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"1907 Conrad Novel May Have Inspired Unabomb Suspect" Front-page headline, The Washington Post, July 9, 1996
I confess that in my eyes the story [The Secret Agent) is a fairly successful (and sincere) piece of ironic treatment applied to a special subject-a sensational subject if one likes to call it so. And it is based on the inside knowledge of a certain event in the history of active anarchism. But otherwise it is purely a work of imagination. It has no social or philosophical intention. It is, I humbly hope, not devoid of artistic value. It may even have some moral significance. (Emphasis by Conrad in original) Joseph Conrad, Letter to Algernon Methuen. November 7, 1906.1
It is not common for canonical literary works, published nearly ninety years earlier, to be mentioned in front-page headlines about suspected terrorists. But the novel in question, The Secret Agent, is not exactly a typical canonical work; and Theodore J. Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber and "FC" as he signed his letters to the media, is not a typical terrorist. A Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan who was briefly an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Kaczynski is a far more proficient bomb-maker than Martial Bourdin, who destroyed himself in the 1894 Greenwich explosion that was the starting point for Conrad's novel. Between 1978 and 1995 his home-made bombs injured twenty-three people and killed three personsHugh Scrutton, a Sacramento computer store owner, Thomas Mosser, a New Jersey advertising executive, and Gilbert Murray, an official of the California Forestry Association. Kaczynski tried and failed to blow up an airliner in 1979, and he caused a major panic with a "prank" threat to destroy an airliner in June of 1995. During that same summer he also manipulated the news media so that The Washington Post, with the cooperation of the New York Times, published his 35,000-word Manifesto attacking technology, science, and "Industrial Society," first on the Post's own pages and then on the internet. There the Manifesto came to the attention of David Kaczynski who notified the FBI that certain ideas in "Industrial Society" were disturbingly similar to statements in letters he had received from his brother who was...