Ted ‘The Unabomber’ Kaczynsky, who had late stage cancer and died on June 10, reportedly by a suicide, had been subjected to a 3-year psychological experiment at Harvard,1959-62. It is written about in Alston Chase’s Harvard and the Unabomber and summarized in Jonathan Moreno’s Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century. The Harvard experiment aimed at the psychic deconstruction of the young men, using intense humiliation, causing them to experience severe stress. It was run by Henry A. Murray.
Murray was a New York blueblood who would fall in with the upper-crusty Boston Brahmin crowd when at Harvard. But first he obtained his doctorate in biochemistry from Britain’s Cambridge University. In 1937, he became the director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, and the next year he was a consultant for the British Government, setting up their Officer Selection Board. During World War II, he left Harvard and worked as lieutenant colonel for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). James Miller, in charge of the selection of secret agents at the OSS during World War II, said that Murray’s situation test was used by the British War Officer Selection Board and then by OSS to assess potential agents.
From late 1959 to early 1962, Murray’s operation selected twenty-two Harvard undergraduates and tried to measure their responses to extreme stress. Murray said that he submitted them to “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks. His ‘expertise’ would specifically tailor the psychic deconstruction to the individual’s ego, cherished ideas, and beliefs. Afterwards, he would have the subjects repeatedly view the footage of themselves being abused. Kaczynsky was 17 years old when he began the 3-year experiment.
Later, his extensive bombing campaign and his manifesto against science and industry were on behalf of a vicious ecological terrorism, one primarily directed against the human mind. There’s evidence that his mind was severely damaged during those three years at Harvard.
Otherwise, Murray is thought to have had some supervisory role in the psychoactive drug experiments, including that of the notorious Timothy Leary, who brought a suitcase full of New Mexico ‘magic mushrooms’ to Harvard in 1960. Given Murray’s connections and his field of interest — including the monitoring of military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation — it is more than likely that he had some involvement and/or funding with the infamous MK-Ultra program.
