ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 9, 1996 TAG: 9604090091
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
Federal agents have found names of some of the Unabomber's victims in documents seized during a search of the primitive Montana cabin of Theodore J. Kaczynski, adding to the weight of circumstantial evidence that authorities believe will allow them to charge the former math professor with the attacks, senior law enforcement sources said Monday.
The sources said the names, which they would not disclose, were not in the form of a list but were contained in written or published material that they declined to characterize.
Earlier, authorities found a typewriter possibly linked to writings by the elusive Unabomber, as well as bomb-making chemicals. On Friday, federal agents combing Kaczynski's one-room cabin found, under his bed, a complete bomb similar to those used in the Unabomber's 17-year string of attacks. They also have established that Kaczynski, traveling by bus, had visited the Sacramento area around the time of at least one Unabomber attack linked to the city.
Kaczynski, a former University of California, Berkeley, professor who became a recluse, has been charged only with one count of possessing bomb-making components. A federal grand jury will convene in Great Falls, Mont., April 17 to hear the case.
Three people were killed by the Unabomber and 23 injured since the attacks began in 1978. The FBI has run a massive manhunt for the Unabomber for years, but the key break in the case came only in January, when Kaczynski's younger brother noted similarities between Unabomber writings and his brother's and had a lawyer contact the FBI.
Federal agents are focusing considerable attention on how the Unabomber picked his targets. Monday, they continued to sift through the prodigious records stored in Kaczynski's cabin.
The FBI last summer, long before Kaczynski's name came to their attention, began investigating whether the Unabomber used a so-called ecological hit list to select his most recent victims.
According to a report by ABC News in August, the list was published in 1990 in an anonymous publication entitled ``Live Wild or Die'' and cited 11 companies and organizations said to be enemies of the environment.
Two targets stood out: the Timber Association of California, and the Exxon Corp. In April 1995, the Unabomber mailed a deadly pipe bomb to the Timber Association, even though it had by then changed its name to the California Forestry Association; in December 1994, he sent a bomb to a public relations executive whose firm had done work for Exxon.
The bomb sent to the Timber Association was addressed to William N. Dennison, its former head. But it killed the new president, Gilbert P. Murray, whose Sacramento-based timber-industry lobbying group had changed its name in 1992.
Public relations executive Thomas J. Mosser also was killed. Mosser worked for Burson-Marsteller, a firm that counted Exxon among its clients. The Feb. 2, 1994, edition of Earth First!, an outspoken environmentalist journal, carried an article attacking Burson-Marsteller and accusing it of promoting ``an elite form of `environmentalism' that serves the need of the corporate world.''
The article, entitled ``The International PR Machine,'' listed Exxon as one of Burson-Marsteller's clients and charged, erroneously, that Exxon had hired the firm ``to counter the negative publicity from the Valdez oil spill.'' (Burson-Marsteller has said it did no work on the Alaskan oil spill.)
Mosser died in the kitchen of his Caldwell, N.J., home in December 1994. He had been promoted to Burson-Marsteller's parent firm, Young & Rubicam, months earlier.
Suspicions that the 1990 list might have been the origin for the Unabomber's last targets were voiced by a controversial private investigator named Barry Clausen. He told ABC Evening News that he got a copy of the publication from a member of Earth First! The group's officials said they knew nothing of the Unabomber and said the organization had an ``unbroken, unblemished record of nonviolence.''
That, however, would not rule out the possibility the Unabomber read or got ideas from various, and possibly outdated, environmentalist publications. The FBI is also trying to determine whether Kaczynski attended environmentalist meetings such as one held in Missoula, Mont., a month before Mosser was killed. Hundreds of environmentalists attended the gathering to discuss opposition to multinational timber firms. Missoula is 60 miles from Lincoln, the small town nearest Kaczynski's cabin.
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