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

by Tom O'Neill

In my nearly twenty years of reporting on this case, people have asked me all the time: What do I think really happened? I hate that question more than anything. The plain answer is, I don’t know. I worry that as soon as I speculate, I undermine the work I’ve done. In a sense, had I been more willing to fill in the blanks, I might’ve finished this book a lot sooner. That’s not to say I haven’t entertained a lot of pet theories over the years. They’ve fallen in and out of favor as I learned more or shifted my focus. For a while, I was convinced the victims at the Tate and LaBianca houses knew their killers in the Family, that they’d been targeted—maybe not by the girls, but by Manson and Tex Watson. It may have had something to do with a drug burn, or an unknown middleman with connections to Hollywood. Or there’s the possibility that the Family was caught up in a CHAOS or COINTELPRO operation, goaded into violence as sheriff’s deputies and the LAPD looked the other way, necessitating a cover-up. And there’s the most “far out” theory: that Manson was tied to an MKULTRA effort to create assassins who would kill on command. It’s when someone claims that I’ve “found the truth” that I get anxious. I haven’t found the truth, much as I wish I could say I have. My goal isn’t to say what did happen—it’s to prove that the official story didn’t.