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

by Tom O'Neill

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.