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

by Tom O'Neill

The Church Committee’s final report unveiled a 1957 internal evaluation of MKULTRA by the CIA’s inspector general. “Precautions must be taken,” the document warned, “to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions.” A 1963 review from the inspector general put it even more gravely: “A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.” In fact, as the Church Committee’s report went on, MKULTRA had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a psychiatric patient who’d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a CIA-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for “treatment.” (Continued investigation by Olson’s son, Eric, strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide; they threw him out of the window themselves out of fear that he would blow the whistle on MKULTRA and the military’s use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)

Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye subpoenaed a number of CIA spooks. Among them was Gottlieb, rousted from his retirement in California and forced to defend his actions before the Senate. Or rather, before some of the Senate. Gottlieb claimed that his heart condition precluded the possibility of his addressing the whole chamber; instead, he was installed in an anteroom, where he answered questions from a select group while the masses listened over a public address system. As the New York Times pointed out, Gottlieb “managed to elude the lights and microphones and the crush of reporters waiting for him in the Senate hearing room.” He was spared the sight of the incredulity that spread over their faces as he admitted that he had destroyed MKULTRA’s files not to cover up “illegal activity,” but “because this material was sensitive and capable of being misunderstood.” He resented the harm done to his reputation, and he was loath to provide specifics about MKULTRA experiments, saying that he’d never witnessed any himself. Gottlieb’s destruction of the MKULTRA files was a federal crime. It was investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times, “quietly dropped.” His brutal courses of experimentation broke any number of laws, and his perjury that day did, too. But he was never prosecuted. He’d testified before the Senate only under the condition that he receive total criminal immunity.

As for those sixteen thousand new pages, they were mainly financial records, but a few more tantalizing documents found the CIA explicating its ambitions. “Can we obtain control of the future activities (physical and mental) of any individual, willing or unwilling… with a guarantee of amnesia?” they asked. “Can we force an individual to act against his own moral concepts?” And: “Can an individual… be made to perform an act of attempted assassination?”

Next West addressed a sensitive matter: who would the guinea pigs be? He listed four groups—basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and “others, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.” Only the volunteers would be paid.

West reported back to the CIA that the experiments he’d begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. He was ensconced in a civilian institution, and evidently he found it a less oppressive setting than Lackland had been. In a paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. In case the CIA didn’t grasp the significance of this, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”

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...

“We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.” The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses.”

Now I could tie West to the highest, most clandestine echelons of the Central Intelligence Agency. I could tie him to both of the Smiths, the authority figures from Manson’s lost year in San Francisco. And through his efforts to open the Violence Center, I could tie him to bigwigs in the LAPD and the DA’s office who’d helped to prosecute Manson. But I could never prove that he’d examined Manson himself—or even that they’d ever met. Nor had West taken part in Manson’s trial. His absence was conspicuous. One of the world’s leading experts on brainwashing and cults, he was hardly averse to publicity. He’d appeared as a witness many times before. Manson was tried in his own backyard; the proceedings were international news. Yet West went nowhere near them.

With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking West to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA experiment gone right.” In the back of my mind was the most confounding passage in Helter Skelter—one that I’d underlined, highlighted, and finally torn out and taped above my computer. “The most puzzling question of all,” Bugliosi wrote, was how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseless killers. Even with the LSD, the sex, the isolation, the sleep deprivation, the social abandonment, there had to be “some intangible quality… It may be something that he learned from others.” Something that he learned from others. Those had become the six most pivotal words in the book for me.

The financial cover was the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc.: the same group that paid for West’s Haight-Ashbury Project.

On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.” Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.” Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state.

the CIA’s Richard Helms was making the case that MKULTRA’s human guinea pigs had to be entirely unaware of the experiments performed on them. This was “the only realistic method,” he wrote, “to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting.”

West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.” In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. “Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.” West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. “He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.” From that...

A week after Kennedy’s assassination, the newly installed president, Lyndon Johnson, hand-selected a group of thirteen men to investigate the crime. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director. Kennedy had fired him two years earlier, after he’d bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion. Another was the official CIA liaison to the group, Richard Helms, soon to become the agency’s director. A protégé of Dulles, Helms was the longtime secret employer of Jolly West, and one of the few agency officials aware of MKULTRA. But no one else on the commission—except, presumably, Dulles, who started the program—was aware that a CIA “asset” trained in mind control had assumed responsibility for the psychiatric care of Jack Ruby, whom the commission regarded as their “most important witness.”

Hoover released the FBI’s initial findings just two weeks after the killing, concluding that Oswald acted alone. “Hoover lied his eyes out,” the Warren Commission’s Hale Boggs later testified in HSCA hearings, “on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.” Dulles was no less complicit. He’d urged the Warren Commission to limit itself to reviewing the FBI’s investigation, rather than mounting its own. In secret, he met with Helms and other CIA officials to coach them on what questions the commission planned to ask. Faced with these revelations, the HSCA could only conclude that intelligence groups were hiding their links to Oswald and Ruby, if not a CIA effort to assassinate Castro. Some believed that the plot on Castro may have been turned on Kennedy, after his Bay of Pigs invasion failed and he embraced other policy changes that curtailed the agency’s influence, like reducing the U.S. presence in Vietnam, warming diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and decreasing military spending. Even President Johnson had his doubts. “The President felt that [the] CIA had had something to do with the plot,” said an Oval Office memo from ’67.

The Inyo coroner had been notified of the match “within twenty-four hours,” so they’d identified their John Doe as Tenerelli no later than October 18. And yet the chief of police had told the Inyo Register that the identification came ten days later, on October 28.

Bee Greer had told police that when she talked to Tenerelli he “seemed quite natural and told her that he was here to look the area over and possibly find a job.” If the coroner’s time of death was correct, Tenerelli had shaved his pubes, downed a bottle and a half of whiskey, and shot himself within two hours of that conversation.

One last thing bothered me: the pubic hair. If, as police reports stated, Tenerelli had shaved his pubes just before killing himself, and a “few strands” had been found “between the pages” of a Playboy magazine—what happened to the rest? The Family’s Bill Vance had a “magic vest” he liked to wear that was “made of pubic hair,” per a report from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office. The LASO report never said where the pubic hair came from—and how could it, really?—but I found it relevant that Vance, an associate of Manson from prison, was arrested for stealing a gun from a car in Death Valley on October 5, 1969, the day Tenerelli’s car was pulled from the nearby ravine.

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.