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by
Tom O'Neill
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July 16 - July 25, 2025
didn’t need to involve something as vast and intractable as secret government-sponsored mind-control experiments. But I had a gut feeling that something important was in those files. It gnawed at me.
One day I ran out of willpower. I hopped in my car and drove to the library. Soon I was showing up every day when the building opened, staying for hours to read in the basement, and leaving only when they kicked me out at closing time.
Another paper by West, 1965’s “Dangers of Hypnosis,” foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by “crackpots” who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. Contrary to the prevailing science at the time, West asserted that hypnosis could make people so pliable that they’d violate their moral codes. Scarier still, they’d have no memory of it afterward. Just because such outcomes were rare, he argued, didn’t mean they were impossible.
When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, then, West was the only scientist in the world who’d predicted the emergence of potentially violent “LSD cults.” How had he learned so much about acid? You’d never know from his published writing that he’d conducted innumerable experiments with it. In San Francisco, he hoped to conduct more still.
where he opened what he described as a “laboratory” disguised as a “hippie crash pad.” This would serve as a “semi-permanent observation post,” granting him an up-close-and-personal look at the youth. He installed six graduate students in the “pad,” telling them to “dress like hippies” and “lure” itinerant kids into the apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as they liked, as long as they didn’t mind grad students taking copious notes on their behavior. The “pad” opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love.
Who was paying for all this? According to records in West’s files, his “crash pad” was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. For reasons soon to be clear, I concluded that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.
This wouldn’t have been the agency’s first “disguised laboratory” in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. White scrupulously observed the ensuing activities, whatever they were. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used
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As I was soon to see, its funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb, the head of the CIA’s MKULTRA program.
West was interested in drugs. His professional fascination with LSD was practically as old as the substance itself, and he was one of an elite cadre of scientists using it in top-secret research. Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in 1938 by chemists at Switzerland’s Sandoz Industries, but it was not introduced as a pharmaceutical until 1947. In the fifties, when the CIA began to experiment on humans with it, it was a very new substance. Be that as it may, the agency was not inclined to exercise caution.
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who’d discovered its hallucinogenic qualities in 1943, described it as a “sacred drug” that gestured toward “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.” The actor Cary Grant, on the advice of his shrink, took some one hundred LSD trips during their weekly meetings in the late fifties, experiencing a “rebirth” and picturing himself “as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”
The suggestibility from LSD was akin to hypnosis—and Jolly West, of course, had known well enough to study the two in tandem. “You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else,” Fischer explained. “Hammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being… [It] could result in some violent activity, even though LSD was considered a love drug.”
Once the Korean War was over and the American POWs returned, the army brought in a team of scientists to “deprogram” them. Among those scientists was a young psychiatrist from Cornell, Dr. Louis J. West. He would later claim to have studied eighty-three prisoners of war, fifty-six of whom had been forced to make false confessions.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a poisons expert who headed the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, had convinced the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, that mind-control ops were the future. Gottlieb, whose aptitude and amorality had earned him the nickname the “Black Sorcerer,” developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste, poisoned handkerchiefs, poisoned cigars, poisoned anything. Mind control became Gottlieb’s pet project.
Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion. The project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.” Under its umbrella were 149 subprojects, many involving research that used unwitting participants.
CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.
In 1949, at the Nuremberg trials that adjudicated the crimes of World War II, the United States adopted the International Code for Human Experimentation: “A person must give full and informed consent before being used as a subject.” MKULTRA scientists flouted this code constantly, remorselessly—and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to “induced pain” and “psychosis.” They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try to
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In fact, as the Church Committee’s report went on, MKULTRA had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a psychiatric patient who’d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a CIA-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for “treatment.”
(Continued investigation by Olson’s son, Eric, strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide; they threw him out of the window themselves out of fear that he would blow the whistle on MKULTRA and the military’s use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)
So came another congressional investigation, more robust than the last, with sixteen thousand additional pages of documentation at its disposal. Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye subpoenaed a number of CIA spooks. Among them was Gottlieb, rousted from his retirement in California and forced to defend his actions before the Senate. Or rather, before some of the Senate.
Gottlieb’s destruction of the MKULTRA files was a federal crime. It was investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times, “quietly dropped.” His brutal courses of experimentation broke any number of laws, and his perjury that day did, too. But he was never prosecuted. He’d testified before the Senate only under the condition that he receive total criminal immunity.
As for those sixteen thousand new pages, they were mainly financial records, but a few more tantalizing documents found the CIA explicating its ambitions. “Can we obtain control of the future activities (physical and mental) of any individual, willing or unwilling… with a guarantee of amnesia?” they asked. “Can we force an individual to act against his own moral concepts?” And: “Can an individual… be made to perform an act of attempted assassination?”
The Times had called MKULTRA “a secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind.” It looked like no one would suffer any consequences for it.
The New York Times ran twenty-seven stories on MKULTRA, eight on the front page. But no one in the press corps, and none of the senators involved, followed up to see that the promised investigations took place.
“CIA operators and agents all had cover names,” it said, “even in classified documents. Gottlieb was ‘Sherman R. Grifford.’” So West really had lied all those years. Not only was he a part of MKULTRA, he’d corresponded with the “Black Sorcerer” of MKULTRA himself. Preserved in his files, the letters picked up midstream, with no prologue or preliminaries. The first one was dated June 11, 1953, a mere two months after MKULTRA started. West was then chief of psychiatric service at the airbase at Lackland, Texas.
Addressing Gottlieb as “S.G.,” he outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis. Enumerating short- and long-term goals, he offered a nine-point list, beginning with a plan to discover “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew.” Another item proposed honing “techniques for implanting false
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West had hypnotized mental patients and “normal subjects” and exposed them to a host of drugs, including chlorpromazine, reserpine, amphetamines, and LSD—the same ones that David Smith would inject in his confined rodents about a decade later. Of course, at least two of these, LSD especially, would prove instrumental in the Manson Family’s group psychology.
One thing was indisputable: The CIA’s falsified documents invalidated the Senate investigation’s findings. The agency lied, obstructed justice, and tampered with evidence, and the West documents prove it.
With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking West to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA experiment gone right.”
Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”
Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Two days later, at the Dallas police headquarters, officers escorted Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to an armored car that would drive him to the county jail. A man stepped out from the crowd and aimed a revolver at Oswald’s chest. It was Jack Ruby, a nightclub proprietor with connections to Cuban political groups and organized crime. He fired once at point-blank range, sending a fatal bullet into Oswald’s stomach. According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a
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West would be getting nowhere near Ruby, who was soon convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Ruby was reportedly unmoored by the news. He’d killed the president’s assassin, and the citizens of Dallas had rewarded him with a trip to the gallows. He fired his attorney and hired Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist with a law degree who’d assisted in the trial, to represent him on appeal.
West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West
West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.”
the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind.
A week after Kennedy’s assassination, the newly installed president, Lyndon Johnson, hand-selected a group of thirteen men to investigate the crime. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director.
In the seventies, when Congress looked into abuses by intelligence agencies, it found evidence that the CIA and FBI had obstructed the Kennedy investigation.
Dulles and Helms had deliberately concealed failed CIA plots to assassinate Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro. Allegedly, the CIA had aligned with organized crime figures, many sworn enemies of President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy; they teamed up with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami and New Orleans to assassinate the dictator. Helms had personally overseen those schemes.
Based on new ballistic evidence of a second gunman in Dallas, the HSCA rejected the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald had acted alone. There was a “probable conspiracy,” it announced, to assassinate the president.
“Hoover lied his eyes out,” the Warren Commission’s Hale Boggs later testified in HSCA hearings, “on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”
They wrote, “The fact is that nobody knows why Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald—and this includes Jack Ruby.”
Manson, the ex-con, the Hollywood striver, the oversexed, unwashed guru who’d been discarded from society, had used LSD to collect and reprogram his followers. In the summer of love, he walked the same streets and frequented the same clinic as Jolly West, the upright air force officer, the world-renowned psychiatrist, the eloquent hypnotist who wrote to his CIA handler that there was “no more vital undertaking conceivable” than to dose unwitting research subjects with LSD and replace their memories.
So I also hired a private detective, a retired LASO deputy nicknamed Moon, who worked out of an office in Arizona. To this day, I’ve never met him, though we’ve shared thousands of emails and calls. Moon found people and police records I never could’ve turned up on my own. He’d participated in the LASO raid of the Spahn Ranch, and he reached out to other retired cops, urging them to speak to me. He also schooled me in skip tracing, the art of finding people who don’t want to be found.
I could poke a thousand holes in the story, but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact, the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another. It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies with Hollywood elite, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers, an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD mind-control experiments tested in the field…
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I’ve already mentioned Mary Neiswender, the reporter who told me that Bugliosi was “terribly dangerous”: he’d sent an emissary warning that he knew where her kids went to school and implied that “it would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers.” And I knew that Bugliosi had been indicted for perjury as a result of his prosecuting the murders—as mentioned earlier, he’d leaked information about Manson’s “hit list” to a reporter and had threatened professional consequences for his coprosecutors if they told anyone.
Those turned out to be two of the milder incidents in his quest for self-preservation. In 1968, Bugliosi fell into a scandal kept under wraps by the DA’s office until ’72, when he was running for district attorney of Los Angeles. (He lost the election.) He’d stalked and terrorized someone he was convinced had carried on an affair with his wife and fathered his first-born child, Vincent Jr. As clichéd as it sounds, Bugliosi suspected his milkman, Herbert Weisel, who was married with two children.
No sooner was the milkman imbroglio resolved than Bugliosi fell into another fiasco, again abusing his connection to the criminal justice system to straighten it out. His mistress, Virginia Cardwell, the single mother of a five-year-old, told him she was pregnant. It was his. With visions of public office still dancing in his mind, and Helter Skelter on the eve of publication, he ordered Cardwell, a Catholic, to get an abortion. She refused, but after Bugliosi threatened her and gave her money for the procedure, she lied and said she’d done it. He wasn’t about to take her word for it. He got
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choked her, struck her in the face several times with his fists, threw her onto the floor, pulled her up by her hair, and threatened to kill her if she had the baby, saying she wouldn’t leave the apartment alive if she lied to him: “I will break every bone in your body—this will ruin my career.” Bruised and battered, Cardwell gathered herself and went to the Santa Monica Police Department, where she filed a criminal complaint. The cops photographed her bruises and then, evidently, did nothing.
All of which is to say that I approached Bugliosi with extreme caution.
As if to prove that point, he kept threatening to sue me, making it clear that he wouldn’t tolerate any allegation of misconduct. He spoke so quickly, and with such a flurry of hyperbole and legalism, that I could hardly rebut one of his points without three more rising up to take its place. Just as my encounter with Roger Smith had, my interview with Bugliosi lasted for some six hours, and I came out of it with little more than a list of denials and evasions. But at least Smith had given me wine and pizza. Bugliosi gave me only vitriol.
These pages rewrote the narrative of the case. That’s why Melcher had threatened to throw them from his rooftop; that’s why Bugliosi would sue me if I printed them.
