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

by Tom O'Neill

August 25, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover issued a memorandum to the chiefs of each of his FBI field offices in the United States, outlining the objective of COINTELPRO. (The name was an abridgment of Counter Intelligence Program.) First launched in 1956 to “increase factionalism” among Communists in the United States, COINTELPRO had been activated on and off throughout the early sixties, often to vilify civil rights leaders—Martin Luther King Jr. most prominent among them. In his ’67 memo, Hoover formed a new branch of the operation, aiming to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations… The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to this Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis… Efforts of various groups to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be frustrated. No opportunity should be missed to exploit… the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups… [and] to capitalize upon existing conflicts between competing black nationalist organizations. Hoover specified more than twenty cities where COINTELPRO methods could be put to effective use, Los Angeles among them. In a later memo, he ordered the Bureau to “pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercised their potential for violence.”