by Sam Kean
Nowadays, the best interrogation methods focus less on seeking confessions and more on getting bad guys to incriminate themselves by talking too much. The thinking is that the more people blab, the more likely they are to contradict themselves or else spill details about their movements and alibis that detectives can check into and trip them up with. Cops can also use tricks like asking people to tell a story backward, or having them sketch an unrelated picture while going over their story, since doing so increases the “cognitive load” on them and makes it harder to keep their lies straight.
Admittedly, these “soft” methods don’t satisfy our need for revenge—the sense that bad guys deserve rough treatment. But innocent people get arrested on false charges all the time. And if your goal isn’t to enact revenge as much to see bad guys actually convicted and locked away, then helping them relax and letting them blab until they screw up is far more effective.
2 During high school Kaczynski actually helped make a bomb once, but at the time it didn’t register as a big deal. The whole thing wasn’t even his idea. He happened to have a classmate who was fascinated with bombs. Being a good chemistry student, Ted knew how to produce an explosion by mixing ammonia and iodine together; if you then touch the mixture—even with a feather—voilà, it’s a crude bomb. When the classmate heard this, he begged Ted to teach him how.
Now, Ted probably shouldn’t have relayed this information. But he did so in a sad attempt to impress the other boy, a popular wrestler, and make a friend. It didn’t work. The bomb did, unfortunately, and when the boy deployed it during chemistry class one day, it blew out two windows and one girl temporarily lost her hearing. Thankfully, everyone else in the vicinity escaped unharmed. The school’s principal saw the incident for what it was—a knucklehead stunt—and suspended Kaczynski for a day, then forgot about the whole matter. Only decades later, in retrospect, did it seem ominous.
3 To be accurate, it wasn’t David as much as his wife Linda who cracked the case. After reading the manifesto, Linda asked David if it were possible that Ted (whom she’d never met) might be the Unabomber, given their mutual contempt for industrial society. David rejected the suggestion at first, but eventually admitted the idea might hold water, based on several clues he couldn’t ignore.
For instance, David noticed that some of the bombs had been detonated shortly after the Kaczynski family had sent Ted money. Ted also knew carpentry (several bombs had wooden components), and he’d lived in several cities where the bombs killed people. Finally, David recognized certain phrases in the manifesto that his brother used in letters (e.g., “cool-headed logicians”), as well as his brother’s idiosyncratic spelling (e.g., “analyse,” “wilfully”). Along those same lines, one of the FBI agents later noticed that both Kaczynski’s letters and the manifesto contained the phrase “can’t eat your cake and have it too,” rather than the more common “can’t have your cake and eat it too.” If you think about it, the second one is illogical, since you can indeed have your cake, wait a while, and then eat it. What’s logical is the first one—you cannot eat your cake and then have it. Ted had of course thought this through and insisted, to his doom, on using the correct version.
4 Kaczynski’s encryption system was genius. It started with a list of numeric substitutions: 4 = THE, 18 = BUT, 1 = the present tense forms of TO BE, 2 = the past tense forms of TO BE, and so on. This list included individual letters, too, with 39 = A, 40 = B, et cetera. But he also introduced some twists. Both 62 and 63 equaled S, for instance, and 45, 46, and 47 all equaled E, to throw off any attempts to use letter-frequency counts in deciphering the text. He even used different letters for a voiced and unvoiced “TH,” and lumped all forms of ME, MY, and MINE together under one number. Even more devilishly, he intentionally misspelled words, included strings of nonsense sometimes, and swapped in German and Spanish words (he spoke both languages) whenever it suited him. All these ploys—and the addition of other encryption techniques—would have made the codes nearly impossible to decipher without supercomputers and dedicated effort.
5 In 2012, Kaczynski sent a cheeky update to the Harvard alumni magazine for the 50th anniversary of his graduation. Incredibly, in a monumental editorial lapse, the magazine published it. He listed his occupation as “prisoner,” his address as a supermax prison in Colorado, and his “awards” as eight life sentences from the U.S. district court in California.
10
TORTURE: THE WHITE WHALE
Imagine it’s 1960, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two young men are sitting in a harshly lit lab, being watched by researchers. One of the young men is smiling wickedly; the other is squirming, getting more and more agitated each minute. They’re classmates at Harvard, and they’re engaged in a debate about their philosophies on life. Teenagers often have strong opinions, and the agitated one—whom the researchers have dubbed “Lawful”—is especially strident.
As things get heated, their voices rise. Lawful’s heart starts racing, and he squints under the hot lights. When he signed up for the study, he was told that the debates would be friendly, but his classmate keeps being abusive—mocking Lawful’s points instead of critiquing them in a logical way. Today, the classmate goes further than ever. He looks Lawful up and down and sneers, And another thing: your beard looks stupid.
Lawful blinks, stunned. This isn’t how debates work. You criticize a person’s arguments, not the person himself. He flushes red, nearly growling, and leans forward in a surge of adrenaline. He’s been coming to these “debates” for months now, and the heart-rate monitor strapped to his chest has never spiked like this.
Lawful would be even angrier if he knew the truth: that his interlocutor isn’t a Harvard student at all. He’s a hotshot young lawyer who’s been coached to fight dirty and make ad hominem attacks. Lawful is one of twenty-two Harvard juniors suffering this abuse week after week as part of a psychological study. But none of the others show such intense reactions. Perhaps that’s why the lawyer loves provoking him.
Meanwhile, the scientist studying Lawful watches the exchange through the remove of a two-way mirror. Lawful is focused on debating, but every so often he can see murky movements behind the mirror, like glimpses of life underwater. There, arms crossed, stands Henry Murray, a Harvard psychologist whose work on interrogations has piqued the interest of the CIA.
An observer once described Murray as “urbane, witty, and attentive,” but also “so charming as to be suspect.” He masterminded this entire setup—the noir-detective lights, the mirrors, the heart-rate monitors. In a later paper on the study, Murray will admit that the lawyer’s attacks were “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive,” but in truth that’s exactly what he wants. He wants to see Lawful crumble. Murray records each interaction on film as well. He does so partly to study the students for signs of frustration—their tics and frowns and furrows. From time to time, however, he also forces the students to watch the films, so they can see themselves frothing and sputtering on camera. It’s a way to wring a little more humiliation out of each session.
And no one would be more humiliated than Lawful. The boy was undeniably brilliant (his IQ was 167), but tests revealed him as the most alienated student in the study. Indeed, Murray took special interest in the boy for that reason, and had personally bestowed the nickname Lawful in a mocking reference to how uptight he was. The boy’s real name was Theodore Kaczynski. The world would later know him as the Unabomber.
Murray and Kaczynski came from entirely different worlds, one blue-collar, one blue-blood.
Murray was the blue blood. He grew up in an elegant brownstone in Manhattan that sat where Rockefeller Plaza does today. As an adult, he proudly listed his ancestor—the Earl of Dunmore, first governor of New York colony—on his resume.
Naturally, Murray attended Harvard and captained the crew team there. But despite becoming one of the most eminent psychologists of his generation, the field didn’t exactly set him on fire at first. He majored in history at Harvard and enro
lled in just one psychology course before getting bored and dropping it. (He later joked that he never again set foot in a psychology class until he had to teach one.) He then earned a medical degree from Columbia University but abandoned plans to enter surgery due to poor dexterity. (A botched surgery as a child had left one eye adrift and interfered with his hand-eye coordination.) He ended up pursuing a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge University instead, but he hardly distinguished himself there. As one critic commented, “There is nothing in his education… or subsequently in medical school to suggest that he was suited for anything but the life of a patrician clubman.”
He finally found his calling when, in 1923, at age thirty, he came across a book by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung at a used bookstore in New York. He started reading it right there in the aisle and, electrified, skipped work the next two days to finish it. He was soon making plans to visit Jung in Switzerland to study with him.
Truth be told, Murray also sought out Jung for selfish reasons. Murray’s wife Josephine was his emotional rock, a steadying presence in his life. Unfortunately she didn’t excite him, especially sexually. The woman who did excite him was his mistress, the artist Christiana Morgan, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that Morgan was flamboyant and unstable. Murray was smitten with her but couldn’t bear to abandon Josephine, and he kept going round and round about what to do. So he sought Jung’s opinion on the matter. Coincidentally, Jung also had a wife and a mistress, and while he listened to Murray agonize over the matter, Jung interrupted and suggested that maybe Murray didn’t need to choose. He could do as Jung did, and keep both women around. After all, they were both dynamic, creative men. How could they be expected to settle on just one woman?
Naturally, this humiliated Murray’s wife (she thought Jung a “dirty old man,” one historian noted), but Murray brushed her concerns aside and embraced Jung’s advice. Like many people drawn to psychology, the field attracted him in part because he had demons of his own (beyond his messy love life, he was a longtime amphetamine addict), and he was mightily impressed with how Jung had resolved his dilemma. Psychology seemed noble to him, a way to help people with their toughest issues, and from that moment forward Murray dedicated his life to picking apart the workings of the human mind.
Over the next few decades, Murray pioneered a new approach to psychology. Psychology at the time was split into two warring camps. One consisted of psychoanalysts like Jung, who explored the vast, murky waters of the subconscious. But many scientists criticized psychoanalysts, not unjustly, for lacking rigor. Meanwhile, the other camp reveled in rigor, almost to a fault. These psychologists would zero in on some scrap of the sensory or nervous system in an animal, present different stimuli, and measure the animal’s reactions with stopwatches and electrical gizmos. It was all reflexes and rats running through mazes—anything but hard data was considered mushy.
Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, who ran an abusive psychology experiment on several students, including Theodore Kaczynski, the future Unabomber. (Courtesy of Harvard University Archives.)
Murray appreciated data-driven science—he’d come out of biochemistry, after all—but he also longed for something richer. Individual personalities fascinated him, and he wanted to study human beings the way that novelists did, in all their messy particulars. In fact, he eventually abandoned Jung as his role model and turned toward Herman Melville, whom Murray considered the true discoverer of the subconscious. (Although tellingly, when Murray read Moby-Dick, he identified not with Ishmael or Queequeg, but with the megalomaniacal Captain Ahab.) In the end, Murray split the difference, taking a novel, data-driven approach to studying personalities.
This middle path pleased no one, of course, but Murray’s wealth shielded him from the consequences of being an iconoclast. Despite running counter to both main currents of psychology then, he used his social connections to win an appointment at Harvard. Resentful colleagues later denied him tenure, but rather than dump him, university brass spun Murray off into his own fiefdom, the Harvard Psychology Clinic, on whose door he painted a white whale. Whenever the clinic faced a budget shortfall, Murray simply pulled out his checkbook and covered the costs himself.
During World War II, Murray also used his social connections to win special assignments from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. Some of this work looks awfully dodgy by today’s standards. One project involved piecing together a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, to predict his behavior during the war and suggest ways to influence him. Murray described Hitler as a blend of “artist and gangster” and “a compound, say, of Lord Byron and Al Capone.” He even speculated on the erotic adventures of the Führer: “Rumor has it that Hitler’s sexual life… demands a unique performance on the part of the women, the exact nature of which is a state secret.” However titillating, this assessment has zero basis in fact.
Other work for the OSS proved more worthwhile. To help the agency manage a flood of job applicants, Murray helped devise tests to sort people into types and determine what jobs they were suited for. If you’ve ever taken a personality test, you’re familiar with this work. Murray also helped devise a system to probe how well applicants could lie under pressure, read other people’s weaknesses, and stand up to interrogation. In other words, he devised a system to find good spies.
More than anything else he did during the war, this spy work fascinated Murray—especially the dynamic between interrogators and captives, which seemed rich with drama. So, when the war ended, he decided to study interrogations systematically at Harvard. It just so happened that the OSS’s successor, the CIA, shared his fascination and saw this work as a way to gain an edge during the Cold War.
In the worldwide battle between communism and democracy, communism seemed poised to crush its rival in the late 1940s. Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union had conquered all of Eastern Europe, and Mao Zedong had seized control of the world’s most populous nation, China. War nearly broke out in Europe over Berlin, and did break out in Asia over Korea. The threat of atomic weapons then ratcheted the tension higher still.
However scary, though, atomic bombs were merely external threats. Even more frightening to many Americans was the prospect of their minds being invaded—of communists conquering their souls from within. Thousands of POWs in Korea signed declarations in which they “confessed” to crimes they never committed, such as using germ warfare against enemy troops. Similarly, during the Soviet Union’s notorious show trials in Eastern Europe, defendants confessed to absurd deeds—and did so with slurred words and glazed, zombie-like looks. CIA analysts reviewed this evidence and took a big but understandable leap. They concluded that communist interrogators had discovered a surefire method of brainwashing people: a psychological superweapon that allowed them to crack open people’s minds and turn them into “Manchurian candidates” that would do their evil bidding.
In truth, the communists had no such ability. What they did have was torture.
Sometimes communist interrogators employed “mild” torture techniques like isolation and sleep deprivation. When that didn’t work, they either beat their captives silly or got creative and did things like inject chemicals to induce seizures, or wrap people in wet canvas that shrank and crushed them as it dried. To be sure, these methods were probably useless for gathering intelligence, based on what we know about the science and psychology of torture. There’s of course never been a genuinely scientific study on whether torture works. Such a study would require splitting a pool of volunteers into two groups, one of which gets tortured to reveal their innermost secrets and one of which gets interrogated through humane means, and then comparing the results. Even compared to other cases in this book, a study like that would be crazily unethical, and in the absence of a rigorous study, we can’t draw any firm conclusions about the efficacy of torture. Still, the best science out there does cast doubt on its reliability. Even mild stress compromises our ability to recall information, and th
ere are fewer things more stressful than torture. Moreover, studies have shown again and again that people under duress will confess to all sorts of ludicrous things simply to find relief from torment. However crazy it seems from the outside, false confessions happen all the time.
If you want reliable intelligence, then, there are better ways to acquire it than torture.1 But of course Soviet and Chinese communists weren’t necessarily seeking reliable information; they often wanted false confessions, which they then could use as propaganda. In that narrow, cynical sense, torture does “work,” works brilliantly.
Unfortunately, such subtleties were lost on CIA analysts. They were terrified that the communists had discovered the psychological equivalent of the atomic bomb, which would give them a decisive edge in the Cold War. As a result, the CIA instituted a crash program called MK-ULTRA in 1953 to narrow the “mind-control gap.” “MK” indicated that the project fell under the scope of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, while “ULTRA” was reportedly a nod to the ULTRA program during World War II, which involved cracking German military codes. The implication was that defeating the Soviet Union in this arena was every bit as crucial for the survival of democracy as defeating Nazi tanks and submarines had been. We had to develop new methods for hacking the human brain as quickly as possible, and do to the commies what the commies had been doing to us.
Under MK-ULTRA, any method for probing the mind was considered fair game. Grim, humorless CIA analysts teamed up with fortune-tellers and occultists to study hypnosis, telepathy, clairvoyance, and other voodoo, all on the off-off-chance that some of it wasn’t baloney. MK-ULTRA is best known today for its reckless deployment of LSD, which agents hoped would prove useful as a truth serum. (The army did similar work with PCP and mescaline.) To be fair, the agents did at least dope themselves first. They’d spike their colleagues’ wine or cigarettes at parties, then follow them around town as they went screaming mad, convinced that “monsters” (really passing automobiles) were trying to devour them. But it wasn’t long before agents started doping strangers. Sometimes they used drug-coated swizzle sticks; other times they hired magicians to teach them sleight-of-hand, so they could slip mickeys into drinks in bars and brothels. (One particularly creepy agent ran a bordello in San Francisco where he’d watch LSD-fueled sex from behind a two-way mirror—and do so while sitting on a toilet with a pitcher of martinis in hand.) In fact, LSD might be little more than a laboratory curiosity today if the CIA hadn’t tested it so widely. It’s one of the twentieth century’s great ironies that this straitlaced, ultraconservative agency inadvertently spawned the counterculture drug movement of the 1960s. The Grateful Dead were as much a child of the Cold War as fallout shelters were.
