Postal Rules Lifted as Bomb Threat Passes

Now that the Unabomber’s threat to blow up an airplane out of Los Angeles International Airport has passed, U.S. postal officials announced Wednesday that they are dropping their sweeping ban on the mailing of large packages from California.

At the same time, the Postal Service will keep in place extra security measures that were instituted for parcels last week after the bomb threat by the self-described anarchist.

“We are moving all mail out of California, but under heightened security measures,” said David Mazer, manager of corporate relations for the Postal Service in Southern California. While declining to spell out the details of security arrangements, he said, “We’re moving packages.”

As mail service begins to return to normal, federal and local airport officials say they have no immediate plans to remove tightened security measures that were in place at the airport through the Fourth of July holiday.

Meanwhile, at the conclusion of a week that included at least six communiques from the serial terrorist to newspapers, magazines and a UC Berkeley professor, officials say that the recent flurry of correspondence has given investigators cause for hope in their pursuit of the mail bomber, who has eluded them for more than 17 years while killing three people and leaving another 23 injured.

“We’ve got more information and we’re in the process of sifting through it,” FBI spokesman George Grotz said. “I think it’s obvious we are trying to sort through all of this additional information.”

Late last month, the Unabomber began sending letters to a number of publications--at first promising to blow up a plane out of Los Angeles but then describing the threat as a prank to call attention to his unorthodox views of modern society.

If a mainstream paper were willing to publish a lengthy manifesto titled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which calls for an end to high-tech advances, the bomber said he would agree to cease attacks against people. Most recently, he has written to a Berkeley psychology professor who once commented on the motives of the Unabomber in a newspaper article.

The new round of letters has been of great help to federal investigators, said Don Davis, assistant inspector in charge of the Postal Inspection Service in San Francisco.

Now, Davis said, officials have the Unabomber’s stated motive. Early on, he noted, the serial killer seemed to target universities and computer stores, then computer scientists and geneticists. Then an advertising executive was the victim of a bombing last year.

“It’s not until he started writing . . . that he’s telling us his motive,” Davis said. “Once you know the driving force you can build the whole package,” tying together various isolated pieces.

The standard procedure in a mail bombing investigation is to “try to identify the components and trace them back, find the origin,” Davis said, explaining recent interviews with owners and managers of Northern California scrap yards. “The problem with this guy is he hasn’t given us much to trace back. He doesn’t buy much you can trace.”

The mail procedures put in place because of the latest airport threat have stopped or slowed the delivery of several thousand of the 400,000 parcels a day handled in Southern California, said the Postal Service’s Mazer.

Because of the restrictions, post offices turned away all sizable packages from individuals except those that were sent fourth class, which are usually moved by truck or train.

Mail from large commercial shippers continued to be accepted.

Now the restrictions on non-commercial customers will be lifted. “We’re accepting all mail,” Mazer said. “There’s no change in security. We’re still analyzing the mail, but now we are accepting priority mail and express mail from individuals.”

On Wednesday, however, some customers at postal windows in Downtown Los Angeles were turned away, including one woman who said a clerk refused to send two packages to Beverly Hills. The woman said she was told no one else would take her packages either.

When informed of the incident, Mazer said: “We just announced this development this morning. That particular post office apparently didn’t get the word. They should have accepted the packages.”

There were signs Wednesday that the public had not gotten the message either.

“People still don’t know about it,” said Joseph Mina, manager of the Mailboxes Etc. store in Tarzana, which can route parcels through either the U.S. Postal Service or United Parcel Service. “When they stopped accepting the mail, it put a damper on us at first. But then people shifted to the United Parcel Service because they were accepting all parcels if we inspected them.”

Security measures remained in place at Los Angeles International Airport and elsewhere in the state, with no prospects for immediate change.

Fred O’Donnell, the Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Los Angeles, said, “The FAA’s position remains exactly as it has been.”

The Unabomber threat was only one--but by far the most publicized--of an increasing number of threats against airliners and facilities at Los Angeles International Airport, records show. The airport recorded 47 bomb and sabotage threats last year, double the number received in 1993. In the first half of 1995, the airport has logged 21 such warnings.

About half of the threats over that entire period were deemed serious enough that airliners were “swept” for explosive devices before being returned to service, according to an official who asked not to be identified. None of those threats were announced to airline passengers.

Jacobs reported from Sacramento and Glionna from Los Angeles. Times staff writers Mark Gladstone in Sacramento and Richard C. Paddock in San Francisco also contributed to this story.