During his second year at Harvard, Professor Henry Murray recruited the eager teen for a psychology experiment. The 3-year-long ordeal, designed to measure reaction to psychological torture, was part of the CIA’s MK-Ultra program. It was, in Murray’s own words, “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive.” Harvard dorm mates recall Kaczynski rocking while doing his homework. He made no friends and didn’t earn particularly high grades.
Harvard alumnus, and fellow lapsed academic, Alston Chase compellingly argued that it was at Harvard where the future Unabomber was made. In the post-World War II years, the Ivy League school adopted the General Education Curriculum that replaced moral education with positivist teachings that comforted students in the knowledge that science is a liberating force that will eventually yield a full understanding of nature. The optimist outlook was only challenged by a post-Hiroshima distrust of technology which Kaczynski eventually adopted. On top of it, the victimhood of the Murray experiment crystallized the grudges of his awkward childhood.
After Harvard, Kaczynski went on to graduate school at Ann Arbor, and then a professorship at Berkeley. Having developed a fantasy of living as a revolutionary agitator, the young mathematician, who took no part in the late sixties riotous Berkeley culture, quit his job and bought a cabin in the Montana wilderness.
Although there is ample evidence of him expressing interest in women, Kaczynski had few dates in his life. On rare occasions when he wasn’t rebuked, he sabotaged the relationship. As a teen, he broke up with a girl over her religious devotion, something that Kaczynski, being brought up by politically progressive lapsed Catholics, found exasperating. Or, as his brother David Kaczynski speculated, he fled an emotional connection.
Based in Montana, the former academic attended an Earth First summit, sabotaged logging equipment, and, in 1978, launched a campaign of terror. In the best tradition of sixties radicalism, he sent 16 bombs in 18 years, murdering three people and injuring 23. His first victims were acquaintances from Northwestern University, guilty of being insufficiently awed by the angry white man’s insights in sociology, and airlines which, in the bomber’s opinion, polluted the Earth. The FBI nicknamed him the “Unabomber”—universities and airline bomber. He later expanded his terror operations to the logging, computer, and advertising industries.
Kaczynski paused the bombings in 1987 after a woman spotted him planting a device, enabling the FBI to produce the iconic Unabomber sketch, sporting a hoodie and aviator sunglasses. The terrorist felt exposed at the time but resumed his campaign in 1993, inspired by al-Qaeda’s first World Trade Center bombing.
In 1995, Kaczynski offered to halt the violence if the New York Times and the Washington Post would publish his 35,000 word essay Industrial Society and Its Future. The work that became popularly known as The Unabomber Manifesto was run as a special supplement to the Post and immediately received accolades in the mainstream media.
The Manifesto asserted that industrialization has been a disaster to humanity, turning humanity into slaves who fill their days with meaningless “surrogate” activities. Because a peaceful return to nature was impossible, Kaczynski called to destabilize society, with the goal of fomenting a worldwide anti-industrial revolution.
