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Unabomber also sent a letter but no manuscript to Scientific American. It was a critique of a story about particle accelerators, so innocuous that staff members initially failed to twig to its authorship. The letter with Penthouse's manuscript, by contrast, contained one menacing and macabre touch. Since Penthouse was less "respectable" than the other publications, "we promise to desist permanently from terrorism, except that we reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published." Bob Guccione, the magazine's headline-happy publisher, volunteered a page to Unabomber for a monthly column if he would stop the rampage.
The Unabomber's manuscript, to judge from the Times and Post stories, is a farrago of Luddite venom embracing politics, history, science and sociology. It blames many of the world's present-day problems on the industrial revolution and forecasts an Orwellian future, in which helpless humans are controlled by computers. Unabomber thus advocates a violent rebellion against technological society as the only way to restore what he calls "wild nature."
In the accompanying letters, Unabomber gave a one-word response to questions about his motive. "The answer is simple: anger." He also chided the FBI for being "surprisingly incompetent" and denied that an April mail bomb, which killed a lobbyist for California's timber industry, had been triggered by the terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City. "We strongly deplore the kind of indiscriminate slaughter that occurred in the Oklahoma City event," read Unabomber's letter to the Times-blithely sidestepping the fact that last week's threat to blow up a passenger plane is perhaps the ultimate indiscrimination.
Unabomber gave the Post and the Times three months to decide whether they would publish his manifesto. At week's end publishers of both papers declared they were still weighing their options. The Times and the Post, and Penthouse as well, face something of an ethical dilemma. If they publish, they will be acceding to the demands of a mass murderer who may well raise the ante by demanding more space for more manifestos. And they may also be inviting copycat behavior by other lethal social critics. If the publications say no, they could be seen by the public as accomplices to murder if Unabomber carries out his threat. "Why should a trusting relationship be established with an individual who has shown total contempt for human life?" asks Everette Dennis of Columbia University's Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.
Meanwhile the FBI, Postal Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have beefed up their 150-member, San Francisco-based, Unabomber task force. In Washington and New York City, experts have examined the manuscripts and letters for clues -- a giveaway mistake like a fingerprint, the indentation of a phone number on a package -- that would provide the identity and whereabouts of the elusive killer. Nothing so far, though, has changed their profile of Unabomber as a single white male, probably in his early 40s, with at least a high school education and some experience, even if indirect, with higher learning. Although Unabomber claims to belong to an anarchist group called F.C., he appears to be a loner and a neat freak, whose deadly packages are constructed with care, even though some elements are homemade.