The CIA Created the Unabomber

Ted Kaczynski’s violent reign as the Unabomber began five years before I was born and ended when I was 13. I didn’t follow the case at all, and almost everything I know about the Unabomber comes from Saturday Night Live sketches. My entire knowledge of the case could be summed up in one sentence: a mad genius who lived in a shed and looked like a hobo killed some people by mailing them bombs.

I recently came across a new bit of information that I hadn’t heard before. WNYC’s Radiolab ran a segment about a psychological study that was conducted at Harvard while Kaczynski was a student there. It was allegedly a study to monitor how individuals react to stress. The Radiolab story mentioned that many subjects described the study as the worst experience of their twenties. Kaczynski participated in the study, and it has been suggested that his experience at Harvard pushed him over the edge.

I found this extremely intriguing because Kaczynski’s time at Harvard coincided with the launch of a covert CIA research program called MK-ULTRA. The objective of MK-ULTRA was to experiment with brain function through the use of drugs, hypnosis and other methods for mind control purposes. The CIA was also trying to perfect torture and interrogation techniques. Could this Harvard “stress study” be an extension of MK-ULTRA?

The study, officially named the “Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted Men”, was spearheaded by a psychologist named Henry A. Murray. He began working at Harvard in 1927 and specialized in personality assessment tests. During World War II, he left Harvard to be part of the Office of Strategic Services, a wartime intelligence agency. The OSS would eventually become the Central Intelligence Agency. Murphy worked with recruits, designing tests to give OSS applicants including one called “Selection of Personnel for Clandestine Operations — Assessment of Men.”

After returning to Harvard, Murphy continued developing personality assessment tests and continued working closely with the OSS and eventually the CIA. The CIA funded his three-year study that Kaczynski participated in, which encompassed countless assessment tests and about 200 hours of the subjects’ time.

Professor of Philosophy and author Alston Chase has written a book about the Harvard study and its most famous subject entitled Harvard and the Unabomber: The Making of an American Terrorist.Chase has talked with Kaczynski many times as well as other subjects who were willing to talk to him. Although no one is allowed to view Kaczynski’s study file (Harvard has “permanently removed” it from their archives), his defense lawyers and several psychology experts were allowed to view select portions of the file. Psych test expert Bertram Karon found nothing remarkable about Kaczynski’s psychological profile. On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest level of psychological distress, Karon gave Kaczynski a 2. It wasn’t until after he left Harvard that Kaczynski began his psychological decline.

After speaking with other subjects, Chase concluded that the mind control and stress experiments the subjects participated in could be directly responsible for Kaczynski’s rejection of society and reign as the Unabomber. Most of the files relating to Project MK-ULTRA were destroyed before Congress brought the CIA to trial. There is a possibility that the Kaczynski study file no longer exists. Without it, it is impossible to know whether or not Kaczynski was doomed to become the Unabomber since birth, or if the government’s inhumane experiments caused him to hate society, fear technology and eventually turn to murder.