Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

by Tom O'Neill

When it came to prosecuting the Manson Family, the Los Angeles DA’s office left nothing to chance. I’d already seen that Vincent Bugliosi had no problem getting his witnesses to lie on the stand, and that Deputy DA Buck Compton gathered intelligence on “subversives and militants.” What I found next was evidence of more pervasive, top-down interference by the DA’s office, which took extraordinary measures to control, and likely in part to fabricate, the story of the Manson murders.

If people recall any aspect of the trial, it’s usually the testimony of Linda Kasabian, the state’s star witness. She’d served as a lookout and a driver for the Family during both nights of murders. Granted immunity, Kasabian was able to describe the crimes and the inner workings of the Family in nauseating detail, clinching the case against Manson. And while many observers weren’t pleased that an accomplice to the murders would walk free, Kasabian took pains to appear more honorable than the others. She showed remorse; she emphasized that she hadn’t participated in any of the violence.

Susan Atkins’s testimony was the blueprint for the official narrative of the murders. But if it was shaped to serve the prosecution, how much of it should we believe?

First: Atkins told Howard that Sharon Tate died in her bedroom, on the bed. (Later, she was said to have died in the living room.) Second: she said the killers were tripping on LSD the night of the Tate murders. If that were true, the defense could’ve argued that they had “diminished capacity,” thus sparing them the gas chamber. Bugliosi, wanting to eliminate that possibility, made Linda Kasabian testify on multiple occasions that no one took any drugs on the nights of the murders. (In a 2009 documentary, Kasabian contradicted her testimony, saying that all the killers had taken speed on the night of the Tate murders.)

Third: Atkins said that they killed the LaBianca couple because of something to do with “blackmail,” although she couldn’t elaborate. She said she’d participated in those murders, too—she was the one who left the kitchen fork protruding from Leno LaBianca’s belly. (In the official narrative, Atkins was in the car that brought the killers to the LaBiancas’, but she never went inside the house.)

She said nothing about Helter Skelter, Manson’s race war, except to note that those words were left in blood on the LaBianca refrigerator. She made no mention, in other words, of a racist motive, black people, holes in the desert, Armageddon, or the Beatles, all of which became central to Bugliosi’s prosecution.

made no mention of Manson’s “instructing” anyone to go anywhere or kill anyone—all of which would be repeated incessantly in Atkins’s later accounts.

Why did the killers target strangers for murder? Why would previously nonviolent kids—except for Atkins, none of them had a criminal record—kill for Manson, on command, and with such abandon and lack of remorse? And if Manson hoped to ignite a world-ending race war, why didn’t he order more killings, since the two nights of murder didn’t trigger that war?

Bugliosi made a fortune and achieved worldwide fame from his prosecution of the Manson Family and Helter Skelter. Over the years, many people in law enforcement have told me that they never believed the Helter Skelter motive. Their theories were always more mundane—they would’ve made thinner gruel for Bugliosi’s book.

Many of the psychiatrists who testified said that the defendants’ minds had been so decimated by LSD that they likely had no way of discerning real memories from false ones. They may not even have known if they were at either house on the nights of the killings, let alone whether they participated in the murders.

If the murders weren’t committed to incite a race war, what was the reason?

The more I learned about Atkins’s past, though, the stranger her manipulation became to me. In the years before the Family’s rise to notoriety, the justice system afforded her a shocking amount of latitude. If anything, she’d gotten away with far too much in those years. When she was on probation, she broke the law regularly, but her arrests never put her in any further legal jeopardy. Instead, there was a pattern of catch-and-release. Whenever the police brought her in, she’d find herself cut loose within a few days. Why was law enforcement so lenient with her?

Smith may have had ulterior motives when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury. As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties.

It’s a confusing story to tell because it involves two Smiths, and they ran in the same circles—both were drug researchers with a sociological interest in the Haight-Ashbury youth scene. On top of Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, there was David Smith, no relation, the charismatic creator of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. You wouldn’t think that Manson, a chary ex-con who disdained conventional power structures, would spend a lot of time at a government-funded clinic, no matter how groovy its trappings. But Manson and the girls were at the HAFMC a lot.

The Smiths had to make it clear that they knew Manson well, and that they’d felt some sympathy toward him—there could be no denying that, given how often they’d been seen together. But the book came two years after the murders, when both men had an interest in distancing themselves from that Manson, the murderous one, the metaphor for evil. Love Needs Care attempts the delicate task of elucidating the Smiths’ relationships to Manson while making it seem as if they had no idea that he and his followers would someday erupt into unconscionable violence.

David Smith described the Family’s frequent trips to the HAFMC, where “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known around the halls, were treated for sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to. They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”

Bugliosi kept any mention of the Family’s speed use out of the trial. David thought he understood why—it risked presenting “mitigating circumstances” for the prosecution. And the defense wouldn’t want it coming up, either; no one wants his or her clients to look like addicts.

In a 2009 documentary, Linda Kasabian claimed that she and her companions each swallowed a “capsule” of speed before leaving for Cielo Drive on the night of Sharon Tate’s murder. (At the trial, she testified that she hadn’t taken any drugs around the time of the murders.) In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins also later copped to taking speed before the Tate murders. Tex

David Smith mirrored the sentiment, writing that Manson’s LSD trips replaced his “underlying depression with a manic smile” that sometimes betrayed darker philosophies.

One reason the HAFMC was free, after all, was that David, Roger, and their colleagues had received private and federal grants to conduct drug research there. The Smiths were both studying amphetamines and LSD, the latter being the crucial component in Manson’s “reprogramming” process. How had an uneducated ex-con—someone who, months ago, had never taken acid and maybe never even heard of it—come to use the drug to such sophisticated ends? And wasn’t it suspicious, at least, that he was coming to the HAFMC to see two people who were studying that very phenomenon, the use of drugs to control and change behavior?

His research started with sixteen albino mice. With the assistance of other researchers, he separated these into two groups of eight in “aggregate” settings—small, closely confined communities intended to simulate crowding. Then he injected the mice with amphetamines. Over the next twenty-four hours, they transformed from docile animals into frantic combatants, fighting one another until they died either from injuries, self-inflicted wounds from overgrooming, or simple exhaustion. The violence was unremitting; Smith described “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage.” Afterward, all that remained in the blood-spattered cages were scattered, dismembered body parts. Simply by confining the animals in close quarters, he’d increased the toxicity of the amphetamines more than four times. In another attempt, some of the mice were dosed with other chemicals—mescaline, chlorpromazine, or reserpine—before they received amphetamine injections. The extra drugs sometimes had a sorting effect, segregating the mice that would kill from the mice that wouldn’t. Or they had a soothing effect, all but eliminating the violent tendencies.

“When the speed scene hit, it was a total shock to everybody,” he told me. “Suddenly, what I’d learned in pharmacology relative to amphetamines was applicable [to people].”

Throughout Love Needs Care, Smith draws parallels between the rodents he’d studied and the speed-addled hippies in the Haight. The mice on speed, he wrote, “become inordinately aggressive and assaultive… [turning] upon one another with unexpected savagery. Their violent behavior is probably intensified by confinement for it is strikingly similar to that observed in amphetamine abusers who consume the drugs in crowded atmospheres.”

Once peaceful and well-adjusted, the “speed freaks” of San Francisco now “lashed out with murderous rage at any real or imagined intrusion,” assaulting, raping, or torturing to relieve the paranoid tension. “Cut off from the straight world, crammed together in inhuman conditions, and controlled by chemicals,” Smith concluded, “they behaved, quite naturally, like rats in a cage.”

In fact, according to Dr. Eugene Schoenfeld, who participated in a portion of Smith’s rat research in 1965, LSD was an integral component of the project. Smith and his colleagues would inject the rats with acid in hopes of making them more suggestible before he gave them amphetamines. Suggestibility was among the most prized effects of LSD from a clinical perspective. And yet Smith kept LSD out of the official documentation of his research. The article he published in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs never mentioned acid. I asked Smith if LSD was part of his protocol. He denied it—then, a moment later, without provocation, he reversed himself. “Yeah, I stuck LSD in them,” he said.

Calhoun reported that rats in confined groups—even without drugs—became uncharacteristically aggressive. They’d erupt in rape, murder, cannibalism, and infanticide. A dominant male rat emerged in the “behavioral sink”—Calhoun’s term for his aggregated rat cultures—subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organizing female rats into a “harem” of sex slaves.

He concluded that amphetamines were more toxic to rats in groups than rats alone. Their crowding essentially exacerbated the effects of the stimulant.

Why would he use LSD to induce suggestibility in rats before injecting them with amphetamines and making them berserk? Past a certain point, Smith had little interest in helping me sort it out.

“Something in the deepest resources of their soul enabled them to do something that you and I cannot do,” he said to me that day. “There was something independent of Charles Manson that was coursing through them… These people not only killed for him, but they did it with gusto, with relish. One hundred and sixty-nine stab wounds! Some of them postmortem! What does that show? I think it’s circumstantial evidence that some people have much more homicidal tendencies than others.”

It’s those “tendencies” that recall David Smith’s research. In a 1969 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Smith wrote that the main purpose of his experiments with mice was to “isolate” the “behavioral” traits of the rodents that would kill after they’d been aggregated and injected with amphetamines—and then to “modify” their behavior using other drugs. Two years later, writing of the study and its parallels to hippies in the Haight in Love Needs Care, Smith admitted that “it has yet to be determined whether amphetamines modify the personality primarily by biochemically altering the central nervous system or by reinforcing or precipitating long-term psychological tendencies.” Strikingly, as Bugliosi had it, those “psychological tendencies” were exactly what Manson had learned to exploit.

In the two years before the Manson murders, several papers in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs and other periodicals looked at the increase of psychotic violence in the Haight and its ...

Just as Manson’s time in the Haight was “extricated” from the record at trial, the study by the two Smiths and Alan Rose—a study into the origins of the same psychological tendencies found in members of the Manson Family—had disappeared.

“Was there something going on behind the scenes that your testifying would have exposed, a Big Picture, that they didn’t want exposed? Maybe like in L.A., where they kept releasing him for offenses without charging him when they had evidence against him?”

For the first time, Smith lost his temper. “Okay, you’re operating from the theory that he was tied in—something else was going on. Tom, I can’t help you. I don’t know.” His face reddened, and he shouted, “I really don’t know!”

He reminded me that San Francisco in the late sixties may as well have been another country, so different were its customs and mores. I was sympathetic, to a point. By then I’d spoken to so many people about this period that it felt at once totally near and completely alien. So many of my sources, even the most reliable, had trouble explaining their feelings and motivations, not just because so much time had passed but because some schism stood between them and the past. It was irreparable—wherever the sixties had come from, they were gone, even in memory.

As we refilled our wineglasses, Smith conjured the scene: “It was a time when birth control pills first became widely available… You will find this absolutely stupid—women used to walk around and pull up their sweaters to show that they didn’t have bras and they would actually seek you out to have sex. Unheard-of.” He continued, “Then comes the whole drug thing. Then comes the Haight-Ashbury. The whole Bay Area was one of the most electric places you could possibly be… It was like a magnet.”

When Smith traded his parole job for the ARP, he remembered the Haight already yielding to speed, “the beginning of one of the most incredibly destructive patterns of drug use I’d ever seen… The first six months I was there, there were thirty murders within, like, a six-block radius of the office we had. ...

“Nothing happened according to schedule in the Haight-Ashbury. You had people walking around jacked up on two grams of speed tempered out with heroin and people carrying guns and tweaking on acid and it was absolutely crazy. Actually, Charlie and his girls were the sanest people around in some ways.”

steered Smith back toward the subject of Manson’s psychology. I still felt that he was trying to have it both ways: to acknowledge Manson’s anger and instability and, sometimes in the same breath, to downplay the eccentricities of a man who’d started a cult as Smith watched on.

“They were isolated. They were doing acid every day and they were essentially without any reality checks at all… There’s a time when everything flips. And I don’t know when that was, but it sure as hell wasn’t when he was in San Francisco.”

The thing is, Tom, as I look back on that time I don’t know what else I could have done… I felt real sadness about it—I don’t feel any culpability.”

“You’re not gonna like this,” I wrote to my agent, pausing before I typed the next line: “but I think the JFK assassination is involved.” I paused again. “And the CIA’s mind-control experiments.”

I’d learned that yet another shadowy researcher kept an office there—and that his LSD research had clearer, more nefarious ties to the CIA than any of the others. At least his name wasn’t Smith this time: he was Dr. Louis Jolyon West.

He’d used drugs and hypnosis to conduct behavior-control experiments on Americans without their knowledge or consent.

Born in Brooklyn in 1924, West had enlisted in the army air force during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. He came to my interest when I learned that he’d accepted an office at the Haight-Ashbury clinic from David Smith himself to recruit subjects for LSD research. Earlier in his career, West researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. During the Korean War, he helped to “deprogram” returning prisoners of war who’d allegedly been brainwashed. His success earned him national attention.

Around the same time, he achieved still more fame when he joined civil rights activists like his friend the actor Charlton Heston, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in marches demanding equal rights for African Americans. Ironically, while he was fighting for the rights of some, he was suspected of infringing on those of others. His detractors alleged that through the fifties and early sixties, at air force bases in Texas and Oklahoma, he performed experiments on unwitting subjects using LSD and hypnosis.

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, West psychiatrically examined Jack Ruby, who’d murdered Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Not long before Ruby was due to testify for the Warren Commission, West examined him alone in his jail cell. He emerged to report that Ruby had suffered an “acute psychotic break.” Sure enough, Ruby’s testimony before the commission succ...

Through the seventies, journalists linked West to the CIA’s mind-control res...

Then seventy-four, he’d been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, and he prevailed on his son to help him commit suicide with a cocktail of pills.

Nearly every psychiatrist and researcher I spoke to from Haight-Ashbury had invoked his name, often unfavorably. When I saw that he’d been accused of conducting mind-control experiments, I second-guessed myself; this was not an excursion to be taken lightly.