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

by Tom O'Neill

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.”