Retired FBI Agent Jerry Webb: The True Teamwork Involved in the Unabomber Case
By Jerry Webb
There is a quote by Vala Afshar I absolutely love:
“We are not a team because we work together. We are a team because we respect, trust, and care for each other.”
And there you have the FBI in a nutshell.
I had the good fortune to spend two of my 22 years in the FBI on a case where teamwork was absolutely essential to the success of the case. That would be the 18-yearlong investigation involving 16 bombing incidents which took the lives of three people. And without the teamwork involving the FBI, ATF, and U.S. Postal Inspection Service in the form of the UNABOM Task Force (UTF), bomb number 17 would have been placed in a U.S. mailbox and sent to another innocent victim.
The fact it did not make it to a mailbox was because on April 3, 1996, the campaign of terror conducted by Theodore John Kaczynski was brought to an end by a team of dedicated professionals who descended on a lonely cabin in an isolated corner of Montana.
How they got there is quite a story. The truth of it deserves to be told. The truth is a fascinating story of teamwork in action. Anything less than the truth is an insult to all who were touched by the case, investigators and victims alike.
I would like to say a little about that teamwork which led to the case being brought to a logical conclusion. I have no intention of reinventing the wheel and talking about the whole case. That would take a book to explain. And, in fact, several books have been written about everything which went into the case. An excellent one would be the one written by SAC Jim Freeman, ASAC Terry Turchie, and SSA Max Noel.
But I would like to just talk a little about what I saw from my single cog on a huge machine, hump-street-Agent perspective. And I want to mention as many people and events as my 21-year-old memory of the case will allow me to conjure up.
We were encouraged to work with a partner as a team on all of our steps. Much of the time I worked with Joyce Seymour of ATF who was great. I covered a bunch of leads with Pat Turtle of our office and I also formed close bonds with Mike Grady of ATF and Paul Wilhelmus of the Postal Inspection service, both just fantastic guys.
Case Would Be Solved
We were lucky on our squad to have John Conway on board with us. John was the original San Francisco UNABOM case agent and saw the case through to the finish line. John’s time working UNABOM is measured in decades, not in a few months. He never lost sight of the fact the case would one day be solved. Even when he was being encouraged by FBIHQ supervisors to close the case during the six year lull which started when the subject was seen while placing one of the devices in 1987, and the widely circulated composite drawing of an individual in a gray hooded sweatshirt was etched into the collective memory of the nation. John would have none of that.
The case was going to remain open and the case was going to be solved.
At the height of the task force operation in San Francisco there were around 50 federal investigators assigned to three separate squads. Some from ATF and some Postal Inspectors. ATF ASAC Mark Logan and Chief Postal Inspector Don Davis played a large part and sat in on the strategy sessions with both the general UTF meetings held on a regular basis, as well as the upper level management level meetings.
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Posted: September 5th, 2017 under News Story.
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