As a Harvard student, Kaczynski was part of an experiment backed by the Central Intelligence Agency that one author argued shaped his worldviews.
Kaczynski entered Harvard University as a 16-year-old on a scholarship, after skipping the sixth and 11th grades. It was there that he was subjected to an experiment run by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray that was backed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Murray’s study was widely reported to be part of a CIA program code-named Project MK-Ultra, inspired by the use of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea. The program sought to understand how to control subjects’ minds, sometimes using substances such as LSD, according to a“The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War,” the document says.
CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of many files related to MK-Ultra in 1973. Nevertheless, Kaczynski disclosed some of his apparent involvement in the study in correspondence from prison with the professor Alston Chase, who later wrote a book about the Unabomber.in the Atlantic magazine that Kaczynski’s experiences at Harvard — his studies, overlapping with his roughly three-year participation in Murray’s experiment — helped create the Unabomber.
“Thus did Kaczynski’s Harvard experiences shape his anger and legitimize his wrath,” wrote Chase, who died in 2022. “By the time he graduated, all the elements that would ultimately transform him into the Unabomber were in place …”While working for what was a precursor to the CIA, Murray conducted an experiment that put subjects under mock interrogations, with blinding spotlights and verbal abuse, Chase wrote, citing a report by the psychologist and his colleagues.
Though there has not been a definitive link between the study and Kaczynski’s actions, which killed three people and injured 23 others, some have suggested that the program may have exacerbated his“The Harvard experiment was stressful and stress aggravates the symptoms of schizophrenia,” the psychologist Nigel Barber told History.
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