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

by Tom O'Neill

In August 1967, the same month Hoover launched COINTELPRO, CIA director Richard Helms inaugurated the agency’s aforementioned illegal domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, which also employed agents and informants to infiltrate “subversive” groups and then “neutralize” them. CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis. In the summer of ’67, the president was convinced that the divided, disorderly America he led couldn’t possibly be the product of his own policies. Foreign agents, and presumably foreign money, must be to blame. He ordered the CIA to prove that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their origins abroad. Richard Helms complied without hesitation. In the six years that followed, the CIA tracked thousands of Americans, insulating its information gathering so thoroughly that even those at the top of its counterintelligence division were clueless about its domestic surveillance. CHAOS kept tabs on three hundred thousand people, more than seven thousand of them American citizens. The agency shared information with the FBI, the White House, and the Justice Department. At its peak, CHAOS had fifty-two dedicated agents, most of whom served to infiltrate antiwar groups, like their counterparts in the FBI. Undercover, they hoped to identify Russian instigators, although they never found any. With the Interdivision Intelligence Unit (IDIU), a new branch of the Justice Department outfitted with sophisticated computerized databases, they collab...