is a map he drew of the yale university campus. you can see right up here at the top is the library and smiley walked down the street, past the tower.sf british arts center. it was there that the police officer introduced himself and said he was with the library and asked if smiley had per chance inadvertently taken anything with him. smiley, even though he was under no obligation to cooperate he decided that he would go back with this officer to the bin i can and they began looking through his things. first they looked through his briefcase and found a number of rare map there is but smiley said he had brought those with him. they found no evidence to to find that wasn't true. then they noticed him fidgeting with his blazer pocket and something in his blazer and they asked him to take it out. when they did, he took out this.

this is a map of new england by john smith in 1616. this is yale's copy that was done in 1631. i want to pause for a moment and tell you about this map and explain what makes it so important and what makes it so valuable. we all know of john smith from the virginia colony down the street from here and his role in founding that and study in 1607. he had sort of a second chapter in his life after he was sort of drummed out of virginia for reasons that i won't go into. he started exploring this area that was then just known as north virginia with the idea of founding a new colony there. and he thought that it needed a snappier name so he came up with the name new england and john smith was actually the person who coined that term as a way to claim this territory for his home country and sort of tell the other countries, you know,

this is english territory. and he also wanted to claim this territory for himself and make sure that he got credit for discovering it and that he was going to be involved in the colonization and so he put an enormous portrait of himself up here in the corner. and he was so vain that, actually updated the portrait of the years on different versions of the map. this is a later version of the map. you can see his beard is much bushier than earlier versions and his jacket is much more elaborately decorated. another interesting thing about this map is that you probably can't see it from there, but all up and down the coastline here are names of english towns and cities. london is there. and cambridge and oxford and other places. of course, in 1616 before the pilgrims landed in new england, none of those cities or towns existed. the reason they're there on the map is because after he made the map, he brought it to england and presented it to prince charles at the time and asked him to change the names of all

the native american settlements to english towns and cities. it was this breathtaking act of virtual colonization that occurred before a single english settler had actually set foot in the territory. and interestingly, most of the towns or cities disappeared on the map or aren't in the place he put them inspect one remained in the corner. you can see where he wrote plymouth. that is where the pilgrims when they sailed from plymouth with the copy of smith's map in hand on the mayflower they steered to that location and took the name for the plymouth colony. so, this is a really important map and it's a seminal document in the founding exploration of north america. and it's also a quite rare map. even though it's not a one of a kind, there are only a few

copies that exist in variation institutions throughout the country and the world. and because of, that it's a very valuable map. at auction this map could go easily for $50,000 to a map collector. and so when smiley was found with this map that was both rare and valuable one of the librarians at the time noticed the handwriting at the bottom of the map and recognized it as belonging to a patron of yale who donated a lot of libraries and book it is to library. she immediately cried out, that's our map. they put handcuffs on smiley and led him away to spend the night in jail. so the fbi was called in to investigate this case. immediately they realized that they had a problem. so as i mentioned, there may have only been a few dozen copies of this map. it's not so they're there's only one copy.

it's not like a work of art in a museum where there's one copy. if it's missing from the wall, everyone knows it's stolen. an fbi agent came in and said, i understand smiley had a copy of this map, that you are missing a copy of this map but how do i know the copy you're missing is the copy that smiley took? and they actually got lucky very early on in the case with another map smiley had on him that day. it's this one. this is a map by gerard deyoe, a dutch map maker was talking about from the 1500s. this is the world map from his atlas, which is even more rare than the smith map. it was only produced in the first edition of his atlas, which never sold very well and sle few copies of this map survived. probably worth $150,000 at least at auction. and so it wasn't what was on the front of this map that interested investigators, though. it is what was on the back of

this map. so, you can see that on the back of the map there were these four little worm holes that had been made by these parasitic pests, probably hundreds of years ago as it was sitting on the dusty shelf of a library. the four holes on the map lined up exactly where four holes in the atlas that was in yale's collection that smiley was looking at that day. this was as good as a fingerprint to investigators. it was sort of this cartographicic csi they were able to catch him red-handed and say he took this map, yes, it was from the volume belonging to yale. because it was worth over $150,000 they could charge him with theft of a heritage which carries a hefty sentence. the fbi knew smiley had stolen at least two maps maybe more. the fbi agent began to further investigate the case. even though he knew nothing about rare maps when he started working on the case, he did know

a lot about thieves. and he knew that when a thief is caught red-handed, it's usually not the first time they've committed a theft. so, he began calling around and sending e-mails out to other rare book and manuscript libraries around the country. he asked them two questions. have forbes smiley been in your collection lately? and, are you missing any rare maps? and six institutions answered yes to both of those questions. yale university both the sterling and the beinecke boston public library, new york public library, missing from two divisions, the rare book and map division, the hoeten lie enen enen houghton library and newberry library in chicago. investigator hs to determine what maps were missing from the libraries, what books smiley looked at, which maps he may

have taken and where those maps may have ended up. and it became quite an ordeal. the library hs to go back in many cases through hundreds of call slips dating back several years to find which items smiley had looked at and then compare them to their catalogs. for those books acquired over 100 years ago they were not accurately cataloged as to what maps they contain. some might just say map or maps. some may list some maps but not others. some may have said they had a map but they're missing it long before smiley got there. it was really this difficult enterprise they had to go in to figure out the extent of his crimes. lucky for them, he did come forward when he heard there were federal charges pending against him. smiley did come forward and he offered to cooperate. as david said, he eventually admitted stealing 97 maps but

the libraries to this day accuse him of stealing more than he admitted. i'll get to that in a moment and show you some examples of that. the maps that he stole were worth over $3 million in total. so, they were -- the cream de la cream of antique maps. most expensive most valuable maps that he stole. and so all this happened in 2005-2006. this was all -- had been reported in newspapers. pretty well known by the time that i started on this trail in 2011. i remember reading about this case in "new yorker" and other places it happened. i was a map lover myself and i was intrigued by these rare obs and the fact that people were willing to pay thousands and tense of thousands of dollars for them. it made me curious to know more about why that was the case. but i also wanted to know more about smiley. he had never talked to the press before.

he had given an interview. he had never explained why he started taking these maps especially given the fact that he was himself a rare map dealer. by all accounts loved these maps and celebrated them. what was it that caused him to go to the dark side as it were and start actually taking these maps out of libraries? so that is the task i set for myself. originally i was going to write an article for boston magazine and update the case, tell it start to finish. through a friend of smiley he agreed to talk to me. i sat across the picnic table at martha vineyard and bit end of that four hours i was completely convinced this was not a magazine article, this was a book. that he was such a complex character in this world of map dealers and map collectors was so interesting. final lishgs the stories of the map makers themselves many times were just as interesting as smiley's story f not more so. i'm going to share about what i

learned about smiley and some of these maps that he stole. this is another map i had made for the book in new england showing key stories and locations. smiley grew up in this small town in new hampshire called bedford. despite his high flute ant name, e forbes smiley ii. he was always fascinateded with history. even as a young boy, he would read about history and studied history of the area, particularly the history of new england. and he went to college in -- hampshire college in massachusetts and he made history a special. history and religion. he was known for all sorts of eccentric things like reciting the iliad in the middle of campus and telling his friends about every church steeple they passed and the architecture of

that church. after college he settled in new york. it was there he entered the map trade. he started at this department store, b. altman's department store, which no longer exists but had a small division that sold rare maps and atlases. it was conveniently located just a dozen blocks from new york public library. that's where his real education in maps began. and he became so fascinated by looking at the different maps and comparing them to each other and realizing which map maker copied from whom. and he just couldn't get enough of this topic and became incredibly knowledgeable in a short period of time. as he went on as a map dealer, he was successful. the late 1980s was a very good time to become a map dealer because the prices of maps were suddenly increasing exponentially. and, you know, people -- well, even wealthy people were no

longer able to afford a lot of fine art. the prices for that had become untakenable. so maps became a new way of collecting for folks who were wealth y not billionaires. doctors, lawyers, wall street executives. who would buy these rare maps, put them on their walls and have if not a one-of-a-kind item, a very rare item that was beautiful to look at and also had this historical story behind. -t. they became very popular. maps that went for a couple thousand dollars went for tens of thousands of dollars and eventually approaching hundreds of thousands of dollars. he put together a collection of maps in the new york and mid-atlantic region for a man named larry slaughter which was donated to new york public library as slaughter collection.

he also put together a collection of maps in boston and new england for a man named norman lebanthol. ironic given later events and given he was taking maps out of those very libraries he was stealing ing putting them into. he also had several flaws that were his undoing. he was a terrible business person. from the beginning he was chasing maps he couldn't afford and buying one map in order to pay for another one. he became notorious for bouncing checks to his fellow dealers and some stopped doing business with him and hurt his client base. in addition, he -- as maps

became more valuable in the 1980s there was a lot more competition that ensued. so, a number of new map dealers came in and they really looked at it as a business and we may think of map dealing and collecting as this rarefied pursuit of people, you know, stud yously studying in libraries. it's quite a business in some ways a cut-throat business of people bidding against each other at auctions for a very small number of var sxrair valuable items. a number of these map dealers didn't like smiley very much either because he bounced checks to them or because they just thought him arrogant and sort of a know it all and so they would bid against him in auction and sometimes drive the price up on him. sometimes they would bid together against him. lastly smiley was just never a team player. always had this secretive, go it alone attitude that you know he was just going to make it on

his own two feet and he didn't need anyone else's help. again, that contributed to his financial problems because it was really necessary sometimes for different dealers to sort of ban together in bidding on certain items they would split up. so he became even less able to compete because of that. eventually, as he told me he was too proud to admit he failed in this pursuit and he told me that he was looking at the map of sterling memorial library on the table in front of him, realizing he could fold it down to the size of a credit card, walk out with it in his pocket and sell it the next day for $30,000. that was the moment when temptation got the better of him. he sold that first map and may have told himself it was just this one-time thing he was going to do and get out of his financial duress. of course, that started a slippery slope and he began stealing more and more maps and selling them for more and more

money and became map thief that i write about in my book. i'm going to talk about a few of the maps he stole just to give you an idea of the kind of items he took and why they're valuable and what he did with them when he took them. this is another map by john smith. it's actually a map he made a few years before his map of new england and a map of the virginia colony. it's a particularly striking map because john smith had rudimentary survey materials. he went up and down chesapeake bay in the rivers in a very small boat and just took sights on different landmarks. from that he was able to create this very accurate map of the region that was in use as a map for 200 years after he created it. on this map he did not put a picture of himself. he put a picture as the native

american chief in the corner and this picture of another native american here. there's little crosses at some areas along the rivers he put there and scholars today think that was the limits of the area he actually individually surveyed himself. point past that was the area he actually relied upon the knowledge of the natives of the area to mapt rest of the area. you can see how accurate that is, as well. it's particularly successful and really quite amazing he was able to do the job on this. smiley had stole -- there were two copies of this map missing from the boston public library. when smiley admitted the maps he had taken, he only admitted to stealing one. and interestingly enough, the librarian afterwards did not

give up on this. he was sure smiley had taken the other one as well and he began scanning dealers' catalogs and actually saw a copy of this map and went down to new york with the book that the map was missing from and was able to match that map against the book by a little impression that was made in the page on the -- that was facing where the map was missing. so that's at last one map smiley did not admit to that was eventually recovered by the $ library. on the smith map you can see north is actually to the right. then on this map north is at the top. you can see the chesapeake bay. the appalachian mountains here. this map was sort of the definitive map of the 18th century washington area. it was all done from original

surveys by joshua frye and peter jefferson. if you're wondering if that jefferson has any relation to thomas jefferson he was actually his father. and after peter jefferson died he bequooeted his surveying equipment to thomas jefferson who created some maps of his own, including one map of virginia. in map was made between the growing tension between french and english. as colonists move inward into the mountains, they move against the french who were coming down from canada. eventually, that would erupt in french and indian war. but for almost 100 years before war actually broke out, there was sort of this cartoftgraphic war between french and indian for them to draw competing maps of the ohio valley and into virginia.

so, this map is;.j+l actually commissioned in order to survey this area here where these competing claims were taking place. and was, you know leaps ahead of any maps for the time and was the most accurate map into the revolutionary war. as i said, this was thomas jefferson's father and thomas jefferson used this map as well to create his own maps. this was taken from the boston public library. an atlas of maps made in 1875, one around the american revolution. this is one smiley took out of that atlas. i want to show you a few maps of washington, d.c. as well since we are -- since that's where we are today. this is a map made in 1792.

it was the first printed map of washington, d.c. it was made by andrea elocott, who was assistant to londfont plaza. he designed washington, d.c. and designed it on a model of paris and grand boulevards that would go through the center of the city and, unfortunately, he put the boulevard through the property of one of the main land owners at the time and he wasn't that thrilled about it and complained to washington and jefferson, who were in charge of plans for the capital and londfont was dismissed so it fell to. elocott to continue his plans and actually put them into practice. he finished the surveying and produced a series of maps of washington, d.c.

and the first published map was don done in june of 1792. there were two pirated versions that appeared in magazines before the official map was ever: printed. this map you're looking at was actually in a magazine that was printed in boston. the boston map is incredibly rare. after smiley's thefts were discovered, harvard and boston public library were both missing their copy of the elocott map from the edition of that magazine. of course, smiley only admitted stealing it from -- admitted stealing one copy of this map. so, after the maps were recovered, a number of the libraries all went down to new haven and -- to look at the maps and determine whose was whose. they had a little bit of a fight

over some of these maps. being librarians, it was a quiet fight, but there was a lot of maps that changed hands and that went to different institutions who were able to prove through different marks on the map or different impressions whosezb" ÷ was whose. this was actually proven to be harvard's copy of this map. so the boston public library is still missing their edition. this is the last map i want to show you. this is also by elocott and also of washington, d.c. you can see it's a very different looking map. and it was meant to be displayed in this diamond shaped like this. and as you can see it's all of the topography of washington, d.c. sort of stripped of the landmarks and the street names. and this one is also quite rare. after smiley's thefts were

revealed, yale university, the sterling library there realized they were missing their copy. and smiley actually listed a copy of this map on his website. in that listing mentioned that he knew of no versions of this map that had come up for auction since 1991 when he had actually helped purchase it for the slaughter collection, which ended up at new york public library. but as i said, yale was missing their copy of this map. right around the time it was on smiley's website the map also appeared in the catalog of a dealer smiley was known to do business with. smiley never admitted to stealing this one. yale didn't have any defining marks that would show this is actually their map. they didn't have a digital image of it. they didn't have any other kinds of evidence and so because of that, the fbi decided that it wasn't a map that smiley had

stolen and it was never returned and never recovered back to yale. i just wanted to close with a few words about what smiley did with the money he gained from stealing these maps because in some ways i find this to be one of the more compelling aspects of the story and one of the things that convinced me there was a book here. this is a map of a small town in maine called ;ófjusebeck, a flea bite of a town. can you barely find to a map in far northern maine. smiley purchased a farmhouse here in the late 1980s, right up here. and given his life of history and love of new england, he restored this farmhouse lovingly to his ideal of a perfect new england farmhouse. he didn't stop there. he began buying up property including the post office and a restaurant, a general store.

he renovated this children's park with gazebo. half the people in town looked at him as this robin hood coming in to save the economic prospects. he employed carpenters, laborers, people that worked in his shops and stores. all in all spent about $1 million on this project of renovating this town. of course, the other half of the town wasn't all that pleased about some new yorker coming up to maine and telling them what to do with their town and their property. a number of residents of the town got into a feud with him. particularly the folks across the street from him on the lake= qq r(t&háhp &hc% was a family known as the -- named the moriartys. they had a different version of the town they would like to see and it involved an ice cream shop and speed boat marina, sort of this pleasure boating center. and the two of them really came at odds and started this feud

that really divide the whole town in half so half of the people would eat at smiley's restaurant and mail letters if his post office. the other half of the town would eat there, mail letters there and eat at the restaurant in that town. it eventually grew into this legal battle that ended up costing smiley even more money in legal bills on top of the money he was already spending on this renovation project and all the people he was employing and the deaths that he had had in the first place. and it caused him to rapidly increase the pace of his

time off for the cooperation that he provided to the fbi. he currently lives on martha's vineyard where last i knew he was working as a lands escaper for $12 an hour. he has nothing to do with rare maps anymore. in prison he did pick up a new hobby of water color painting. this is a picture of a water color on display at an art show at martha's vineyard i attended. just goes to show you how talented a person he is that just in a few short years was able to produce a water color of this caliber. as you can see on the label, there's one change since his map dealing days. he no longer goes by the name e. forbes smiley iii.

now he goes by edward and sometimes ed. thank you for coming. i'm happy to answer some questions. there are microphones in the aisles. if you have a question, please come up to the mike. >> thank you very much. informational and then more general. the boulevard in d.c. and the landowner and then a more general -- realize this isn't necessarily your area of authority, but how well are institutions doing these days, in your opinion, of protecting their goods? >> so your question is -- >> what was the boulevard and who was the property owner? >> that i can't tell you. i once knew that during my research, but there are so many maps and so many details. >> comment on how institutions in your opinion are doing these days in terms of protecting their materials?

>> that i can't comment because i look quite a bit into that. particularly, the libraries that smiley target have had done a lot to change their security practices. they've installed new cameras. they have, in some cases, installed new policies for how maps are delivered to patrons for example, yale has a bar code affixed to every single map and it's scanned in and out of the vault every time someone wants to look at it op other libraries have instituted digital images so if, god forbid, a map has gone missing they can identify it and tell that it's their map. on the other hand, you know, as you know you know, libraries are chronically short-staffed and underfunded and so there's a real variation between libraries and what they've -- what they've done and what they've been able to do. you know there wasn't a single curator who i spoke to who said this couldn't happen again

somewhere. as long as we're providing access to these materials, unless we want to lock them all up and provide digital images to people, which would be a real shame, you'll assume some measure of risk and the question is, how much risk are you able to minimize. >> i have a question over here. i got a sense of reading your book at the end, a number of libraries weren't forthcoming in the maps they were missing. and i was kind of -- wanted to get your feel for why you felt -- they felt that way? >> yeah. there was a real -- there was a real variety of the amount of transparency that libraries were able to show. and in some cases that's understandable. you can imagine that if you are looking for donations of material from people, you know, you don't want to be necessarily advertising the fact that have had items stolen from your institution.

unfortunately, that also, you know plays into some of these thefts by smiley and other people and allows them to continue because of the fact that these thefts aren't widely disseminated. it sometimes can allow them to go on a lot longer than they otherwise would have. there's a real tension that exists there. you know to their credit, i think libraries have gotten better about that and become more transparent since the smiley affair. i was impressed how transparent the libraries were and opened up their files and were incredibly open and the information they gave me. there still is that secrecy that exists in terms of these deaths that can help aid and abet thieves. >> i think there must be a commonality between the market for these maps and old books or

antic we tik antiquities, in that there's almost a black market that people ignore from where those maps come from. how it would be possible for people to buy these things when they come from yale or whatever. and i'm just wondering if you could talk a little more about that black market and how things can be sold so easily when they're so -- while they have been stolen. do you not have to say what the precedent is and where they got them? obviously, the answer is no. >> it's interesting as i began to research this issue ask how maps are bought and sold.

people asked me, is there a black market where they're selling these things, and then it's ending up in, you know, this private collection in japan or something. it's actually unlike art theft thefts of rare maps and books can be done quite out in the open because there are multiple copies of these things. smiley would go primarily from three dealers he worked with for a number of years and he would say that he was selling off maps that were in the collection of an old boston dealer -- old boston collector and he was going to be coming to them with very rare material over the next few months. those dealers bought that story, they believed him and they bought these maps and then sold them on to other collectors and they put them on their wall in fool display. there's definitely some criticism of whether those dealers should have asked more questions and if they should have accepted smiley's story at

face value. at the same time it's difficult in some cases to prove the provenance of these maps. once you go back a couple of decades, it can be sometimes hard. even if you know it was sold at action in the 1990s then you can ask, where was it sold before that going back two or three deaths is hard. i think there has been a lot more effort on the part of dealers to look at provenance and not just take the dealer's word at face value but i think that is one of the -- one of the issues inherent in the field that sort of aids and abets the thieves. >> there's no shame either. it's wanting to acquire it overcomes the possibility that perhaps, it was taken from yale library. it just astounding me, but, i mean -- >> i certainly think that's the

case. there's this willful ignorance that you don't ask too many questions because you don't want to know the answers to them. i don't think that represents everyone in the field but certainly some of that does go on. >> i just wanted to answer the question the gentleman raised a few moments ago about the location. it was torn down by daniel carroll, relation to charles carroll, carrollton so far, the mansion was located at the intersection of what is now new jersey avenue and independence avenue, basically in the front yard of the capitol building. and fontnue knew what land was his to play with and what was still private land. he knew that was still his lands, carroll ignored him. to prove his point, he went in in the dead of night and tore that building down just to prove it was his. that's what helped to contribute. >> thank you so much for telling that story.

just goes to show you the story behind these maps, you know, politics was alive and well in d.c. even before the city of d.c. was actually created here. >> i'm wondering how much is water color sell for? is there possibly a further for him in that field? >> i don't know. that art show was part of a grant that the island cultural commission gave to different artists to display their work. i think he -- maybe he he made like $2,000 or something. you know, certainly i don't know if it has occurred to him that he could sell e. forbes smiley originals and profit just from the name alone. to my knowledge, he hasn't gone and actually sold any of his work. >> thanks for the engaging talk. two quick questions. if there were a movie on the ed

smiley story, who do you see playing mr. smiley, since you know him that well? secondly sitting with the archivalists of the united states sitting right in front of you, if you could procure any map in any way without punishment in the world, what would that be? >> got to be careful what i say here. in terms of the movie, you know, i sort of see william h. macy as the smiley character. that immediately springs to mind. maybe brad pitt as the investigative reporter telling his story. >> casting is being done as you speak. >> in terms of the map that i would take, if i -- if i could, it would probably be a map from yale that i uncovered during my research. it was by this gentleman by the name of john seller and there's

only three copies in the world and it was a very early map of new england and it shows the -- the area of new england around the time of king phillips' war. it's this very interesting map where there are all these pictures of sort of colonists and native americans fipting each other and this glimpse in time to this area. of course, being from new england, it's really particularly interesting to me. and the interesting thing about that map is that it's actually been stolen twice from yale. it was stolen back in the '70s and was by another map thief who sold it and it was recovered. and then smiley came in and stole it again. and actually put a copy on his website. he actually colored the map, which was particularly devastating given the fact there's only three of these things. he actually colored it. he put it on his website. in his description of the map said there was a version at yale that was uncolored but that this was a different version.

which was just really you know the height of huberus that he would do such a thing. >> thank you. >> thank you all so much. great questions. appreciate you coming. i'm happy to sign any books you may have. you've been watching american history tv on c-span3. we to want hear from you. follow us on twitter twitter @cspanhistory. connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/cspanhistory where you can leave comments. check out upcoming programs on our website, c-span.org/history. every sunday at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. eastern, a look at american artifacts. travel with c-span to historic sites, museums and archives to learn what artifacts reveal

about american history. american artifacts every sunday at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. eastern here on american history tv on c-span3. and the 114th congress gavels in on tuesday at noon eastern. we'll see the swearing-in of members and the election of the house speaker. watch the house live on c-span and the senate live on c-span2. and with the new congress you'll have the best access on the c-span networks with the most extensive coverage anywhere. track the gop as it leads on capitol hill and have your say as events unfold on tv, radio and the web. for 17 years, the unabomber mailed homemade bombs that targets airliners, universities and killing 23 and injuries 24 others. a panel of former fbi agents and co-author of the book "unabomber" talked about the investigation and explained how the fbi changed its methods to

capture suspect ted kaczynski. this talk was sponsored by the museum. it's about an hour. good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. my name is craig floyd. i'm the chairman and ceo of national officers memorial fund. i want to welcome you all here today to the museum's witness to history, investigating the unabomber, the tenth in our series of witness events. generously sponsored by our friends from target, who join us here in the front row, as well as in partnership today with the museum, our host. i'll turn things over to john maynard in just a moment from the museum for moderation of today's event. i want to thank you all for

coming. today is a glorious day outside. the fact you would want to spend an hour or two here with us that's extra special. and i thank you for taking the time to join us. i think you're in for just a fascinating discussion here in just a moment. i[i also want to thank our friends from c-span who tend to cover many of these witness to history events. they're with us once again today. they'll be sharing this on air over the coming weeks. for those of you who may not be familiar with the national law enforcement officers memorial fund, our organization, a little background. we remember formed in 1984 by congressman mary biage a former new york city police officer and police legend. he is actually the author of the legislation to establish the national law enforcement memorial, our first major initiative. we dedicated that memorial in 1991. it sits just a couple of blocks from here and-n judiciary scare the 400 block of e street

northwest washington. on the walls of that memorial are the names of 20,267 federal state, local tribal and territorial law enforcement professionals who have given their lives in the line of duty. our latest initiative is to establish a national law enforcement museum. we've been working on this now since 2000 when congress authorized our organization to build the first ever national law enforcement museum. we've been working on it ever since. that museum will open in just a few years from now in a place again, called judiciary square, right across the street from the national memorial. but in many ways our museum already exists. we've collected 17,000 artifacts. fascinating artifacts of law enforcement history that will help us tell that story. and we've also produced a number of educational and public programming events of which witness to history is part of

that. this afternoon is certainly a good example. we bring together law enforcement professionals, experts, who were involved in some of the most famous criminal cases in american history. and today we bring together a group of experts who work so diligently and for so long on the unabomber investigation. one of the longest manhunts in american law enforcement history. and i want to just thank once again our friends from target for sponsoring today's event and all of our witness to history events. i now would like to turn our program over to john maynard, who will moderate today's program. john, please join us here. >> thank you craig. good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. and those of you watching on c-span. welcome to the museum's night studio and welcome to the museum, the unabomber's cabin.

for nearly two decades beginning in 1978 an i will loses ive criminal sent homemade bombs that targeted universities, airlines and computer stores, killing three people and injuring 23 others. the fbi branded him the unabomber and despite an investigation that spanned eight states and involved about 500 agents the fbi was flummoxed. 35,000-word manifesto written by the unabomber whose real name was ted kaczynski, proved a turning event and brought an end of reign. before the manifesto the investigation was hampered by bureaucracy, institutional pride, professional jealousies and some egos. today we talk to three fbi agents to bring fi naturalty to the case by cutting through the cumbersome procedures of the investigation and breaking free of bureaucratic restraint. their new book "unabomber: how the fbi broke its own rules to

capture ted kaczynski" details the investigation into the unabomber how these three worked in the agency. jim freeman to my left was the special agent in charge of the multiagency unabomb investigation. he began his career as a special agent with the fbi in 1964 with assignments in oklahoma city, los angeles and miami. and in 1993 assigned a special agent in charge of the san francisco division. following the unabomber investigation he returned from the fbi in 1996, retired from the fbi in 1996, and he joined charles schwab. just recently retired as senior vp of global security. max knoll ultimately became special agent supervisor of expand task force and ultimately concentrating on monday upon. he served as an fbi agent for 30 years and worked on numerous high-profile investigations

including the weather underground, the pattie hearst kidnapping and the disappearance of jimmy hoffa. he rye tireetired from the fbi in 1999. terry turchie between 1994 and 1998 on an operational level. following the unabomber case he became inspector and led the task force in the hunt for olympic bomber eric rudolph. in 1999 he was named deputy assistant in the new counterterrorism division of the fbi and traveled extensively overseas to investigate international terrorism in the middle east and in the former soviet union. i should also note in the book, jim writes that terry is the only fbi agent he knows who got into a fight with a russian spy. when he wrestled a kgb agent to the ground on a brooklyn subway platform in 1986. so, please welcome our panel. if you're treating today's conversation, please use the

museum's handle which is @museum and national law enforcement handle which is @nleomf. jim, let's start with you. all three of you are listed as co-authors but the book is told from your perspective. tell us how the book came together and what was your main objective for the book. >> well thank you for your kind comments, introducing the three of us. i want to point out we represent dozens of fbi agents and atf agents and officers of the u.s. postal inspection service, who all made a made -- worked together for the task force the last three years. you might imagine how many individuals and how much work went into such a project. the book came about in a very similar way to how the investigation came about those last two years. when i had volunteered -- i was the only volunteer ever for the unabomb task force after 16

years of inability to find him. i volunteered because i was in san francisco, and that's where the task force had been set up. so i wanted to take a shot at catching ted kaczynski. the investigation required that i look for a team that would bring together a strategic plan. and terry was where i went. he was in the san francisco office. he was a supervisor of national intelligence matters in the palo alto agency. i decided i wanted a different i wanted to shake it up. after 16 years what else could i do but shake it up? in the fbi there's that time -- a wall between the national intelligence service and criminal investigative service for various reasons. i wanted to take advantage of the synergy of that in preparing

a strategic plan and executing it. the book came together the same way. it was a matter of the three of us represent a unique perspective in the way the case was managed. we wrote it in that manner. we didn't want to write a book that stood on its own as our own creation. we wanted to just do a definitive description of the investigation, which was very complex and had over the years had not been appropriately described in any of the books that had been written about the unabomb case or mostly centered on ted kaczynski. can he wrote the book to center on the investigation. >> terry and max, i will ask you both, tell us about your reaction when you were asked to join this newly formed task force. >> i was stunned. i was very happy in palo alto. any of you familiar with california know that's a nice place to be. we had an office across from

stanford. i was settled for the rest of my career, at least i thought until jim had this bizarre idea that he was going to solve the un unabomb. i got a call one day. he said, i have a couple questions to ask you. how do you feel about coming up to the city and taking over the unabomb task force? jim is putting together a different structure and is interested in you doing that. my response was to laugh and say, that's funny, but thanks for the offer, but no thanks. so there was a pause. he said, i'm actually not joking. and then i didn't know what to say. everybody tried to stay away from the corridor in the san francisco office where they had signs that said unabomb. no one wanted to go near there. i said, i think i would need a lot of time to close up everything down here and get up there. and he said, how much time do you need?

i said proibbably i need a month. he said, how about a couple of hour hours? nothing went right until i met jim in the office and realized he was very very serious and maybe we had a chance to do things differently. >> max, tell us about your enrollment? >> i was already on the task force. i saw jim's taking over the task force and reconfiguring it and bringing terry in as an opportunity to leave the task force and go back to what i did best. and i submitted a memorandum to jim to that effect saying, please, let me go back and do what i was doing before, which was organized crime and asian organized crime work. unfortunately, terry and jim had other ideas. terry convinced me that i needed to stay. he went in and saw jim. jim said, i know he wants off but he's not going. so i stayed.

>> jim, for maybe some of our younger visitors, give us a brief overview of the unabomber. what were some of his targets and some of his motives as we later learned? that's what made it difficult to identify a suspect was because the unabomber became very clear early on had to be a lone wolf. he was not talking to anyone, or else something would have come to light in less than 16 17 years. his early targets were against university professors, graduate students, bombs sent through the mail to specific professors as well as bombs placed in the corridor outside of computer room university of utah. that was repeated in other locations as well university of california at berkeley. then there was -- early on, i think his third bombing was against american airlines

flight, a mailed bomb was placed on there with a rigged altimeter that was a barometer was used and rigged to be an altimeter to explode at a certain altitude. it did detonate. it did ignite a fire but it didn't explode. it saved the lives of all the people on that plane. even so, the pilot recognized that smoke was coming into the cabin and he did an emergency landing saving people's lives. airline and universities were the early targets. so the fbi has a propensity for acronyms. it became unabomb and it was a moniker that stuck. >> i will ask you again, jim, for both max and terry when did you realize that this was a case you would have to adjust the normal protocol and the subtitle of the week is how the fbi broke its own rules.

go through some of those rules. >> well we actually had a meeting in jim's office. one of the first things it he wanted was a strategy. he wasn't very clear on exactly what he wanted but he knew he wanted it to be out of the box and really something we hadn't tried before. really made the impression that we want to solve this case. we're not just doing this for some process or to kind of baby-sit here until someone else comes along. we're all here in san francisco and we're going to stay here until we do this. i went away. i talked to max. max and i had a number of meetings over the next week and met with just about everybody that was on the task force. and talked to them about what they thought our lacking -- some of our failings were as far as what we had overlooked before and how we might do this in a different way. it became apparent that we needed a different organization and structure and then we needed things that come with that. so at the end of a week i gave jim a paper.

it said, here is what i think we should do based upon everybody i talked to and their input. number one we had kind of a morale issue. a lot of people did want to get off the task force. they had worked hard. they had been there a long time. they were tired. to try to deal with that, it was kind of simple. i recommended to jim that we have people choose a partner. i know when you watch tv everybody works with a partner. that's not necessarily the way it is in real life. so we had a meeting. we told everybody whether it's an fbi and atf agent or postal inspector and atf agent, have people get together, choose a partner. and you will be with this person for a long long time. that way when you have a down day, probably your partner will have an up day. you guys will be more creative working together like this. that was the biggest thing we did to make a difference in the internal mechanism of how things would operate. then all the more complicated things made several suggestions.

we needed to have a media component built into the strategy to use the media to get to the public. eventually, we would have things and a specific message to tell the public. we needed a significant analytical capability that was integrated into the investigation that up until that time we just didn't have. third, we needed to deal with the issue of profiling. again, you probably watched shows like "criminal minds" and that type of thing. it doesn't happen in real life like on tv or in a couple of hour movie. so we needed to look differently there. we chose different people to work with us on the profiling. we will get into that in a while. those are the essence of what i passed along to jim that was really the sum total of what many of the agents and analysts we had had told me during the interviews. >> you mentioned the media. it's a natural question for me to ask, but as we were discussing earlier, the fbi does play it close to the vest when

it comes to media. what was the advantage in this case for you to shift the strategy to be more media friendly? >> we knew right away that we needed to have a consistent message to take to the public. we also had to have a consistent spokesperson. so we decided to recommend to jim that he be our spokesperson. not fbi headquarters, not all the others that had a hand in it but jim because jim would always be sitting with us and would have the latest information that we were going to be getting coming from the reinvestigations that max was very much involved in. we wanted to give a consistent message to the public. over time what we ended up doing, long before even we got the manifesto in 1995 was we started go being to the public with one message, and that was when you think about the unabomber, think about chicago between 1978 and 1980 then think about salt lake city,

because between 1980 and about 1982 or '83, that seemed to be the focus of where there was a connection for the unabomber. and then after that time frame, from 1985 and on, think of the san francisco bay area. put those three things together and then eventually -- i'm going to defer to max to talk about the composite. that became a significant part of the message. chicago, salt lake and the san francisco bay area and the composite. by 1995 we got the manifesto. when all those pieces came together, we went back out to the public through jim with the message. we really, i think got what we were looking for. i will go back to that composite. it's a fascinating story of the investigation as well. >> i will jump in before you address that. the compose it is the iconic picture of the man in the hooded sweatshirt, the aviator sunglasses. >> early on in the investigation, you do a lot of

monotonous tasks. reviewing the file we didn't have a lot of leads. reviewing file and trying to determine if there were things that hadn't been done in the past. i was reviewing the file with regard to utah related bombings. there was a bombing in 1987 at a computer company in salt lake city. it was the only time the individual known as the unabomber was ever seen. he was seen by an employee very close. she was within three feet of him, looking at him out the window as he placed a bomb beside her left front tire of her car. she was interviewed afterwards by a police artist, an artist they brought in to do a composite. she did the composite. when i reviewed the file, it was something unusual. there were five different composites by that same artist in that same witness on five different days. it was just unusual for me to see that. why? so i found this particular

witness, tammy and asked her why. tammy said, he wasn't capturing what i was trying to tell him. he kept getting the shape of the face wrong and some other things. she was very adamant. i said tammy how can you be so adamant about that? she said well, i just reviewed my notes. and i said what notes? there's no notes in the file from you. she said, well, i woman dered why they never came back and got notes from me. they instructed me to write down everything and nobody every came back. she brought me her notes. she was very consistent with what she said. jim had just finished a case supervising as the sac a kidnapping case in san francisco, the kidnapping of a young woman. she was snatched out of her bedroom at a slumber party taken, raped and killed. they used a forensic artist to do the artist concept of the

person who killed -- kidnap and killed her. it eventually led to the identification of a guy named richard alan davis. richard alan davis, if you took his mugshot and you put the drawing side by side they were exact. i'm not being negative. but most police artists' concepts have been you talk to a witness and you give them a book full of noses and a book full of types of faces and ears and they plug all the things to the. i refer to those as mr. potato head drawings. they captured the features of a person but not really the person. jeanie was an artist first. she was a tremendous artist. she could interview a person and draw a real life like picture of who the person was describing. so jim said, find her. get jeanie and see if we can do this. we did. we took her to utah.

tammy interviewed with jeanie for something like four hours to get a composite. everyone thinks the life of an fbi agent is very interesting and they do exciting things. during that four-hour period of time, i got the privilege of playing with tammy's 3-year-old on the living room floor and watching "lion king" on tv. the artist concept that resulted was a great artist concept. if you have the opportunity to look at the two different concepts, it's just remarkable after seven years what tammy could describe and what jeanie could draw and if you take ted kaczynski's university of california official photograph and put it beside it you see exactly the jaw line and the jutting chin that she described. that was a unique thing. we did it in black and white. we didn't want people focusing on yellow hair. because we were afraid he might be wearing a wig and so forth.

what we found out later he was. he was wearing a yellow wig and he was supporting that yellow wig by planting yellow hairs in bombing to throw us off track when he didn't have blonde hair. there were all kinds of interesting things throughout the case like that. >> terry you mentioned the manifesto. i want to get to that. give us a sense in the final years of the pressure you felt to catch this guy. i was reminded reading the book, 1993 was the oklahoma city bombing. first question perhaps to the whitehouse or the high levels was that the unabomber. talk about just the pressures that you felt. >> one of the saddest things that happens is when you were assembled and you think you have a great plan and someone else gets killed. that happened in 1995. it happened to us in 1994. while all of this was coming together and while we thought we were making a difference. you can see the moral of people

just kind of start to dip. you go home every night, max and i commuted. we commuted from the east bay over to san francisco. while everybody else chose their partner, we kind of became partners. we kept each other's moral up. on those moments and those days, of course, people back here, because it's their job, the phones are ringing off the hook media has its own spin. the families and the victims of the families are on the phone or they want to talk to you. you do. we went and sat down with people. what do you say? i remember the epsteins. dr. charles epstein was a unabomb victim in 1993. i remember john conway the first case agent for unabomb, took me out to meet the epsteins. we sat in the living room. the apprehension of going in there. they were one of the first families i met when i started doing this. we sat down and it was not at

all what i expected. i think from that point on, this is what really got us through the days. they sat there and they were more worried about me and whether i or not i was getting enough sleep than they were about what had happened to him. as max and i and jim dealt with the families and the victims over the years, they were all that way. in the darkest days when you would expect that they will be upset, they would be sitting down with you and saying, you got to make sure you stay focused and stay rested and know that we have confidence in you. it's hard to convey how you feel. but i will tell you i know how i think everybody feels today that's looking at the world and is responsible for being on the front front lines of counterterrorism. you worry and work long hours and it's difficult to put it down. we used to say -- i know they still say that -- if you are a

baseball player and you bat bat .500 you are about the greatest in the world. the fbi and the cia, we cannot afford to bat .500 and we can't afford to bat .900. because one out of 100 getting through can be not just a tragedy but perhaps going forward could literally affect the sovereignty of our country. that's how serious the problem of terrorism became. that's how we took this when we spent the days together. >> june of 1995 the unabomber sent out his manifesto. it did not just go out to the "new york times" and "washington post" but also "scientific american" and "penthouse." i did not know that. tell us your reactions when you learned about the manifesto. did you realize this was going to be a major break, or was this going to lead to more complications? >> for me it was a major break. back up a little bit. i was concerned about the unabomber, the difficulty to catch any criminal that's not

communicating, it makes it very difficult. once they start communicating you have opportunity for lead material to develop. the unabomber had been quiet for almost seven years up until he started bombing again in 1993. and then in '94 it continued. he started writing letters. i felt, that's good. he wrote a letter to the "new york times," an editor to begin with. and then leading up to suddenly he comes forward, gushing 35000 word manifesto. i thought, alleluia this is the right direction. he also attached to that an extortion demand, a threat to the newspapers. he preceded -- followed that, actually, very closely with i'm going to blow up -- he was claiming to have a terrorist group behind him which we didn't believe. we're going to blow up an airliner if you don't public the manifesto. then a few days later he came

with another letter, i was just kidding about that. which we didn't think was funny. when that manifesto came, of course, we read it intensely and looking for any clues. we had experts that we sent copies to people that were lynn quiz tick experts. i would like you to address how we brought that a conclusion to where we made use of the manifesto to bring the public attention to it. >> sure. when we got the manifesto in all 35,000 words there were a number of people on the task force who thought it would be a great project to go back to and try to source what time did this person -- what time frame was this person educated in who wrote this? what could we tell about phrasing? what could we tell about the four books that were referenced in the manifesto?

all of these things. that took us on this journey to a number of college campuses. i will take you back to 1985. one of the things that happened in 1985 in november was that a professor in michigan, university of michigan got a bomb in the mail. his name was mcconnell -- professor mcconnell. it was a bomb that was actually built into a three-ring binder. there was a letter with it. this is my thesis statement on the history of science. i would like you to take a look at this and maybe tell me what you think. sponsor my thesis. of course, when professor mcconnell and his assistant opened up the binder, it was actually a bomb that went off. we were really fascinated in 1994 a couple of postal inspectors were fascinated by and proposed a project to focus in on this history of science what does it mean. we had done a lot of work on that. gone to a lot of university campuses and talked to a lot