Chaos Quotes

“And so, feeling the line between "researcher" and "conspiracy theorist" blurring before me, I hunkered down in the library to read about the many ways our government has deceived us.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Less than three weeks earlier, NASA had put the first man on the moon, an awe-inspiring testament to technological ingenuity. 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.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“I’d come to feel like a prisoner of my own story.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Technology had destabilized every atom of human nature, and a new class of chemicals with unpronounceable names could reduce people to machines. The human mind, like any other appliance, could be rewired and automated.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“focused on two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary objective, according to three congressional committees that investigated them in the midseventies, was to discredit the left-wing movement by any means necessary—an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“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.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“if Polanski had coerced Sharon into sleeping with two men, and filmed it, wasn’t that spousal abuse? “Roman’s a sicko,” Bugliosi had said. “He was making her do it.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“According to detectives, the footage, clearly filmed by Polanski, depicted Sharon Tate being forced to have sex with two men.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“If the CIA wanted a presence in the Los Angeles DA’s office, Younger didn’t strike me as someone who’d put his foot down. Nor did his second in command, Lynn “Buck” Compton, who’d been an LAPD detective before getting his law degree and joining the DA’s office. Compton was the lead prosecutor in the trial of Sirhan B. Sirhan for the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. And he’d been a World War II hero—his exploits with the parachute infantry regiment, the Easy Company, were chronicled in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“The committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO actions in L.A., the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther and a decorated Vietnam vet. Pratt would be imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a murder the FBI knew he didn’t commit. He was in Oakland at the time of the crime, four hundred miles away, at a Black Panther house that the Bureau had wiretapped. It had transcripts of a call he’d made to the Panther headquarters in Los Angeles just hours before the murder. Still, Bureau agents enlisted a federal informant to lie on the stand about Pratt’s involvement. Even before the frame-up, FBI gunmen had attempted to kill Pratt by shooting at him through the window of his apartment; he survived only because a spine injury he’d sustained in the war made it more comfortable to sleep on the floor. Pratt was serving a life sentence when the Church Committee released its landmark findings, confirming what he’d long suspected: LASO and the LAPD were complicit in the COINTELPRO operation. The committee quoted a report that the FBI’s Los Angeles outpost had sent to Hoover himself, advising that “the Los Angeles [Field] Office [of the FBI] is furnishing on a daily basis information to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office Intelligence Division and the Los Angeles Police Department Intelligence and Criminal Conspiracy Divisions concerning the activities of black nationalist groups in the anticipation that such information might lead to the arrest of the militants.” By the Church Committee’s estimation, this meant that Los Angeles law enforcement was guilty of obstructing justice and hindering prosecution.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Its unforgettable grandiosity may have hidden a more prosaic truth: that a few rich guys had gotten in over their heads with an unstable ex-con.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan, the same trio who’d been booted from the party in mid-March, were now regular guests at the house, sometimes staying for days at a time. They also supplied most of the drugs. By July, the three men, all international smugglers, had cornered the market on MDA, which was manufactured in Doyle and Harrigan’s hometown, Toronto. Frykowski wanted in. Although he didn’t have much cash—Folger, his heiress girlfriend, kept him on a tight leash financially—he negotiated a deal with his new friends, making himself a middleman between them and Hollywood. Soon after we spoke on the phone, Kaczanowski visited Los Angeles. I met him in the backyard of his friend’s home in West Hollywood. A handsome man with a craggy face, thick black hair, and robust blue eyes, he spoke with a heavy accent and a reserved, contemplative air. Though it was maybe three in the afternoon, he opened a bottle of red wine and poured us each a generous glass.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“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?”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Manson spent his earliest years in neglect. When he was still an infant, his mother would leave him to go on benders with her brother, during one of which the pair decided to rob a guy who looked wealthy. Within hours, they’d been arrested, and Manson’s mother was imprisoned for several years. He was eight when she was released, and they spent the next months with a succession of unreliable men in seamy locales, his mom racking up another arrest for grand larceny.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“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.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“General Curtis E. LeMay, a legendary fighter pilot who’d implemented the carpet bombing of Japan during World War II. A notorious hawk, LeMay had served as chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he’d tried to organize a coup against Kennedy among the Joint Chiefs of Staff; he wanted to force the military to flout the president’s orders and bomb the Soviet missile bases they’d found in Cuba.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Saving America sounded a lot like COINTELPRO, which sounded a lot like CHAOS--they all ran together, in part, it seemed, because they'd all shared notes.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“The true extent of the agency’s domestic activities against dissidents would probably never be known, the Times declared—but the paper had been able to uncover CHAOS activities from the late sixties that had targeted the Black Panther party.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“In August 1967, the same month Hoover launched COINTELPRO, CIA director Richard Helms inaugurated the agency’s aforementioned illegal domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, which also employed agents and informants to infiltrate subversive groups and then neutralize them.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties

“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.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“read about CHAOS and COINTELPRO until I must’ve sounded, to all my friends, like a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist, someone who might go off on a long-winded tangent about the threats of the deep state. But the fact that the CIA has become an all-purpose scapegoat—the preeminent symbol of global power run amok—doesn’t change the fact that its abuses of power in the 1960s were legitimate and myriad. If anything, these abuses were so gross that they’ve lent authority to any and every claim against federal intelligence agencies: if the CIA and the FBI are capable of killing American citizens in cold blood, often in elaborate schemes, what aren’t they capable of?”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Now, before the Church Committee, he allowed that the FBI’s ruthless pragmatism had obscured any sense of morality he and his colleagues might’ve had. “Never once,” he said, “did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’… The one thing we were concerned about was this: ‘Will this course of action work? Will it get us what we want?”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“The CIA wasn’t even supposed to operate on domestic soil. What could they have been doing messing around with an acid-soaked cult in Los Angeles? And if Whitson had been close enough to the murders to stop them, why didn’t he?”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“This has been the most exciting thirteen years of my life. There’s nothing like the adrenaline rush of catching these people in lies, and documenting it—knowing that you’ve found something no one else has found.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“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.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“So many of my sources, even the most reliable, had trouble explaining their feelings and motivations, not just because so much time had passed but because some schism stood between them and the past. It was irreparable—wherever the sixties had come from, they were gone, even in memory.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Roger Smith knew that the stereotype of the addict had a lot of potency in the popular imagination. Casual drug users were regarded as inherently criminal, a tear in the fabric of society. The public’s fear of such people was easily manipulated.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“After the Family was caught, Time magazine picked up on the bizarre parallels between Stranger in a Strange Land and Manson’s own “nest.” In January 1970, it ran a piece called “A Martian Model?” arguing that Manson had “no powers of invention at all… He may have murdered by the book.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

“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.”
― Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties