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2026-06-13 2026-10-12 Harvard University
Harvard
Harvard College
Organization
AcademicInstitution
CIA
MKULTRA
ColdWar
TimothyLeary
HenryMurray
CenterForInternationalAffairs
HarvardInternationalSeminar
JeffreyEpstein
ProgramForEvolutionaryDynamics
Private Organization Harvard University is a Cambridge research university whose psychologists, centers and programs appear in the record of CIA conduit funding, MKULTRA research and the Jeffrey Epstein donations. 1636 Cambridge, Massachusetts
type with reverse role fn
employed_by Henry Murray true professor of psychology 1
type with reverse role start end fn
employed_by Timothy Leary true lecturer on clinical psychology, Center for Research in Personality 1959 1963 6
type with reverse role end fn
employed_by Richard Alpert true assistant professor of clinical psychology and of education, appointment terminated 1963-05-27 7
type with reverse role fn
employed_by William Yandell Elliott true professor of government 26
type with reverse role fn
employed_by Martin Nowak true professor of mathematics and biology, director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics 34
type with reverse role start end fn
funded Jeffrey Epstein true gifts of about 9.1 million dollars, 1998 to 2008, per the 2020 Harvard review 1998 2008 32
type with reverse role start end fn
funded Central Intelligence Agency true CIA conduit foundations channeled 456,000 dollars into the University, 1960 to 1966, per the Doermann faculty report 1960 1966 22
type with reverse role start fn
employed_by Clyde Kluckhohn true director of the Russian Research Center and of the Project on the Soviet Social System 1949 18
type with reverse role start fn
funded Carnegie Corporation of New York true seed money for the Russian Research Center 1948 16
type with role start fn
contractor_to Human Resources Research Institute Russian Research Center contract AF 33(038)-12909 for the Project on the Soviet Social System 1950 19
type with reverse role fn
employed_by Martin Orne true Medical School researcher, Studies in Hypnosis Project funded through the CIA's Human Ecology Fund 12
type with reverse role start fn
employed_by Stephen Kosslyn true chair of the Psychology Department, 2005, recommended Epstein's Visiting Fellow appointment 2005 32
type with role start fn
participant_in Project MKUltra two research projects with Harvard involvement, disclosed by the University in October 1977 1977-10 10

Harvard University is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636 and the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Its psychologists, research centers and visiting programs recur in the documented record of Central Intelligence Agency behavioral research, CIA conduit funding and the donations of Jeffrey Epstein.

Henry Murray and the OSS Assessment

The Harvard psychologist Henry Murray served as a lieutenant colonel in the Office of Strategic Services. The assessment staff of the OSS wrote that the idea of a psychological-psychiatric assessment unit was presented at an executive staff meeting of William J. Donovan in October 1943, that Murray and Donald K. Adams were invited as consultants to a two-day conference at a secluded intelligence briefing area known as The Farm, and that Murray was one of the six-member task force that received the first group of assessees at Station S, a country estate forty minutes outside Washington equipped to set up stressful situations to test the candidates. Harvard faculty on the assessment staff list included Murray, O. H. Mowrer, James G. Miller and Harvey A. Robinson. In the spring of 1945 Murray took part in the assessment of about 800 Chinese recruits for paratroop-commando units at Kunming.1

John Marks wrote that Donovan called in Murray to devise a system for testing the suitability of applicants to the OSS.2 Alston Chase added that Murray, according to Timothy Leary, also monitored military brainwashing experiments during the war.2

The Murray Stress Experiments and Ted Kaczynski

Chase wrote in The Atlantic in June 2000 that from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962 Harvard psychologists led by Murray conducted an experiment on twenty-two undergraduates in a house known as the Annex, then used by the Department of Social Relations as a laboratory for research on human subjects. The subjects were identified by code name. According to Chase, one of them, code-named "Lawful," was Ted Kaczynski, who had entered Harvard College in the fall of 1958 at the age of sixteen and later became the Unabomber.2

Chase described the procedure as a staged debate: each student was told he would debate his philosophy of life with another student, was seated in a brightly lit room before a one-way mirror with a motion-picture camera recording his expressions, and had electrodes attached to record heart and respiratory rates, while the opponent was a prepared confederate who attacked him. Chase quoted the participants' later recollections, including one code-named Cringle, who described "getting hit real hard" under the lights. Chase wrote that he first learned of the experiment from Kaczynski, with whom he corresponded from July 1998, that he found no evidence that LSD was used in the research, and that whether the research had a defense connection of some kind remained an open question.23

Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and the Psilocybin Project

The lecturer Timothy Leary and the assistant professor Richard Alpert worked at the Center for Research in Personality. Marks and Lee and Shlain each describe the project Leary founded in 1960 to give Psilocybin and later LSD to graduate students, prisoners and volunteers, set against the CIA's search for drugs that could be used in interrogation and behavioral work.45 Chase, citing Lee and Shlain, wrote that Leary established the psilocybin project with the approval of Murray, then chairman of the Department of Social Relations, and that Murray took a psilocybin session himself.2

Faculty concern about the program began in March 1962, when members of the Center for Research in Personality charged at a closed meeting that the drug experiments were being conducted in an unscientific and irresponsible manner. The Harvard Crimson reported in February 1963 that Leary had left the University for Mexico to establish a headquarters there.67 On May 27, 1963 Nathan Pusey, the University president, announced that the Corporation had terminated Alpert's appointment for giving hallucinogenic drugs to an undergraduate. Leary was relieved of his teaching duties and his salary was suspended for absenting himself from the University without permission.7 In March 1963 Leary told a radio audience that consciousness-expanding drugs should be available to anyone who seriously wanted to study them, citing experiments with more than 400 individuals, over 66 per cent of whom in his account recorded positive changes.8 Undergraduates signed a letter to President Pusey and the Corporation protesting the dismissal.9

The Two MKULTRA Projects

In October 1977 University officials disclosed that CIA financial records showed Harvard involvement in two research projects conducted under Project MKUltra.10 The University's general counsel, Daniel Steiner, said the two projects involved no drug experimentation and declined to name the individuals who took part or the nature of their relationship to the University.10 The Crimson noted that the disclosure came the week after Stanford University made its own extensive disclosure of MKULTRA connections.11

In late January 1978 a University statement outlined Harvard's involvement in the CIA funding of an unidentified investigator. On February 1, 1978 Martin Orne, then professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, identified himself as that investigator. Orne said the members of his Studies in Hypnosis Project at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center had unwittingly received approximately $30,000 from the CIA in the early 1960s through the Human Ecology Fund, a foundation established by the CIA; the project also received funds from the United States Air Force and the National Institute of Mental Health. Steiner said the University had no record of the second project mentioned in the CIA document. He had concluded in January that Orne's right to privacy outweighed the University's interest in full disclosure and the public's right to know, and asked in February whether the University would now release the CIA documents, he said he would like to think the situation over. The Crimson editorialized that the University should release the documents relating to its involvement in the MKULTRA projects.1213

Earlier in 1977 the University had issued guidelines, the first of their kind in the country by the Crimson's account, regulating faculty dealings with intelligence agencies. Steiner was a member of the committee that drafted them, and he had not released particulars of the two projects by mid-November.14 In June 1977 CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote to President Derek Bok that the guidelines could violate faculty members' rights to privacy and free association.15

The Russian Research Center, the Carnegie Corporation and the CIA

The Russian Research Center was founded at Harvard in 1948; the Carnegie Corporation of New York describes its own role as providing seed money that year.16 Sigmund Diamond wrote in his 1992 book Compromised Campus that Harvard's research for the Center was reported in a December 1947 newspaper account to be going to the State Department and other agencies, including the Central Intelligence Group, before publication.17

Diamond wrote in 1994 that on June 13, 1949 Clyde Kluckhohn, the Center's director, wrote to Provost Paul H. Buck that "in accord with previous conversations with you and Mr. Conant" he had arranged with Harrison Williams, "the head of CIA for the New England area," that a directive would be prepared requiring representatives of government agencies to clear through the Boston office of the CIA before requesting assistance from the Center. Louis Menand, replying, wrote that he did not dispute the claim of Diamond and James G. Hershberg that President James B. Conant agreed to let the CIA vet members of the Center.18

In the spring of 1950 the Center undertook the Project on the Soviet Social System under contract AF 33(038)-12909 with the Human Resources Research Institute of Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, with Kluckhohn as project director. Interviews with Soviet refugees were conducted in displaced persons camps in West Germany in 1950, and the digitized collection holds summary transcripts of 705 interviews.19

Marshall D. Shulman was an associate director of the Russian Research Center from 1954 to 1962 before he was named head of the Russian Institute at Columbia University.20

The Center for International Affairs and the Conduit Foundations

Robert R. Bowie organized the Center for International Affairs in 1958. The Crimson reported in February 1967 that the Center was then spending $761,000 on research, against $29,000 in its first year, 1958 to 1959. Foundation grants and government contracts accounted for more than 90 per cent of the funds in 1955 to 1956, when the University provided office space but no budget money.21

In April 1967 Humphrey Doermann, assigned by dean Franklin L. Ford to examine possible CIA influence, told the Faculty that CIA "conduit" foundations had channeled $456,000 into the University between 1960 and 1966. The Crimson wrote that conduit foundations, unlike "dummy" organizations, do not receive all their money from the CIA, so there was no proof that the agency's dollars reached the University, and that the aid carried no strings attached, so the government could not directly influence research or prevent publication.22

In March 1967 Edwin O. Reischauer, a trustee of the Asia Foundation, affirmed his support for the foundation after it disclosed that it had indirectly accepted money from the CIA.23 The same spring the Crimson reported that Paul Sigmund, Allston Burr Senior Tutor in Quincy House and instructor in government from 1959 to 1962, had organized in 1959 the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, renamed the Independent Research Service, and directed it from the House. The Crimson, citing Congressional Quarterly, reported that the Service received $145,000 from a CIA front, the Independent Foundation. Sigmund had also taught an International Student Relations Seminar in the Harvard Summer School in 1954, which the Crimson described as supported by CIA money that Harvard apparently did not know about, and he had worked on his Harvard doctoral thesis on a grant from the Catherwood Foundation, which Congressional Quarterly listed as a CIA "cooperator."24

Henry Kissinger and the Harvard International Seminar

Henry A. Kissinger directed the Harvard International Seminar, a summer program that brought foreign policy figures from Europe and Asia to Cambridge. Frank Donner wrote in 1980 that the seminar received funding from at least three CIA cutouts, among them the Asia Foundation, the Fairfield Foundation and American Friends of the Middle East, the last of which channeled about $243,000 to the program.25

William Yandell Elliott and the National Security Council

William Yandell Elliott was a professor of government at Harvard. The list of persons in the Foreign Relations of the United States gives his posts as Assistant Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization, 1952 to 1953, and Office of Defense Mobilization representative on the Planning Board of the National Security Council, 1953 to 1954.26 The minutes of the 146th meeting of the Council, May 27, 1953, list "W. Y. Elliott, ODM Planning Board Member," and the minutes of the 155th meeting, July 16, 1953, name William Y. Elliott as Director of the Office of Defense Mobilization.2728 In July 1959 the Crimson reported that Elliott, as Director of the Harvard Summer School, had left for Moscow with Vice President Richard Nixon and had been a member of the National Security Council planning board since 1953.29

Kenn Thomas and Len Bracken wrote in 1998 in the Steamshovel Press that Charles Marsh facilitated Marion Pettie's tie to Elliott, whom they described as a Harvard professor on the National Security Council planning board and a Radio Liberty trustee.30

Jeffrey Epstein and the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics

Harvard's Office of the General Counsel, with the firm Foley Hoag, reviewed the University's ties to Epstein; the 27-page report was released on May 1, 2020, with a letter from the vice president and general counsel, Diane Lopez. The report found that before his 2008 conviction Epstein donated $9,179,000 to support Harvard faculty and programs, in gifts made between 1998 and 2007 that typically ranged from $10,000 to $200,000, and that the University accepted no gifts from him afterward; the Crimson and Harvard Magazine gave the total as about $9.1 million. Four gifts totaling $736,000 came after his 2006 arrest. Lawrence Bacow, the University president, announced new donor guidelines in response.313233

Epstein's single largest gift, $6.5 million in 2003, created the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, directed by Martin Nowak. The report found that Epstein made more than 40 visits to the program's offices at One Brattle Square between 2010 and 2018, that Nowak had authorized proximity cards, a keypad code and a key to Office 610, which the program called "Jeffrey's Office," and that Nowak approved the posting on the program's website of flattering and false descriptions of Epstein's philanthropy. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences placed Nowak on paid administrative leave the day the report was issued.323334

The report found that Epstein held an appointment as a Visiting Fellow in the Psychology Department for 2005 to 2006, recommended by the department chair Stephen Kosslyn, to whom Epstein had donated $200,000 between 1998 and 2002 for his work; Epstein paid $10,072 in tuition and fees, the report found no evidence that he engaged with Harvard students as a Visiting Fellow, and he was readmitted in February 2006 for 2006 to 2007 and withdrew in September 2006, after his arrest, at the University's request.3235 A November 2008 email from Kosslyn, then Divisional Dean for Social Sciences, written after he spoke with the Mathematics Department chair Benedict Gross, stated: "If [President] Drew [Faust] weren't opposed to taking JEE's money, there wouldn't be a problem . . . but she is," a reference to President Drew Faust.35 After 2008 Epstein helped steer money to Harvard faculty: WBUR reported that the report found he "facilitated" $7 million in gifts from Leon Black to Nowak and, in 2015, a $2 million gift from Black for George Church; the Globe reported that donors Epstein introduced to Nowak and Church provided $7.5 million and $2 million between 2010 and 2015, and the donors denied that Epstein directed their gifts.3336 The report's table of unrestricted gifts to Nowak that he said Epstein helped him obtain lists $500,000 from the Falconwood Foundation on September 10, 2010, $2,000,000 from Leon and Debra Black on November 22, 2011, $4,000,000 from Leon and Debra Black on December 29, 2014, and $1,000,000 from the Black Family Foundation on October 30, 2015, and the report states that Nowak "acknowledged that Epstein played a role in helping" obtain them. The report found it likely that Epstein visited the program's offices more than 40 times between 2010 and 2018, and its table of visits by year for 2010 through 2018 reads 4, 5, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 5 and 6 (46 in all); the visits ended after program researchers complained to Nowak.35

Footnotes

  1. OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel for the Office of Strategic Services (New York: Rinehart, 1948), staff list and chapters on the origin and organization of the program and on the Station S and overseas assessments. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/z9va5p3c ↩︎

  2. Chase, Alston, "Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber," The Atlantic Monthly, June 2000, quoting Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979), and Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams (1985). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/378239/ ↩︎

  3. Chase, Alston. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist. W. W. Norton, 2003. ↩︎

  4. Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. Times Books, 1979. ↩︎

  5. Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Grove Press, 1985. ↩︎

  6. "Drugs and the University," The Harvard Crimson, February 14, 1963. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/2/14/drugs-and-the-university-pthe-experiments/ ↩︎

  7. "Psilocybin, Senate Race Highlight Harvard Year," The Harvard Crimson, July 9, 1963. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/7/9/psilocybin-senate-race-highlight-harvard-year/ ↩︎

  8. "Leary Advocates Wide Availability Of Consciousness-Expanding Drugs," The Harvard Crimson, March 19, 1963. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/3/19/leary-advocates-wide-availability-of-consciousness-expanding/ ↩︎

  9. "Undergraduates Protest Decision to Fire Alpert," The Harvard Crimson, May 31, 1963. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1963/5/31/undergraduates-protest-decision-to-fire-alpert/ ↩︎

  10. "A CIA Test Tube," The Harvard Crimson, October 1, 1977. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1977/10/1/a-cia-test-tube-padd-harvard/ ↩︎

  11. "Harvard and the CIA," The Harvard Crimson, October 5, 1977. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1977/10/5/harvard-and-the-cia-peach-year/ ↩︎

  12. "CIA Grants Funded Hypnosis Research," The Harvard Crimson, February 2, 1978. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1978/2/2/cia-grants-funded-hypnosis-research-pthe/ ↩︎

  13. "Harvard And the CIA Continued," The Harvard Crimson, February 11, 1978. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1978/2/11/harvard-and-the-cia-continued-pbabnother/ ↩︎

  14. "Harvard and the CIA," The Harvard Crimson, November 17, 1977. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1977/11/17/harvard-and-the-cia-pbwbhen-the/ ↩︎

  15. "Harvard: A Threat To Privacy," The Harvard Crimson, December 3, 1977. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1977/12/3/harvard-a-threat-to-privacy-pcia/ ↩︎

  16. "Throwback Thursday: Back in the USSR," Carnegie Corporation of New York. https://www.carnegie.org/article/throwback-thursday-back-in-the-ussr/ ↩︎

  17. Diamond, Sigmund. Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945-1955. Oxford University Press, 1992, chapter "The Russian Research Center, 2: Scholarship and Intelligence." https://academic.oup.com/book/47341/chapter/422336543 ↩︎

  18. Diamond, Sigmund, letter in "Conant & the FBI," with reply by Louis Menand, The New York Review of Books, October 20, 1994, quoting Kluckhohn to Buck, June 13, 1949. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1994/10/20/conant-the-fbi/ ↩︎

  19. "Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System," Harvard Library research guide (705 interviews). https://library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/static/collections/hpsss/about.html ; Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System schedules, project director C. Kluckhohn, contract AF 33(038)-12909. https://sites.harvard.edu/martin11/the-harvard-project-on-the-soviet-social-system ↩︎

  20. "Shulman Named Head Of Russian Institute," The Harvard Crimson, April 15, 1967. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/4/15/shulman-named-head-of-russian-institute/ ↩︎

  21. "Harvard's International Affairs Center: New Emphasis Towards Research Projects," The Harvard Crimson, February 6, 1967. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/2/6/harvards-international-affairs-center-new-emphasis/ ↩︎

  22. "CIA Financial Links," The Harvard Crimson, April 15, 1967. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/4/15/cia-financial-links-phumphrey-doermanns-report/ ↩︎

  23. "Reischauer Calls Asia Fund Valid," The Harvard Crimson, March 25, 1967. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/3/25/reischauer-calls-asia-fund-valid-pedwin/ ↩︎

  24. "Former Quincy Senior Tutor Directed CIA-Supported Group from House," The Harvard Crimson, March 15, 1967. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1967/3/15/former-quincy-senior-tutor-directed-cia-supported/ ↩︎

  25. Donner, Frank. The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System. Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 312 to 315. ↩︎

  26. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. II, part 1, list of persons, entry "Elliott, William Y." https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1 ↩︎

  27. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. II, part 2, doc. 90, minutes of the 146th meeting of the National Security Council, May 27, 1953. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p2/d90 ↩︎

  28. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, vol. II, part 1, doc. 79, minutes of the 155th meeting of the National Security Council, July 16, 1953. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d79 ↩︎

  29. "Elliott Flies to Moscow With Nixon's Mission," The Harvard Crimson, July 23, 1959. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1959/7/23/elliott-flies-to-moscow-with-nixons/ ↩︎

  30. Thomas, Kenn, and Len Bracken, "The Finders' Keeper," Steamshovel Press no. 16, 1998. ↩︎

  31. "Harvard Asked Its Lawyers to Review the University's Ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Here's What They Found," The Harvard Crimson, May 2, 2020. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/5/2/harvard-concludes-epstein-review/ ↩︎

  32. Rosenberg, John S., "Harvard Reports Jeffrey Epstein Gifts," Harvard Magazine, May 1, 2020, quoting the Office of the General Counsel report and the Lopez letter to President Bacow. https://www.harvardmagazine.com/print/71335 ↩︎

  33. "7 things to know about the report on Jeffrey Epstein's ties to Harvard," The Boston Globe, May 1, 2020. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/05/01/metro/7-things-know-about-report-jeffrey-epsteins-ties-harvard ↩︎

  34. "FAS Places Prof. Nowak On Leave After Report Finds Epstein Used His Program to Rehabilitate Image," The Harvard Crimson, May 2, 2020. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/5/2/epstein-review-nowak-leave/ ↩︎

  35. Office of the General Counsel, Harvard University (Diane E. Lopez, Ara B. Gershengorn and Martin F. Murphy, Foley Hoag), "Report Concerning Jeffrey E. Epstein's Connections to Harvard University," May 2020, pp. 3-4, 10-11, 13, 18. https://ogc.harvard.edu/file_url/208 ↩︎

  36. Larkin, Max, "Even On Black List, Epstein Maintained A Presence At Harvard, Investigation Finds," WBUR, May 1, 2020. https://www.wbur.org/news/2020/05/01/epstein-harvard-report ↩︎