Bin Laden left Sudan in 1996, when that country, bowing to pressure from the U.S. and Saudi governments, expelled him. His next home was Afghanistan. Many have called the pressure on Sudan a mistake—at least there people knew where he was. In Afghanistan, he slipped off the radar. But he was far from inactive. That year, a U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia was bombed, and nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed.
Bin Laden issued a fatwa (an Islamic legal decree) in early 1998 declaring war on the “Jews and Crusaders” of the United States: “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” he stated.
Truck bombs exploded on August 7, 1998, outside the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people, 12 of them Americans. The United States responded with cruise missile attacks against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
The next direct attack against U.S. interests came on October 12, 2000, when al-Qaeda suicide bombers blew up a small boat beside the USS Cole, a destroyer moored in a harbor in Yemen, killing seventeen U.S. sailors.
Then came September 11, 2001, when nineteen al-Qaeda suicide bombers flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and a third airplane into the Pentagon; a fourth plane was intended to strike the U.S. Capitol but was downed by passengers in a field in Pennsylvania before it could reach its target. Nearly three thousand people were killed on this day, which made it the world’s worst terrorist attack to date. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda became household names. A month later a multilateral military action, led by the United States, was launched in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. Bin Laden narrowly escaped capture and death at Tora Bora and remains on the loose today.
Subsequent al-Qaeda attempts against the United States include the failed airliner bombings of Richard Reid, who carried explosives in his shoe, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who carried them in his underwear. Quick-acting civilians foiled both plots. There are also alleged al-Qaeda connections to 2009’s Fort Hood shooting.
The last Criminal Minds episode of the third season, “Lo-Fi” (320), and the first episode of the fourth season, “Mayhem” (401), involve the planning and execution of a terrorist attack in New York City, during which Special Agent Aaron Hotchner unknowingly helps to place an ambulance loaded with explosives near a hospital in which an unspecified but very important person is being treated. On January 18, 2010, well over a year after the episode first aired, a Taliban suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed ambulance close to Afghani president Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace and detonated it.
On July 7, 2005, Muslim suicide bombers exploded four bombs in London, killing fifty-six and injuring about seven hundred. This attack is mentioned in the episode “Mayhem.” The same episode refers to Dr. Azahari Husin, a Malaysian terrorist and an engineer who is believed to have built the bombs used in devastating terrorist attacks in Bali and Indonesia. Associated with the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, Husin was killed in a police raid on November 9, 2005.
Al-Qaeda remains the focus of a great deal of controversy and uncertainty. Rather than a rigidly controlled organization, it appears to be a loose network of many groups, some of which, like al-Qaeda in Iraq or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, use the name but don’t necessarily share any operational structure with other branches or have a direct connection to bin Laden. Even if bin Laden were to die or be captured, his role at this point might be largely symbolic; new al-Qaeda leaders are rising up all the time. Since the struggle of the West is against Islamist jihadism as a whole rather than against a specific group or people, many believe that the best way to approach the effort is through a combination of intelligence and law enforcement tactics. Others consider it war and prefer a military-oriented response. The usual U.S. approach has been to combine the two, using every tool possible.
Despite al-Qaeda’s many attacks around the world and the impact that those attacks have had on the civilian populations of the targeted countries, the overall goal that Osama bin Laden espouses—to remove Western countries from the Middle East and reestablish the caliphate (Islamic religious rule) throughout the Muslim world—has yet to come to pass. Although there appears to be a nearly unlimited supply of disaffected young (mostly male) Muslims willing to give their lives to suicide missions, many more Muslims have been turned off by bin Laden’s tactics, which increasingly seem to include killing other Muslims.
ANTHRAX ATTACKS are the crime around which the Criminal Minds episode “Amplification” (424) revolves. The anthrax killer in this episode proves to be a scientist who was fired from his position at Fort Detrick. The 9/11 attacks are also mentioned in this episode, and the Amerithrax attacks (so named because they were suspected to have been caused by terrorists on U.S. soil) also come up in the episodes “Lessons Learned” (210) and “100” (509).
The first wave of letters containing anthrax spores—coarse brown granules—were mailed in Trenton, New Jersey, on September 18, 2001, just a week after the 9/11 attacks. They were sent to the New York Post, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the National Enquirer. On October 9, two more letters were mailed, also from Trenton, addressed to Democratic senators Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, and Patrick Leahy, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
When a Daschle aide opened the letter and found the substance inside, government mail service was immediately shut down; as a result of that and a misread zip code, the Leahy letter didn’t turn up for more than a month. While it languished in Sterling, Virginia, a postal worker there contracted anthrax poisoning. The anthrax that was sent to the senators was more potent than the first batch, a highly refined white powder described as “weaponized.” The media letters caused cutaneous (through the skin) anthrax poisoning, whereas the purer powder caused inhalational (through the breath) anthrax poisoning, which is much more severe.
Crude letters accompanied the anthrax. The ones sent to the senators read as follows:
09-11-01
YOU CANNOT STOP US.
WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.
YOU DIE NOW.
ARE YOU AFRAID?
DEATH TO AMERICA.
DEATH TO ISRAEL.
ALLAH IS GREAT.
The Daschle and Leahy letters each contained enough refined spores to kill a hundred thousand people if appropriately dispersed.
The first person to die from these attacks was Robert Stevens, sixty-three, a photo editor at the tabloid newspaper the Sun (published by the National Enquirer’s parent company, American Media, in Boca Raton, Florida). He developed inhalational anthrax and died on October 5.
Some in the media and politics were already casting blame on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda or Saddam Hussein and Iraq, acting either independently or in concert. Others suspected domestic terrorists on the far right, observing that the two senators who were targeted were both political liberals who held key positions in determining whether the post-9/11 U.S. Patriot Act would be brought to the Senate floor for a vote. The FBI launched a massive investigation of the attacks, now called Amerithrax, that would continue for years.
On October 21 and 22, two more victims, both postal employees, died. A hospital employee died on October 31, and the fifth fatality, a ninety-four-year-old woman in Connecticut, died on November 21. No anthrax was found in her home, but it was believed that she was exposed to some carried by the mail.
The strain of anthrax that was killing people was determined to have come from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. A “person of interest,” Dr. Steven Hatfill, who worked at the facility, was named, and the FBI searched his home. He was later cleared, but not before the accusations and the publicity devastated his life. The government settled a lawsuit brought against it for ruining Hatfill’s reputation.
In late July 2008, the FBI notified another Fort Detrick s
cientist, Dr. Bruce Edward Ivins, that it was going to charge him with the attacks. On July 27, Ivins committed suicide before the charges could be filed. The FBI concluded that Ivins had acted alone. He had helped to develop an anthrax vaccine and was upset that it was about to be taken off the market. He also had a long history of making homicidal threats and had struggled with anxiety, paranoia, and depression. He was a Catholic with strong antiabortion feelings, and it was speculated that he sent anthrax letters to the two Democratic senators because they were known to be prochoice.
Not everyone is convinced that Ivins was the perpetrator or that he acted alone if he was. The investigation continues on some fronts, but as far as the FBI is concerned, it had identified its man, was able to prove its case to the bureau’s satisfaction, and was ready to go to court. The presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law evidently did not apply, with Dr. Ivins dead, and no more definitive answer may ever be known.
ANOTHER CRIMINAL who is frequently brought up in the show is the Unabomber. He’s mentioned by that moniker in “Amplification” (424) and “100” (509) and by his real name, Ted Kaczynski, in “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (103) and “A Real Rain” (117).
The Unabomber was first heard from on May 25, 1978, when a crude bomb exploded in the hands of a University of Chicago campus police officer. The victim’s injuries were minor because the bomb was a primitive device constructed in a wooden box.
Another bomb went off at Northwestern University on May 9, 1979, again slightly injuring the person who found it. On November 12, a bomb exploded on an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and twelve passengers suffered from smoke inhalation. Both of these bombs were also in wooden boxes, but the composition of the bombs was becoming more sophisticated. The airplane bomb had been sent through the mail, so it wasn’t meant to target a specific airline or flight, because the bomber couldn’t know on which flight his package would end up.
United Airlines president Percy Wood received a package, purportedly containing a book, at his Chicago-area home on June 10, 1980. When he opened the package, the book proved to have been hollowed out to conceal a bomb. Wood received minor injuries. The package held a wealth of clues, including the letters FC engraved on a metal part of the bomb. The package had been sent to Percy Wood, there were bits of wood shrapnel inside the package, the book had been published by Arbor House, and the phony return address was on Ravenswood Street. The bomber was displaying his signature, loud and clear.
The FBI launched a task force that included representatives from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Their code name for the case was Unabom, which stood for the “university and airline bombing” targets.
The investigators didn’t have much to go on yet. They knew how the Unabomber constructed his bombs, but he made them from scrap material that could have been found almost anywhere. His targets had been selected, it turned out, almost at random.
Over the next few years, additional bombs turned up. Some were defused before they went off; others caused injuries of various degrees of severity. The signature FC became commonplace.
On December 11, 1985, the Unabomber’s efforts claimed their first life, that of Hugh Sutton, a computer store owner in Sacramento, California.
The next incident, on February 28, 1987, provided what might have been a real clue: an eyewitness saw a hooded man in sunglasses placing an object on the ground. The object turned out to be a bomb that seriously injured the man who found it.
After that, the Unabomber was silent for six years. He surged back into the public consciousness in 1993, when two of his bombs injured victims on June 22 and 24. On December 10, 1994, and April 24, 1995, he struck again, and each of these bombs killed their victims.
In 1995, the Unabomber sent out a thirty-five-thousand-word manifesto that he claimed would explain his actions. He wanted it widely published, and FBI director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno agreed. Their reasons were different from his, however: they believed that someone would recognize the ideas and the writing style and be able to identify the killer. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets cooperated and ran the document in full.
The first line of the manifesto’s introduction was “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” In the fourth paragraph, the Unabomber spelled out his goal in more detail:
We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.
The manifesto finally defined the FC signature, which stood for Freedom Club. Throughout, the writer referred to “we” instead of “I,” but most experts believe he acted alone.
Thousands of tips poured in to the task force, but one stood out. A man named David Kaczynski pointed to his brother, Ted.
Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago (the site of the first bombs) on May 22, 1942. He was a child prodigy who skipped the sixth and eleventh grades, attended an intellectually rigorous high school, and went to Harvard at sixteen, where he began to view the technologically oriented modern world as crushing to the human spirit. After earning his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan—where he started, then abandoned, the process of getting a sex-change operation—he taught for two years at the University of California in Berkeley (the site of two bombs). After living for a while in Salt Lake City, Utah (the site of two more bombs), he moved into a remote mountain cabin in Montana, where he tried to live off the land.
Kaczynski’s handwriting and writing style were compared with the Unabomber’s notes, envelopes, mailing labels, and the manifesto itself and believed to be a match. The FBI arrested him and searched his cabin on April 3, 1996. They found a wealth of bomb-making materials; forty thousand handwritten pages of journals and notes, including descriptions of his bomb-making experiments and his mailings; and a live bomb that was ready to be sent out. He pleaded guilty in January 1998 and was sent to a supermax prison in Colorado for the rest of his life. He’s an active correspondent from prison, and some of his ideas are embraced today by radical antitechnology activists.
12
Group Dynamics
SOME KILLERS, like Ted Bundy or Ed Kemper, like to work alone. Others prefer to pair up, like Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, whereas still others—Kenneth Bianchi comes to mind—are happy to kill solo or as part of a team. Then there are some who seem to need the security of a group. The same dynamic works for armies and firing squads: if many people are killing, and it seems to be for a reason, then it must be okay.
Armies and firing squads, however, usually have the interests of their government or society in mind. Not so our next batch of murderers.
WHEN CHARLES MANSON was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 12, 1934, the name that was put on his birth certificate was “no name Maddox.” He was born to a promiscuous sixteen-year-old alcoholic named Kathleen Maddox. After a few weeks, he was named Charles Milles Manson, the surname coming from a man to whom Kathleen was briefly married. She filed a paternity suit in 1936 against a man called Colonel Scott, and a court awarded her a judgment of five dollars a month, which Colonel Scott never paid.
From this inauspicious beginning came one of the most notorious criminals of the twentieth century, a man mentioned more often than anyone but Ted Bundy in the first five seasons of Criminal Minds. Manson is mentioned in eight episodes: “Extreme Aggressor” (101), “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (103), “The Popular Kids” (110), “The Tribe” (116), “Somebody’s Watc
hing” (118), “Children of the Dark” (304), “Memoriam” (407), and “The Performer” (507).
Manson’s mother went to jail for robbing a gas station in 1939, and Manson went to live with an aunt and an uncle in West Virginia. The uncle was a sadist who called Manson a sissy and, in a misguided attempt to “make a man” of him, outfitted him in a dress for his first day at school—a cruel stunt that had also been done to Henry Lee Lucas. Kathleen, upon her parole, reclaimed her son, but she was not a good mother. She had a habit of leaving him with other people for days at a time while she indulged her tastes for booze and sex, and one story claims that she once traded him to a bar-maid for a pitcher of beer.
In 1947 Kathleen tried to put him in a foster home. None was available, so Manson went into the Gibault School for Boys in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he stayed for ten months before running away. His mother didn’t want him back, so he took off again, living on the streets and supporting himself through theft. He was arrested but escaped after a single day in jail. Recaptured, Manson was sent to Father Edward Flanagan’s Boys Town, where he lasted four days before skipping out. Arrested again at the ripe old age of thirteen, he was sent to a boys’ reform school, where he claims to have suffered frequent sexual abuse at the hands of other inmates and some of the guards.
In “Minimal Loss,” Prentiss and Reid are taken hostage by an underground cult during a federal raid.
From there, Manson’s life was a collage of crimes and prisons. When he was paroled in 1967, after serving time for pimping and transporting women across state lines for sexual purposes, it was over his own objections. He knew where he belonged and where he felt at home.
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