Word: ronay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...explosives-unit chief Tom Thurman and his associates will be looking for what is called "observable bomb damage" in the wreckage. Says Chris Ronay, a retired FBI agent who preceded Thurman as head of the unit: "They call us the blacksmiths of the laboratory. We don't use too much sophisticated instrumentation. We use hammers and trowels and microscopes." Members of the unit will be studying the plane's metal surfaces for tiny pitting that could have been caused by an explosion that would have melted tiny pieces of metal and sent them, and other tiny bits of debris, shooting...
...director in charge of international terrorism and a supervisor of the Pan Am 103 case. "We tend to think terrorists are invincible, that they're smart as hell, and often they're not." Just lucky. "All you need is a clock and an explosive that's powerful enough," says Ronay. On Pan Am Flight 103, the bomb was the size of a coffee cup, but it happened to be placed near the skin of the plane, where it broke through the fuselage and weakened the frame of the aircraft, causing the plane to break up. "If it had been inboard...
...team will conduct microscopic examinations of pieces of the plane's skin and infrastructure, looking for metal damage characteristic of a powerful bomb blast. "An explosion generates temperatures and velocities of detonation that are far greater than those encountered in a crash scenario due to mechanical failure," says Chris Ronay, Thurman's predecessor as chief of the FBI bomb unit. "You get torturing, feathering, pitting and tearing in metal that's entirely different from damage inflicted by a fire or a fall...
...injure 22 others, he had to be powerfully angry. Yet he must have enormous patience to experiment with explosives and triggers and not blow his fingers off. "When you see this stuff, some of these components bear markings of having been put together and taken apart repeatedly," said Chris Ronay, the FBI's top bomb expert in the 1980s. "It's not just that he's creating something carefully. He's played with it for a while. He marks things with numbers so he can put them together again right. He's leaving a little of himself at each crime...
According to former fbi bomb expert James Ronay, who worked on the case for years, the Unabomber's extraordinary attention to detail points to an obsessive personality. Says Ronay: "If the bomber were only interested in producing a bomb that worked efficiently, he could do it a lot more easily. It's more of an uncontrollable urge to fool with this thing as much as possible." It also suggests a loner: nobody could easily keep up much of a social life while building and testing such intricate contraptions. And because his first devices were relatively unsophisticated, the fbi and other...