Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
This month I decided to look at some of the dirty dealings our government has gotten itself up to, starting with this weeks book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring.
Now, there are very few people who are NOT familiar with the story of the Manson Family and the horrific murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent and then a day later the murders of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca, usually just called the Tate-LaBianca murders. The book that prosecuting attorney Vincent Bugliosi wrote after the trial, Helter Skelter, is one of if not the best selling true crime book of all time.
And O’Neill says quite early on, he’s not a Manson apologist, he’s not questioning Manson’s guilt or the guilt of any of his sheeple who killed at his command. What he’s saying, and he is able to document it in detail, is that there is much more to the story....and Bugliosi is NOT The good guy he presents himself as. In point of fact, O’Neill uncovered evidence that Bugliosi suborned perjury and hid evidence from the defense. Enough so that if any defense attorny picked this up, they could make a real argument for a new trial for the surviving members of the Family who are still in prison. Assuming they could get a sympathetic judge, which is a surprisingly hard thing to do with the Manson Murders.
Which I get. To be completely fair, I truly do understand not wanting to give them another shot at freedom, given that Sharon Tate was 8 months pregnant when she was brutally stabbed and hung and Abigail Folger comes from an oustandingly wealthy coffee empire.
O’Neill did speak with Bugliosi and presented what he found, at which point Bugliosi declared they were enemies and began writing 30 page long threatening letters to O’Neill and his publishers, editors, agents. For his part, in addition to the perjury issues, O’Neill found incidents where Bugliosi had beaten his mistress into a miscarriage, then forced her to drop the charges she had filed against him for the assault...mistress because he was married when this incident happened. He also believed his son was not his and stalked the mail man, to the point the poor man had to move and ultimately file suit against Bugliosi for defamation, which Bugliosi lost and had to pay like $12000 in damages.
Anyways, the rabbit hole O’Neill goes down draws some compelling, but not conclusive, ties to the CIA. And its not conclusive, which is the biggest frustration for O’Neill and largely why I am willing to follow him down the rabbit hole. He never claims something that he can’t absolutely prove. And admits at the end that everything he found left more questions than answers.
So what exactly did he find? Well, he found that Terry Melcher, Bugliosi’s star witness and the alleged reason behind the choice of 10050 Cielo Dr as the first house the Manson Family attacked, had a lot more contact with the Manson’s than Melcher wanted to admit to. And that Bugliosi knew this, and supported Melcher’s truncated reporting from the stand.
So did Dennis Wilson, the drummer from the Beach Boys. So did a lot of people. Like Roger Smith, who was Manson’s parole officer and became the foster parent to Manson’s child with Mary Brunner. Smith tried to claim he didn’t really spend that much time with Manson, except there was the OTHER Smith, Dr. Dave of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which Dr. Dave used to study the behaviors of the hippies in San Francisco. The staff from the HAFMC report MANY visits between Manson and Roger Smith.
O’Neill found possible links between Smith, and Jolly West, aka Louis Jolyon West, aka the number one researcher for Sidney Gottleib, the CIA mastermind behind MKULTRA. And while there were no smoking gun documents linking West to Manson, is it really too far a leap to wonder if the Manson Murders were the ultimate end game of MKULTRA? I mean, the evidence that O’Neill lays out for West having been ultimately successful in his mind control experiments, using combinations of LSD, sodium pentathol, and hypnosis is truly astounding.
And while Manson was clearly not formally educated, I don’t think he was stupid. If he saw the impact of LSD on the hippy community of Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love...and we KNOW he was there in 1967...He saw the potential to make his own minion army. And boy did he. With a hold so strong that a decade after the murders, at Susan Atkins first parole hearing, she said she could still hear Charlie talking to her.
O’Neill spends the first half of the book poking holes in Bugliosi’s telling of events, and these are massive gaping holes, that implicate everyone from LAPD, to LASO, to literal WWII heroes....If you’ve all seen or read Band of Brothers, you might recognize the name Buck Compton. Yeah, HE’S in here. And they are all implicated in at best gross incompetence, to fraud, to a major cover up. Of what? Who fucking knows! That’s the most frustrating thing about reading, and I can only imagine trying to write this book. There are so many loose ends that will never be tied, leaving one to only speculate.
O’Neill tries very hard to not become a conspiracy theorist, and to only report on what he could definitively prove. I, on the other hand, have no such compunctions. I think that Roger Smith was given guidance by Jolly West on how to brain wash and control someone using LSD and Smith did so to Manson, with the full blessing of the Federal Parole System. Why? Because there were many such operations in the 1950’s and 60’s, from FBI’s COINTELPRO to CIA’s CHAOS...yes they had a program called CHAOS....which was grossly illegal as it operated within the United States, using US Citizens as test subjects. Both the FBI and the CIA’s pet projects were geared towards showing the instability and negative aspects of the countercultural movements on the American way of life. And what better way to demonstrate that than a series of grisly murders conducted against the rich and famous by a band of drug addled, violent hippies, who live in a commune, and call themselves The Family?
O’Neill does not say this. He carefully, explicitly, DOES NOT SAY THIS. Because while the pieces of the puzzle are there, he was never able to find the smoking gun to prove the theory. Which is why this is only MY conspiracy theory. But....it does make sense. But...well, like the Kennedy assassinations and the Epstein files, we will probably never know the full and complete story of how Manson was able to obtain the level of control he did, to orchestrate the crime of the century. And so like all good mysteries, the author leaves it on a cliff hanger, even knowing the mystery will never be solved.
This book was quite good, it kept me reading right through the last page, even when the author was letting the reader down gently that there were no solutions to this most magnificent of puzzles.
