Tonight I watched another two episodes of "Manhunt : Unabomber". Before I talk about it, I wanna correct two mistakes I made concerning the details of the case and of his life. I think I said that his so-called "Manifesto" was published in the New York Times. It was not. The Washington Post was the paper that published it, and for a specific reason that is revealed in the show. My other error was in stating that Kaczynski was a professor at Harvard. He did go to Harvard as a student, entering the university at age 16, but it was at Berkeley that he was briefly a professor before dropping out of society. What I did not know, but what the miniseries reveals - and I was stunned to learn - was that Ted Kaczynski was an unwitting participant in horrific MKUltra psychological experiments that took place at Harvard in the 1950s, involving electroshock "therapy". He was 16 years old when this happened to him, and it was made possible because a) his high IQ level singled him out as a prime subject for testing, and b) his mother, unbeknownst to him, had signed a release form okaying the "experiment", which no doubt was not explained to her in any honest way.
This was the CIA, once again, of the Allen Dulles era, and as this television show makes clear, they more or less created, or certainly helped to create, the Unabomber, who so resented the experiments undertaken upon him as a teenager that he eventually dropped out of society and ended up mailing bombs to professors and other people employed in technological professions.
To be clear on my part, he is 100% guilty of his crimes, and I in no way sympathise with him for being in prison for the rest of his life. But as we see in the show, it's not that simple. Even the FBI profiler working at the forefront of the case knows that it's not that simple.
And it's not that simple because : how might Ted Kaczynski's life have turned out had the CIA never had an MKUltra program, had never chosen him (and others) with high IQ levels to be experimental subjects, and had not subjected him to the psychological cruelties depicted in the movie?
How might his life have turned out? Would he have ended up mailing bombs to people?
To be fair, it is shown in the program that he knew chemistry even as a young teenager and he used this knowledge to construct a small explosive envelope that he passed to a friend in a school classroom. The friend had thrown rocks at him and hit him in the head. Kaczynski wanted to "get him back" and created a minor explosive device, a folded paper message that blew up when the friend opened it. In the movie, it creates a small explosion that causes cuts and bruising to the friend's face. So the eventual Unabomber knew, even as an adolescent, how to make explosives, and to use them for revenge.
Along with his high IQ, he likely also had Asperger's Syndrome, which made him anti-social and withdrawn.
But even with that background, as a socially maladjusted youth with a one-time act of violent revenge in his past, would he still have turned into the Unabomber, if not for the truly cruel and unusual experiments he endured at Harvard, over an 18 month period?
In lieu of an answer, we can ask another question : would Sirhan Sirhan have wound up shooting at Robert Kennedy had he not been subject to MKUltra techniques? In Sirhan's case it cannot currently be proven that he was a subject of MKUltra because there is no documentation available, as there is with Ted Kaczynski, whose mother signed a form giving Harvard University (under the sponsorship of the CIA) the authority to experiment on her son, of whom she had stated she was "worried about" because of his withdrawn demeanor.
With Kaczynski, there is proof that he was a teenaged victim of MKUltra, which in my opinion (and likely in the opinion of the filmmakers) contributed greatly to his eventually wanting to "blow up" society. In the case of Sirhan, while there is no documented proof at this time that he was a subject of the overall MKUltra program - in his case as a passive, moderately intelligent and "gullible" personality, eligible to be created into a Manchurian Candidate (an assassin) - there is nevertheless a wealth of information uncovered by researchers over the past fifty years that leads directly to the same conclusion, that Sirhan was also a product, in a different way, a different aspect, of the same CIA program, called MKUltra.
In Ted Kaczynski's case, he was just a teenaged test subject at Harvard, taken under the wing of a math professor who tricked him into talking about his life and philosophy. You would need to see the miniseries to really understand what I am talking about, the level of deceit by the professor, who is working with the CIA scientists to try and create a method for interrogating Soviet spies, using "brainwashing" techniques, a term that was at that time newly coined.
These people in the CIA, at that time, were so diabolical, and so demonic, as to defy description.
I don't wish to offend my (hopefully) new friends at the current CIA, which I envision to be a whole new Agency long evolved from the Dulles Era, but I feel that I must still tell the truth about what I am reading in well researched books and seeing, in movies and television programs, about that era.
It was a horror show, evil beyond measure. Sorry to say, but true, 100%.
Experimentation on teenagers, and even on children. The use of electroshock, and LSD, on test subjects.
And all to try and stop the Soviets, who never matched up to the US in any way.
The threat of the Soviet Union, while serious, was way overstated.
The real threat was right here, inside the United States.
One of my Pet Peeves is that we, as a nation and as a civilised society, need in my opinion to undertake a massive study of the nature of sociopathy, and of how it relates to ego and the need for the hard core sociopath to rise up to a position of power so that he (or much less likely she) can dominate others.
This seems to be the ultimate need of the sociopath : domination.
And this domination is achieved by manipulation. By trickery. By gaining the trust of the less aggressive and socially awkward members of society and tricking them. In political matters this is achieved simply by fooling stupid people. But in more sophisticated ways, it was done by the CIA in the 1950s onward, in the MKUltra program to develop mind control.
Mind Control. Take a step back and think about that for a minute or two.
Do you think Mind Control is sinister?
I do.
I had two weeks of memories erased from my mind, by techniques used during the MKUltra era, which supposedly ended in the 1970s.
In my case, no electroshock was used, just hypnosis and drugs. But an attempt was made, to entirely remove from my memory, an event of profound importance and enormity, important not only to me but to the United States Of America as well.
In my case, I was thankfully not used as a test subject to create an interrogation protocol for Soviet spies, nor was I subject to a program to create Manchurian Candidates.
But I still have experience with brainwashing techniques. Yes I do. And I think that anyone who uses such techniques on another person is evil beyond measure.
Those techniques didn't work on me in the long run, because, after four years, I broke through the artificial amnesia that was created in me to prevent me from remembering what happened to me in 1989. I broke through what was done do me, and I am stronger for it.
It is too bad, especially for the victims of their crimes, that the same cannot be said for MKUltra subjects like Ted Kaczynski and Sirhan Sirhan. Those guys were subject to the worst possible experiments of that horrible program, and in experimenting on them, and on others, the CIA - in the Dulles era - helped create monsters like the Unabomber, and the assassin of Robert Kennedy.
And in some cases, like Sirhan, they created those monsters on purpose.
That's all I know for tonight. See you in the morning.
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