published?

No, he did not.

So he actually saw it

because it was published?

Because, in fact, his wife had read it.

She talked to him and said, "You better

read this manifesto.

That sounds like your brother."

She'd never met Ted.

She had read his letters

that he sent back to his

brother.

He used a lot of the same words in those

letters back to David.

David picked out a few phrases in another

document that he

had published 20 years earlier and all.

It was sounding a lot like

the words in the manifesto.

So David was on board finally that I

think he's run afraid

that he's the Unabomber.

How did David feel about basically

turning in his own brother?

How did that go down?

Well,

he didn't think very much of it, but he

was so much concerned

knowing that people would die.

They had this threat that either

published it or I'm

going to blow up a plane.

We had every right to believe that that

actually would happen.

I heard about David by means of his

attorney in Washington, D.C., who called

me and said, "I have a client who thinks

his brother might be the Unabomber."

So we exchanged some

information about that.

He said, "I can't tell you if my client

won't let me divulge his name,

but what he wants is one thing.

He wants you to take the

death penalty off the table."

Wow.

Anyone knows an law enforcement...

That's quite a request.

Yeah.

First time I ever...

I didn't even know the subject's name and

I'm already being asked to take the death

penalty off and saying, "Of

course, I don't have the..."

The jurisdiction.

One other question I heard, and you can

either confirm or deny this, that

actually CBS News got a hold of Ted's

name before you guys were ready to move

and were threatening to run a story

before you were ready to go.

Is that true or false?

Oh, that's absolutely true.

Okay.

Yeah.

I had a

producer, actually a producer from 60

Minutes, who made a call into me and said

he wanted to meet right away and I'm in

Montana at the time, but I didn't want to

tell him I'm in Montana

because he didn't know where...

He just knew that we were

focusing on a suspect out west

and his source was...

I still don't know who his source was,

but it was somebody that only had a

portion of the information and he seemed

to be getting it a little bit more every

few hours and the guy would call back and

say, "We think he's this.

We think he's in the

mountains of Montana."

He just starts getting closer and closer.

And Turchie was listening to this and he

had a computerization

project that was underway.

It was a huge thing because

this was in 1995,

1996.

By this time computers and

the FBI had just arrived.

The data was all corrupted

because it was every type of memo,

teletype, report,

laboratory report and all.

Nothing was standardized.

They could go into a computer.

So it was really slow to get the data in

there, but we're also throwing in data

from the universities that had been

targeted, the students that were there at

that time, faculty, everything.

And as soon as...

While we're working behind the scenes

while we're talking to this lawyer and

he's talking to Dave D'Incy and said,

"I'll call you back to see

if he'll agree to the terms."

We were still hung up on this tick tick,

the death penalty off the table.

And I said, "Well, I can't do that, but

here's what I'll do.

I'll send you a letter saying that I will

make a recommendation to the prosecutor

that this is what the brother wants.

I can go that far."

And I faxed him that letter and that's

what they're discussing about whether

David Kaczynski would agree

to divulge his brother's name.

And so in that interim,

Terry Turchie fed this information into

our computer and out popped the same name

that the attorney was giving me,

Ted Kaczynski, because he had said he had

been a professor at the University of

California, Berkeley.

He grew up in Chicago and really just on

those two points, we already had closer

data points that were in our haystack of

information from all the investigations

and other information we'd gathered.

And so we actually had...

When he got on the phone and said, "Okay,

we can give you the name," and I said,

"Is it Theodore Kaczynski?"

And it was.

They didn't, they had it.

What's the plan for running the story?

I mean, they were going to run it, but

apparently you made the arrest and later

that day they did their story.

Well, there was a lot of negotiation in

which often happens with cases where you

have imminent danger and all that.

The media will see the benefit of giving

law enforcement a little

thank God they did because

we didn't...

We had an affidavit for a search warrant

and or an arrest warrant.

And I'm talking to Louis Free, the

director, and he's a former

prosecutor himself and all.

And he says, "Jim, you have adequate

probable cause there for an arrest

warrant or a search warrant."

Then as the day progressed, Department of

Justice would not put their careers on

the line and say,

"Here's an arrest warrant."

So they gave me a search warrant.

The search warrant, how do you have a

bomber, a known murderer in a cabin,

isolated cabin, and serving a search

warrant, are you just supposed to go up

and knock on the doors, "Excuse me, Mr.

Kaczynski, we're here

to serve a warrant."

Like to have a chat.

You know, I want to jump in here because

I think this is a really good point to

share with the audience.

And a lot of people

may not be aware of this.

But the FBI, when you're doing an

investigation, and most investigations

oftentimes are these long-term

investigations, unlike local law

enforcement, local law enforcement can go

out based on probable cause

and they can lock somebody up.

And then the state attorneys, district

attorneys review the case later on.

You are a bit hamstrung by that because,

as you had just said, you

could get a search warrant.

But these prosecutors at

the US Attorney's Office

wouldn't give you an arrest warrant.

But you had already said you, even you

and the FBI director both

agreed that you had probable cause.

Maybe delve into that a little bit more.

I mean, I worked on a number of

multi-agency task forces with the feds.

And the local state and local, we could

go and initiate an arrest.

And oftentimes the feds would tell us,

you guys go grab that guy because you can

hook him up on probable cause.

We have to jump through these

bureaucratic hoops to go through the DOJ

and the US Attorney's

Office to make this happen.

Just maybe talk a little bit about that

and how that was a

hindrance or even if it wasn't.

Well, it definitely was

a hindrance bureaucracy.

It was a hindrance

from day one on this case.

In the FBI and our headquarters and

supervisory staff, everything operated

kind of on a work,

individual cases, a whole variety.

But you get into a mindset on these

various types of crimes

that one size fits all.

You have the statute, you have this fax,

and you put it together, and it

all works out the same way. But that wasn't the case for the inev

work in their murder case. The New Jersey Police Department working their murder case, we're going to bring

it all together, and

it's going to be singular.

And nobody's going to talk to me talking

about the leak and all.

Nobody's going to talk

to the media except me.

I became the media point for the two

years that I had the case.

And so we had a deal where we're actually

bypassing bureaucracy at headquarters.

And we're talking directly to the

director, we're talking directly to

Attorney General Janet Reno.

And it was with them that Terry and I

went with them to meet with the

publishers to convince the publishers

that there was a law enforcement purpose

that would

make it worthwhile to

set aside the requirement that you don't

yield to a terroristic threat.

We think by publishing the manifesto, it

will serve the purpose people will

recognize because it's such a unique

subject matter,

somebody will recognize it.

So we kind of put our

reputation on the line on that.

How hard was that conversation?

I mean, did those publishers push back

pretty hard, or were you

able to win them over easily?

That was very interesting meeting.

I'll say this.

He has the publishers, you know, from the

New York Times and Washington Post and

their editorial staff they brought with

them in a conference room at FBI

headquarters and Janet Reno walked across

the street to be there.

And it was very interesting.

And they were, they first were not

interested in being a tool of the law

enforcement and the federal government.

You can't, you know, you're not going to

be telling us what to do.

We're going to make our own decision, but

give us please give us the facts that

would cause you to want,

you know, to want to do this.

And so we went through

that whole presentation and

they came up with,

well, okay, if we, you know,

hypotheticals, if we decide to do this,

what if he then continues bombing?

And, you know, our

psychologists and all that we had on the

case would say he will continue bombing.

You can't trust him.

Even if he turn, even if you do what he

says and publish, he might still bomb.

Right.

And so that is a risk.

And it's the risk to the publishers, but

it's a risk to Janet Reno, to the

director FBI, to the publisher,

so

the publisher turns, turns into

the attorney general and to the Louis

free and said, what if we

publish and he bombs what then?

And to her credit, Janet Reno sat up

straight and said, you can say that the

attorney general of the United States

authorized this course

of action and is for,

you know, is to help out law enforcement.

And Louis Free jumped right in behind

that and said, then you can

say the director of the FBI

approves of it because it serves a law

enforcement purpose.

And that was.

Wow.

Janet stood up and Louis

backed up right behind her.

Did

they agree right then and there or did

they waver and, you know, kind of, you

know, to me, it just it's insane that the

news media wouldn't want to cooperate.

I mean, what's their

liability at that point?

It'd be interesting to like, was there

really some battle going on beside behind

the scenes like, you know, just people

losing their cool and saying, you know,

what in the hell are

you even thinking here?

This is there's people's lives at stake

and, you know,

conversations to that effect.

That was all going all of that was going

on, but not not in this close knit group

that actually making decisions.

And those decisions were

made in that room that day.

And they, you know, the publishers, you

know, they said, well, give us a moment.

And they talked among themselves, you

know, well, this is 35000

page manifesto or document.

It's it's a small book.

Public newspapers, we

don't publish books.

So how are we going to do this?

So there was talking about, well, maybe

we should and we thought this might be a

good idea to kind of serialize it over a

period of days instead of

just publishing the entire thing.

And they kind of like that idea.

And they actually worked out well,

Washington Post can pay for

this and we'll pay for that.

That all happened right there and around

the conference table.

And when they left, it was

everybody was on the same page.

Jim, the publishing of the manifesto

seems to be the key moment in this case

that helped us solve it.

There are so many other details and we

can go back and talk about the beginning

of the case and how

everything transpired.

But since we're at this point already,

OK, the manifesto gets published.

You've talked about the brother

recognizes that those are the words of

his brother, Ted Kaczynski.

And now you've got your suspect.

You even came up with the same name

through other means.

So take us now through

that part of the process.

The case is now broken.

How do you arrest Ted Kaczynski?

He lives in the mountains in Montana.

How do you even find him number one?

And then how did the

arrest actually go down?

OK, well, the correct one thing, the case

had not broken in the sense that the

public didn't know yet.

So this was very much

a tightly held secret.

Broke with you.

Yeah.

Even within, you know, it

was a need to know basis.

So even agents on the periphery of the

Unibom investigation were not told that

we now have we're locked in on a suspect.

We're sending a group of people and a

supervisor, Max Knoll, to Montana

to start investigating this suspect.

We didn't tell our own office in Salt

Lake City that actually had

administrative for Montana.

And we set up a and I went

there, Terry Turchie went there.

We set up a little field, many field

office in Helena, Montana.

We rented office space.

We were there for 40 days, actually, kind

of biblical in sense, but it was 40 days

from the first time that we landed in in

Helena, Montana,

until we made the arrest.

And in those 40 days,

we had to come up with convincing

evidence because Max Knoll, the

supervisor there, had gone out with the

we've made a contact of the neighbor that

ran a lot of sawmill

next to the his cabin.

He knew him personally.

And he told the, it's the same day that

Max introduced himself to this

owner of the property.

And the guy offered, "Let's just walk up

the trail here and I'll just show you

what you're dealing with in

terms of the cabin and all."

Ted still, it was March at this time and

snow was still everywhere.

And he'd been, you know, he'd been locked

in there by snow and ice for since the

first snow, I guess, in the winter.

So, but it was getting enough time.

It happened that as they walked out

there, Ted opened his door and saw them.

And with a,

it was such that he was in the same garb

that he was wearing when we arrest him.

He was looking really old tattered

clothes and beard and everything.

And Max just gets a

look at him and with the,

with this guy that Ted know,

Ted would know him by sight.

And they just said, "Oh, hi, Ted.

We're just taking a look around."

And Ted just went back in his cabin,

thought nothing of it.

But Max looked at this guy and he said,

"Oh my God, is this what we've been

looking for all this time?"

And he came back and he was absolutely

convinced to Terry and I, this guy, this

hermit, snowbound hermit

cannot be the Unabomber.

He was adamant about that.

And he was like the most experienced

criminal agent you would have.

And so we ended up

going through this thing.

Well, we have to, you know, we have a lot

of work ahead of us.

And Max also had another great quote.

He said, "A snowbound hermit is going to

be one heck of a hard

sell as the Unabomber."

And that proved true day in and day out.

And so we knew our

work was really cut out.

And so we brought more agents

in, rented cars, playing cars.

And we were going around and we put

Lincoln, Montana off limits.

Nobody could go in

there too small of a town.

They'll know the FBI's there.

So they were working in the towns that

surrounded, which was held on kind of on

one side, Missoula,

Montana, and the other.

And they were about 80 or

90 miles away from Lincoln.

And they started going to

motels, checking lectures.

And we had another whole project going on

to where, where did we know that the

Unabomber was on any given day?

So he had started not only mailing

package bombs, where he had to go into a

post office and mail it.

So we know that he was in Sacramento on

that date when the bomb was mailed to

Tiburon, California,

and to Yale University.

So if we have a suspect, yes, he can't be

somewhere else except in Sacramento on

that day, because that's

where we know the Unabomber was.

And we were building

up this entire thing.

And we had all the letters that David

Kaczynski had saved, every letter had

ever written to him, including the

envelopes that had a postmark date.

So we know we started to build a

library of known facts about the

whereabouts of the Unabomber.

And so that was giving us a

lot of things to look for.

They could go in and say, if Ted was the

Unabomber and he went to Sacramento, he

had to go through Missoula.

And the only way he had no vehicles, he

only had a bicycle, the only way you

could get there is on the

Greyhound bus out of Lincoln.

Because no Uber, no taxis,

no, it was a really small

mountain town.

And so we had to go to Missoula.

So we started checking motels and all in

there and along the bus

route back to Sacramento.

They started getting hits because this

time we had photographs of

Ted Kaczynski, our suspect.

And even a bus driver

recognized him on a given day.

We go into motel records

and used his true name.

And so we're gathering all this data.

And in those weeks that

we had to operate secretly,

we built up one heck of a library of

evidence that we have a suspect and

he's in every place that the Unabomber

is known to have been, no

conflict in any of those dates.

And that was

a big element in our search warrant.

And then

as we became more acquainted with

David Kaczynski and his family, David's

mother would finally interviewed her only

like two or three days

before we made the arrest.

And Kathy Puckett, our FBI agent who was

also a PhD in psychology, she became

really good friends with

Ted

and David's mother.

And she pulled out a trunk of

documents and found even more

documents to go through

that were known documents.

Written by Ted Kaczynski and we could

have then experts compare words and

things with the actual manifesto and

coming up with all of that.

But the mother at this time, Jim, did the

mother at this point three days before

her son was arrested, did she know he was

the suspect as the Unabomber?

Yes.

And David had shared that with her and

the family were becoming very concerned

because we start asking, well, how does

Ted come up with the money even by a bus

ticket to go anywhere

because he had no means of support?

And they're saying, well, Teddy would

sometimes call and say, or write a letter

and say, I need to even never call.

He would write a letter and say,

I need money to do this or do that

medical things or whatever.

And they would send him four or $500

at a time.

And so then they, we looked at the dates

of that and it was starting to coincide

with the timeframe of bombings that where

he needed to be in Salt Lake City or need

to be in Sacramento or in

San Francisco on those dates.

And we'd look and see, well, he asked for

money just like a month before.

So he had money we found in a bank

account that he had in Missoula.

So, you know, we're starting to build a

whole real solid case around him, but

nothing, he didn't have anything, but

like a prosecutor says, I saw him, you

know, put this bomb down.

We didn't have one eyewitness, by the

way, that dates back to 1987.

We show her the picture

and she couldn't make it.

So it's like, all that needs to go over

your eyewitnesses, your worst piece.

Really, what did the family tell you?

What triggered him to become radicalized?

How he went from, you know, functioning

in society, working as

a university professor.

Now he's completely off the grid as like

you said, as a hermit in

this mountainous Montana cabin.

What transpired there, do you recall?

Well,

the realization came through the

manifesto again, because as

David Kaczynski read through that

manifesto, he kept

pulling out ideas and all that.

This certainly sounds like Ted and I

remember when he pulled out a letter and

all here, this is from Ted, he's saying

kind of the same thing about

society and

enough to where it really, the more David

looked at the comparison of words and

letters he had and what he'd written in a

manifesto, he became

more and more convinced.

And it was really bothering him that the

family had given money that might have

financed trips for Ted

to go and murder somebody.

That's possible.

And by this time he had

assassinated, you know, three

people. 123 others.

Yeah.

But okay, so you've got

us hanging now on the edge.

Three days before he's arrested, the mom

is pulling out all these letters and

other writings and you're just nailing

all the evidence against him.

And somehow in three days, the arrest

occurs and it's up in this mountain and

he hates people and he

doesn't want to talk to anybody.

And you didn't have, I guess you had the

warrants you needed at that point.

So who goes in there

and makes the arrest?

Well,

just to back up just a bit,

we talked about the leak and the leak,

you know, we wish we'd had another cell.

The CBS

leak, yeah.

To get all this information together.

And those words had never

been used in federal court.

They never actually used a word

comparison as official

evidence

that would link somebody to a crime.

So this would be a first that the

Department of Justice was

also having to hang their hat on.

And remember, there are visions of Ted in

a snowbound cabin, no

running water, no electricity.

Our laboratory said he

melted scrap aluminum.

He would need a portable kiln, electrical

kiln that actually do

that to get the temperature.

We don't do that in Ted's cabin.

There was a potbellied stove.

That was the only heat

source we had in that cabin.

I guess he melted in the stove.

I don't know, but he did it.

But there was just, there was a lot of

things that were contradictory.

Like how could he possibly do this?

And it was the, actually the leak,

although it was forcing us into

accelerated action, it

actually served our purpose.

You know, the people on the ground, we

want to get this done.

And we all these

questions being asked and

had to have ironclad evidence before they

would sign off on anything.

And so it was the leak that pushed us

into a 20, they gave us a 24 hour

deadline before they would publish.

And

I said to Louis Free, I get him on the

phone and I was saying,

we've got to get

people from San Francisco.

I wanted a SWAT team here not to hit the

cabin, just to encircle it

to make sure that he didn't

run out and escape over the

mountains and this sort of thing.

Or to respond

retroactively if he started shooting or

trying to harm himself.

Yeah, I mean, I would imagine at that

point, you're kind of thinking, okay,

well, if this guy's living remotely out

in this cabin, he's

kind of a survivalist.

So you're thinking maybe he's a type or

something like that as a survivalist

that's got, you know, rifles and knives

and any number of things.

So I guess that's how you approached it.

Well, we knew that from a neighbor that

he had at least a rifle in there because

he hunted, he poached deer all the time.

And, you know, he lived

off the land, you know?

So yeah, he definitely had

guns.

But that

had to be his bomb making

laboratory, his cabin, you know?

What are the chances that

he has a bomb or maybe booby traps to

blow up if somebody forces

in the door or something?

Well, and I was going

to ask you that too.

I mean, what countermeasures or

procedures did you guys go about when you

were even approaching it?

Because it could be very likely from his

bomb making experience that he did have

some kind of booby traps.

Right.

And all I have is a search warrant.

Yeah.

And were there any booby traps on the

trails or the surrounding areas of that?

Very much a concern and

we didn't know at the time.

And you talked before about local law

enforcement can act on this probable

cause and what they could see.

Actually,

FBI agents, any federal agent can

actually do that as well.

But the preponderance of

legal advice is not to do so,

you know, unless you

just absolutely have to.

So I actually authorized

Ted's arrest based on evidence.

I did not have any prosecutor's authority

to arrest Ted and we did.

But backing up a little bit,

we brought in, you know, overnight,

Louis Freeh was able to talk to the head

of CBS News and bias like an extra 12

hours or something so I could get people.

I think we filled up every Delta flight

from San Francisco flying into Salt Lake

City and then another

flight into Helena, Montana.

And we brought dozens of agents in just

in the open nights landing

all night long or landing.

And we were going to go the next morning.

We had

resourceful people there that had gone

out and actually rented a seven up seven

up ranch, which was like a tourist thing

with little, little bungalows and all but

it was closed for the season, but they're

reopening for the Easter weekend because

he had a restaurant there.

And so I talked to them

and rented the whole place

for several days.

And it was like five

out of Lincoln, Montana.

And we had a covered

story for why we were there.

And, you know, like a corporate retreat

or something, I forgot what it was.

But anyway, if anybody

asked, this is what you tell them.

And the people in the in that location

were very cooperative and

worked worked with us very well.

And so we had we had a staging area and

everybody was coming into that staging

area that next morning,

like from before dawn.

And

we're just making plans on the fly.

And I had about a week earlier, I talked

to Max Knoll, the supervisor there.

And he's a guy that

had criminal experience.

I mean, he had been on a SWAT team that

killed the airline hijacker and SFO, some

Eastern European guy that

did that like decades before.

I mean, he'd been there and done, you

know, in all kinds of cases.

And I said, Max,

we got a plan for eventually we're going

to get an arrest warrant for this guy.

And then we're going to go in there and

we praise, you know, we thought

everything you talked about, booby

trapped cabin, booby trapped

access areas to the cabin, you know,

thinking about all that.

So we got to take him

outside the cabin, obviously.

And so our first plan was to well, when

he finally goes into town, he goes in for

provisions every spring after he comes

out, so he's starting to

come out of his cabin now.

So we can just wait for

him and we'll just take him.

Well, we couldn't do all that because of

the leak and we had this deadline.

So we have to do it

within the next 12 hours.

Yeah.

Put a crimp on that.

So we came up with there was a Forest

Service police officer in a regular

police uniform that new Ted

worked there with him for years.

So we put him in the

team of three people, Max Knoll, the

supervisor and FBI agent from Helena,

Montana, and this police officer.

It took 40 days to get here.

This is the moment we opened on.

They found out that from that property

owner next door, that there had been a

company that was looking at mining leases

from the previous fall and that they had

signed up actually gold and silver mining

leases in that area.

So the risk was going to be that

this police officer knows Ted, the three

of them will walk down to the cabin,

making all kinds of

noise, talking loudly,

so that Ted would hear them coming and

not be frightened, and would recognize

this police officer.

And then

what happened is

that's where we went out.

We had deployed the

SWAT team all around the cabin, but the

lake, you know, 50 yards away behind

trees and stuff, just in case they needed

backup because they're going up there.

And I'm with the SWAT guy at another

cabin about 200 yards away,

and with a radio link to

those guys, and also to,

but not to Max and him, that team, they

were in communicado once

they started walking in there.

And so Max is, they keep walking up there

and they're talking loud, and nothing's

happening in the cabin.

And they get all the way up to the cabin,

they finally hear some rustling around

inside, and Ted opens

the door just a crack.

And he looks out and the

police officer says, "Hi, Ted.

I'm sorry, but you know, I'll get here so

early in the morning when I got these

gentlemen from a mining company that are

going to survey the property, and we need

to find your property markers on your

posts at the corners of your and Ted

says, "Well, they're out there.

They can just go look."

And the police officer said,

"No, they're covered with snow.

We need you to come out and help."

By this time, Ted had opened his door and

he had stepped out on the

front little porch there.

And he said, "Well, let me get my coat."

And so he turns around to go back in and

they boom, they grab him, and they're

rustling like this,

you know, just bear them.

This one agent from Helme is a big guy

and gives him like a big bear hug.

Well, they start wobbling around and it's

icy and it looks like they're going to

almost fall off the porch.

Max comes around and he puts his weapon

right in Ted's face.

And I just says, "I'm special agent Max

Knoll, the FBI, and I'm

here to search your cabin."

Hello.

And he puts a-- Friendly bear hug, yeah.

And he puts handcuffs on him and move

them off to a-- we prearranged.

There was an elk hunter's cabin with no

electors or anything that

was within walking distance.

So that was the whole thing that was set

up to be where we would take him.

And he did.

And it just--

that was the moment of detention.

It was not officially under arrest.

That's the moment they finally had him.

But catching Ted

Kaczynski was only half the story.

In part two, we go inside the cabin,

uncover the evidence that sealed the

case, including a live he was sleeping on

top of, and hear what

finally drove him to kill.

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