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

by Tom O'Neill

COINTELPRO promised the violent repudiation of what Hoover had dubbed a “hate-type organization.” The Bureau’s strategy was merciless, its results disastrous but effective. In Chicago, famously, the FBI recruited William O’Neal, recently charged with impersonating a federal officer and driving a stolen car across state lines, to infiltrate the Panthers’ Illinois chapter, forgiving those charges in exchange for his services. Soon O’Neal became the personal bodyguard for Fred Hampton, the chapter’s chairman. O’Neal’s post allowed him to provide the Bureau with a steady stream of intelligence, including detailed floor plans of Hampton’s apartment. Although he found no evidence that Hampton or the group posed a threat to anyone’s safety, O’Neal continued to inform. In December 1969—days, coincidentally, after Manson was charged in the Tate–LaBianca murders—O’Neal slipped a barbiturate into Hampton’s drink over dinner. By the end of the night, the police had raided Hampton’s apartment and shot him twice in the head at point-blank range. O’Neal was one of many such informants around the country, and Hampton’s death one of many such deaths. The FBI’s role may never have come to light if not for the Citizens’ Committee to Investigate the FBI, an audacious crew of activist-burglars who took it upon themselves to break into a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, just west of Philadelphia. One night in March 1971, the group took a crowbar to that office’s dead-bolted door, ...