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High­light­ing an aspect of “the Unabomber” case that has attracted com­par­a­tively lit­tle atten­tion, this pro­gram doc­u­ments con­victed Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in an exper­i­ment at Har­vard while an under­grad­u­ate. This exper­i­ment may very well been part of the intel­li­gence community’s psy­cho­log­i­cal exper­i­men­ta­tion and mind con­trol programs.

1. Shortly before the broad­cast was recorded, Kaczyn­ski lost an appeal to have his guilty plea over­turned. “A fed­eral appeals court refused again yes­ter­day to let Theodore Kaczyn­ski with­draw his guilty plea and face a death-penalty trial for the Unabomber mur­ders. A dis­sent­ing judge said the rul­ing treats Kaczyn­ski as ‘less than human.’ The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Fran­cisco denied a rehear­ing of its 2-to-1 rul­ing last Feb­ru­ary that found that Kaczyn­ski pleaded guilty vol­un­tar­ily to save his life. . .Before his plea in a Sacra­mento fed­eral court, Kaczyn­ski had objected to his court-appointed lawyers’ plans to por­tray him to the jury as men­tally ill.” (“U.S. Appeals Court Rules Kaczynski’s Guilty Plea Stands” by Bob Egelko; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 8/18/2001; p. A7.)

2. As we shall see, Kaczynski’s lawyers may have been right. Fur­ther­more, his aber­rant men­tal state may have resulted (in part at least) from his par­tic­i­pa­tion in an exper­i­ment as a pre­co­cious, 16-year-old under­grad­u­ate at Har­vard. “In the fall of 1958, Theodore Kaczyn­ski, a bril­liant but vul­ner­a­ble boy of six­teen, entered Har­vard Col­lege. There he encoun­tered a pre­vail­ing intel­lec­tual atmos­phere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into sub­ject­ing him­self to a series of pur­posely bru­tal­iz­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal experiments—experiments that may have con­firmed his still-forming belief in the evil of sci­ence. Was the Unabomber born at Har­vard?” (“Har­vard and the mak­ing of the Unabomber” by Alston Chase; The Atlantic Monthly; June/2000; p. 1; accessed at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/06/chase.htm .)

3. Devel­op­ing the story of this appar­ently bru­tal­iz­ing exper­i­ment, the broad­cast sets forth Har­vard psy­chol­o­gist Henry A. Murray’s super­vi­sion of the exper­i­ment in which Kaczyn­ski par­tic­i­pated. “No. 7 Divin­ity Avenue is a mod­ern multi-story aca­d­e­mic build­ing today, hous­ing the university’s Depart­ment of Mol­e­c­u­lar and Cel­lu­lar Biol­ogy. In 1959, a com­fort­able old house stood on the site. Known as the Annex, it served as a lab­o­ra­tory in which staff mem­bers of the Depart­ment of Social Rela­tions con­ducted research on human sub­jects. There, from the fall of 1959, through the spring of 1962, Har­vard psy­chol­o­gists, led by Henry A. Mur­ray, con­ducted a dis­turb­ing and what would now be seen as eth­i­cally inde­fen­si­ble exper­i­ment on twenty-two under­grad­u­ates. To pre­serve the anonymity of these stu­dent guinea pigs, exper­i­menters referred to indi­vid­u­als by code name only. One of these stu­dents, whom they dubbed ‘Law­ful,’ was Theodore John Kaczyn­ski, who would one day be known as the Unabomber, and who would later mail or deliver six­teen pack­age bombs to sci­en­tists, aca­d­e­mi­cians, and oth­ers over sev­en­teen years, killing three peo­ple and injur­ing twenty-three.” (Ibid.; p. 2.)

4. Reflect­ing the per­spec­tive that most peo­ple have of Kaczyn­ski, the pro­gram fur­ther under­scores the pos­si­bil­ity that Kaczynski’s behav­ior may have been strongly influ­enced by the exper­i­ment. “Most of us believe we already know Ted Kaczyn­ski. Accord­ing to the con­ven­tional wis­dom, Kaczyn­ski, a bril­liant for­mer pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics turned Mon­tana her­mit and mail bomber, is, sim­ply, men­tally ill. He is a para­noid schiz­o­phrenic, and there is noth­ing more about him to inter­est us. But the con­ven­tional wis­dom is mis­taken. I came to dis­cover that Kaczyn­ski is nei­ther the extreme loner he has been made out to be nor in any clin­i­cal sense men­tally ill. He is an intel­lec­tual and a con­victed mur­derer, and to under­stand the con­nec­tions between these two facts we must revisit his time at Har­vard.” (Ibid.; p. 3.)

5. Appar­ently, Har­vard has been less than can­did about all of the data con­cern­ing the exper­i­ment in which Kaczyn­ski par­tic­i­pated. “Kaczyn­ski told me that the Henry A. Mur­ray Research Cen­ter of the Rad­cliffe Insti­tute for Advanced Study, although it released some raw data about him to his attor­neys, had refused to share infor­ma­tion about the Mur­ray team’s analy­sis of that data. Kaczyn­ski hinted darkly that the Mur­ray Cen­ter seemed to feel it had some­thing to hide. One of his defense inves­ti­ga­tors, he said, reported that the cen­ter had told par­tic­i­pat­ing psy­chol­o­gists not to talk with his defense team.” (Idem.)

6. Alton Chase was only slightly more suc­cess­ful than Kaczyn­ski at obtain­ing infor­ma­tion about the exper­i­ment. As the infor­ma­tion about the exper­i­ment was clar­i­fied, the abu­sive nature of the exper­i­ment began to become clear. “Sev­eral of the research assis­tants I inter­viewed couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk much about the study. Nor could the Mur­ray Cen­ter be entirely forth­com­ing. After con­sid­er­ing my appli­ca­tion, its research com­mit­tee approved my request to view the records of this exper­i­ment, the so-called data set, which referred to sub­jects by code names only. But because Kaczynski’s alias was by then known to some jour­nal­ists, I was not per­mit­ted to view his records. Through research at the Mur­ray Cen­ter and in the Har­vard archives I found that, among its other pur­poses, Henry Murray’s exper­i­ment was intended to mea­sure how peo­ple react under stress. Mur­ray sub­jected his unwit­ting stu­dents, includ­ing Kaczyn­ski, to inten­sive interrogation—what Mur­ray him­self called ‘vehe­ment, sweep­ing, and per­son­ally abu­sive’ attacks, assault­ing his sub­jects’ egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.” (Ibid.; pp. 3–4.)

7. Detail­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file of Kaczyn­ski devel­oped by prison psy­chi­atric offi­cials, the pro­gram doc­u­ments the con­ver­gence of two belief sys­tems that pre­cip­i­tated Kaczynski’s attacks. “My quest was specific—to deter­mine what effects, if any, the exper­i­ment may have had on Kaczyn­ski. This was a sub­set of a larger ques­tion: What effects had Har­vard had on Kaczyn­ski? In 1998, as he faced trial for mur­der, Kaczyn­ski was exam­ined by Sally John­son, a foren­sic psy­chi­a­trist with the U.S. Bureau of Pris­ons, at the order of a court. In her eval­u­a­tion John­son wrote that Kaczyn­ski ‘has inter­twined his two belief sys­tems, that soci­ety is bad and he should rebel against it, and his intense anger at his fam­ily for his per­ceived injus­tices.’ The Unabomber was cre­ated when these two belief sys­tems con­verged. And it was at Har­vard, John­son sug­gested, that they first sur­faced and met. She wrote: ‘Dur­ing his col­lege years he had fan­tasies of liv­ing a prim­i­tive life and fan­ta­sized him­self as ‘an agi­ta­tor, rous­ing mobs to fren­zies of rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence.’ He claims that dur­ing that time he started to think about break­ing away from nor­mal soci­ety.’” (Ibid.; p. 4.)

8. Ask­ing a piv­otal ques­tion, the pro­gram sets forth the cen­tral point of inquiry—did the Mur­ray exper­i­ment lead to Kaczynski’s behav­ior. “It was at Har­vard that Kaczyn­ski first encoun­tered the ideas about the evils of soci­ety that would pro­vide a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for, and a focus to, an anger he had felt since junior high school. It was at Har­vard that he began to develop these ideas into his anti-technology ide­ol­ogy of rev­o­lu­tion. It was at Har­vard that Kaczyn­ski began to have fan­tasies of revenge, began to dream of escap­ing into wilder­ness. And it was at Har­vard, as far as can be deter­mined, that he fixed on dual­is­tic ideas of good and evil, and on a math­e­mat­i­cal cog­ni­tive style that led him to think he could find absolute truth through the appli­ca­tion of his own rea­son. Was the Unabomber—‘the most intel­lec­tual ser­ial killer the nation has ever pro­duced,’ as one crim­i­nol­o­gist has called him-born at Har­vard?” (Idem.)

9. Ini­tially, the psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file of Kaczyn­ski is not what one would have expected, given what ulti­mately came to pass. “The health-services doc­tor who inter­viewed Kaczyn­ski as part of the med­ical exam­i­na­tion Har­vard required for all fresh­men observed: ‘Good impres­sion cre­ated. Attrac­tive, mature for age, relaxed. . . . Talks eas­ily, flu­ently and pleas­antly. . . . likes peo­ple and gets on well with them. May have many acquain­tances but makes his friends care­fully. Prefers to be by him­self part of the time at least. May be slightly shy . . . . Essen­tially a prac­ti­cal and real­is­tic plan­ner and an effi­cient worker. . . . Exceed­ingly sta­ble, well inte­grated and feels secure within him­self. Usu­ally very adapt­able. May have many achieve­ments and sat­is­fac­tions.’ [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s] The doc­tor fur­ther described Kaczyn­ski thus: ‘Pleas­ant young man who is below usual col­lege entrance age. Appar­ently a good math­e­mati­cian but seems to be gifted in this direc­tion only. Plans not crys­tal­lized yet but this is to be expected at his age. Is slightly shy and retir­ing but not to any abnor­mal extent. Should be [a] steady worker.’” (Ibid.; p. 12.)

10. In assess­ing the Kaczyn­ski story and the exper­i­ment to which he was sub­jected, it is inter­est­ing (and pos­si­bly sig­nif­i­cant) to note the pro­fes­sional back­ground of the experimenter–Henry A. Mur­ray. “He [Mur­ray] lent his tal­ents to national aims dur­ing World War II. For­rest Robin­son, the author of a 1992 biog­ra­phy of Mur­ray, wrote that dur­ing this period he ‘flour­ished as a leader in the global cru­sade of good against evil’ . . . . (He had long shown inter­est, for exam­ple, in the whole sub­ject of brain­wash­ing.) Dur­ing the war Mur­ray served in the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices, the fore­run­ner of the CIA, help­ing to develop psy­cho­log­i­cal screen­ing tests for appli­cants and (accord­ing to Tim­o­thy Leary) mon­i­tor­ing mil­i­tary exper­i­ments on brain­wash­ing. In his book The Search for the ‘Manchurian can­di­date’ John Marks reported that Gen­eral ‘Wild Bill’ Dono­van, the OSS direc­tor, ‘called in Har­vard psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor Henry ‘Harry’ Mur­ray’ to devise a sys­tem for test­ing the suit­abil­ity of appli­cants to the OSS. Mur­ray and his col­leagues ‘put together an assess­ment sys­tem . . . [that] tested a recruit’s abil­ity to stand up under pres­sure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skill­fully, and to read a person’s char­ac­ter by the nature of his cloth­ing.... Murray’s sys­tem became a fix­ture in the OSS.’” (Ibid.; [Part II]; pp. 10–11.)

11. After the war, Mur­ray put his OSS-related skills to work at Har­vard. “Before the war, Mur­ray had been the direc­tor of the Har­vard Psy­cho­log­i­cal Clinic. After the war Mur­ray returned to Har­vard, where he con­tin­ued to refine tech­niques of per­son­al­ity assess­ment. In 1948, he sent a grant appli­ca­tion to the Rock­e­feller Foun­da­tion propos­ing ‘the devel­op­ment of a sys­tem of pro­ce­dures for test­ing the suit­abil­ity of offi­cer can­di­dates for the navy.’ By 1950, he had resumed stud­ies on Har­vard under­grad­u­ates that he had begun, in rudi­men­tary form, before the war, titled ‘Mul­ti­form assess­ments of Per­son­al­ity Devel­op­ment Among Gifted Col­lege Men.’ The exper­i­ment in which Kaczyn­ski par­tic­i­pated was the last and most elab­o­rate in the series. In their post­war form, these exper­i­ments focused on stress­ful dyadic rela­tions, design­ing con­fronta­tions akin to those mock inter­ro­ga­tions he had helped to orches­trate for the OSS.” (Ibid.; p. 11.)

12. Kaczyn­ski was reluc­tant to par­tic­i­pate in the exper­i­ment. “Kaczyn­ski told Mello that he was ‘pres­sured into par­tic­i­pat­ing’ in the Mur­ray exper­i­ment. His hes­i­ta­tion turned out to be sen­si­ble. Researchers gave the vol­un­teers almost no infor­ma­tion about the exper­i­ment in which they would par­tic­i­pate. . . . the test that served as the cen­ter­piece for this under­tak­ing appears remark­ably sim­i­lar to the old OSS stress test. Stu­dents would be given the third degree. But whereas the OSS appli­cants must have known that endur­ing unpleas­ant inter­ro­ga­tions could be part of their job, these stu­dents did not. The intent was to catch them by sur­prise, to deceive them, and to bru­tal­ize them.” (Ibid.; [Part three]; p. 1.)

13. The pur­pose, and con­text, of the exper­i­ments remains unclear and some­what omi­nous. “At other times, he recalled the ide­al­is­tic goal of acquir­ing knowl­edge that would lead to improv­ing human per­son­al­ity devel­op­ment. At still other times, his lan­guage seemed to sug­gest a con­tin­ued inter­est in stress­ful inter­ro­ga­tions. For exam­ple, Mur­ray explained in his ‘Notes on Dyadic Research,’ dated March 16, 1959, that an ongo­ing goal of the research, which focused heav­ily on ‘degree of anx­i­ety and dis­in­te­gra­tion,’ was to ‘design, and eval­u­ate instru­ments and pro­ce­dures for the pre­dic­tion of how each sub­ject will react in the course of a stress­ful dyadic pro­ceed­ing.’” (Ibid.; p. 5.)

14. Some have raised the ques­tion of whether the exper­i­ment may have been related to CIA mind con­trol research being con­ducted at that time. (Some of that was done at Har­vard.) In par­tic­u­lar, some have raised the ques­tion of whether some of the stu­dents may have been admin­is­tered LSD. (For more on the intel­li­gence community’s exper­i­men­ta­tion with LSD, see RFA#28—available from Spit­fire.) “Such equiv­o­ca­tion prompts one to ask, ‘Could the exper­i­ment have had a pur­pose that Mur­ray was reluc­tant to divulge?’ Was the multiform-assessments project intended, at least in part, to help the CIA deter­mine how to test, or break down, an individual’s abil­ity to with­stand inter­ro­ga­tion? The writer Alexan­der Cock­burn has asked whether the stu­dents might have been given the hal­lu­cino­genic drug LSD with­out their knowl­edge, pos­si­bly at the request of the CIA. By the late 1950’s accord­ing to some, Mur­ray had become quite inter­ested in hal­lu­cino­gens, includ­ing LSD and psilo­cy­bin. And soon after Murray’s exper­i­ments on Kaczyn­ski and his class­mates were under way, in 1960, Tim­o­thy Leary returned to Har­vard and, with Murray’s bless­ing, began his exper­i­ments with psilo­cy­bin. In his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Flash­backs (1983), Leary, who would ded­i­cate the rest of his life to pro­mot­ing hal­lu­cino­genic drugs, described Mur­ray as ‘the wiz­ard of per­son­al­ity assess­ment who, as OSS chief psy­chol­o­gist, had mon­i­tored mil­i­tary exper­i­ments on brain­wash­ing and sodium amy­tal inter­ro­ga­tion. Mur­ray expressed great inter­est in our drug-research project and offered his sup­port.’” (Idem.)

15. Fur­ther devel­op­ing the hypo­thet­i­cal CIA/LSD/mind con­trol con­nec­tion, the pro­gram sets forth more infor­ma­tion about Mur­ray and the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. “That Leary had Murray’s sup­port was con­firmed by Mar­tin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain in their book Acid Dreams: The Com­plete social His­tory of LSD (1985). ‘Leary returned to Har­vard and estab­lished a psilo­cy­bin research project with the approval of Dr. Harry Mur­ray, chair­man of the Depart­ment of Social Rela­tions. Dr. Mur­ray, who ran the Per­son­al­ity Assess­ments sec­tion of the OSS dur­ing World War II, took a keen inter­est in Leary’s work. He vol­un­teered for a psilo­cy­bin ses­sion, becom­ing one of the first of many fac­ulty and grad­u­ate stu­dents to sam­ple the mush­room pill under Leary’s guid­ance.’” (Ibid.; p. 6.)

16. After not­ing that there is no evi­dence that Kaczyn­ski ever received any LSD or other mind-altering drugs, the pro­gram goes on to empha­size that, nonethe­less, the defense/intelligence con­nec­tions of the project are appar­ent. “Although direct evi­dence of sup­port from a fed­eral defense grant is so far lack­ing, cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence exists: the strong sim­i­lar­ity between the OSS stress tests and the later exper­i­ments; Murray’s asso­ci­a­tion with the OSS; his grant pro­posal to do research for the Navy Depart­ment; and the lack of any clearly explained pur­pose for the study. Obvi­ously, the dyadic stud­ies would have had con­sid­er­able util­ity for the defense estab­lish­ment, either as a frame­work for test­ing recruits or as con­tin­u­ing work on how to improve inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques.” (Idem.)

17. A cen­tral point of dis­cus­sion con­cerns the fact that the exper­i­ment does appear to have con­tributed to Kaczynski’s emo­tional insta­bil­ity. “There is no evi­dence of imme­di­ate men­tal degra­da­tion in the project’s after­math. Emo­tional tur­moil is another mat­ter. As Sally John­son, the foren­sic psy­chi­a­trist, reported, Kaczyn­ski clearly began to expe­ri­ence emo­tional dis­tress then, and began to develop his anti-technology views.” (Ibid.; p. 7.)

18. Appar­ently, Kaczyn­ski him­self had con­cerns about the pos­si­bil­ity that he was a vic­tim of mind con­trol. “When, soon after, Kaczyn­ski began to worry about the pos­si­bil­ity of mind con­trol, he was not giv­ing vent to para­noid delu­sions. In view of Murray’s exper­i­ment, he was not only ratio­nal but right.” (Ibid.; p. 11.)

19. Pro­vid­ing back­ground to some of the appar­ent effects of Harvard’s cur­ricu­lum on under­grad­u­ates, the broad­cast relates insights of a num­ber of Har­vard alumni con­cern­ing the trau­matic philo­soph­i­cal views that many of them assim­i­lated. This may have had an effect on Kaczyn­ski as well. (Ibid.; [Part Two]; pp. 7–9.)

20. Unfor­tu­nately, Kaczyn­ski seems to have become some­thing of a role model for less respon­si­ble ele­ments of the Green move­ment. “Kaczyn­ski has attracted a large new fol­low­ing of admir­ers. Indeed, he has become an inspi­ra­tion and a sort of leader in exile for the bur­geon­ing ‘green anar­chist’ move­ment. In a let­ter to me, Kaczyn­ski made clear that he keeps in con­tact with other anar­chists, includ­ing John Zerzan, the intel­lec­tual leader of a cir­cle of anar­chists in Eugene, Ore­gon, who was among the few peo­ple to visit Kaczyn­ski while he was in jail in Sacra­mento, await­ing trial. Accord­ing to The Boston Globe, Theresa Kintz, one of Zerzan’s fel­low anar­chists, was the first writer to whom Kaczyn­ski granted an inter­view after his arrest. Writ­ing for the London-based Green Anar­chist, Kintz quoted Kaczyn­ski as say­ing, ‘For those who real­ize the need to do away with the techno-industrial sys­tem, if you work for its col­lapse, in effect, you are killing a lot of peo­ple.’” (Ibid.; [Part Four]; p. 3.)

21. Not all of Kaczynski’s admir­ers are lim­it­ing their activ­i­ties to intel­lec­tual imi­ta­tion. “The Los Ange­les Times has reported that last June, 200 of Zerzan’s com­rades rioted in Eugene, smash­ing com­put­ers, break­ing shop win­dows, throw­ing bricks at cars, and injur­ing eight police offi­cers. Accord­ing to the Seat­tle Times, fol­low­ers of Zerzan’s also arrived in force at last December’s ‘Bat­tle of Seat­tle,’ at the World Trade Orga­ni­za­tion meet­ing, where they smashed shop win­dows, flat­tened tires, and dumped garbage cans on the street.” (Idem.)

22. This type of activ­ity has met with Kaczynski’s explicit approval. “Kaczyn­ski con­tin­ues to com­ment approv­ingly on the vio­lent exploits of envi­ron­men­tal rad­i­cals. In a let­ter he wrote last year to the Den­ver tele­vi­sion reporter Rick Sallinger, he expressed his sup­port for the Earth Lib­er­a­tion Front’s arsons at the Vail ski resort—fires that destroyed more than $12 mil­lion worth of prop­erty.” (Idem.)

23. ” ‘I fully approve of [the arson],’ he wrote Sallinger, ‘and I con­grat­u­late the peo­ple who car­ried it out.’ Kaczyn­ski went on to com­mand an edi­to­r­ial in the Earth First! Jour­nal by Kintz, who wrote, ‘The Earth Lib­er­a­tion Front’s eco-sabotage of Vail con­sti­tuted a polit­i­cal act of con­science per­fectly in keep­ing with the sin­cere expres­sion of the bio­cen­tric par­a­digm many Earth First!‘ers espouse.’” (Idem.)

(Recorded on 9/9/2001.)