FBI profiler reveals personal job experiences
A former FBI profiler turned author compared her experiences in the FBI to an all-season passport to experiencing the adventure rides at Disneyland.
“The next 20 years of my life were the best E-ticket I could possibly have,” Candace DeLong said of joining the FBI during her lecture Thursday in the Taggart Student Center Ballroom.
The lecture was the last of the year sponsored by the ASUSU Arts and Lectures office.
“I never dreamt I would have the life I have now,” Delong said.
DeLong, retired FBI agent and author of the book “Special Agent: My Life as a Woman in the FBI,” recounted her experiences on three prominent cases she worked during her career.
DeLong was head nurse in a maximum security psychiatry hospital when a friend suggested she become an FBI agent. At first she thought only men could work for the FBI, she said, but after finding out women work there she became interested and entered the FBI Academy for training five months later. She was a divorced mother with a 4-year-old child at the time, she said.
“I remember my mom telling me you can have a career or a family but you can’t have both,” she said.
DeLong worked in the Chicago and San Francisco areas during her career and talked in detail about her work tracking a Puerto Rican terrorist group, the 1982 Tylenol murders and the famed Unabomber case.
After leaving the FBI Academy she said she wanted to work on the terrorist unit.
“That’s where the action is,” DeLong said she thought at the time. “That’s where I want to be.”
In Chicago she helped bring down a terrorist group called FALN, whose goals were to make Puerto Rico independent from the United States, she said.
Until Sept. 11, 2001, she said, they were the most successful terrorist group operating in the United States, carrying out 120 bombings. The FBI succeeded in following a FALN terrorist to a safe house where they discovered 3,000 rounds of ammunition, 24 pounds of dynamite and 48 blasting caps. They replaced the explosives with fake ones so they could continue surveillance and capture more of the terrorist group. She told of a time she grabbed a fellow agent and began kissing him to avoid detection when they were tailing a terrorist.
When the suspect looked at her, “You feel like you have big red letters across your forehead saying ‘I am an FBI agent and I am following you,'” she said.
Also in Chicago in 1982, DeLong worked on a case called the Tylenol murders. Seven people were poisoned by cyanide placed in Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area, she said, and the case had far-reaching effects.
“This is the only case in my 52 years of life that actually changed the way we live our lives,” DeLong said.
Because of this case, regulations were put in place requiring tamper-proof bottles for medication and even things like lipstick, she said.
DeLong said she began training in criminal personality profiling in 1984.
DeLong also worked on the Unabomber case involving bombs that were mailed or delivered to university professors, airline executives or people in the technology industry, she said.
The name Unabomber is an acronym representing “Un” for university, “a” for airlines, plus “bomber” to represent the method of the attacks, she said.
“There are people back at headquarters whose only job is to come up with these names,” she said.
Their break in the case came when the Unabomber sent a manuscript he called his “Manifesto” to the press, saying that if they published it the bombings would stop, she said.
Working with the FBI, the papers agreed to print it in the hopes that someone would recognize distinct phrases or ideas that would lead them to identify the Unabomber, she said.
DeLong said a man named David Kazynski recognized the writings as similar to an anti-technology paper his brother Ted had asked him to help publish 25 years earlier. The FBI was able to trace Ted Kazynski’s movements to locations where bombs had been sent from or hand-delivered, she said, something they had not been able to do for even one of the thousands of suspects they had investigated.
DeLong and her partner were sent to Montana to the town where Kazynski was living in an 8-by-10 foot wooden shack to pose as National Geographic reporters and keep an eye on his movements, she said. After weeks of preparation, the FBI was able to arrest Kazynski without incident and discover bomb components and a journal where he talked about how good it felt to kill people, she said.
DeLong said she called her family that night and told them, “The beast is dead,” referring to the nickname “Unabeast” they had given to Kazynski.
It was DeLong’s involvement in the Unabomber case that allowed her to transfer back to San Francisco where she grew up, and where her son wanted to attend college, she said.
“I never thanked him for that,” she said.