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

by Tom O'Neill

Another one of my sources had tipped off Vince about my reporting, giving him the ludicrous idea that I believed he’d framed Manson. That was dead wrong. I’ve never been a Manson apologist. I think he was every bit as evil as the media made him out to be.

Driving away, I felt despondent. I’d just gone toe-to-toe with one of the most famous prosecutors and true-crime authors in the world. Of course I hadn’t broken him. I knew I wasn’t alone, either. Other reporters had warned me that Vince could be ferocious. One of them, Mary Neiswender of the Long Beach Press Telegram and Independent, told me that Vince had threatened her back in the eighties, when she was preparing an exposé on him. He knew where her kids went to school, “and it would be very easy to plant narcotics in their lockers.” Actually, I didn’t even need other sources—Vince himself had told me mere minutes before that he had no compunction about hurting people to “exact justice or get revenge.”

a piece like this, pitch-black, would be a welcome departure from my routine as an entertainment writer, which called for a lot of sit-down meetings with movie stars in their cushy Hollywood Hills homes, where they’d trot out lines about brave career choices and the need for privacy. That’s not to say the work was without its twists and turns. I’d gotten in a shouting match with Tom Cruise about Scientology; Gary Shandling had somehow found a way to abandon me during an interview in his own home; and I’d pissed off Alec Baldwin, but who hasn’t?

According to the legal principle of vicarious liability, any conspirator was also guilty of the crimes committed by his coconspirators. In other words, if the prosecution could prove that Manson had ordered the killings, he would be guilty of murder, even having not laid a finger on any of the victims. Bugliosi had to show that Manson had a unique ability to control his followers’ thoughts and actions—that they would do whatever he asked, even kill complete strangers.

In one of the most remarkable exchanges in the trial, Manson’s attorney, Irving Kanarek, asked Dr. Fort if “a school for crime” could exist, peopled with social rejects and fueled by LSD: “Let us say with your knowledge of LSD, you have a school for crime, and then you take them here and you program them to go out and commit a murder here, there, everywhere… Are you telling us that this can be done, that you can capture the human mind by such a school for crime?” “I am indeed telling you that,” Fort said. And he’d never seen anything like it. He compared it to a government’s ability, through the nebulous powers of patriotism, to condition soldiers to kill on its behalf.

Whether you thought it was full-on brainwashing or merely intense coercion, the fact remained: He’d done it. No one else had. This remains the most enduring mystery of the case. It’s the one that still keeps me up at night. And while all this back-and-forth about LSD is provocative, it feels like an insufficient explanation.

With an eye on other possible motives, I focused on three questions in my first weeks of reporting. First: Did the victims at the Tate house have something to do with the killers? Second: Had Terry Melcher known who the killers were immediately after the crimes, and failed to report them to the authorities? Third, and most sensationally: Were the police aware of Manson’s role in the crimes much earlier than it seemed—had they delayed arresting the Family to protect the victims, or Melcher and his circle, from scrutiny? Here, as neatly as I can tell it, is what I learned in the early, frantic weeks of my reporting. Just as important is what I didn’t learn—which goes a long way toward explaining how a simple three-month magazine assignment turned into a twenty-year obsession.

In the fifties, she married Johnny Fontaine, a mobster-turned-actor who’d been a pallbearer at the gangster Mickey Cohen’s funeral. A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo.

iiiiinteresting. so that's where puzo/coppola got that name from.

Though I found no proof, the consensus among Fine’s associates was that he’d continued working in espionage operations through the sixties. His only child, Shayla, told me that his public-relations gig was a cover—and, yes, she said, Tacot had reported to her father. What kind of work were they doing? She never knew, except that it was classified. Whenever I saw Tacot, I returned to the subject of Fine. “Don’t mention that name anywhere!” he barked, seeming genuinely disturbed. When I asked why not, he said, “None of your fucking business! You’re fucking with the wrong people!” Or was I fucking with lowlifes who only wanted to present an illusion of importance? I really couldn’t say. And when I finally was able to talk to Billy Doyle, things didn’t get any clearer.

Over the years, Manson researchers have generally agreed that Melcher was stretching the truth. Karina Longworth, whose podcast You Must Remember This devoted a whole season to Manson, said in one episode that Melcher “was vague about the details of his meetings with Manson, and probably shaved a couple of visits to the ranch off the official record.” It would be one thing to fudge the numbers a bit—it’s easy to see why someone would want to understate their relationship with Charles Manson. But I became convinced that this was graver than that. I found proof that Melcher was much closer to Manson, Tex Watson, and the girls than he’d suggested. A year before the murders, he’d even lived with a member of the Family at the house on Cielo Drive. There was a strong likelihood that Melcher knew, immediately after the crimes, that Manson was involved—but he never told the police. I found evidence that Melcher lied on the stand, under oath. And Bugliosi definitely knew about it. Maybe he’d even put him up to it, suborning witness perjury.

“I do not believe that Terry Melcher was at the Spahn Ranch after the murders. I just don’t believe that,” he said. “If he was there at the Spahn Ranch, Manson would have harmed him, because Manson was very upset.” But with the sheaf of papers in front of him, and the handwriting undeniably belonging to Bugliosi, Kay slumped in his chair. “I am shocked,” he said. “I am just shocked.” He was planning his retirement then, having boasted that he was leaving office “sixty and zero”: sixty court appearances opposite Family members, without a single one of them earning parole. With the evidence of Bugliosi’s corruption in his hands, Kay said, “This throws a different light on everything… I just don’t know what to believe now.” He went on: “This is egregious conduct if this happened. All of this should have been turned over to the defense.”

Looking at the heavy lines that Vince had drawn through the most damning parts of the interviews, Kay said, “I just don’t understand the cross-outs… it just doesn’t make any sense.” His voice trailing off, he asked the question I’d so often asked myself. “If Vince was covering this stuff up,” he said, “if he changed this, what else did he change?” I asked Kay whether this evidence would be enough to overturn the verdicts against Manson and the Family. Yes, he conceded—it could get them new trials, and it would mean big trouble for Bugliosi. If he were found guilty of suborning perjury, he would technically be eligible for the death penalty, since that was the maximum possible sentence in the Manson case.

At LASO’s Malibu station—Spahn was in its jurisdiction—Manson’s lawlessness was something of an open secret, Guillory said. Firemen patrolling the ranch’s fire trails had even encountered Manson and the Family toting machine guns. And yet Manson never paid a price. The cops always looked the other way. 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.”

I gave him my song and dance—well rehearsed, by then—and, while he found it unlikely that Manson had ever informed for his office, he said it was possible for a federal agency to call and ask for one of its informants to be released from LASO custody. In such cases, they’d call the investigator; the captain would be uninvolved. “It’s possible that a phone call was made, yes. [But] what benefit would be gained by keeping it a secret forever? The theory that somebody asked them to do something different than the norm is not implausible,” he admitted, “though I don’t know why they wouldn’t tell you. I can’t imagine why they would want to keep it a secret. I don’t see anything to be gained—if, in fact, there was some other agency involved in 1969 or 2005—to keep that quiet.” Unless, I thought, it resulted in the murders of innocent people. I sensed this was the closest thing to a concession I’d ever get from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office. I thanked Osborne for his time and went on my way.

Fairly early in my reporting, I knew I could have wrapped up my Premiere story if I really wanted to. I had the guts of a great piece, even if it was too late for the milestone thirtieth anniversary of the murders. I’d spoken to duplicitous celebrities, seedy drug dealers, bumbling cops, and spurious prosecutors. I’d been threatened and cajoled and warned off my investigation. But I didn’t have a smoking gun. There were only mountains of circumstantial evidence. The thrust of my story was still mired in ambiguity. I worried that my reporting could be too easily dismissed, Lee Baca–style, as “Hollywood fluff.”

“I could never understand how he got to know all these important people,” she told me. “He told me that he worked within the Central Intelligence Agency. And he was in a part of the agency that was absolutely nonexistent. He did not exist.”

As usual, I was anxious to find some way to verify everything I’d heard. With Whitson, especially, my reporting had crossed the line into conspiratorial territory, and I would be hard-pressed to convert skeptics on the merits of my interviews alone. Of course, clandestine intelligence agents are exactly the sort of people who don’t leave a lot of paper behind, and Whitson, by all accounts, was so savvy that he didn’t need to take notes. I’d filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with the CIA, asking for any information on him. Their response said that they could “neither confirm nor deny” Whitson’s connection to the agency. FOIA specialists told me that this is the closest one can get to confirmation that someone worked for the CIA.

He sank years into a scheme to construct a maglev monorail train stretching from Las Vegas to Pasadena.

True detective season 2!

According to the minutes of Atkins’s November 26 arraignment, the judge assigned Caballero to the case right then and there. No mention was made of Condon’s removal—or how or why it occurred. The full transcript of the hearing has vanished from the archives of the Los Angeles Superior Court.

Smith may have had ulterior motives when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury. As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that it had allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties. Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines, and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when he was appointed to lead the study, “[I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.” There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in t...

At first I was inclined to disregard these as the product of my more speculative side—I saw no purpose in linking the behavior of mice in a controlled experiment to the behavior of people in the world at large. But I took another look when I saw that Smith himself had made such a connection. He spoke of his mice as proxies for human beings. His research started with sixteen albino mice. With the assistance of other researchers, he separated these into two groups of eight in “aggregate” settings—small, closely confined communities intended to simulate crowding. Then he injected the mice with amphetamines. Over the next twenty-four hours, they transformed from docile animals into frantic combatants, fighting one another until they died either from injuries, self-inflicted wounds from overgrooming, or simple exhaustion. The violence was unremitting; Smith described “frenzied attacks of unrelenting rage.” Afterward, all that remained in the blood-spattered cages were scattered, dismembered body parts. Simply by confining the animals in close quarters, he’d increased the toxicity of the amphetamines more than four times.

Through my research on the HAFMC, I’d learned that yet another shadowy researcher kept an office there—and that his LSD research had clearer, more nefarious ties to the CIA than any of the others. At least his name wasn’t Smith this time: he was Dr. Louis Jolyon West. His friends called him “Jolly,” for his middle name, his impressive girth, and his oversized personality.

I’d dared to tell my agent about any of this only because I’d found firm documentation for a long whispered rumor about West. He’d used drugs and hypnosis to conduct behavior-control experiments on Americans without their knowledge or consent. That allegation had landed on the front page of the New York Times in 1977, but West had denied it until the day he died, and no one had ever proven the charge.

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.)

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,

Enumerating short- and long-term goals, he offered a nine-point list, beginning with a plan to discover “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew.” Another item proposed honing “techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects… or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.” West wanted to reverse someone’s belief system without his knowledge, and make it stick. He hoped to create “couriers” who would carry “a long and complex message” embedded secretly in their minds, and to study “the induction of trance-states by drugs.” All of these were the goals of MKULTRA, and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.

Even before his CIA connections came out, West’s experiments got him in plenty of trouble. In 1972, he announced plans to build a lab in an abandoned Nike Missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. He would call it “The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence,” or the Violence Center, for short. There, in perfect isolation, he could study the origins and control of human violence by experimenting on prisoners. Governor Ronald Reagan gave the Violence Center a full-throated endorsement. But West’s proposal for grant money landed him in hot water. He planned to test radical forms of behavior modification, implanting electrodes and “remote monitoring devices” in prisoners’ brains. A federal investigation concluded that the program involved “coercive methods” that threatened “privacy and self-determination.” The committee’s disclosures stymied the Violence Center before it got past the planning stages. The California legislature vetoed the project; UCLA’s student body rose up in protest of West. And this, to reiterate, was before anyone had a clue about his CIA work.

Its final five-volume report—arriving in 1979, after two and a half years and $5.4 million in taxpayer money—did just the opposite. Based on new ballistic evidence of a second gunman in Dallas, the HSCA rejected the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald had acted alone. There was a “probable conspiracy,” it announced, to assassinate the president.

Altobelli had gotten a disturbing call from Bugliosi. “The first thing he wanted to know about was your relationships with young boys,” he told me when I called back. As Bugliosi remembered it, Altobelli had told him years ago that I “dated ten, twelve, and fourteen-year-olds,” Altobelli said, adding that he knew it was a lie. I’m gay, and when Altobelli and I became friends, I was dating someone younger—but he was twenty-nine, not twelve.

Neither of the officers who investigated Tenerelli’s abandoned Volkswagen believed he committed suicide. One of them, the California Highway Patrol’s Doug Manning, called the official story “a bunch of malarkey.” The other, Inyo sheriff’s deputy Dennis Cox, called it “bullshit.”

I prefer the second guy

When pressed by Kanarek about not having a signed agreement, Caballero said, the “common practice is such that these agreements aren’t written down. It is just normally not done. These people are lawyers, professional people. You make an agreement and you keep it” (Caballero testimony, California v. Manson et al., 25803). Kanarek made sure to point out that Linda Kasabian’s attorneys had received a fully executed contract for her deal with the prosecution.

“CBS was unquestionably the CIA’s most valuable asset,” adding, “over the years the network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers” (61).

Fischer, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at the time, had to check on the mice in eight-hour intervals, often in the middle of the night. “It was brutal,” he told me of the carnage he’d encounter. “There was no rhyme or reason—it was just helter skelter.”

HMMMM

The first and still definitive book on the MKULTRA program is by the former State Department official who compelled the agency to release its financial records: John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Norton, 1979).

Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Human Resources, U.S. Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Sess., Aug. 3, 1977

The closest thing was an in-house investigation by the CIA, called the Victims Task Force. Unsurprisingly, the three-man team of agents (two from the CIA, one from the DEA) turned up only two victims of MKULTRA, both women. Each had been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a party in Greenwich Village on January 11, 1953 (one of the women received a $15,000 settlement from the federal government, the other was deceased).

Further, I spoke to Robert H. Wiltse and Frank Laubinger, the two CIA agents on the task force, and they told me they never even contacted a university or other facility where MKULTRA research had occurred. Their seven-month investigation consisted of contacting less than half a dozen people who were named in the diary of George H. White, the CIA agent who conducted experiments in safe houses in New York and San Francisco between 1953 and 1965. When I asked Wiltse why the academic institutions and federal facilities where most of the MKULTRA research occurred had been ignored, he replied that he “didn’t know.” When pressed, he said it “didn’t seem necessary,” adding that he never even left the CIA headquarters in Langley, during the investigation. Laubinger told me that he was the one who investigated the safe houses operated by White, and that he believed Wiltse was responsible for investigating the academic institutions. Laubinger called Gottlieb “an honorable man who was dealt a blow” by the congressional investigations. He said if the communists had mind control technology in their arsenal, “Well, maybe we ought to have it too.”