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

by Tom O'Neill

I saw the story we tell ourselves about the end of the sixties. The souring of the hippie dream; the death throes of the counterculture; the lurid, Dionysian undercurrents of Los Angeles, with its confluence of money, sex, and celebrity.

Conversely, the number one song in the country was Zager and Evans’s “In the Year 2525,” which imagined a dystopian future where you “ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies / Everything you think, do, and say / Is in the pill you took today.” It would prove to be a more trenchant observation about the present moment than anyone would’ve thought.

Manson returned the reproach: “I will have you removed if you don’t stop. I have a little system of my own… Do you think I’m kidding?” Grabbing a sharp pencil, he sprang over the defense table, flinging himself toward Older. A bailiff intervened and tackled him, and the girls jumped to their feet, too, chanting unintelligible verses in Latin. As he was dragged from the courtroom, Manson remained defiant, shouting, “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!” It was a glimpse of the raw pugilism that ran beneath Manson’s philosopher-guru facade. The judge began to carry a .38 revolver under his robes.

How did Charles Manson, a barely literate ex-con who’d spent more than half his life in federal institutions, turn a group of previously peaceful hippies—among them a small-town librarian, a high school football star, and a homecoming princess—into savage, unrepentant killers, in less than a year?

In the end, Manson and his followers got the death penalty anyway. Bugliosi said that they had, “coursing through their veins,” the willingness to kill others. For the jury, as for the public, that was a much more comfortable truth: these people were an aberration. Brainwashing, complete loss of agency—these were difficult to contemplate, let alone to accept.

it was impossible, back then, to separate geniuses from charlatans. Everyone blended in.

Why not Wilson? “Well, they thought he was nuts, and by that time he was,” Melcher said. “He had a hard time separating reality from fantasy, seriously. He had inventions. He tried to sell me once a new invention that was the size of a cigarette box, an antigravity device. You kept it in your glove compartment, but when you get into a traffic jam, you just turn it on and fly right over the other cars. He really thought it worked.”

“I know you have money, resources, powerful lawyers,” I said, aware that the interview was next to over. “But that’s not going to stop me from writing my story, and there is no way you can shut it down with all of that, because it is the truth, and you can’t shut down the truth, Terry.”

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 found Guillory credible, if overheated. I knew I wanted to believe him—and that put me at risk of falling into the great trap of conspiracy theorists, who come to believe in grand plots simply because they make the world a more fascinating place. Certainly I’d have a more interesting magazine story on my hands if Guillory were correct. But that was a big if.

Bugliosi, you may recall, had chalked up the failure to a simple mistake—the search warrant was “misdated.” But now that I had it in my hands, I saw no evidence of any misdating. The warrant was clearly dated August 13, 1969. According to the California penal code, a warrant is good for ten days after its date. The raid was completely legal on August 16, a fact I verified with many police and attorneys.

He spent a while reading my documents in silence, and then he sighed. “Chicken shit!” he croaked. “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.”

But the burglary inaugurated a spate of whistle-blowing that undermined the FBI’s credibility over the next few years. Congressman Hale Boggs, the House Majority Leader, compared the FBI to the “secret police,” conceding that even Congress lived in fear of them, and that they’d “hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny.” Lawsuits brought under the Freedom of Information Act forced the attorney general to reveal more incriminating FBI files.

Beausoleil went to trial on November 12, 1969. The prosecutor was Ronald Ross, the deputy DA in Santa Monica, who confirmed to me that the case had been tried separately under very suspicious circumstances. He had orders, he said, to keep Charles Manson and the Family out of the trial.

As the months passed, Manson granted Smith a special role as “protector” in the abstruse mythology he’d begun to construct around himself. The Haight had introduced him to Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein’s provocative 1961 sci-fi novel. Manson was obsessed with the book. He carried a worn copy with him at all times, and though he was barely literate, he seemed to grasp the nuances of its dense narrative and its invented language. There’s no saying who might have read the book to him or told him about it, but in its hero, Valentine Michael, Manson recognized himself, so much so that he named his first child after him.

West had a hunch that alienated kids “with a pathological desire to withdraw from reality” would crave “shared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging.”

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. Scarier still, they’d have no memory of it afterward. Just because such outcomes were rare, he argued, didn’t mean they were impossible. 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. He “personally knew” of two other instances, and he’d “heard on excellent authority” of three more, but he didn’t elaborate. Later, I’d get a sense of what, or who, he might have had in mind.

Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that they’d sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed Communists: the POWs must have been “brainwashed.” The word, a literal translation of the Chinese xi nao, didn’t appear in English before 1950.

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.”

West kept meticulous notes on the Ruby case, all dutifully filed. As investigators, scholars, and journalists struggled to piece together the puzzle, he watched from afar, compiling records for his own book about Ruby. He never ended up writing it, but he paid close attention to an exhaustive 1965 volume, The Trial of Jack Ruby, by John Kaplan and Jon R. Waltz. They wrote, “The fact is that nobody knows why Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald—and this includes Jack Ruby.” Jolly West had jotted down that line with a note to himself: “good quote.” It was, until now, the closest he ever came to receiving public credit for his work.