Criminal Masterminds

by Anne Williams

  After McVeigh’s discharge from the army, his erratic behaviour became more pronounced, and he began to move around from city to city, working as a security guard. He lived in a succession of trailer parks and motels, becoming more and more alienated from society and eccentric in his behaviour. His only friends during this period were his former army colleagues, whom he visited from time to time around the country. However, he never stayed anywhere for very long, and would become restless and leave after a few days. He is also known to have been experimenting with drugs, particularly methamphetamine, which is known to cause extreme paranoia in some users.

  Making bombs

  In 1993, the Waco incident rocked the United States. What happened at Waco was that a cult community known as the branch Davidians, a religious group that had originated in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, were accused of crimes such as paedophilia. Federal agents then targeted the commune, and the authorities proceeded to mount a siege at their compound. While this was happening, there was outrage in the press and among many commentators, at the heavy-handed way in which the police and the authorities were dealing with the incident. In particular, what horrified the nation was that during the siege, many cult members met their deaths, including the Davidians’ leader, David Koresh.

  Along with many other Americans, McVeigh visited the scene of the siege, and he became infuriated by the way the authorities were handling the incident. It seemed to sum up the way in which, in their eyes, individual liberties were being eroded by the modern-day state. McVeigh’s hatred of the government intensified, with results that were to prove disastrous.

  It was at around this time that McVeigh began to make bombs, assisted by one of his former army friends, Terry Nichols. The pair then devised a plan to detonate a bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In this way, they hoped to undermine the state. Whether or not they realised how much loss of life and injury it would cause to innocent citizens, including many children, is unclear, but it seems likely that they did.

  The Oklahoma terror attack

  McVeigh chose to make his attack in the morning, a time of day when he knew there would be a lot of people arriving at their offices to start the day. He method was breathtakingly simple: he drove a truck loaded with bombs to the building, set a timed fuse, ignited it, and then walked away. He then got into his getaway car, and sped off down the highway, leaving a trail of devastation behind him.

  When the bomb detonated, minutes later, it killed and wounded hundreds of people who were in and around the building, including many children who were attending a day care centre there. Meanwhile, McVeigh was driving out of the city, thinking that he had got away with the attack. He was wrong, however. Police soon picked him up for speeding, and it was then found that he was driving without a licence and carrying a gun.

  He was about to be released for these minor offences when news came in that a manhunt had been launched to find the perpetrator of the Oklahoma bombing. It then became clear that, by chance, the police had found their man.

  Executed by lethal injection

  Not surprisingly, McVeigh’s trial was a highly controversial one, with outraged members of the public and the press baying for his blood, and others urging a calmer approach. The fact that McVeigh had managed to kill and injure so many children made him especially unpopular. In 1997, after a high-profile trial, McVeigh was convicted of the atrocity and received the death sentence. Co-conspirator Terry Nichols was given a sentence of life imprisonment.

  Despite McVeigh’s protestations that he had acted alone and taking full responsibility for the crime, many believed that this was not the case, and that he was part of a group of political activists – including Nichols’ brother James – who had planned the attack together. Many conspiracy theories as to the reasons for the bombing arose, including the idea that the US government itself had a role in the attack, since one report concluded that bombs had been placed within the building itself. According to this rather far-fetched theory, the government needed grounds for persecuting right-wing groups and thus had a hand in planning the attack in some way.

  Conspiracy theories

  Another theory was that McVeigh belonged to a criminal group called the Midwest Bank Robbers, who had been active in the United States in the early 1990s. This group were outspoken racists with white supremacist views. The evidence for McVeigh’s involvement was that the FBI found that the same type of explosive caps were used by both McVeigh and the Robbers. There was also evidence to show that McVeigh and the Robbers had held meetings in Arkansas a short time before the Oklahoma bombing occurred. Yet another conspiracy theory alleged is that McVeigh was part of a group of Islamic fundamentalists based in the Philippines, and was linked to the al-Qaeda network.

  Whether or not McVeigh was working alone or in collusion with others, the Oklahoma bombing was one of the worst domestic terror attacks in

  US history, and he will be remembered as the man who planned and executed it, killing and injuring hundreds of innocent victims in the process.

  The Unabomber

  The Unabomber was the codename that the FBI gave to the terrorist Theodore (Ted) Kaczynski, who perpetrated a series of mail bombings to universities and airlines starting in the 1970s and ending in the 1990s. In the process, three people were killed, twenty-three wounded and hundreds more terrorised. His crimes prompted the most expensive manhunt ever mounted by the FBI.

  An extremely intelligent, well-educated man, Kaczynski penned a paper called Industrial Society and Its Future and sent it to various media outlets, giving his reasons for his crimes. As he saw it, his atrocities were committed to draw attention to the problems of modern society, especially in terms of technological innovation. He believed that his campaign would help to cause the downfall of civilisation and halt the progress of technology. However, although he had a distinguished academic mind, it soon became clear that he was mentally unbalanced, and his crude bombs, which killed and maimed innocent victims, were obviously the work of a deranged killer.

  The brilliant loner

  Theodore John Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in Chicago. He grew up in Evergreen Park, a working-class area in the suburbs of Chicago. One significant episode that happened in his childhood was that, while he was still a baby, he was given some medicine that caused an extreme allergic reaction and had to be taken in to hospital. As was the custom of the day, during the time he was there, his parents were only allowed to visit him occasionally. According to Kaczynski’s mother, when he returned home, he had changed from being a contented baby into a fearful, withdrawn one, and he never again found it easy to establish relationships with other people. Today, the dangers of isolating babies and young children from their mothers or regular carers has been recognised, and it is known that such an experience can cause deep-rooted anxieties in adults.

  Although he was very withdrawn and sensitive, the young Theodore, or Ted as he became known, was clearly very gifted and did brilliantly at school. Yet despite his intellectual prowess, he was lacking in social skills, and was unable to relate well to his peers or to adults. His academic success meant that he was able to skip several grades and graduate from high school early. Again, this process of fast-tracking gifted children and young people is now known to have some drawbacks, in that these individuals often find it difficult to establish relationships with their own age group, having been separated from them throughout their school career.

  The drop-out

  After leaving high school, Kaczynski went on to gain a degree in mathematics from Harvard, and then a master’s degree and a PhD from Ann Arbor University, Michigan. His teachers were amazed by his ability to solve mathematical problems, and he soon reached a level that marked him out as something of a genius. He was offered a fellowship at the university, and began to teach students. He worked for three years as a lecturer there, and during this time published important papers on mathematics. After that, he completed two years as an assistant p
rofessor in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Still only in his twenties, Kaczynski now looked set to reach the top of his career as a mathematician. However, in 1969 he suddenly resigned from the job, without explaining why. Not only did he leave Berkeley, he severed all ties with the academic world, to the puzzlement of his colleagues, who could not understand why this mathematical genius should decide to walk away from his career for no apparent reason.

  University and airline bombs

  After quitting his job, Kaczynski had very little income, and went to live in a remote wooden cabin in the countryside. He began to do odd jobs for local people, but was earning very little money, barely eking out an existence and living without basic amenities in the cabin. His family tried to help, but he maintained a distance from them as well as everyone else. The more isolated he became, the more cranky and disturbed his behaviour was, until in 1978, he began to send bombs through the mail.

  His first target was Professor Buckley Crist at Northwestern University, who received a package in May 1978. The package had been left at a car park in Chicago University with a return address to Professor Crist. When the professor received the package, he became suspicious and had the package opened by a campus police officer, Terry Marker. It exploded, but fortunately Marker was only slightly injured. The bomb had been crudely assembled, and as a result it was not very effective. Evidently, although Kaczynski was a mathematical genius, he was not so good at DIY.

  Next, Kaczynski began to target airlines, sending bombs designed to explode in airports and on aeroplanes. In 1979, a bomb placed in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444 began to smoke, but fortunately it did not explode before the pilot made an emergency landing. Because of the seriousness of the crime, the FBI was called in to investigate. From this time on, Kaczynski stepped up his campaign with bombs that, while still primitive, were now lethal. In 1985, he sent one to the University of California, which resulted in a student losing four of his fingers and the sight in one eye. In the same year, he began to target computer stores, leaving nail bombs in the car parks outside these stores. In one case, the store owner was killed outright.

  The Unabomber manifesto

  After this atrocity, Kaczynski’s activities ceased for a while. However, in 1993 he targeted a computer science professor at Yale University, David Gelernter, who thankfully survived the bomb Kaczynski sent to him. Another academic, geneticist Charles Epstein, was not so lucky. He was maimed by one of Kaczynski’s bombs in the same year. The following year, Kaczynski targeted an advertising executive, and the year after, the president of the California Forestry Association. Meanwhile, the FBI seemed unable to make any progress on catching up with the Unabomber, who by now was terrorising the general public with these random terror attacks.

  More clues came in when Kaczynski began to write letters to the newspapers, threatening to strike again if his articles were not printed. He demanded that a manifesto he had written, entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, be printed in one of the US’s major newspapers and promised that he would then end his bombing campaign. In order to try and resolve the situation, the New York Times printed his manifesto, which became known as The Unabomber Manifesto. A great deal of controversy surrounded this decision; in some quarters, it was felt that this was pandering to the murderer. However, the newspaper argued that printing the manifesto might help to solve the mystery for once and for all.

  Kaczynski’s writing showed signs of mental disturbance, in that it was essentially a rant, although obviously the work of an intelligent, well-educated man. In it, he argued that human beings suffer from the ‘progress’ of technology, which harms the majority of people on the planet, and causes immense environmental damage. Kaczynski believed that the only way forward was through bringing technological progress to an end and returning to live as our ancestors did.

  The net closes

  As the New York Times editors had hoped, publishing the manifesto laid a trail of clues that led to the Unabomber’s door. David Kaczynski, Ted’s brother, recognised Ted’s writing style and train of thought, and felt compelled to contact the police to let them know who the Unabomber was. At one time, David had been very influenced by his brother’s ideas and had even helped to buy the plot of land where Ted now lived. However, since then he had distanced himself from his brother somewhat, feeling that Ted’s reclusive life was unhealthy. Ted had few social contacts, only seeing people when he needed to buy food, and living in a very restricted way, without electricity or running water. In addition, Ted had begun to show signs of serious mental disturbance.

  Reading the Unabomber Manifesto in the newspaper, David realised that Ted was responsible for the bombing campaign. He contacted the police and told them where Ted was living, asking them not to let his brother know that it was he who had turned him in. Police offers duly arrested Ted Kaczynski at his cabin in Montana in April 1996. Unfortunately, David’s part in turning his brother in came to light. However, David used the reward money he received to pay his legal expenses, and also to compensate the victims’ families.

  At the trial, Kaczynski refused to plead insanity, which was the most obvious defence in his case. A court psychiatrist diagnosed him as suffering from schizophrenia, but fit to be tried. Kaczynski initially pleaded guilty, but later withdrew his plea; however, this was not accepted, and he was convicted. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and incarcerated at Florence, Colorado, where he remains to this day.

  Abimael Guzmán

  Abimael Guzmán was the notorious leader of the Sendero Luminoso (‘Shining Path’), a Maoist revolutionary group that developed a reputation as brutal, ruthless terrorists in Peru. The group was formed, ostensibly, to wage a ‘people’s war’ against the injustices of the state, but went on to murder many ordinary citizens, including poverty-stricken peasants and left-wing political organisers such as trade unionists, simply because they had, in the eyes of the Shining Path, colluded with the state. The group was active as a guerrilla movement from the late 1970s until the 1990s, when Guzmán was finally captured and imprisoned. After his initial trial, which many considered to be undemocratically carried out, there was a rise in atrocities and massacres; however, in the longer term, the group became less active in Peru.

  Philosophy professor

  Abimael Guzmán was born Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso on December 3, 1934 in Mollendo, a coastal town about 1,000 km (620 miles) to the south of Lima, the capital city of Peru. His father was a rich man whose wealth had come from winning the national lottery, and who had fathered children by six different women. Guzmán himself was illegitimate, and when he was only five years old, his mother Berenice Reynoso died, leaving him to the care of his mother’s family. He was raised by them until he was thirteen, when he went to live with his father and stepmother in the city of Arequipa. Here, he attended a private Catholic school, and did well in his studies. As a young man, he went on to take a degree at the San Augustin University in Arequipa, majoring in Social Studies.

  It was at university that Guzmán became politicised. A shy, diligent, student who was obsessively well organised and hardworking, Guzmán soon became interested in radical politics. He was particularly influenced by a book written by the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party, José Carlos Mariátegui la Chira, entitled Seven Interpretative Essays on Peruvian Reality and published in 1928. In it, Mariátegui argued that a Marxist perspective could be applied not just to modern industrial societies, such as Great Britain, where Marx had predicted revolution would occur, but also to the conditions of an agriculturally-based Latin American society such as Peru. Just as Mao had envisioned in China, and Lenin in Russia, agricultural societies with a large, poverty-stricken peasantry could also undergo revolution – and, contrary to Marx’s predictions, these were the countries where, in fact, the major communist revolutions took place, rather than in Europe.

  Revolutionary leader

  In Peru, the agricultural econo
my was controlled by large landowners, or ‘latifundistas’, who kept the peasant population in conditions of miserable poverty. Guzmán proposed that new, more egalitarian communities could evolve on the model of some aspects of the Incas’ social organisation. In addition, Guzmán argued that, if the corrupt government of Peru could be destabilised, by whatever means possible, the situation would be ripe for revolution.

  On gaining his degrees in law and philosophy, Guzmán took up a position as Professor Philosophy at a university in Ayacucho, a city in the Andes. Here, he became the protege of Dr Efraín Morote Best, who encouraged him to study Quechua, the language spoken by the Indians of the region. During this time, Best and Guzmán developed a wide circle of radical academics who were frustrated by the iniquities of the society they lived in, with a corrupt government and an oppressed peasantry. In 1965, Guzmán travelled to China to see communism in action, and returned determined to change the situation in Peru.