David Kaczynski starts to accept the truth and finally reaches out to the FBI. But can agents convince their bosses that this is the guy? Project Unabom is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Listen and follow on Apple Podcasts. https://apple.co/Project_Unabom
Late January, 1996, a young FBI agent in the DC field office named Molly Flynn gets an assignment from her higher ups.
Theres a lawyer in town named Tony Bisegli who claims to have a client who might know something about the Unabomber.
Go talk to him.
When I first met Tony, he provided some material and told me that he did not even know the identity of the client, but he considered himself to have, you know, a retainer of sorts, although he was representing them free of charge.
Molly isn't on the Unabomber task force, but she's in DC, helps out the investigation when she can.
What she gets from Tony the lawyer is a bunch of letters between Tony's client and a person whose writing sounds like it might be the Unabomber.
I recall reading the letters, and just my first impression was that the writer was an angry person.
But, you know, they kind of referenced mom and daddy, so the context would make you understand that the author and the recipient were brothers.
The letters were just the start.
There are other things this potential suspect.
Had written, including something that was written in the early seventies that may have been something of a precursor to the Unabomber manifesto.
This was the essay that would eventually make its way to Kathy Puckett, the one she got at the end of our last episode that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
It's a 23 page typewritten essay from 1972, six years before the first Unabomber attack.
Molly only has time to skim it.
Her job is just to deliver the essay to the FBI lab.
But the FBI lab is only interested in one thing, whether the guy who wrote this essay used the same typewriter as the Unabomber.
I think they eliminated it within probably five minutes.
They obviously were looking for specific characters.
And I think they told me right there, like, no, this doesn't match.
And I recall saying, okay, well, who's going to look at the content?