Jeremy Kuzmarov
Netflix has revived public interest in the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski (1942-2023), a one-time mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, who killed three people and injured 23 in a mail-bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 targeting people he thought were destroying society and the environment through use of modern technology.
Kaczynski was a victim of the CIA’s Operation MK-ULTRA program as a Harvard University undergraduate student in the late 1950s, where he was subjected to mock interrogations and abusive attacks under the direction of Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, who worked for the CIA.
Russell Crowe plays Dr. Murray in the Netflix film about Kaczynski called Unabomber. Described by Timothy Leary as “the wizard of personality assessment,” Murray was the long-time director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic going back to the late 1920s, who wrote a classic psychology text on personality and provided a personality assessment of Adolf Hitler when he was working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.[1]
Co-founder of the humanistic psychology discipline dedicated to expanding human potential that gave birth to alternative therapies in the 1960s and 1970s, Murray also monitored military experiments on truth-drug brainwashing and interrogation when he was with the OSS.[2]
In the early 1960s, Murray approved CIA asset Timothy Leary’s appointment to the Harvard faculty and psilocybin and LSD research projects, which entailed performing drug tests on Harvard students. The testing was an offshoot of the MK-ULTRA program which aimed to further the use of LSD and other mind-enhancing drugs as a mechanism of social control.[3]
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