Explosion Norway

[Jan Klimkowski]

The Unabomber link is disturbing.

Ted Kaczynski was a subject of brutal mind manipulation experiments at Harvard. The official version says it stops there. Personally, I doubt the official version.

Here are some excerpts from the four part Atlantic article by Alston Chase, which can be read online in full starting here:

In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments -- experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard? A look inside the files

In 1959 a comfortable old house stood on the site. Known as the Annex, it served as a laboratory in which staff members of the Department of Social Relations conducted research on human subjects. There, from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Harvard psychologists, led by Henry A. Murray, conducted a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on twenty-two undergraduates. To preserve the anonymity of these student guinea pigs, experimenters referred to individuals by code name only. One of these students, whom they dubbed "Lawful," was Theodore John Kaczynski, who would one day be known as the Unabomber, and who would later mail or deliver sixteen package bombs to scientists, academicians, and others over seventeen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-three.

Through research at the Murray Center and in the Harvard archives I found that, among its other purposes, Henry Murray's experiment was intended to measure how people react under stress. Murray subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation -- what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, assaulting his subjects' egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.

Kaczynski was accepted by Harvard in the spring of 1958; he was not yet sixteen years old. One friend remembers urging Kaczynski's father not to let the boy go, arguing, "He's too young, too immature, and Harvard too impersonal." But again Turk wouldn't listen. "Ted's going to Harvard was an ego trip for him," the friend recalls.

The Murray Experiment
PERHAPS no figure at Harvard at this time better embodied the ongoing war between science and humanism than Henry A. "Harry" Murray, a professor in Harvard's Department of Social Relations. A wealthy and blue-blooded New Yorker, Murray was both a scientist and a humanist, and he was one of Lewis Mumford's best friends. He feared for the future of civilization in an age of nuclear weapons, and advocated implementing the agenda of the World Federalist Association, which called for a single world government. The atomic bomb, Murray wrote in a letter to Mumford, "is the logical & predictable result of the course we have been madly pursuing for a hundred years." The choice now facing humanity, he added, was "One World or No World." Yet unlike Mumford, Murray maintained a deep faith in science. He saw it as offering a solution by helping to transform the human personality. "The kind of behavior that is required by the present threat," Murray wrote Mumford, "involves transformations of personality such as never occurred quickly in human history; one transformation being that of National Man into World Man." Crucial to achieving this change was learning the secret of successful relationships between people, communities, and nations. And coming to understand these "unusually successful relations" was the object of Murray's particular research: the interplay between two individuals, which he called the "dyad."

The concept of the dyad was, in a sense, Murray's attempt to build a bridge between psychology and sociology. Rather than follow Freud and Jung by identifying the individual as the fundamental atom in the psychological universe, Murray chose the dyad -- the smallest social unit -- and in this way sought to unite psychiatry, which studied the psyches of individuals, and sociology, which studied social relations. This kind of research, he apparently hoped, might (as he put it in a 1947 paper) promote "the survival and further evaluation of Modern Man, "by encouraging the emergence of the new "world man" and making world peace more likely.

Murray's interest in the dyad, however, may have been more than merely academic. The curiosity of this complex man appears to have been impelled by two motives -- one idealistic and the other somewhat less so. He lent his talents to national aims during World War II. Forrest Robinson, the author of a 1992 biography of Murray, wrote that during this period he "flourished as a leader in the global crusade of good against evil." He was also an advocate of world government. Murray saw understanding the dyad, it seems, as a practical tool in the service of the great crusade in both its hot and cold phases. (He had long shown interest, for example, in the whole subject of brainwashing.) During the war Murray served in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helping to develop psychological screening tests for applicants and (according to Timothy Leary) monitoring military experiments on brainwashing. In his book The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate" (1979), John Marks reported that General "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS director, "called in Harvard psychology professor Henry 'Harry' Murray" to devise a system for testing the suitability of applicants to the OSS. Murray and his colleagues "put together an assessment system ... [that] tested a recruit's ability to stand up under pressure, to be a leader, to hold liquor, to lie skillfully, and to read a person's character by the nature of his clothing.... Murray's system became a fixture in the OSS."

One of the tests that Murray devised for the OSS was intended to determine how well applicants withstood interrogations. As he and his colleagues described it in their 1948 report "Selection of Personnel for Clandestine Operations -- Assessment of Men,"

The candidate immediately went downstairs to the basement room. A voice from within commanded him to enter, and on complying he found himself facing a spotlight strong enough to blind him for a moment. The room was otherwise dark. Behind the spotlight sat a scarcely discernible board of inquisitors.... The interrogator gruffly ordered the candidate to sit down. When he did so, he discovered that the chair in which he sat was so arranged that the full strength of the beam was focused directly on his face....
At first the questions were asked in a quiet, sympathetic, conciliatory manner, to invite confidence.... After a few minutes, however, the examiner worked up to a crescendo in a dramatic fashion.... When an inconsistency appeared, he raised his voice and lashed out at the candidate, often with sharp sarcasm. He might even roar, "You're a liar."

Even anticipation of this test was enough to cause some applicants to fall apart. The authors wrote that one person "insisted he could not go through with the test." They continued, "A little later the director ... found the candidate in his bedroom, sitting on the edge of his cot, sobbing."

Before the war Murray had been the director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. After the war Murray returned to Harvard, where he continued to refine techniques of personality assessment. In 1948 he sent a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation proposing "the development of a system of procedures for testing the suitability of officer candidates for the navy." By 1950 he had resumed studies on Harvard undergraduates that he had begun, in rudimentary form, before the war, titled "Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men." The experiment in which Kaczynski participated was the last and most elaborate in the series. In their postwar form these experiments focused on stressful dyadic relations, designing confrontations akin to those mock interrogations he had helped to orchestrate for the OSS.

PLANNING for the last of Murray's "multiform assessments" was well under way by the spring of 1959. The idea, according to Murray's notes, was to "call for volunteers from a large undergraduate course."

Get about 80 sophomores; administer a series of scales or questionnaires dealing with various dimensions of personality; pick 25 subjects, some extremely high, some extremely low and some in middle on each of these scales; study these 25 subjects over a three year period by the multiform method of assessment; come up with 700 rank orders, and using a computer, obtain clusters of intercorrelations, factors, but final decisions are reached after prolonged discussions and reassessments; enormous amount of data which staff analyzes, interprets, formulates.

Kaczynski told Mello that he was "pressured into participating" in the Murray experiment. His hesitation turned out to be sensible. Researchers gave the volunteers almost no information about the experiment in which they would participate. Each was simply asked to answer yes to the following question: "Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems (parts of an on-going program of research in the development of personality), by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?"

In fact it would never be clear what the "certain psychological problems" were. And the test that served as the centerpiece for this undertaking appears remarkably similar to the old OSS stress test. Students would be given the third degree. But whereas the OSS applicants must have known that enduring unpleasant interrogations could be part of their job, these students did not. The intent was to catch them by surprise, to deceive them, and to brutalize them. As Murray described it,

First, you are told you have a month in which to write a brief exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live.
Second, when you return to the Annex with your finished composition, you are informed that in a day or two you and a talented young lawyer will be asked to debate the respective merits of your two philosophies.

When the subject arrived for the debate, he was escorted to a "brilliantly lighted room" and seated in front of a one-way mirror. A motion-picture camera recorded his every move and facial expression through a hole in the wall. Electrodes leading to machines that recorded his heart and respiratory rates were attached to his body. Then the debate began. But the students were tricked. Contrary to what Murray claimed in his article, they had been led to believe that they would debate their philosophy of life with another student like themselves. Instead they confronted what Forrest Robinson describes as a "well-prepared 'stooge'" -- a talented young lawyer indeed, but one who had been instructed to launch into an aggressive attack on the subject, for the purpose of upsetting him as much as possible. Robinson has described what happened next.

As instructed, the unwitting subject attempted to represent and to defend his personal philosophy of life. Invariably, however, he was frustrated, and finally brought to expressions of real anger, by the withering assault of his older, more sophisticated opponent.... while fluctuations in the subject's pulse and respiration were measured on a cardiotachometer.

Not surprisingly, most participants found this highly unpleasant, even traumatic, as the data set records. "We were led into the room with bright lights, very bright," one of them, code-named Cringle, recalled afterward.

I could see shadowy activities going on behind the one-way glass ... [Dr. G] ... started fastening things on me. 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 heart beat going up ... and sweating terribly ... there I was under the lights and with movie camera and all this experimentation equipment on me ... It was sort of an unpleasant experience.

"Right away," said another, code-named Trump, describing his experience afterward, "I didn't like [the interrogator]."

[Dr. G] ... came waltzing over and he put on those electrodes but in that process, while he was doing that, kind of whistling, I was looking over the room, and right away I didn't like the room. I didn't like the way the glass was in front of me through which I couldn't see, but I was being watched and right away that puts one in a kind of unnatural situation and I noted the big white lights and again that heightens the unnatural effect. There was something peculiar about the set-up too, it was supposed to look homey or look natural, two chairs and a little table, but again that struck me as unnatural before the big piece of glass and the lights. And then [Mr. R] ... who was bubbling over, dancing around, started to talk to me about he liked my suit.... the buzzer would ring or something like that, we were supposed to begin.... he was being sarcastic or pretty much of a wise guy.... And the first thing that entered my mind was to get up and ask him outside immediately ... but that was out of the question, because the electrodes and the movie and all that ... I kind of sat there and began to fume and then he went on and he got my goat and I couldn't think of what to say.... And then they came along and they took my electrodes off.

And so it went. One subject, Hinge, thought he was "being attacked." Another, Naisfield, complained, "The lights were very bright.... Then the things were put on my legs and whatnot and on the arm, ... I didn't like the feel of the sticky stuff that was on there being sort of uncomfortable."

Although the "stressful dyadic proceeding" served as the centerpiece of Murray's experiment (it occurred during the second year of the three-year study), it was merely one among scores of different tests the students took in order to allow Murray and his associates to acquire, as Murray wrote, "the most accurate, significant, and complete knowledge and understanding of a single psychological event that is obtainable."

Before the dyadic confrontation took place, Murray and his colleagues interviewed the students in depth about their hopes and aspirations. During this same period the subjects were required to write not only essays explaining their philosophies of life but also autobiographies, in which they were told to answer specific, intimate questions on a range of subjects from thumb-sucking and toilet training to masturbation and erotic fantasies. And they faced a battery of tests that included, among others, the Thematic Apperception Test, a Rorschach test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the California Psychological Inventory, a "fantasy inventory," a psychological-types inventory, the Maudalay Personality Inventory, an "inventory of self-description," a "temperament questionnaire," a "time-metaphor test," a "basic disposition test," a "range of experience inventory," a "philosophical outlook test," a food-preference inventory, analyses of their literary tastes and moral precepts, an "odor association test," a "word association test," an argument-completion test, a Wyatt finger-painting test, a projective-drawings test, and a "Rosenzweig picture frustration test." The results were then analyzed by researchers, who plotted them in numerous ways in an effort to develop a psychological portrait of each personality in all its dimensions.

Only after most of this data had been collected did researchers administer the stressful dyadic confrontation. During the year following this session each student was called back for several "recall" interviews and sometimes was asked to comment on the movie of himself being reduced to impotent anger by the interrogator. During these replays, Murray wrote, "you will see yourself making numerous grimaces and gestures" and "uttering incongruent, disjunctive, and unfinished sentences."

During the last year of the experiment Murray made the students available to his graduate-student assistants, to serve as guinea pigs for their own research projects. By graduation, as Kenneth Keniston, one of these researchers, summarized the process later, "each student had spent approximately two hundred hours in the research, and had provided hundreds of pages of information about himself, his beliefs, his past life, his family, his college life and development, his fantasies, his hopes and dreams."

Why were the students willing to endure this ongoing stress and probing into their private lives? Some who had assisted Murray in the experiment confessed to me that they wondered about this themselves. But they -- and we -- can only speculate that some of the students (including Kaczynski) did it for the money, that some (again, probably including Kaczynski) had doubts about their own psychic health and were seeking reassurance about it, that some, suffering from Harvard's well-known anomie, were lonely and needed someone to talk to, and that some simply had an interest in helping to advance scientific knowledge. But in truth we do not know. Alden E. Wessman, a former research associate of Murray's who has long been bothered by the unethical dimension of this study, said to me recently, "Later, I thought: 'We took and took and used them and what did we give them in return?'"

What was the purpose of the experiment? Keniston told me that he wasn't sure what the goals were. "Murray was not the most systematic scientist," he explained. Murray himself gave curiously equivocal answers. At times he suggested that his intent was merely to gather as much raw data as possible about one interpersonal event, which could then be used in different ways to help "develop a theory of dyadic systems." At other times he recalled the idealistic goal of acquiring knowledge that would lead to improving human personality development. At still other times his language seemed to suggest a continued interest in stressful interrogations. For example, Murray explained in his "Notes on Dyadic Research," dated March 16, 1959, that an ongoing goal of the research, which focused heavily on "degree of anxiety and disintegration," was to "design and evaluate instruments and procedures for the prediction of how each subject will react in the course of a stressful dyadic proceeding."

Sometimes Murray suggested that his research might have no value at all. "Cui bono?" he once asked. "As [the data] stand they are nothing but raw data, meaningless as such; and the question is what meaning, what intellectual news, can be extracted from them?" In another context he asked, "Are the costs in man-hours incurred by our elaborate, multiple procedures far greater than any possible gains in knowledge?"

Such equivocation prompts one to ask, Could the experiment have had a purpose that Murray was reluctant to divulge? Was the multiform-assessments project intended, at least in part, to help the CIA determine how to test, or break down, an individual's ability to withstand interrogation? The writer Alexander Cockburn has asked whether the students might have been given the hallucinogenic drug LSD without their knowledge, possibly at the request of the CIA. By the late 1950s, according to some, Murray had become quite interested in hallucinogenics, including LSD and psilocybin. And soon after Murray's experiments on Kaczynski and his classmates were under way, in 1960, Timothy Leary returned to Harvard and, with Murray's blessing, began his experiments with psilocybin. In his autobiography, Flashbacks (1983), Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to promoting hallucinogenic drugs, described Murray as "the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support."

Forrest Robinson reports in his biography that Murray took psilocybin and in 1961 delivered a talk on his experience to the International Congress of Applied Psychology. That Leary had Murray's support was confirmed by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain in their book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (1985).

Leary returned to Harvard and established a psilocybin research project with the approval of Dr. Harry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations. Dr. Murray, who ran the Personality Assessments section of the OSS during World War II, took a keen interest in Leary's work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Leary's guidance.

Kaczynski thinks he was never given LSD. And after exhaustive research I could find no evidence that LSD was ever used in Murray's research. Nevertheless, whether the research had a defense connection of some sort remains an open question. Although direct evidence of support from a federal defense grant is so far lacking, circumstantial evidence exists: the strong similarity between the OSS stress tests and the later experiments, Murray's association with the OSS, his grant proposal to do research for the Navy Department, and the lack of any clearly explained purpose for the study. Obviously, the dyadic studies would have had considerable utility for the defense establishment, either as a framework for testing recruits or as continuing work on how to improve interrogation techniques.