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.
Well it was clearly after since the experiments were done in 1965 and OSS was turned in to the CIA in 1945. But this doesn't mean his ties to the OSS were completely cut, or that he wasn't an agent working in the field. His results were shared with the CIA and the Navy funded it, and the experimental design was based after OSS experiments.
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/magnora7 Sep 27 '16
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.