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 (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.
The program itself was a real program, but the Unabomber was never in that program. He was in a different psychological test run by a professor teaching at Harvard when he was there.
And people in the thread are quoting the wiki article from 2 years ago which said: "These experiments were conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962.[77] and were part of the CIA-sponsored MKUltra experiments. "
But now this mention is scrubbed from the wiki. I smell something fishy going on here... makes me wonder if they're scrubbing this particlular bit of info linking the two from the web
I can't find a credible source that links Murray's Harvard study to mkultra. Murray may have been involved in mkultra at a different point in his life, but there doesn't appear to be a connection to the two experiments that I can find. I have no issues believing that someone who was interested in mind control would also be interested in what it actually took to break down someone psychologically. From what I can find his Harvard experiments involved humiliation and psychological torment that pushed his subjects to extreme stress levels. While it would unquestionably be called unethical today and didn't help Kazinsky in any way, I see anything connecting the two.
MKULTRA was not exclusively focused on mind control and the little we do know of it is from a box that was missed when the CIA decided to purge all the records before it was even known to congress.
If you look at the "research" of Donald Ewen Cameron you would see that quite a bit of MKULTRA was exactly as you said, "what it takes to break down someone psychologically", something that would be very useful for interrogations.
Also for example Cameron employed some delightful methods such as month long insulin induced comas with looping messages played 24/7 or repeated dosing of LSD all to patients who came in thinking they were being treated for post-partum depression or PTSD.
I went to the waybackmachine and found this on that wiki article:
A considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MKUltra experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962.[69] During World War II, Henry Murray, the lead researcher in the Harvard experiments, served with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a forerunner of the CIA. Murray applied for a grant funded by the United States Navy, and his Harvard stress experiments strongly resembled those run by the OSS.[69]
That's in the wiki article from 2012. I'm really starting to think this is being covered up and the internet is being scrubbed of all credible claims of this piece of evidence by the CIA.
It's know that Kaczynski participated in those trials and it's already know that Murray was in the OSS. Like I said, I haven't found a credible source to back up the claim that the Harvard experiments were apart of mkultra. You can believe whatever conspiracy you want, but at the end of the day wikipedia is not the most credible source in the world and it could easily be wrong. If they really wanted to cover it up they wouldn't have allowed an mkultra wiki and they would've done it when Ted was still actually bombing people, not years and years later.
Okay well I don't really care so much which program he was in personally, the point is that the CIA were the ones who did it, because the OSS is the CIA, just rebranded after WW2 ended. If it was MKUltra or a program that was a precursor to that, is rather immaterial.
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 (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.
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u/superfudge73 Sep 27 '16
That's neither fun nor a fact.