by Sam Kean
MK-ULTRA was eventually shuttered for lack of results, and a later director of the CIA ordered all files related to it destroyed. As a result, the full extent of the program remains murky. But at least 185 scientists at 86 institutions took part, and the CIA actively recruited psychologists with low moral standards. One’s personnel file read, “His ethics are such that he would be completely cooperative.”
Much of the research that the CIA sponsored focused on stress—both the causes of stress and the strategies people used to cope with it. In isolation, this work was worthwhile: it helped people deal with tension and anxiety in their lives. But the CIA took these results and twisted them. Once its analysts understood what caused stress, they suddenly had a blueprint for inducing it in POWs and spies, to wring supposed secrets out of them. Similarly, if analysts knew how people coped with stress, they could undermine those coping mechanisms and ratchet up the pressure even more. In its way, the strategy was fiendishly clever: academic psychologists did the work, while the CIA reaped the benefits.
It’s at this point that the CIA’s interests and Henry Murray’s interests converged. To be clear, despite speculation among historians and conspiracy theorists, there’s no hard evidence that Murray ever participated in MK-ULTRA or any other CIA program. That said, so many files were destroyed, and the work was so secretive in the first place, that the lack of paper records proves nothing. Murray certainly shared the CIA’s interest in interrogations. He’d worked for the agency’s predecessor on that topic, and the counterculture psychologist Timothy Leary—a colleague of Murray’s at Harvard—explicitly said that Murray directed military experiments on brainwashing for OSS. So even if Murray never took a dime from the CIA, he was part of its milieu and shared its mentality.
In fact, Murray’s interest in interrogation was arguably even darker and more cynical than the CIA’s. However misguided, CIA analysts sincerely believed they could elicit good intelligence through torture and use that information to save the world. Murray was no doubt happy to help with that, but he mostly just wanted to brutalize people and see what the hell happened. Specifically, he theorized that by attacking people’s core values and exposing those values as meaningless, he could disorient and break them—at which point, they’d be susceptible to psychological manipulation. To that end, Murray inaugurated a study in the fall of 1959 on psychological abuse in what he called “gifted college men,” men like Ted Kaczynski.
If the U.S. government abused psychological science during the Cold War, it’s only fair to note that the Soviet Union did as well, albeit in different ways. Rather than pursue brainwashing (which they knew was bunk), the Soviets used psychology to discredit political activists and lock them away without trials.
The system worked like this. Whenever the KGB arrested a dissident—someone who just wouldn’t shut up about civil rights, or religious freedom, or abuse of power—agents would haul him or her into a mental institution. Several such institutions had KGB members on their boards, and staff psychiatrists would dutifully condemn the dissidents as insane and lock them up. The most common diagnosis was “sluggish schizophrenia,” a mythical, slow-acting form of schizophrenia whose symptoms included “reform delusions,” “a struggle for the truth,” “perseverance,” and, oddly, an affinity for abstract or surreal art. From the KGB’s point of view, declaring dissidents insane had several advantages. Authorities could avoid a trial, where messy secrets might emerge. The label also smeared dissidents as mentally ill, and stigmatized their followers as equally crazy. Between the 1950s and 1980s, thousands of people disappeared into the Soviet psychiatric Gulag, where they were often drugged to keep them docile.
To be sure, some Russian psychiatrists condemned people to asylums out of mercy: their patients likely would have been executed if they hadn’t been declared crazy. But most psychiatrists enthusiastically supported the KGB. Rather than the Hippocratic oath, doctors in the Soviet Union swore a special pledge to serve the Communist Party first, and they took this oath seriously. As one of them put it, doctors there “knew when to put down the stethoscope and take up the pistol.” They’d also been indoctrinated to view the Soviet Union as a workers’ paradise, the greatest state in world history. Defiance toward it was therefore an ipso facto sign of derangement—who else but a crazy person would oppose heaven? Some Soviet psychiatrists even mourned the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev, who seemed obviously schizophrenic to them. After all, didn’t Gorbachev agitate for political reform? Didn’t he natter endlessly about human rights? Only after the Soviet Union collapsed did they realize just how skewed their perspective had been.
Still, the Soviet Union was hardly alone in abusing psychology for political ends. At different points in the twentieth century, Romania, Cuba, South Africa, and Holland were all accused of similar misdeeds. The biggest culprit today is China, which has been cracking down on Falun Gong since 1999 in part by declaring it an “evil cult–induced mental disorder.” One woman’s case report condemned her for “flagrantly telling everyone how much she was benefiting from her practice of Falun Gong.” Similarly, a male adherent was locked up for “giving people valuable presents for no reason.” The nerve!
Sadly, suppressing dissent this way can be effective. Dissidents who are jailed in traditional prisons have a way of becoming martyrs. Dissidents jailed in psychiatric hospitals don’t: people hesitate to voice support for someone who’s deemed crazy, lest friends and loved ones start to look askance at them, too. However abusive, there is a certain logic to this system.
In contrast, the American government’s abuse of psychology was anything but logical. In particular, experiments with LSD and other “truth serums” were poorly thought out and lacked any semblance of consistency. Doses ranged from minuscule hits to more than ten times a typical street dose, and there was so much secrecy surrounding the compounds that even the doctors involved often had no idea what they were injecting people with. (As one said, “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what.”) And the human cost was real. One drugged U.S. marshal robbed a bar with a gun while high. Other experiments killed people or drove them to suicide.
The Harvard research into brutal interrogation methods betrayed a similar indifference to people’s welfare. To be sure, there’s no evidence that Henry Murray actively set out to harm Ted Kaczynski or the other gifted young men. At the same time, Murray didn’t seem to care much if he did.
As a boy growing up in Chicago, Ted Kaczynski was a strange mix of overly sensitive and overly rational. One summer, Kaczynski’s father trapped a baby rabbit in their backyard using a wooden cage. The rabbit was unharmed, but as Kaczynski’s brother and other boys gathered around to gawk, it naturally began to tremble. This was completely intolerable to Ted. As soon as he arrived on the scene, he began shrieking at them to let the bunny go—let the bunny go! He wouldn’t stop screaming until his father did.
At the same time, Kaczynski could be logical to the point of cruelty. One day his brother David was flipping through some baseball cards on the grass with a friend when the friend asked who David’s favorite player was. David was too embarrassed to admit that he knew nothing about baseball, so he peeked down at the cards and blurted out the first name he saw. To his relief, the friend also liked the player. All in all, a harmless childhood fib. But when David returned home and announced to Ted who his new favorite player was, his older brother started grilling him. When had he started liking that player? Why did he like him so much? A deflated David couldn’t say. “I should have known,” he later sighed, “that Teddy would request a reason. All opinions… should be based on reasoning.” Another time, David said to Ted, “Aren’t we lucky we have the best parents in the world?” Kaczynski shot back, “You can’t prove that.”
Still, David more or less worshipped Ted, who was equally brilliant in both math and music. As David once said, “I couldn’t tell if my brother was going to be the next Einstein or the next Bach.”
Ted’s parents were less optimistic abou
t the boy’s future; there was just something off about him. As a child, Kaczynski refused to hug people back—he always squirmed whenever people wrapped their arms around him. He also struggled to make friends. Even when his mother bribed other children with lemonade and cookies to come over and play with him, Kaczynski showed little interest. Things got even worse when he took an IQ test in fifth grade. He scored 167, and his principal recommended skipping him ahead a year in school. His parents didn’t realize that uprooting an already small and awkward boy and planting him among older children would further isolate him, and they did as the principal said.
Now, plenty of loners grow up to be healthy, functioning adults. And Kaczynski did make a few friends in school and did take part in social activities like band (he played trombone). He wasn’t a complete loner, then. But his parents, Turk and Wanda, fretted constantly over his lack of popularity and even bullied him about it, calling him “sick” and “immature” and “emotionally disturbed” for not dating or joining boy scouts. The words scarred Ted. Turk and Wanda then compounded their earlier error by having him skip his junior year of high school as well. Because he had a May birthday, he was now two-plus years younger than most of his classmates.2
At age fifteen, Kaczynski won admission to Harvard. It should have been a proud moment, but his band teacher begged Turk not to let the boy enroll there. However smart, the teacher argued, Ted simply wasn’t ready emotionally for such a pressure cooker of a school. Equally bad, Kaczynski would never fit in there socially. Turk made sausages for a living at his uncle’s shop near the Chicago stockyards, a livelihood that your typical Harvard lad—the scion of a banker or senator—would scorn. The teacher argued that nearby Oberlin College, which also had a strong music program, seemed a better fit. Turk wouldn’t hear of it. Despite his menial job, he was a proud man who read voraciously, and he wanted the best for his son. Harvard it was.
Theodore Kaczynski, the future Unabomber, as a young man.
Family photo of, respectively, Kaczynski, his father, Turk, and his brother, David. (Courtesy of the U.S. Marshals.)
To be fair, in sending Kaczynski to Harvard, his parents had more in mind than just their own pride. They’d all but given up on Ted fitting in at his high school. As psychologists have documented, people with genius IQs often have trouble relating to peers, since their brains simply work differently. (Kaczynski refused to play with the boys in his neighborhood in part because he found them moronic.) But at Harvard, his parents reasoned, Ted would finally meet people on his own level. He would make friends at last and settle into a normal life.
If only. For Kaczynski’s freshman year, a well-meaning dean placed him in a small dorm full of similar students: high achievers from atypical Harvard families. In theory, this common background would help them make friends with each other. In practice, the building contained mostly other misfits who also had trouble socializing. It turned into what one historian called a “ghetto for grinds.” Again, Kaczynski did make a few friends at Harvard; he wasn’t completely alone. Harvard, though, was no less forgiving of poverty in the 1950s than it had been in John White Webster’s day in the mid-1800s. Appearances mattered, and Kaczynski’s awkward manner and threadbare clothing marked him as a loser.
Kaczynski first made the acquaintance of Henry Murray during his sophomore year. At the time Murray was using a psychology course on campus to recruit students for his study on abusive interrogation. Not that he described it that way. On the recruitment fliers he hung, he styled the research, blandly, as a chance “to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems.” Kaczynski didn’t take the course, so it’s not clear how he and Murray met. Perhaps Kaczynski saw a flier in passing and volunteered, or perhaps Murray became aware of the young grind and recruited him. Regardless, a preliminary screening identified “Lawful” as the most alienated youth in the cohort, which apparently gave Murray no pause.
Because Kaczynski was only seventeen then, a minor, Murray had to write to his parents in Chicago and get their permission to enroll him in the study. Poignantly, Wanda Kaczynski didn’t quite grasp what she was getting her son into. All she understood was that Teddy still wasn’t making friends, even at Harvard, and that maybe the nice psychologist in the letter could help her boy with his troubles. She signed him right up.
The other students signed their own consent forms, which were every bit as deceitful as the fliers. Murray first asked them to write up their “personal philosophy of life… the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live.” He then claimed that they’d be engaging in a friendly debate about these philosophies with another student—failing to mention that the “student” was really a lawyer he’d coached to be aggressive and cruel. As one of the interrogees said, “I remember being shocked by the severity of the attack.”
Lying to his subjects was already a violation of the Nuremberg Code for ethical research, but Murray wasn’t done there. He also concealed the true purpose of the experiments, and no wonder: The goal was essentially to shatter the young men. In fact, while the Code aims to minimize suffering during research, the whole point of Murray’s study was to produce anguish. Finally, while Murray did allow the students to drop out of the study if they wanted, he employed every bit of his considerable charm and authority to keep them enrolled—effectively coercing them by claiming that their leaving the study would destroy it.
True to his nickname, Lawful proved one of the more dutiful subjects, enduring more than 200 hours of abuse over three years—including one session, per the imagined scene above, where the lawyer made fun of his fledgling beard. Kaczynski later called the study “the worst experience of my life,” but he persisted in coming back week after week for several reasons. One was cussedness. “I wanted to prove I could take it,” he once said, “that I couldn’t be broken.” He also did so, one historian speculated, because Murray paid the students and the blue-collar Kaczynski needed the cash.
Depending on your point of view, what Murray did to Kaczynski might not rise to the level of torture. After all, he never laid a finger on the boy, nor threatened him or his loved ones. But there’s no question Kaczynski suffered at Murray’s hands, suffered terribly—both his later recollections and his reactions at the time (e.g., his racing heart) testify to that. What’s more, if we can extrapolate from the experience of torture victims to Kaczynski’s experience, the type of suffering he endured must have been particularly painful. Those who suffer for a cause they believe in tend to bounce back more readily after their plight. This is referred to as the Joan of Arc phenomenon: their suffering is noble, and their torture anneals them. In contrast, those picked out at random for abuse, or those caught up in a crusade they didn’t choose, tend to suffer more deeply and often struggle to rebound. There’s no story they can tell themselves, no noble cause that acts as a balm. Torture degrades them.
Now, it’s too reductive to say that the Murray experiment “made” Kaczynski into the Unabomber. After all, twenty-one other students endured the same abuse, and none of them went on to build a shack in Montana and mail bombs to people. As Murray would have been the first to point out, individuals are complicated and idiosyncratic, and causes and effects are rarely straightforward. Along those same lines, it’s also too simplistic to ascribe Kaczynski’s violence to “bad genes” or growing up in a “bad home.”
It is, however, plausible to talk about a combination of bad genes and bad experiences as a trigger for violence. For example, consider the MAOA gene on the X chromosome. This gene produces a protein that helps break down neurotransmitters in the brain. Different versions of the gene break down neurotransmitters at different rates, and the presence or absence of different neurotransmitters can affect our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. This is relevant because people born with certain versions of MAOA are far more likely to be violent and show antisocial behavior—but only if they suffer abuse or neglect as children. If they don’t suffer abuse or neglect, they’re normal.
You need both the bad gene and the bad experience to see the effect.
Now, in the absence of genetic testing, we can only speculate about Kaczynski’s DNA. But he was clearly high-strung as a child, even hysterical (recall the rabbit). On top of that, he grew up in a dysfunctional home where his parents called him “sick” for not making friends and where he faced impossible-to-reconcile pressures to both excel academically and yet be perfectly normal socially. Frankly, his genius probably didn’t help him, either. Many gifted people are psychologically fragile. They’re like orchids, which can blossom if cultivated with care, but often wilt in adverse circumstances. If Kaczynski was indeed vulnerable to mental illness, his home and school life probably compounded his problems.
