1998-05-05 04:00:00 PDT SACRAMENTO -- The plan had been in the works for months, and now, forced by the dangerous chance that a TV news team was going to blow their operation, they had to go. It was either now, or watch their quarry flee into the hills, perhaps forever.

A dozen heavily armed FBI agents hid behind trees upstream from the remote

Montana cabin; 50 more agents waited at the bottom of the road. It was a few minutes before noon, April 3, 1996.

Dressed like outdoorsmen on a morning's stroll, U.S. Forest Service law enforcement agent Jerry Burns, along with two FBI agents, Max Noel and Tom McDaniel, innocuously approached the cabin.

"I just yelled, 'Hello? Hello? Anyone home?' " Burns said, "and then Ted Kaczynski sticks his head out the door. He looked surprised, very surprised."

Burns, who casually knew Kaczynski, said the two men were with a mining company, and maybe Kaczynski could come show them the corners of his land, help them with a survey. Kaczynski said, "Just a minute," and started to duck back inside.

"At that moment, I pulled him out of the cabin," Burns said, "and Tom grabbed the other arm, and Max drew down on him with his weapon. Ted was struggling and he had this flight-type of reaction. I was handcuffing him and searching him. Finally, I said, 'If you act like a gentleman, we will too,' and you could feel the energy leave him."

Kaczynski's reaction to the sudden end of his terror campaign were among the new details of the hunt for the Unabomber that emerged last week in lengthy interviews with Terry Turchie, the FBI agent who ran the UNABOM investigation, and with other federal agents who were intimately involved in the chase.

It was the first time Turchie had talked at length about the case with a West Coast newspaper, and he agreed to the interview on the condition that it not be published until after Kaczynski had been sentenced.

When Kaczynski was arrested, it marked the end of the longest and most expensive manhunt in U.S. history -- it cost more than $50 million and lasted nearly 18 years. As Kaczynski slumped in Burns' arms, he seemed to know it was over.

He glanced down at his sandals and asked, "Can I go back in the cabin and get some better shoes?" The lawmen said no -- they didn't want to leave Kaczynski alone and they didn't think it was safe in there. They may have been right.

The cabin, outside Lincoln, contained a live bomb, all ready to go, along with bomb-making materials, tools, odd bits of clothing and 22,000 pages of a highly personal journal, some of it in English, some in Spanish, some in mathematical code, the detritus of the Unabomber, the tools of his life and, soon, the engine of his undoing.

Minutes after Kaczynski was handcuffed, he was taken to an abandoned hut nearby, where agents had laid out Unabomber wanted posters and news articles about the case in a ploy to try and get him to say something.

"All he said was 'That ruse (about the mining company survey) is the only thing that would have gotten me out of my cabin,' " Burns said, "and when Max asked him if he wanted to talk, he said, 'I'll talk to you about anything noncontroversial,' so they talked about gardening and hunting for the next few hours."

A hundred yards away, Turchie and agent Pat Webb, who has been chasing terrorists for more than 20 years, stepped into the entryway of Kaczynski's cabin and peered inside.

"It was dark, but there was just enough light coming in from a small window to make out things in the room," Turchie said. "I could see books and notebooks and shelves, and across the room we could see lots of bottles and oatmeal containers, and what really struck us about all this is that the containers had tape on them, with printing."

"We could read some of the writing, and it said things like 'Experiment 97' or 'potassium chlorate.' Pat Webb is probably the most experienced bomb agent we have, and he looked at that and he turned to me and said, 'Terry, this is the guy.' Pat had been looking for him for a long time, too, and when he said that, that's when I was 100 percent sure."

Twenty years ago, the percentage was more like zero. When the Unabomber started leaving bombs in the late 1970s and early '80s, he was the soul of anonymity.

Even though the investigation had a focus -- an unknown bomber who apparently did not like universities, airlines and computers -- there was no real federal task force devoted exclusively to catching him, even after the first fatal blast in 1985.

But the scope of the investigation grew with each attack, and after two fatal bombings in 1995, 125 agents from the FBI, the Postal Inspection Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were on the job.

Then the real break came.

"In June of 1995, the Unabomber sent out copies of his 35,000- word anti-technology manifesto and the FBI made sure that about 60 academics around the country got copies," Turchie said. "The FBI now knew that the only way to catch this guy was to involve the public.

"We also made a decision to try and get the manuscript published," Turchie said, "because we hoped someone would read it and recognize the writing."

Shortly after the manuscript arrived in the FBI's hands, senior Department of Justice officials sat down with top editors from the New York Times and the Washington Post and asked the two papers to publish the manifesto.

On Sept. 19, 1995, the Post, in conjunction with the Times, published the entire tract in an eight- page supplement.

And the calls and letters started coming in to the FBI.

By early 1996, Turchie said, the task force had sifted through 55,000 calls, analyzing the backgrounds of suspects and comparing them to the anarchistic and pontificating character that seemed to emerge from the manifesto.

Soon they had a hard list of about 10 suspects. "Six or seven" were in Northern California and some of them were academics. But Kaczynski was not one of them.

The case was almost stalled.

Then things changed.

In Washington, D.C., attorney Anthony Bisceglie contacted an FBI agent he knew and said he was in touch with someone who might know something about this case. No names were mentioned.

Molly Flynn, an agent in the FBI's Washington office who spent most of her time chasing interstate thefts and other routine crimes, was asked to talk to the lawyer. Eventually, he gave her a 23-page essay that, on the surface, seemed like just another meaningless tract, not unlike the hundreds of other strange writings that had streamed into the UNABOM Task Force as people across the country tried to turn in their ex-husband, their professor, their plumber or anyone else who remotely fit.

"I started reading it," Flynn said, "and all of a sudden, it was 'Bing! bing! bing! all over the place, and so I went to the manifesto and started comparing it, paragraph by paragraph, back and forth."

She took the essay to the FBI laboratory and asked them to see if it was typed on the typewriter that produced the manifesto.

No such luck. But something about the manuscript bothered her, and so she faxed it to the task force in San Francisco, where agents Joel Moss and Kathleen Puckett read it and were excited enough to get Turchie to take it home to read.

All the eerily familiar things started cropping up in the essay, Turchie said -- the Unabomber's fascination with federal funding of science, his preoccupation with genetics and behavioral modification.

"Then I got to the fourth page, and it just floored me," Turchie said. "He said the net effect of all this is that it interferes with the sphere of freedom. The sphere of freedom! I jumped off the couch and found my copy of the manifesto and found it in there -- the 'sphere of human freedom.' "

Over the next week, Bisceglie persuaded his client, David Kaczynski, to talk to the FBI, and he brought the agents letters his brother had written him.

By now, in the middle of February, the investigation was focusing full time on Kaczynski as the only suspect. One team did a major background investigation that showed Kaczynski was in all the right places at all the right times.

Two days before the end of February, "we decided to send a very small group of (agents) to Helena, Mont. We wanted them to gather enough evidence for a search-warrant affidavit, and we had a second concern about safety -- if this did turn out to be the Unabomber, we didn't want him on the road delivering another bomb."

Then the case got a completely unexpected jolt.

At the end of February, agent George Grotz, who is the FBI's spokesman in San Francisco, got a call from some producers at CBS News who said they heard the FBI had a single suspect. Then, in the last week of March, Grotz got a call from another CBS producer who knew the suspect "lived in a cabin with no heat or light, somewhere in Montana."

It was clear this news wasn't going to stay secret. The FBI says CBS cooperated by not breaking the story immediately, but the network also indicated it was under intense pressure not to be beat on the story.

On April 2, the FBI flew another 50 agents to Montana. Turchie arrived at midnight and spent the night finishing up the search-warrant affidavit. By 11:45 a.m., the operation was ready to start, with the hillside team ready to block Kaczynski if he should try to head for the hills, and an additional 50 agents at the bottom of Stemple Pass Road.

And at noon, with everyone in position, Jerry Burns called out to Ted Kaczynski.

In the end, it came down to a man who had a horrible and sickening suspicion about his brother. He became, as lead prosecutor Robert Cleary said in January, "a true American hero" by turning him in.