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

by Tom O'Neill

Since West’s paper was light on specifics, it’s hard to know if it was only a ploy for more funding. Whatever it was, the CIA felt it had to keep it under wraps. When the agency was forced to disclose MKULTRA to the public, they submitted an expurgated version of West’s paper to Congress, an act of deception that’s never been exposed. At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility” that the CIA had turned over to the Senate. West’s name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But what shocked me was that the Senate’s version didn’t include West’s nine-page attachment, but rather an unsigned summary. There was no mention of West’s triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of “the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual” with a “fictional event.” In sworn testimony, the CIA said that everything it shared with Congress was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names. Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely misrepresented its contents. The one-page summary of West’s accomplishments in the lab doesn’t exist in West’s original. The new page was only a theoretical discussion of LSD—of its possible effects on “dissociative states.” It concluded, “The effects of these agents [LSD and other drugs] upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied.” West, of course, h...