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

by Tom O'Neill

In an interview on February 11, 1970, DeCarlo described Melcher’s two visits to the Spahn Ranch in late August and early September, 1969, and his third visit to the Barker Ranch—more than two hundred miles away—in mid-September.

Bugliosi’s notes on the two visits to the Spahn Ranch read: [DeCarlo] released 72 hours after the bust on 8-16-69. Went back to Venice for a few days & then went back to [Spahn] ranch. Week or week & a half later, went up to Barker with Tex & Bruce Davis in a flatbed truck. Manson & 4 or 5 girls left at same time in a car. Rest of family stayed at Spahn. Between time that Danny returned to the Ranch & time he left for Barker, definitely saw Melcher out at [Spahn] ranch. Heard girls say, “Terry’s coming, Terry’s coming.” Melcher drove up in a Metro truck… by himself. Melcher stayed for 3 or 4 hours. 3 or 4 days later, saw Melcher in his same truck.

1½ weeks later saw Melcher with Gypsy & Brenda at bottom of Golar Wash near Ballarat, sitting in a car with the girls. DeCarlo was with Sadie, Tex, Manson, Bruce & Dennis (w[itness]’s child) on foot. All of them got in Melcher’s car, everyone in the car. (Brenda had been the driver. Melcher only a passenger. Everyone called Melcher “Terry[.]”) Charlie took over the driver’s seat & drove to Ridgecrest & picked up a 1959 Buick. DeCarlo & rest then drove off leaving Melcher, Manson & Brenda in the car they had. That’s the last time W[itness] saw Melcher.

Clearly, this was information Bugliosi didn’t want before the jury. But why? Was it simply because any postmurder visits by Melcher undermined the Helter Skelter motive? Bugliosi argued that Manson chose the Cielo house to “instill fear” in Melcher, as Susan Atkins said. But if Melcher were with Manson after the murders, where was the fear? And, most important: What were these additional meetings about?

Melcher was on acid. Was on his knees. Asked Manson to forgive him. Terry Melcher failed to keep an appointment. Called him a pig. They are all little piggies. Helter Skelter meant for everyone to die. Charlie gave Gregg [Jakobson] a 45 slug and said give Dennis [Wilson] this and tell him I have another one for him. This was even more explosive than the files from the DA, I realized. Not only did it suggest that Melcher had some bizarre debt to Manson—it opened up Watkins to accusations of perjury. Just like DeCarlo, Watkins had omitted these details from his testimony. He made no mention of having seen Melcher at the Spahn Ranch in early September 1969—much less having seen him on acid, begging for forgiveness.

Why did Melcher need Manson’s forgiveness?

According to Guillory, that was because his station had a policy handed down from on high: “Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers.”

federal parolee, walked away from an arrest that caught him with stolen cars and credit cards, an arsenal of weapons, and underage runaways. And meanwhile, two of the LASO’s best homicide detectives failed to realize that the biggest raid in California history was going down at the very same ranch that their murder suspect had called.

“This is all a bunch of chicken shit.” The size of the raid; the fact that the DA’s office kept releasing Manson when they had enough evidence to charge him, or at least violate his parole… “It dovetails right in,” he said. “Manson was an informant.”

For a year, I’d been hearing a rumor from people inside and outside the case: that Manson had visited the Cielo house after the murders, that he’d gone back with someone unknown to rearrange the scene. This would’ve accounted for discrepancies in the positions of the bodies: the killers left them one way, and the police found them in another. There were pools of Tate’s and Sebring’s blood on the front porch, splatters on the walkway and the bushes. But according to the killers, neither Tate nor Sebring had ever left the living room, where they died. The coroner described blood smears on Tate’s body, as if she’d been dragged—again, never mentioned by the killers. Those in the area, including a private security officer, had heard gunshots and arguing hours after the killers said they’d left. And Manson himself had claimed on a few occasions that he’d gone back to the house with an unnamed individual to “see what my children did.”

here was Cummings, along with others, saying that Whitson had been at the Tate house after the murders but before the police. Here was Hatami, saying Whitson had called him that morning. Cummings said it was Whitson’s “biggest regret” that he hadn’t been able to prevent the slaughter. Maybe these were the words of a self-important liar, or maybe Manson was telling the truth about this return visit, and Whitson had been there, too. That seemed delusional to me. But Cummings and Hatami weren’t crazy. They were two independent, credible sources with the same story.

It seemed possible to me that Whitson was the fulcrum, the man who could connect everything. The strange omissions at the trial and in Helter Skelter; the blatant failures of LASO to follow up on good leads; the suspicion that Manson could be an informant; the murmurs about a narcotics deal gone south: if I wanted to construct a unified field theory, Whitson, linked to intelligence work by no fewer than a dozen sources, would have to be at the center.

Then came Otto and Ilse Skorzeny, the most sinister of Whitson’s friends. They were Nazis—genuine, German, dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. The United Nations listed Otto Skorzeny as a war criminal. He’d been one of Hitler’s most trusted operatives, leading the manhunt of one of the Führer’s would-be assassins and spearheading a secret mission to rescue Mussolini. After the Third Reich fell, Skorzeny safeguarded the wealth of countless Nazis and helped disgraced war criminals settle into new lives around the world. Brought to trial before a U.S. military court, Skorzeny was alleged to be “the most dangerous man in Europe”—but he was acquitted, having made himself an asset to U.S. intelligence. His wife, the Countess Ilse von Finkelstein, was once a member of the Hitler Youth; a shrewd businesswoman known for her beauty and charm, she negotiated arms deals and contracts for German engineering companies.

it. I focused on two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary objective, according to three congressional committees that investigated them in the midseventies, was to discredit the left-wing movement by any means necessary—an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders.

The sixties youth movement was born on May 13, 1960, when hundreds of demonstrators, most of them UC Berkeley students, began a two-day protest at San Francisco’s City Hall. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) had convened a series of hearings there, and students were chagrined to learn that they were barred from the proceedings. A riot broke out as police turned firehoses on the protesters, the intense pressure forcing them down the building’s imposing marble stairway. Police clubbed protesters and made sixty-one arrests, including more than thirty students. “Black Friday,” as it came to be known, marked the end of the fifties, the dawn of a new age of dissent. The following day, the demonstrators returned undeterred, this time totaling more than five thousand. The HCUA was cowed—never again did it conduct hearings beyond the Capitol. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, couldn’t believe the left had such strength in numbers. He was convinced that foreign Communists sponsored the movement. Thus began a pitched battle between federal law enforcement and young “subversives.” In the midsixties, with the war in Vietnam escalating, Berkeley became a hotbed of antiwar activity. Sit-ins were staged on campus; rallies were held throughout the Bay Area, each growing in size and fervor. Late in 1964, some fifteen hundred students crowded into Berkeley’s Sproul Hall to protest the university’s mistreatment of campus activists. More than seven hundred of them we...

It struck me that the Tate–LaBianca murders had been so often invoked as the death knell of the sixties. Arguably, they did more than any other event to turn the public opinion against hippies, recasting the peace-and-love flower-power ethos as a thing of latent, drug-addled criminality. As the writer Todd Gitlin noted, “For the mass media, the acid-head Charles Manson was readymade as the monster lurking in the heart of every longhair.” Wasn’t this the goal of CHAOS and COINTELPRO?

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.”

In Quantico, Virginia, at the sprawling marine corps base where the FBI would soon open its own academy, a less-formal “Hoover University” trained agents in the delicate art of passing as leftists. They grew unkempt beards, refrained from bathing for days at a time, parroted radical talking points, got stoned, and tripped on acid. In the Black Panther party and, in Los Angeles, the US Organization, informants were instrumental in fomenting violence. They would spread disinformation to catalyze an intergroup rivalry, or they’d simply arrange for the bloodshed themselves.

Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (commonly known as the Black Panther party) had become the bête noire of federal law enforcement. From Hoover on down, the FBI’s ranks saw the group as a threat to the national order rivaled only by communism and nuclear holocaust. Originally, the Panthers served to safeguard Oakland’s black residents from overzealous policing. They promoted lawful, armed self-defense in inner-city neighborhoods, and their social outreach programs brought meals and health care to those who couldn’t afford them. Their Ten-Point Program demanded “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.” But as the party grew in size and prominence, opening chapters in nearly every major city in the United States and abroad, it embraced more militant action against the long arm of law enforcement, starting in Oakland. In 1967, Newton shot and killed a cop during a traffic stop. In ’68, Eldridge Cleaver, who headed the Panthers’ Ministry of Information, was in a firefight during which he and two cops suffered gunshot wounds and a seventeen-year-old Panther was killed. That same year, the violence found its way to Los Angeles, as gunfights led to four Panther deaths. By 1969, the Panthers had been involved in more than a dozen shoot-outs with police, some the result of ambushes. Fearing infiltration by informants, the party began to implode, purging members and, in one notorious case, torturing and...

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 i...

FBI had behaved conspiratorially with COINTELPRO, early and often. One of its greatest coups came in January 1969, when G-men had incited the murders of two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus. FBI infiltrators had lied to the Panthers’ rivals, the US Organization, telling them that the Panthers were meeting on the campus to plan their assassinations. US responded by ambushing two Panthers at a Black Student Union meeting and shooting them dead. LASO knew that the Panthers were murdered because of the FBI’s meddling. They didn’t care. In fact, they hid the FBI’s role in the violence. In their eyes, the most desirable outcome had been achieved: two Panthers were dead, three US gang members were in jail, and the American public was more fearful of black militants. The FBI used the incident to spur more violence between US and the Panthers, according to a 1970 memo from the Los Angeles Field Office: The Los Angeles Division is aware of mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that the US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP [Black Panther party] activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course. That emphasis comes from the Church Committee, who noted that “due course,” in this case, meant nothing less than first-degree murder. The committee’...

Two years later, the Panthers had become almost synonymous with Hollywood’s liberal elite. Actresses such as Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg appeared at their rallies. Hoover felt he had to widen the chasm between blacks and whites in Los Angeles. In a November 1968 memo, an L.A. field agent discussed new efforts to spread disinformation to Hollywood’s liberal whites. In the context of the Tate–LaBianca murders, the memo is chilling. Remember, the Tate house by then had become a high-profile gathering place for liberal Hollywood—among others, for Fonda, Cass Elliot, and Warren Beatty, all three of whom were under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, who would die at the hands of the Family, was an outspoken civil rights activist. That year she campaigned for Tom Bradley, the first African American candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Many in the Polanski–Tate crowd belonged to the White Panther party, explicit allies of the Black Panthers, or to the Peace and Freedom Party of California, which also voiced its support. The FBI, according to the memo, planned to generate distrust through disinformation: The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) has been furnishing the BPP with financial assistance. An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of PFP in which it is set forth that the BPP has made statements in closed meetings that when the armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites. Emphasis min...

Furthermore, Tex Watson’s girlfriend and three of Crowe’s friends had witnessed the shooting; they called an ambulance after Manson made his getaway. At the hospital, Crowe refused to tell the police who’d shot him. Wouldn’t the police have questioned the four witnesses? Did Crowe even say who they were? Why didn’t the police pursue a near fatal shooting with plenty of witnesses, especially when the alleged shooter was a paroled ex-con? We might never know—Bugliosi doesn’t clarify any of it in Helter Skelter.

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...

Rockefeller’s commission failed to reveal that “between 150 and 200 CIA domestic files on Black dissidents had been destroyed,” the Times reported. “The CIA conducted at least two major programs involving the use of American blacks, when the Panthers, organized by young blacks in the mid-60s, were publicly advocating revolutionary change… Just how successful the CIA was in those alleged activities could not be determined.”

Knowing more about CHAOS and COINTELPRO, I felt that men like Reeve Whitson were potentially much more common than I’d anticipated, always in peripheral, undefined roles. Part of the reason that Whitson seemed like such a wild card to me was that he appeared to have walked on the scene from nowhere: an outré, worldly man suddenly hobnobbing with the LAPD’s top brass. I wanted others who fit that profile. To cover up an operation like CHAOS, the agency needed friends in law enforcement—insiders who could make arrests or, just as important, not make arrests.

A longtime lieutenant with the LAPD, Herrmann had an unusual background for law enforcement. He had a doctorate in psychology; he specialized in quelling insurgencies; he’d developed one of the first computer systems to track criminals and predict violent outbreaks in cities. Daryl Gates, the head of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, hailed him as a “genius,” praising his technical aptitude in particular. But Herrmann’s work wasn’t limited to Los Angeles, or even to the United States. My FOIA request to the FBI yielded a collection of redacted documents detailing his extensive employment history. Concurrent with his time in the LAPD, he’d worked under contract for a dizzying list of American intelligence and military agencies: the air force, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the President’s Office of Science and Technology, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Most of his work for these groups remains classified.

You might have guessed: given Herrmann’s long list of government employers, I wondered if his work for these defense contractors could have been a front for the CIA, one of the few agencies that didn’t appear on his résumé. As usual, official channels were useless. My FOIA request to the CIA for Herrmann’s records yielded the same “neither confirm or deny” response that Reeve Whitson’s had.

I did find, however, a record of Herrmann’s overseas work, much of which he conducted while still employed with the LAPD. Having spent four months in 1967 training Thai police in counterinsurgency tactics, Herrmann returned to Asia in September 1968 to join the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. Documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, listed him as a scientific “advisor” to the army. His responsibility was to train South Vietnamese police in “paramilitary techniques” to deploy against Viet Cong insurgents. None of the records described those techniques in any detail, but the mere mention of them was enough to make me put a few things together. The dates of Herrmann’s stint in Vietnam, his job description, his professional affiliations, and his training made it abundantly likely that he was working for a CIA project called Phoenix, one of the most controversial elements in the agency’s history. Lyndon Johnson had secretly authorized Phoenix in 1968; it was discontinued in early ’71. The agency described it as “a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.”

According to a 1971 congressional investigation, the program violated the codes of the Geneva Conventions and rivaled the Viet Cong’s own terrorism in its mercilessness. During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives admitted to massacring civilians and making it appear that the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong. Their hope was to “win the hearts and minds” of neutral Vietnamese citizens, compelling them to turn away from the insurgency in revulsion. A Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, the single most decorated combat veteran of Vietnam, published a bestselling book, Soldier, that detailed typical orders from his Phoenix superiors: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”

Like Governor Reagan and President Johnson, Herrmann believed that California’s student dissidents were funded by foreign Communists. He told the Observer that he had a “secret plan” for “forestalling revolution in America.” The key was “to split off those bent on destroying the system from the mass of dissenters; then following classic guerilla warfare ‘theory’ to find means which will win their hearts and minds.” He called this plan, simply, “Saving America,” and it included strategies for “deeper penetration by undercover agents into dissenting groups,” such as “army agents pos[ing] as students and news reporters.” In a turn worthy of Minority Report, he wanted to use mathematical probability models to predict when and where violence would erupt. He also called for the use of long-range electronic surveillance devices; if informants had already penetrated any “dissenting groups,” they would “secretly record speeches and conversations.”

The state had a strong case against Atkins. She had probation officers in both L.A. and Mendocino, and neither was happy with her. According to their reports, she’d brazenly defied all attempts at supervision since her sentence was imposed. Since she’d received a courtesy transfer of her probation from Mendocino to Los Angeles County, she’d changed her address more than six times without permission. She hadn’t sought employment. She’d failed to check in for almost every monthly appointment. And most recently, she’d told the probation office that, although she knew it was forbidden, she was moving to the Mojave Desert with her friends, with no plan to return to L.A. Describing Atkins’s whereabouts as “totally unknown,” the probation office’s report advised, “The best thing is to revoke the defendant’s probation as it appears she has no intentions of abiding by it.” Despite that recommendation, at a hearing that month, Judge Wayne Burke of Mendocino County Superior Court decided that “the defendant has not violated probation. She has complied with the terms. Probation is reinstated and modified to terminate forthwith. She is released.” Not only did the ruling defy the probation office—it seemed to reward Atkins’s bad behavior, “terminating” her probation more than two years before it was scheduled to conclude. And off she went, soon to participate in the murders of at least eight people.

Atkins was living in San Francisco then. She’d fallen in with a strange man who promised to change her life, and her probation officers weren’t thrilled about it. Her sudden infatuation with this “Charlie” meant she might backslide into the recklessness that had gotten her arrested in the first place, when she’d been found in a stolen car in Oregon with two ex-cons, one of whom she’d met while working as a stripper. It was the end of a crime spree for the trio. They’d stolen the car in California, driven it across the state line into Oregon, and held up a string of gas stations and convenience stores, with Atkins at the wheel. When they were apprehended outside Salem, she told the officer she would’ve shot and killed him if he hadn’t caught them by surprise. Then only eighteen, Atkins was convicted of being in possession of stolen goods and a concealed weapon. Her three-year probation sentence was transferred to San Francisco, where she promised to clean up her act. And so she had, until the summer of ’67, when she’d fallen under Manson’s spell. According to probation records, Atkins phoned her San Francisco probation officer, Mary Yates, that November 10, saying that she’d joined a communal marriage with seven other women. They were all hitched to a “traveling minister” by the name of Charlie, fresh out of federal prison. Atkins and Charlie’s other “wives,” many of them pregnant by him, would soon be leaving San Francisco in a “big yellow bus” bound for Southern Californi...

One hundred and sixty-nine stab wounds! Some of them postmortem! What does that show? I think it’s circumstantial evidence that some people have much more homicidal tendencies than others.” It’s those “tendencies” that recall David Smith’s research. In a 1969 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Smith wrote that the main purpose of his experiments with mice was to “isolate” the “behavioral” traits of the rodents that would kill after they’d been aggregated and injected with amphetamines—and then to “modify” their behavior using other drugs. Two years later, writing of the study and its parallels to hippies in the Haight in Love Needs Care, Smith admitted that “it has yet to be determined whether amphetamines modify the personality primarily by biochemically altering the central nervous system or by reinforcing or precipitating long-term psychological tendencies.”

when the article, “Acute Amphetamine Toxicity,” finally appeared in the spring 1969 Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, both Roger Smith and Alan Rose had been removed as authors. Contradicting his later claim in Love Needs Care, David Smith wrote that he “disagreed” with the consensus that “personality was the prime factor in differentiating between psychotic and nonpsychotic reactions,” arguing instead that “in the drug subculture of the Haight-Ashbury, the prime determinates of psychotic vs. nonpsychotic reactions were immediate drug environment and experience of the user.” More significant than the contradiction, I felt, was the article’s obscurity: when the HAFMC republished bound editions of all the Journals five years later, “Acute Amphetamine Toxicity” wasn’t included in the collection. All the annotations referring to it in other Journal articles had been removed, too. Just as Manson’s time in the Haight was “extricated” from the record at trial, the study by the two Smiths and Alan Rose—a study into the origins of the same psychological tendencies found in members of the Manson Family—had disappeared.

The summer of love had yet to come, and the Tate–LaBianca murders were still years away, but West would effectively predict them both. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, he’d contributed a chapter called “Hallucinogens,” warning students of a “remarkable substance” percolating through college campuses and into cities across the United States. It was LSD, known to leave users “unusually susceptible and emotionally labile” as it caused a “loosening of ego structure.” That language was reminiscent of the “reprogramming” spiel that Charles Manson would soon develop, urging his acid-tripping followers to “negate their egos.”

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Another paper by West, 1965’s “Dangers of Hypnosis,” foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by “crackpots” who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. Contrary to the prevailing science at the time, West asserted that hypnosis could make people so pliable that they’d violate their moral codes.

West cited two cases to back up his argument: a double murder in Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a “military offense” induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base.

The “pad” opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. West took pains to ensure that it felt realistic, decorating it “with posters, flowers and paint.” Thus was born the Haight-Ashbury Project, as he called it, or “HAP,” for short. For the next six months, he undertook “an ongoing program of intensive interdisciplinary study into the life and times of the hippies.”

According to records in West’s files, his “crash pad” was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. For reasons soon to be clear, I concluded that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.

A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. White scrupulously observed the ensuing activities, whatever they were. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men—something of a psychedelic honeypot experiment.

“basic moral, religious or political matters.” The title of the project was Mass Conversion. As I was soon to see, its funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb, the head of the CIA’s MKULTRA program. In other words, as I said to David Smith, it was all but certain that Jolly West came to the Haight to answer a more ignoble question than “What is a hippie?” “That would be a cover project,” I told Smith.

For West, the failure of sixties idealism was the most desirable outcome—one that he was quite possibly working toward. A copy of his résumé from this period hints at the thrust of his research. He was at work on a book called Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States. But he never published it.

Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in 1938 by chemists at Switzerland’s Sandoz Industries, but it was not introduced as a pharmaceutical until 1947. In the fifties, when the CIA began to experiment on humans with it, it was a very new substance.

Full-fledged U.S. research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence human behavior through drugs and hypnosis.

In 1949 it launched Operation Bluebird, a mind-control program whose chipper name belied its brutal ambitions and its propensity for trampling on human rights. In its yen to best the Soviets, the CIA tested drugs on American citizens—most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases—who didn’t even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they underwent.

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The human mind, like any other appliance, could be rewired and automated.

In a speech at Princeton University, Dulles warned that Communist spies could turn the American mind into “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.” Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion.

The project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.” Under its umbrella were 149 subprojects, many involving research that used unwitting participants. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.