Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test subject

[mahatmakanejeeves]

RETROPOLIS

Before he was the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski was a mind-control test subject

By Bryan Pietsch
June 11, 2023 at 3:48 a.m. EDT



Ted Kaczynski, the anti-technology anarchist who came to be known as the Unabomber, is led from the federal courthouse in Helena, Mont., in 1996. (John Youngbear/AP)

Ted Kaczynski, the anarchist and so-called Unabomber who died in a federal prison medical facility on Saturday, transformed from boy genius to terrorist, going from a star mathematics student to a feared assailant who targeted academics, scientists and industrialized society as a whole.

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. Though he graduated with a mathematics degree, later completing a doctorate in the field before becoming a professor, questions remain over whether — or to what extent — he was affected by the experiment, which reportedly involved mock interrogations in which participants’ beliefs were harshly disparaged.

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 document the CIA made publicly available in 2018. (There has not been evidence to suggest LSD or similar substances were used at Harvard on Kaczynski.) ... “The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for use in interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War,” the document says. “And generally to explore any other possibilities of mind control.”

[Ted Kaczynski, who planted fear and death as the Unabomber, dies at 81]

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. ... Chase argued in a June 2000 article 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 …”

{snip}

Gift Article
https://wapo.st/3MVBNbE

By Bryan Pietsch
Bryan Pietsch is a reporter covering U.S. and international news for The Washington Post from its hub in Seoul. He previously reported for the New York Times in Colorado. Twitter https://twitter.com/bybryanpietsch

[Sanity Claws]

1. Oh my

I had only heard that he had a difficult upbringing. He felt that he was pushed to achieve and did not develop emotional ties with his family, a Complex PTSD situation.

[EYESORE 9001]

2. I followed news stories back then, and I don't remember hearing anything about this

Did I miss the part where his defense made even a cursory mention of this?

[dlk]

10. His defense may not have known

Or have been stonewalled/threatened about bringing it to light. There’s no doubt more to this story.

[keep_left]

18. The MK-Ultra connections were reported in a documentary a number of years ago. I found it...

...on YouTube and posted it here. It looks like the documentary was made by National Geographic, though the YouTube account has edited it to try to hide that (probably to avoid a DMCA takedown request). I think the MK-Ultra history is about two-thirds of the way in.

[EYESORE 9001]

20. Thank you for doing that

I will most certainly watch it when time allows

[Ferrets are Cool]

3. One wonders IF any of the other subjects were adversely affected.

[stopdiggin]

15. that's valid

As is the observation for widely different impact(s) of PSTD, childhood deprivation/abuse, religious indoctrination ... And a whole host of other environmental keys. We have much to learn. And one of the chief lessons seems to be - wide variation. And a sad paucity of 'universals.'

(I wasn't quite sure if you post was meant straightforward inquiry - or as dismissal and brushoff - which I have to admit got a little play in this direction too. But - I'll try to keep an open mind.)
----- -----

[Ferrets are Cool]

19. Not a brush off.

I hope they kept up with the "participants'. Of course, if anything bad came of it, the CIA would probably hide it from the public.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. Social media bad actors (Putin,Xi,BoneSaw) are running same experiment today, creating lone wolves

... and "stochastic terrorists" (terrorists randomly created without physical participation in an organization or cell).

[AllaN01Bear]

5. i had heard about this in ufo magazines about the ultra program.,

[Prairie_Seagull]

6. Like most everyone, I followed the unibomber case in the news-

but I have never heard of the MK-Ultra tie in. Never. Now that Kacynski has passed maybe more will come out about this although who knows, there are many I am pretty sure who would like this issue to stay quietly in the past.

[milestogo]

16. Sirhan Sirhan, who was held responsible for the RFK assassination

reportedly went through this kind of mind control program.

[Gary 50]

7. I remember Kacyznski's brother asked his mother why Ted was "strange."

She said he got sick when he was a baby and had to be hospitalized. They only let the family visit every other day or every third day. She said he was never the same again.

[Joinfortmill]

8. CIA? We'll never learn the whole truth.

[dlk]

11. The full story has been buried

Files have likely been destroyed. For public safety reasons, it would be good to know, though.

[VGNonly]

9. Ken Kesey

was a participant in MK-Ultra.

[dlk]

12. Interesting

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest…

[Delmette2.0]

13. His brother David wrote a book about Ted.

The book is titled Every Last Tie: The Story of the Unibomber and His Family.

I read it years ago. It is very good book.

[Aviation Pro]

14. Men Who Stare at Goats?

Maybe true.

[Kid Berwyn]

21. Detroit Free Press story failed to mention MK/ULTRA

The Free Press did mention he became an angry person while at U-M (“Ted Kaczynski's homicidal thoughts may have started as a University of Michigan student”)

So, to fill in the blanks:

The Unabomber, the CIA and LSD

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR - ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch, June 12, 2023

Word came this weekend that Ted Kaczynski was found dead in his cell at the Federal Medical Center Prison in Butner, North Carolina, an apparent suicide. In 1999, Cockburn and I wrote this piece on Ted K.’s experience as a volunteer in CIA-sponsored mind control experiments while at Harvard. – JSC

It turns out that Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, was a volunteer in mind-control experiments sponsored by the CIA at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Michael Mello, author of the recently published book, “The United States of America vs. Theodore John Kaczynski,” notes that at some point in his Harvard years–1958 to 1962–Kaczynski agreed to be the subject of “a psychological experiment.” Mello identifies the chief researcher for these only as a lieutenant colonel in World War II, working for the CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. In fact, the man experimenting on the young Kaczynski was Dr. Henry Murray, who died in 1988.

SNIP…

As chairman of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard, Murray zealously pursued the CIA’s efforts to carry forward experiments in mind control conducted by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps. The overall program was under the control of the late Sidney Gottlieb, head of the CIA’s technical services division. Just as Harvard students were fed doses of LSD, psilocybin and other potions, so too were prisoners and many unwitting guinea pigs.

Sometimes the results were disastrous. A dram of LSD fed by Gottlieb himself to an unwitting U.S. army officer, Frank Olson, plunged Olson into escalating psychotic episodes, which culminated in Olson’s fatal descent from an upper window in the Statler-Hilton in New York. Gottlieb was the object of a lawsuit not only by Olson’s children but also by the sister of another man, Stanley Milton Glickman, whose life had disintegrated into psychosis after being unwittingly given a dose of LSD by Gottlieb.

What did Murray give Kaczynski? Did the experiment’s long-term effects help tilt him into the Unabomber’s homicidal rampages? The CIA’s mind experiment program was vast. How many other human time bombs were thus primed? How many of them have exploded?

CONTINUES…

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/12/the-unabomber-the-cia-and-lsd/

We are fortunate that one of Dr. Olson’s children is a DUer and appreciates we remember their father and his work in service to our country.