The Unabomber’s involvement in the CIA’s sinister MK-Ultra experiment

Just a few blocks east of Harvard sits an unassuming three-story Victorian apartment house that to the casual observer is nothing of note.  

But in 1958, No. 8 Prescott Street’s most notorious tenant moved into a gloomy single room dormitory on the first floor. His name was Theodore ‘Ted’ Kaczynski, a  brilliant but timid 16-year-old math prodigy that would later become infamously known by his nom de guerre — ‘the Unabomber.’

Now, in the wake of Kaczynski’s suicide on June 10 at the age of 81, a sinister little-known aspect of his life has emerged from his time as an undergraduate at Harvard University, that suggests his involvement in the CIA’s atrocious brainwashing program known as MK-Ultra.

Led by a maniacal psychologist named Dr. Henry Murray, Kaczynski was one of 22 coeds subjected to, in Murray’s own words, ‘vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive’ mock interrogations between 1958 and 1962.

Patients were dosed with potent mind-altering drugs, subjected to extremes of temperature and sound, high and low pressure, oxygen, food and sleep deprivation, strapped to electroshock machines and forcefully interrogated under a blazing spotlight for hours at a time. 

While very little is known of the clandestine experiment and the potential effect it had on Kaczynski during his formative years; it is well known that he eventually retreated to the wilderness of Montana in 1971, where he began a 17-year-long bombing campaign that resulted in three deaths, 23 injuries and the longest and most costly manhunt in American history that spanned two decades.

In the years since his 1996 arrest, there has been no shortage of discourse dedicated to understanding Kaczynski’s unique criminal profile. 

Could an esteemed institution known for nurturing some of the greatest minds, also unwittingly have served as a breeding ground for dark experimentation?

Could Kaczynski’s harrowing experience in the MK-Ultra program, combined with his already fragile psychological state, set the stage for his eventual radicalization from lonely boy genius to lethal domestic terrorist.

Kaczynski was a shy but brilliant wunderkind from Chicago when he entered Harvard University on scholarship at the tender age of 16.

Raised in a working-class Polish-American family in the suburb of Evergreen Park, Kaczynski demonstrated exceptional intelligence from an early age. 

Kaczynski said his childhood was an unhappy one in part because his parents pushed him hard academically, which contributed to his intense anger towards his family later in life.

He had outpaced his peers by skipping the 6th and 11th grade back home, where scholastic achievement also meant social exile.

‘By the time I left high school, I was definitely regarded as a freak by a large segment of the student body,’ he later admitted to Sally Johnson, a forensic psychiatrist with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Thus, filled with intellectual ambition, the academic whizkid entered the hallowed halls of America’s most prestigious university in hopes that his uncanny genius would finally a challenging match and nurturing home.

Far from it, Harvard became an incubator for Kaczynski’s virulent pathology and anti-tech ethos which further isolated him from his peers.

It began with his placement in special housing at No.8 Prescott Street which was designed to offer its youngest students a nurturing, intimate environment.

Instead, it siloed the socially-awkward boys from their fellow classmates who were living a more conventional college experience in dormitories. Social adjustment proved difficult for Kaczynski.

Within a year, Kaczynski —still an impressionably young teenager—had been recruited by the CIA as a human guinea pig to study mind control under intense interrogation, psychotropic drugs, hypnosis and psychological coercion in the top-secret government project known as MK-Ultra. 

Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached new heights in the wake of WWII. 

Fearful of falling behind in the realm of mind control and interrogation techniques, the CIA initiated MK-Ultra, a program aimed at exploring the boundaries of human manipulation through various means, including drug administration, hypnosis, and psychological coercion. 

DR. EVIL: The Harvard professor who conducted sinister psychological experiments on students for the CIA

Dr. Henry Murray was a preeminent Harvard professor who led the viscous interrogation of Kaczynski as part of the CIA-run brainwashing experiment known as Project MK-Ultra.

Murray, an affluent New Yorker with scientific and humanitarian interests, was a critical figure before and during World War II in the field of psychology.

During the war Murray served in the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the CIA) helping to develop psychological screening tests and a rigorous stress test for potential applicants. 

Soon after Murray’s experiments on Kaczynski and his classmates were under way. Timothy Leary returned to Harvard in 1960 and began his experiments with psilocybin under Murray’s purview.

According to Timothy Leary, Murray ‘expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support.’

He described him as ‘the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation.’ 

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Perverse human experiments were conducted on prisoners, addicts, mentally and terminally ill patients, unwitting citizens and even children. 

Of the most horrific were those done on children diagnosed with schizophrenia that were given LSD everyday for six weeks. Others were fed cereal laced with uranium and radioactive calcium.

Doctors were paid enormous stipends to administer drugs to their unwitting patients on the behest of the CIA.

Under that dark umbrella, a myriad gruesome ‘subprojects’ were launched across the country at institutions such as: Massachusetts General Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital, the Universities of Pennsylvania, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Cornell, John Hopkins New York University. At one point the agency attempted to buy the world’s entire supply of LSD, which they called the ‘truth drug.’ 

One such collaborator was the preeminent Harvard psychologist Dr. Murray who aimed at understanding a human subject’s breaking point under intense interrogation.

Kaczynski told biographer Alston Chase that he felt ‘pressured into participating.’  

Unwitting participants were asked if they wanted to take part in a study where they would be paid hourly for their time. But the nature of the experiment was withheld as the intent was to catch them by surprise. 

Unbeknownst to participants, they faced grueling mock interrogations by a well-prepared adversary, not the peer debate they were led to believe. 

Subjects were escorted to the basement of a non-descript house on campus known to students as ‘the Annex.’ 

They were assigned monikers to protect the highly classified, illegal nature of the experiment. Kaczynski was code named ‘Lawful.’ 

Seated in front of a one-way mirror under a blinding spotlight Kaczynski was given to brutal interrogation while hooked up to a series of electrodes that another former participant un-fondly remembered as ‘somewhat akin to someone being strapped on the electric chair.’  

A motion-picture camera recorded every move and facial expression through a hole in the wall. Electrodes leading to machines that recorded heart beats and respiratory rates. 

As instructed, the unsuspecting subject was told to defend his personal philosophy of life. Only to be assaulted in a withering and vitriolic attack on their egos and most cherished beliefs. 

The goal was to see how well they held up under pressure, to understand a human’s breaking point. 

‘I had a sensation somewhat akin to someone being strapped on the electric chair with these electrodes…I really started getting hit real hard…Wham, wham, wham! And me getting hotter and more irritated and my heartbeat going up and sweating terribly,’ one of them, codenamed Cringle, recalled to Chase.

Another participant nicknamed Drill told Chase that he still suffered from ‘very vivid general memories of the experience…I was startled by my interlocutor’s venom. I remember responding with unabating rage.’

Kaczynski must certainly have been among the most vulnerable of Murray’s experimental subjects. He was among the youngest and the poorest of the group. He came from a dysfunctional home. 

Kaczynski was certainly one of the more vulnerable test subjects in the Harvard experiment. Not only was he one of the youngest and poorest of the group but he also came from a troubled family life.

And gradually, while immersed in the Murray experiment, Kaczynski began to put together a theory to explain his unhappiness and anger. Inwardly, he began to seethe. 

Harvard classmates recalled him as a lonely, thin boy with poor personal hygiene and a room that smelled of spoiled milk, rotting food and foot powder. 

Forensic psychiatrist Sally Johnson, who evaluated Kaczynski, noted his growing health concerns. He started experiencing dreadful night terrors and harbored fantasies of retaliating against a society he perceived as malevolent, which he believed was fixated on enforcing conformity through psychological manipulation. 

Upon his graduation from Harvard, the foundation was laid for his transformation into the sinister figure that would become known as the Unabomber. 

His mindset had crystallized around a set of beliefs, compounded by profound unhappiness and an enveloping sense of isolation. His resolution to commit violent acts followed shortly after. 

He went on to graduate school at the University of Michigan, before he got a job teaching math at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Becoming convinced that technology would spell the end of civilization, Kaczynski retreated to a remote area in the woods of Montana in 1971, where his closest neighbor was ten miles away.

For decades, he lived in a small dingy cabin without electricity or running water. He foraged for food and lived off only a few hundred dollars a year. 

Kaczynski’s reign of terror began in 1978 when he began mailing and hand delivering bombs to targets that he felt advanced technology. He focused his attention to universities and airlines which earned him the moniker ‘Unabomber’ from the FBI.

He managed to evade federal authorities for 17 years while claiming the lives of three victims and seriously maiming 23 others. 

In 1995, Kaczynski released a twisted 35,000 word manifesto titled, ‘Industrial Society and Its Future,’ and promised to stop mailing bombs if it was published. His credo excoriated modernity and the industrial revolution.

Upon reading it, Kaczynski’s younger brother David and his wife Linda Patrik recognized chilling similarities in the letters they had received over the years and turned him into the FBI.

Kaczynski was officially arrested in 1996. When investigators raided the cabin, they found  ‘a wealth of bomb components; 40,000 handwritten journal pages that included bomb-making experiments and descriptions of Unabomber crimes; and one live bomb, ready for mailing,’ according to the FBI.

He was sentenced to life behind bars without the possibility of parole before he was found dead in his cell on Saturday, June 10, aged 81, by suicide.

During his trial, Kaczynski was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia (even though he often denied the diagnosis). Experts said he was prone to delusions and pointed to his irrational fear of mind control…though given his haunting experience as a test subject in MK-Ultra, perhaps he wasn’t wrong. 

As experts continue to grapple with the complexity of Kaczynski’s motivations, we are left to wonder whether his alleged involvement in MK-Ultra played a role in shaping one of the most enigmatic and dangerous figures in American history. 

Very few records remain of Project MK-Ultra as CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of most files related to the controversial study in 1973.

The potential effects of Kaczynski’s participation in the MK-Ultra experiments which aimed to manipulate and control the human mind, cannot be underestimated. 

The clandestine operation raises broader questions about the ethical boundaries of experimentation and the far-reaching consequences of programs carried out in secrecy. 

Alden Wessman, a former research associate of Murray who had long been bothered by the depravity of the  study, told Chase: ‘Later, I thought: ‘We took and took and used them and what did we give them in return?’