They were all tan and looked healthy

December 6th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillSharon Tate was right to be wary of Polanski’s circle, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):

Pic Dawson, who’d threatened Frykowski’s life and been thrown out of Polanski’s party, had been the subject of Interpol surveillance for drug smuggling as early as 1965. The young son of a diplomat, he’d gained entrée in the Polanski crowd through his friendship with Cass Elliot, one of the singers in the popular sixties group the Mamas and the Papas. Like most of the men in the troubled singer’s life, he’d used her for her money and connections. Elliot’s biographers would later write that her infamous 1966 London arrest — she’d been caught stealing hotel towels and keys — was actually a ruse to force her to share information about Dawson’s drug-smuggling operations. Dawson’s colleagues in the drug business, Billy Doyle and Tom Harrigan, also wormed their way into Polanski’s circle through Mama Cass.

According to police reports, Dawson, Doyle, and Harrigan — all twenty-seven, and all romantically involved with Elliot — were joined by a fourth partner, “Uncle” Charles Tacot, a New Yorker who was more than a decade older. A former marine, the six-foot-six strongman was renowned for his prowess with knives; he was rumored to have maintained ties to military intelligence, and he’d been selling drugs in Los Angeles since his arrival in the mid-1950s. Curiously, despite their many years of drug peddling and several drug arrests among them, only Doyle had ever been convicted of any crime — and his conviction was later overturned and changed to an acquittal on his record.

[…]

As the story goes, at some point in the months before the murders, the residents of Cielo threw one of their endless parties, with Frykowski and Sebring leading the charge. Billy Doyle showed up and, in the spirit of the times, drank, smoked, and snorted himself to unconsciousness. Frykowski and Sebring, and maybe Witold Kaczanowski, too, wanted to get even with Doyle for something. Some say he’d sold them bad drugs. So, before a crowd of onlookers, they lowered Doyle’s pants, flogged him, and anally raped him.

[…]

Candice Bergen, in an interview with the LAPD a few weeks after the murders, said that it was a rape, most likely at Sebring’s place or at his friend John Phillips’s (also of the Mamas and the Papas); Dennis Hopper told the Los Angeles Free Press that it was at the Cielo house. He described it as “a mass whipping of a dealer from Sunset Strip who’d given them bad dope.” Ed Sanders, in The Family, reports that Doyle was “whipped and video-buggered,” and the location varies depending on which edition of the book you’re looking at.

[…]

In short, he told the LAPD’s Lieutenant Earl Deemer that he didn’t remember being raped, but he couldn’t be sure; it might’ve happened anyway. He recalled going over to see Frykowski at the Cielo house on the night in question, sometime in early July. Frykowski, thinking it would be a funny prank, slipped some mescaline in his champagne. Folger and Kaczanowski were there, too. “It was out at the swimming pool,” Doyle told Deemer, “and there was two cases of champagne by the pool… And apparently [Frykowski] put some in my drink, and I said, Jesus… I am high… I am really out of my bird.”

He wanted something to bring him down, and Frykowski was happy to oblige, producing some pills that he said belonged to Sharon Tate. Doyle swallowed “about eight of them,” and soon enough, as Frykowski started to laugh at him, he realized that the pills were something else entirely, and that he was dealing with some wild people:

They were crazier than hell. I didn’t realize they were so crazy. I am using the word ‘crazy,’ I mean drug-induced crazy… in California, everybody has a tan. Now, if people don’t have a tan, they look a little different. You can see things in their face[s] that a tan covers up… They were all tan and looked healthy. They looked very straight to me when I first got there. And, uh… I don’t remember much more than that.

[…]

In recent months he’d developed a coke habit, which only exacerbated the paranoia. Convinced that someone, somewhere, was out to get him, he started carrying a gun. It didn’t help that he often bragged about how much cocaine he had, especially when there were women around. “They all wanted to get laid,” he said to Deemer, “and the price of admission was a nose full of coke, and I learned that.” He would show up at parties with a silver coke spoon and tell everyone he had “pounds of it.” His good friend Charles Tacot said, “‘ For Chrissakes, Billy, what do you tell people that kind of stuff for?’ And I said, ‘I want to get laid, Charles.’”

That day, higher and higher on drugs that he couldn’t even name, Doyle became convinced that Frykowski meant to harm him. So he pulled out his gun and pointed it at the Pole, threatening to kill him. Frykowski, the bigger man — and the more sober, too, if only by a hair — wrested the gun from him.

Here Doyle’s memory got hazy; he apparently lapsed into unconsciousness, and Voytek called up Charlie Tacot, asking him to come collect his deranged friend. It was possible, Doyle conceded, that Frykowski or Kaczanowski had raped him after that. He admitted that he might’ve told his friend Mama Cass something to that effect. “I was unconscious,” he told Deemer. “I wasn’t sore the next day… not there. But I was sore everywhere else.”

In another LAPD officer’s account of that interview, Doyle puts it even more frankly: “I was so freaked out on drugs I wouldn’t know if they’d fucked me or not!”

[…]

In our first phone call, Tacot filled in some of the blanks from Doyle’s story. He remembered driving over to pick up Doyle, who was passed out somewhere on the Cielo Drive property. His belt had been split, apparently with a knife. A friend who’d come along for the errand said, “I think Voytek fucked him.”

They took Doyle, still unconscious, to Mama Cass’s place in the Hollywood Hills. Tacot remembered thinking, “If we don’t take care of him, he’s going to go back there and have a beef. I carried him out, laid him by a tree, went back to my car and got about twenty feet of welded link chain, which I had in there for somebody else, originally. I put it around his ankle and a tree with a good padlock and snapped it all together — so I know he’s not going anywhere. Cass was in the hospital at the time. She said, ‘Get the Polaroid! Get the Polaroid!’”

Doyle came to a few hours later, still very high, and simmering with rage. “‘ I’m going to shoot that motherfucker,’” Tacot remembered him saying. “And I said, ‘No, no, we’re leaving town. We’re going to Jamaica… but first you’re going to get sober and you’re going to be on this fucking tree until you are.’”

[…]

After that, Tacot told me, the pair headed off to Jamaica, where apparently they were making a movie about marijuana. (No footage from this film has ever surfaced. Others have said the two were involved in a large narcotics deal.) On August 9, while they were away, “Manson goes up and kills those people and everyone’s looking for [Doyle],” Tacot said. He and Doyle were suspects within days. “I picked up the phone one day and the Toronto Star informed me that me and Billy were in the headlines: two wanted for murder.” A couple of days later, back in the United States, “I took a lie-detector test,” Tacot told me. “They knew I had nothing to do with it. Billy, too. He was in Jamaica with me. We were cleared, out of the country. You can’t kill somebody long-distance.”

[…]

Seemingly everyone in town had partied with Tacot at some point. Corrine Calvet, a French actress who’d worked in Hollywood since the forties, had one of the most alarming stories of them all. Calvet was as famous for her turbulent life as her film roles. She’d starred opposite James Cagney in What Price Glory? In the fifties, she married Johnny Fontaine, a mobster-turned-actor who’d been a pallbearer at the gangster Mickey Cohen’s funeral. A purported Satanist, she’d been sued in 1967 by a longtime lover who accused her of “controlling” him with voodoo.

I met Calvet at her beach-facing apartment in Santa Monica. Solemn and unsmiling, in heavy makeup, her gray hair swept back, she got right to the point.

“The only thing that I can tell you about this Manson,” she said, her accent inflecting the words with glamour and gravity, “is that Charlie Tacot brought him and the girls to a party at our house. Two hours after they were there, I caught Charlie Manson taking a piss in my pool. I told Charlie Tacot to get them out of here and they left. After the tragedy happened, the FBI came by and told me I was next on their list to be killed.”

I explained that Tacot had denied ever having met Manson or anyone in the Family. “Maybe he has good reason to say that,” Calvet said, letting her words hang in the air. She was certain: “Charlie knew them.”

[…]

Tacot had lived in Los Angeles since the mid-1950s, when he moved there from Mexico with his wife. He had two daughters, one of whom, Margot, would later confirm a lot of her father’s story: he was a drug dealer, she said, who operated on the fringes of the music and acting world. Although he would often get arrested, she said, “nothing ever stuck. Someone always took care of it for him.”

[…]

As he grew more comfortable, Tacot made an unexpected revelation: at the time of the murders, he worked for an intelligence agency — he wouldn’t say which — and reported to Hank Fine, a veteran of the army’s Military Intelligence Service (MIS). This had been a World War II–era operation so secret that it wasn’t even acknowledged by the federal government until 1972. Fine, a Polish émigré whose true name was Hersh Matias Warzechahe, was “an assassin who shot people for the government,” Tacot claimed.

Thinking the old guy was fantasizing, I barely followed up on the revelation. But he, and later Billy Doyle, would often reference Fine, only to refuse to answer any questions about him. When I looked into him, I learned neither man had been lying. Tacot also described his friend Doyle — they were still close — as “a dangerous man. He’d kill you in a fucking minute. Both of us are second-generation intelligence.

[…]

Tacot reminded me that Bugliosi, when he wrote Helter Skelter, had given pseudonyms to him and his friends, and not just for the sake of politeness. “He was afraid American intelligence would kill him if he exposed us,” Tacot claimed.

[…]

Some people told me, with certainty, that Tacot had been an assassin for the CIA, that he was a “gun freak” and an incredible marksman. (In his 2006 autobiography, Since Then: How I Survived Everything and Lived to Tell About it, the musician David Crosby identified Tacot as a “soldier of fortune” who taught him how to shoot a gun.) Others said that he was an ex-marine who’d served in Korea and used to show off his impressive knife-throwing skills. I heard that he grew pot in Arizona; that he was a child molester; that he was a coke smuggler; that he was an uncredited screenwriter; and that his intelligence ties were all fictitious.

[…]

Fine, who’d been a movie PR man from the 1940s until his death in 1975, had been in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the counterintelligence agency that oversaw the MIS and evolved into the CIA after World War II. His work often seemed to combine Hollywood and spycraft. Eddie Albert, the star of the sixties sitcom Green Acres, told me that Fine had sent him on undercover missions to Mexico during the war; from his sailboat, the actor had photographed German landing sites and military training grounds. Though I found no proof, the consensus among Fine’s associates was that he’d continued working in espionage operations through the sixties. His only child, Shayla, told me that his public-relations gig was a cover — and, yes, she said, Tacot had reported to her father. What kind of work were they doing? She never knew, except that it was classified.

[…]

I brought up his and Tacot’s alibi for the night of the murders: they’d been in Jamaica, you’ll recall, filming “a pot movie.” Doyle admitted that the movie was a ruse. He and Tacot had really been doing intelligence work there, he said, as part of some effort to keep Cuba out of Jamaica.

“Dead white men will pull your tongue out if you tell this shit,” he said. “You have to understand that the government doesn’t want to have any exposure on the Jamaican thing — there never was a Jamaican thing. They don’t want to know about it.” When I asked why, he said, “How the fuck do I know? I’m a Canadian citizen. I went with Charles on an adventure. I thought we were going to do a movie.”

[…]

Later, when I’d interviewed so many people that some of them had started to compare notes, he said something really impenetrable. “The community has looked at this as a settled thing until you started talking to us.”

“What community?” I asked. “Who?”

“The ties that bind.”

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It was risky to break cover to fire the weapon when it might take five or even 10 shots to get the burst

December 5th, 2024

Logan Nye was an Army journalist and paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division, where he got to see the experimental XM-25 grenade-launcher in action:

I was a young public affairs sergeant assigned to an airborne brigade combat team, and we had one Stryker battalion attached to us that got the XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement (CDTE) System, commonly known as the “Punisher.” It was similar to the SSRS, but it carried a smaller round at 25mm or .98-caliber, closer to the Bolter. When it worked, it really worked: Shooters used a laser to gauge distance to a target, told the weapon how much farther the target was behind the cover, then fired. The round flew past the cover, detonated at the specified distance and generally ruined people’s days.

But it was expensive; each round cost $1,000 and was expected to drop to $35 or so in full production. And the system frequently failed. I photographed a sergeant major firing it in a “familiarization shoot” and something like eight rounds failed in a row. A military police soldier and I slowly counted the shots as I took photos, marking each time that another two weeks of our pay had gone downrange and failed to explode.

It was worse on patrols, where troops couldn’t count on the weapon in tough fights. It was risky to break cover to fire the weapon when it might take five or even 10 shots to get the burst. They obviously tried, but the troops in contact reports would come across the brigade chat system, saying that they’d expended 10 or 20 rounds for zero enemy casualties. It’s no wonder the Army eventually abandoned the CDTE effort in 2018.

The new SSRS looks less complicated:

Key to the Barrett SSRS’s design is its user-friendly, assault-rifle-based structure. The weapon features a butt stock at the rear, an [sic] five rounds ammunition magazine in the center, and a barrel length of 305mm. The grenade launcher is compact and versatile with an overall length of 861mm and weighing just 6.3kg. It can fire various ammunition, including airburst rounds, giving soldiers a crucial advantage on the battlefield.

Barrett SSRS

A big, heavy, unreliable weapon has multiple strikes against it, but a small, light, reliable version might hit the sweet spot, where its small projectile can be launched at high enough velocity for accurate more-or-less direct fire, but the payload is big enough to kill nearby gunmen with a not-quite-direct hit.

Posted in War, Weapons | No Comments »

All bacon is cured

December 4th, 2024

All bacon is cured, but some is labeled uncured:

“Curing is the addition of salt to a product to change the chemical properties in a way that preserves it,” says Moskowitz. The salt in the brine prevents the growth of certain kinds of bacteria that cause meat to spoil. Curing also imparts flavor to the meat. In addition to salt, often sugar, herbs, or spices are added to the brine for flavor.

Both cured and uncured bacon start as slabs of pork belly that are either injected with a wet brine — a saltwater solution — or placed into a wet brine. Some bacon is still made using a dry brine — a dry salt and seasoning mixture — but wet brines are more common.

Smoking meat is also a way of preserving it, and most bacon is smoked over a low temperature after being cured to help further dehydrate the meat, and to impart a nice smoky flavor.

Bacon is most often cured using artificial nitrites, a chemical additive that preserves the meat and gives bacon its pink color. The bacon at Foster Sundry is cured in-house using pink curing salt (it’s not the same thing as Himalayan pink salt), a mixture of sodium chloride (table salt) and sodium nitrite. Pink salt is also known as Prague powder, Insta Cure #1, or pink curing salt #1, and it is commonly used to cure meats, like corned beef.

“There’s a more attractive color on a cured product,” says Moskowitz, “especially when it’s been cured with pink salt.” That’s a large part of the reason butchers prefer cured bacon. When exposed to air, cured bacon maintains its pink color much longer than uncured bacon, which can quickly turn gray.

There isn’t such a thing as “uncured” when it comes to bacon. “It’s misleading,” says Moskowitz. “Most things that are labeled as uncured have had celery salt added to it.”

Celery salt, which contains naturally occurring nitrites, cures the bacon. Bacon labeled as uncured was cured without artificial nitrites like pink salt.

The USDA rules require uncured bacon to be labeled as “no nitrites or nitrates added.” Nitrites are naturally occurring both in our bodies as well as in many foods like celery, lettuce, spinach, and beets. Celery salt and sea salt are two natural nitrates often used to cure meat.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

It cannot afford to be blockaded

December 3rd, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallHaving spent four thousand turbulent years consolidating its landmass, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), China is now building a blue-water navy:

A green-water navy patrols its maritime borders, a blue-water navy patrols the oceans. It will take another thirty years (assuming economic progression) for China to build naval capacity to seriously challenge the most powerful seaborne force the world has ever seen — the US Navy. But in the medium to short term, as it builds, and trains, and learns, the Chinese navy will bump up against its rivals in the seas; and how those bumps are managed — especially the Sino-American ones — will define great power politics in this century.

[…]

As some of the richer Arab nations came to realize, you cannot buy an efficient military off the shelf.

[…]

Gradually the Chinese will put more and more vessels into the seas off their coast and into the Pacific. Each time one is launched there will be less space for the Americans in the China seas. The Americans know this, and know the Chinese are working toward a land-based antiship missile system to double the reasons why the US Navy, or any of its allies, might one day want to think hard about sailing through the South China Sea. Or indeed, any other “China sea.” China’s increasing long distance-shore-to ship artillery firepower will free up its growing navy to venture farther from its coastline because the navy will be become less vital for defense. There was hint of this in September 2015 when the Chinese (lawfully) sailed five vessels through American territorial waters off the coast of Alaska. That this took place just before President Xi’s visit to the United States was not a coincidence. The Bering Strait is the quickest way for Chinese vessels to reach the Arctic Ocean. We will see more of them off the Alaskan coast in the coming years. And all the while, the developing Chinese space project will be watching every move the Americans make, and those of its allies.

[…]

Under the water China is playing catch-up in submarine warfare. It may be able to surface a sub next to a US carrier group, but its underwater fleet is too noisy to hunt enemy submarines. While it works on this problem it is deploying anti-submarine ships and is busy installing a network of underwater sensors in the East and South China Seas.

Between China and the Pacific is the archipelago that Beijing calls the “first island chain.” There is also the “nine-dash line,” more recently turned into ten dashes in 2013 to include Taiwan, which China says marks its territory. This dispute over ownership of more than two hundred tiny islands and reefs is poisoning China’s relations with its neighbors. National pride means China wants to control the passageways through the chain; geopolitics dictates it has to. It provides access to the world’s most important shipping lanes in the South China Sea. In peacetime the route is open in various places, but in wartime it could very easily be blocked, thus blockading China. All great nations spend peacetime preparing for the day war breaks out.

Free access to the Pacific is first hindered by Japan. Chinese vessels emerging from the Yellow Sea and rounding the Korean Peninsula would have to go through the Sea of Japan and up through La Perouse Strait above Hokkaido and into the Pacific. Much of this is Japanese or Russian territorial waters, and at a time of great tension, or even hostilities, would be inaccessible to China. Even if they made it they would still have to navigate through the Kuril Islands northeast of Hokkaido, which are controlled by Russia but claimed by Japan.

Japan is also in dispute with China over the uninhabited island chain it calls Senkaku and the Chinese know as Diaoyu, northeast of Taiwan. This is the most contentious of all territorial claims between the two countries. If instead Chinese ships pass through, or indeed set off from, the East China Sea off Shanghai and go in a straight line toward the Pacific, they must pass the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa—upon which there is not only a huge American military base, but also as many shore-to-ship missiles as the Japanese can pile at the tip of the island. The message from Tokyo is: “We know you’re going out there, but don’t mess with us on the way out.”

Another potential flare-up with Japan centers on the East China Sea’s gas deposits. Beijing has declared an “Air Defense Identification Zone” over most of the sea, requiring prior notice before anyone else flies through it. The Americans and Japanese are trying to ignore it, but it will become a hot issue at a time of their choosing or due to an accident that is mismanaged.

Below Okinawa is Taiwan, which sits off the Chinese coast and separates the East China Sea from the South China Sea. China claims Taiwan as its twenty-third province, but it is currently an American ally with a navy and air force armed to the teeth by Washington. It came under Chinese control in the seventeenth century but has only been ruled by China for five years in the last century (from 1945 to 1949).

Taiwan’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC) to differentiate it from the People’s Republic of China, although the ROC claims it should govern both territories. This is a name Beijing can live with, as it does not state that Taiwan is a separate state. America is committed to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. However, if Taiwan declares full independence from China, which China would consider an act of war, the United States is not to come to its rescue, as the declaration would be considered provocative.

The two governments vie for recognition for themselves and nonrecognition of the other in every single country in the world, and in most cases Beijing wins. When you can offer a potential market of 1.4 billion people as opposed to 23 million, most countries don’t need long to consider. However, there are twenty-two countries (mostly developing states; for example, Swaziland, Burkina Faso, and the island nation of São Tomé and Principe) that do opt for Taiwan and that are usually handsomely rewarded.

The Chinese are determined to have Taiwan but are nowhere near being able to challenge for it militarily. Instead they are using soft power by increasing trade and tourism between the two states. China wants to woo Taiwan back into its arms. During the 2014 student protests in Hong Kong, one of the reasons the authorities did not quickly batter them off the streets — as they would have done in, for example, Ürümqi — was that the world’s cameras were there and would have captured the violence. In China much of this footage would be blocked, but in Taiwan people would see what the rest of the world saw and ask themselves how close a relationship they wanted with such a power. Beijing hesitated; it is playing the long game.

[…]

To go westward toward the energy-producing states of the Gulf they must pass Vietnam, which as we have noted has recently been making overtures to the Americans. They must go near the Philippines, a US ally, before trying to get through the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, all of which are diplomatically and militarily linked to the United States. The strait is approximately five hundred miles long and at its narrowest point is less than two miles wide. It has always been a choke point—and the Chinese remain vulnerable to being choked, which is why by the fall of 2016 the Chinese were nearing the completion of extending the capacity of the port in Gwadar, Pakistan, and linking it by highway to China. All of the states along the strait, and near its approaches, are anxious about Chinese dominance and most have territorial disputes with Beijing.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, and the energy supplies believed to be beneath it, as its own. However, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei also have territorial claims against China and one another. For example, the Philippines and China argue bitterly over the Mischief Islands, a large reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, which one day could live up to their name. Every one of the hundreds of disputed atolls, and sometimes just rocks poking out of the water, could be turned into a diplomatic crisis, as surrounding each rock is a potential dispute about fishing zones, exploration rights, and sovereignty.

To further these aims, China, using dredging and land reclamations methods, has embarked on turning a series of reefs and atolls in disputed territory into islands. For example, one, whose name, Fiery Cross Reef, described what it was, has been turned into an island complete with port and runway in the Spratly Islands. Another has had artillery units stationed on it. The runway could host fighter jets giving China far more control of the skies over the region than it currently has.

[…]

It cannot afford to be blockaded. Diplomacy is one solution; the ever-growing navy is another; but the best guarantees are pipelines, roads, and ports.

[…]

The geopolitical writer Robert D. Kaplan expounds the theory that the South China Sea is to the Chinese in the twenty-first century what the Caribbean was to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Americans, having consolidated their landmass, had become a two-ocean power (Atlantic and Pacific), and then moved to control the seas around them, pushing the Spanish out of Cuba.

[…]

Its lease on the new deep-water port at Gwadar in Pakistan will (if the Pakistan region of Baluchistan is stable enough) be key to creating an alternative land route up to China. From Burma’s west coastline, China has built natural gas and oil pipelines linking the Bay of Bengal up into southwest China — China’s way of reducing its nervous reliance on the Strait of Malacca, through which almost 80 percent of its energy supplies pass. This partially explains why, when the Burmese junta began to slowly open up to the outside world in 2010, it wasn’t just the Chinese who beat a path to their door. The Americans and Japanese were quick to establish better relations, with both President Obama and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan going to pay their respects in person.

[…]

The Chinese are also building ports in Kenya, railroad lines in Angola, and a hydroelectric dam in Ethiopia. They are scouring the length and breadth of the whole of Africa for minerals and precious metals.

[…]

China will not leave the sea-lanes in its neighborhood to be policed by the Americans.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity

December 2nd, 2024

Napoleon ofby Andrew RobertsWithin the space of a year, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon had made peace with Austria, Naples, Turkey, Russia, Britain and the émigrés — and now that the Atlantic Ocean was safe to cross, France was going to send an expedition of 12,000 men from Rochefort and Brest ‘to re-establish order on Saint-Domingue’ (present-day Haiti).

In the early 1790s the produce of this former slave colony of 8,000 plantations was greater than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies combined, providing 40 per cent of Europe’s consumption of sugar and 60 per cent of its coffee, and accounting for 40 per cent of all of France’s overseas trade. By 1801, however, because of the slave revolt led over the course of the previous six years by Toussaint l’Ouverture, sugar exports were a mere 13 per cent of their 1789 total and cotton 15 per cent.

[…]

The Jacobins who had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1794 were either dead, in disgrace or in prison. Napoleon was keen to return to the days when Saint-Domingue produced 180 million francs per annum for the French treasury, gave employment to 1,640 ships and thousands of seamen, and kept the French Atlantic ports thriving. He hoped it might even provide a strategic springboard for a new French empire in the western hemisphere, especially now that France had exchanged Tuscany for Louisiana.

[…]

He ordered Leclerc to follow a three-stage plan: first, to promise the blacks anything and everything while he occupied the key strategic positions on the island, secondly, to arrest and deport all potential opponents, and only then to embark on the reintroduction of slavery.

The charismatic and ruthless Toussaint l’Ouverture, a black freeman who had himself owned slaves, had imposed a constitution on Saint-Domingue in May 1801 that made him dictator for life, ostensibly in the name of the French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality. He had also created an army of 20,000 former slaves and taken over the whole island, expelling the Spanish from the eastern half (the present-day Dominican Republic).

[…]

His plan to defeat the French was to destroy any resources they might find on the coast and then to retreat into the mountainous jungle interior to conduct guerrilla warfare.

Leclerc had failed to take into account the horrific ravages that malaria and yellow fever would wreak on his army. Once a shortage of supplies and the outbreak of those diseases struck he faced impossible odds.

[…]

‘If I were black,’ Napoleon said, ‘I would be for the blacks; being white, I am for the whites.’

[…]

The fighting on Saint-Domingue was brutal. Plantations were torched, massacres and torture were common, towns were razed; there were mass drownings; corkscrews were used to draw out the eyes of French prisoners, and the French even constructed a makeshift gas chamber (étouffier) on board a ship in which volcanic sulphur was used to asphyxiate four hundred prisoners, before the ship was scuttled.

Toussaint l’Ouverture finally surrendered on May 1 on terms whereby the freedom of Saint-Domingue’s blacks was officially guaranteed, black officers were accepted into the French army, and l’Ouverture himself and his staff were allowed to retire to one of his several plantations.

However, on June 7, on his own initiative, Leclerc suddenly reneged on the deal, kidnapped l’Ouverture and sent him to prison in France. The guerrilla war continued, and on October 7 Leclerc wrote to Napoleon: ‘We must destroy all the mountain negroes, men and women, only keep children under twelve years old, destroy half the ones of the plains, and so not leave in the colony one coloured man who wears the epaulette.’

[…]

Twenty generals, 30,000 Frenchmen and possibly as many as 350,000 Saint-Dominguans (of both races) had died. Toussaint l’Ouverture, ‘the Black Spartacus’, died of pneumonia on April 7, 1803 in a large cold cell that can be visited today in the Fort de Joux in the Jura mountains.

‘The Saint-Domingue business was a great piece of folly on my part,’ Napoleon later admitted. ‘It was the greatest error that in all my government I ever committed. I ought to have treated with the black leaders, as I would have done the authorities in a province.’ One lesson he did learn was that blacks could make excellent soldiers, and in November 1809 he set up a unit called the Black Pioneers, made up of men from Egypt and the Caribbean under a black battalion commander, Joseph ‘Hercules’ Domingue, to whom he gave a special award of 3,000 francs. By 1812 Napoleon didn’t believe any colonies could be held in perpetuity, predicting that they would all eventually ‘follow the example of the United States. You grow tired of waiting for orders from five thousand miles away; tired of obeying a government which seems foreign to you because it’s remote, and because of necessity it subordinates you to its own local interest, which it cannot sacrifice to yours.’

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There were only three rules

December 1st, 2024

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenIn 1965, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Colonel Slater took over command of Groom Lake:

Slater was the ideal commander. He was astute, practical, and an excellent listener, which put him in direct contrast to the more elitist Colonel Holbury, who’d held the position before. What the pilots appreciated most about Slater was that he was funny. Not sarcastic funny, but the kind of funny that reminded pilots not to take their jobs so seriously all the time. One of the first things Colonel Slater did after taking command of the base was to hang a sign over the House-Six bar that listed Slip Slater’s Basic Rules of Flying at Groom Lake. There were only three rules.

Try to stay in the middle of the air.

Do not go near the edges of it.

The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there.

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He attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community

November 30th, 2024

Debt of Honor by Tom ClancyI’ve been slowly working my way through Tom Clancy’s works in publication order — I commented on Patriot Games and the next few novels a few years ago — and I just got around to listening to the audiobook version of Debt of Honor, which I enjoyed as a period piece from its publication date of 1994, right at the tail end of Japan’s rise to power. I remember reading a paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s similarly themed Rising Sun around this time.

Oddly, this novel about a nationalist Japanese plot to cripple the US economy and seize US-controlled islands is best remembered for presaging the 9/11 attacks, because the whole complicated story ends with a bit of an afterthought:

With the crisis over, President Durling nominates Ryan as vice president for successfully handling the crisis. However, an embittered Japan Air Lines pilot, driven mad by the deaths of his son and brother during the conflict, flies his Boeing 747 directly into the U.S. Capitol during a special joint session of Congress. The president, as well as nearly the entire Congress, the Supreme Court, and many other members of the federal government, are all killed in the attack. Ryan, who was on his way to be sworn as vice president after being confirmed, narrowly escapes the explosion. He becomes the President of the United States and takes his oath of office before a district judge in the CNN studios in Washington.

[…]

In later years, the novel was noted for its similarity to the circumstances surrounding United Airlines Flight 93, especially regarding its climax, where an embittered Japanese pilot crashes his 747 on a joint session of Congress in the Capitol. While researching for the novel’s ending, Clancy consulted an Air Force officer and described his reaction: “I ran this idea past him and all of a sudden this guy’s eyeballing me rather closely and I said, ‘Come on General, I know you must have looked at this before, you’ve got to have a plan for it.’ And the guy goes, ‘Mr. Clancy, to the best of my knowledge, if we had a plan to deal with this, it would be secret, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about it, but to the best of my knowledge we’ve never looked at this possibility before.’”

In April 1995, United States senator Sam Nunn outlined a scenario similar to the novel’s ending, in which terrorists attack the Capitol on the night of a State of the Union address by crashing a radio-controlled airplane filled with chemical weapons into it. Nunn concluded that the scenario is “not far-fetched” and that the required technology is readily available. However, the 9/11 Commission Report revealed that national security officials did not consider the possibility: “[Counterterror official] Richard Clarke told us that he was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft in the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa. But he attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the intelligence community.”

In the aftermath of the attacks, Clancy was called into CNN and commented on the similarity between a plane crash depicted in the novel and the crash of United Flight 93. CNN anchor Judy Woodruff later remarked: “People in our newsroom have been saying today that what is happening is like right out of a Tom Clancy novel.”

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

There was nothing innocent about it

November 29th, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillTom O’Neill coaxed Bill Tennant, Polanski’s old manager, into talking to him (for Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties):

Tennant had never given an interview about the murders, in part because the events of 1969 had sent his life into a tailspin. He’d had the somber task of identifying the bodies at the Tate house. A 1993 piece in Variety (by Peter Bart, as coincidence would have it) described Tennant’s fall from grace. Through the sixties and seventies, he’d found great success in Hollywood, discovering the script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and agenting Peter Fonda’s deal for Easy Rider. But Bart had found him, “a gaunt, battered figure,” “sleeping in a doorway on Ventura Boulevard.” A cocaine addiction had done away with his marriage and his money, leading him to trade “even the gold inlays in his teeth for a fix.” In Bart’s assessment, “the shock of the Manson murders began unraveling him.”

I tracked down Tennant in London, where he was sober, remarried, and managing Michael Flatley, the Lord of the Dance. He’d become a born-again Christian, but he displayed little compassion or forgiveness for Polanski, his onetime client and friend. “Roman is a shit,” he said. Echoing what I’d heard from other friends of the couple, Tennant said there were two versions of their story. “Which one do you want to tell?”

On one hand, Polanski had fallen into dissolution in London, where he was working on a movie and sleeping around while, back in California, his pregnant wife was putting together a home. Tate “wound up getting murdered because he was fucking around in London,” he said. But that was just one side of it.

“The other story is sitting in the Bel Air Hotel with Roman after the funerals and having to address his financial situation, which was not very good,” Tennant said, “and Roman looking across the table at me and saying, I wish I had spent more. I wish I had bought more dresses. I wish I had given more gifts. So what story do you want to tell? The one about this little prick who left his wife alone… with Jay Sebring and Gibby [Folger] and Voytek, these wankers, these four tragic losers, or do you want to talk about a poor kid, Roman Polanski?”

Tennant resisted the idea that the murders represented a loss of innocence for Hollywood. “There was nothing innocent about it,” he said. “It was retribution.” The big value in Los Angeles when he was there, Tennant said, was this: “He who dies with the most toys wins. I think it’s pretty self-serving to call that period, and what was going on, innocent… What’s innocent about drugs? What’s innocent about promiscuous sex?… You tell me where the innocence was.” Within a week of the murders, Polanski was “partying it up” with Warren Beatty, he added. The brutal reality was that “nobody cared or gave a shit about Sharon Tate. Not because they weren’t nice but because she was expendable. As expendable as an actor whose option comes up and gets dropped.”

After his wife’s murder, Polanski stayed on the Paramount studios lot as much as he could. It was the only place he felt safe. And not just from the killers or the media — from the LAPD. “You found the police surveillance units and you found that the police in Los Angeles knew everything about everybody,” Tennant said: “that there was a kind of FBI-slash-CIA aspect of the Los Angeles Police Department, and that they knew everything there was to know.”

Posted in Crime, Media | 3 Comments »

I don’t discuss Turkey Day nearly as much as Halloween

November 28th, 2024

I don’t discuss Turkey Day nearly as much as Halloween:

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

Joe Rogan interviews Marc Andreessen

November 27th, 2024

I’ve been watching fascinating snippets of this interview with Marc Andreessen, and he makes some alarming points:

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?

November 26th, 2024

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallThe Chinese look at society very differently from the West, Tim Marshall reminds us (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World):

I once took a Chinese ambassador in London to a high-end French restaurant in the hope he would repeat Prime Minister Chou En-lai’s much quoted answer to President Richard Nixon’s question “What is the impact of the French Revolution?” to which the prime minister replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” Sadly, this was not forthcoming, but I was treated to a stern lecture about how the full imposition of “what you call human rights” in China would lead to widespread violence and death and was then asked, “Why do you think your values would work in a culture you don’t understand?”

The deal between the party leaders and the people has been, for a generation now, “We’ll make you better off — you will follow our orders.” So long as the economy keeps growing, that grand bargain may last. If it stops, or goes into reverse, the deal is off. The current level of demonstrations and anger against corruption and inefficiency are testament to what would happen if the deal breaks.

Another growing problem for the party is its ability to feed the population. More than 40 percent of arable land is now either polluted or has thinning topsoil, according to their Ministry of Agriculture.

[…]

There are now around five hundred mostly peaceful protests a day across China over a variety of issues. If you introduce mass unemployment, or mass hunger, that tally will explode in both number and the degree of force used by both sides.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 2 Comments »

He suspected British spies were behind the murder

November 25th, 2024

Napoleon ofby Andrew RobertsThe assassination of Tsar Paul I on March 23 came as a blow to Napoleon, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life):

He suspected British spies were behind the murder, although the actual perpetrators were a group of Russian nobles and the Hanoverian General Levin von Bennigsen. Paul was mentally unstable, although not certifiably insane like George III of Britain, Christian VII of Denmark and Maria ‘the Mad’ of Portugal, who all occupied European thrones at the time, albeit with regencies exercising actual control. Paul’s policies supporting the middle classes had been seen as threatening the Russian nobility. His twenty-three-year-old son and heir Alexander, who was in the palace at the time of the assassination, may have had an intimation that the nobles were going to demand his father’s abdication (which they did indeed secure, before they stabbed, strangled and kicked the Tsar to death). Alexander was crowned tsar later that year. Although he theoretically had absolute power, he knew that he had to work with the nobility if he were to escape his father’s fate.

Alexander I was a riddle. Reared in the Enlightenment atmosphere of his grandmother Catherine the Great’s court, and taught Rousseauian principles at a young age by his Swiss tutor Frédéric de La Harpe, he was nonetheless capable of telling his justice minister, ‘You always want to instruct me, but I am the autocratic emperor, and I will this and nothing else!’ He has been described as combining a theoretical love of mankind with a practical contempt for men. Well-meaning, impressionable and egotistical, he was so good at playing a part that Napoleon later dubbed him ‘the Talma of the North’, and on another occasion ‘a shifty Byzantine’. He claimed that he would happily abolish serfdom if only civilization were more advanced, but never genuinely came close to doing so, any more than he ever carried through the codification of Russian law that he promised in 1801 or ratified the liberal constitution he had asked his advisor Count Mikhail Speranski to draw up a few years later.

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The only sin in espionage is getting caught

November 24th, 2024

Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen As deputy director of the CIA, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Richard Helms was a huge fan of Oxcart:

Despite playing a key role in planning and executing covert operations in Vietnam, Richard Helms did not believe the United States could win the war there. This posture kept him out of step with Pentagon brass. Helms believed Vietnam was fracturing consensus about America’s need to win the Cold War, which he saw as the more important battle at hand. He was an advocate of using technology to beat the Russians by way of overhead reconnaissance from satellites and spy planes, which was why he liked Oxcart so much. And unlike Pentagon and State Department officials, who, for the most part, cautioned the president against ever sending spy planes over the Soviet Union again, Helms, like McCone, felt the president should do just that.

“The only sin in espionage is getting caught,” Helms once said. He believed the best intelligence was “objective intelligence.” Photographs didn’t have an opinion and couldn’t lie. Helms attributed his respect for objectivity to his working as a journalist for the wire service United Press International. In 1936, a then twenty-four-year-old Richard Helms got his first big scoop: covering the Berlin Olympics as a reporter, he was invited to interview Adolf Hitler. Six years later, Helms would be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor organization to the CIA, to spy on Hitler’s men.

[…]

When on base, Richard Helms was known to stop in for a drink. He was a great conversationalist but almost always refrained from telling stories about himself. And as far as World War II was concerned, Helms rarely discussed the subject. In 1945, as a young OSS officer, Helms had worked in postwar Berlin. He was one of the key players in Operation Paperclip; Helms had been tasked with finding a group of Hitler’s former scientists and offering them positions on classified programs back in the United States. Jobs involving biological weapons, rockets, and stealth. Years later, Helms justified his recruitment of former Nazis by saying that if the scientists hadn’t come to work for us, they’d have gone to work for “them.” Helms knew things other men did not know. At the Agency he was the man who kept the secrets.

In 1975, Helms would unwittingly become an internationally recognized figure famous for destroying CIA documents to avoid having their secrets revealed. After allegations surfaced that the CIA had been running a human-research program called MKULTRA—which involved mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD—Helms as director of the CIA was asked to take the stand. While testifying to Congress, Helms stated that he had ordered all the MKULTRA files destroyed two years earlier, in 1973.

Posted in Technology, War | 3 Comments »

Human Challenge Trials aren’t riskier than Randomized Controlled Trials

November 23rd, 2024

Keller Scholl, who spent time at GMU working with Robin Hanson and hanging out with the gang, just came out of quarantine from a Human Challenge Trial:

Scholl’s symptoms might be uncomfortable, but they are also of his own making. That’s because he signed up to be a volunteer in the first human ‘challenge trial’ involving Zika virus, a mosquito-borne pathogen that can cause fever, pain and, in some cases, a brain-development problem in infants. In standard infectious-disease trials, researchers test drugs or vaccines on people who already have, or might catch, a disease. But in challenge trials, healthy people agree to become infected with a pathogen so that scientists can gather preliminary data on possible drugs and vaccines before bigger trials take place. “Accelerating a Zika vaccine by a month, a few days, that does a lot of good in the world,” says Scholl, who studies at Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California.

Alex Tabarrok reminds us that Human Challenge Trials aren’t riskier than Randomized Controlled Trials:

The rest of the article uncritically repeats the usual claims from so-called “bioethicists” that human challenge trials (HCTs) are unethical because they involve risks. Of course, HCTs carry risks—so what? Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) also require that participants are exposed to risk. Indeed, for participants in the placebo arm of an RCT, the risks are identical. Furthermore, since RCTs require more participants to achieve statistical validity than HCTs, they must expose more people to harm and, as a result, it’s even possible that more participants are harmed in an RCT than an HCT. Thus, HCTs are not necessarily more risky to participants than RCTs and, of course, to the extent that they speed up results, they can save many lives and greatly reduce risk to everyone else in the the larger society.

In my talk, The Economic Way of Thinking in a Pandemic (starting around 10:52, though the entire presentation is worthwhile), I explain the real reason why bioethicists and physicians hesitate over human challenge trials: they fear feeling personally responsible if a participant is harmed. “We exposed this person to risk, and they died.” Well, yes. But my response is, it’s not about you! Set aside personal emotions and focus on what saves the most lives.

Posted in Economics, Science | 2 Comments »

You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet and it was impossible to make a distinction

November 22nd, 2024

Chaos by Tom O’NeillIt is easy to see how Polanski’s friend Frykowski may have gotten in over his head, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), in the months before the Tate murders:

When Tate and Polanski left, they gave Frykowski and Abigail Folger the run of the place, and things got weird. The couple threw parties all the time. The door was open to anyone and everyone. The crowds grew rowdier, the drugs harder — not just pot and hash, but an abundance of cocaine, mescaline, LSD, and MDA, which was then a new and fairly unheard-of synthetic. Frykowski was especially enamored of it.

MDA?

MDA was first synthesized by Carl Mannich and W. Jacobsohn in 1910. It was first ingested in July 1930 by Gordon Alles who later licensed the drug to Smith, Kline & French. MDA was first used in animal tests in 1939, and human trials began in 1941 in the exploration of possible therapies for Parkinson’s disease. From 1949 to 1957, more than five hundred human subjects were given MDA in an investigation of its potential use as an antidepressant and/or anorectic by Smith, Kline & French. The United States Army also experimented with the drug, code named EA-1298, while working to develop a truth drug or incapacitating agent. Harold Blauer died in January 1953 after being intravenously injected, without his knowledge or consent, with 450 mg of the drug as part of Project MKUltra. MDA was patented as an ataractic by Smith, Kline & French in 1960, and as an anorectic under the trade name “Amphedoxamine” in 1961. MDA began to appear on the recreational drug scene around 1963 to 1964. It was then inexpensive and readily available as a research chemical from several scientific supply houses.

[…]

A 2019 double-blind study administered both MDA and MDMA to healthy volunteers. The study found that MDA shared many properties with MDMA including entactogenic and stimulant effects, but generally lasted longer and produced greater increases in psychedelic-like effects like complex imagery, synesthesia, and spiritual experiences.

Back to the story:

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.

[…]

“I can close my eyes and I feel that it’s still 1969. I hear people’s voices, I see their faces,” Kaczanowski said. He was amazed at how the usual indicators of class and status had disappeared in Hollywood at the time, where “the most extreme ugliness with total purity was mixed up.” This blurriness was the inevitable outcome of the open-door policy they’d all subscribed to at the end of the decade. “Totally primitive, uneducated people” could dress and act like visionary artists. “And you couldn’t know absolutely who was who. You could have a Manson and you could have a great poet and it was impossible to make a distinction.”

[…]

Accordingly, Kaczanowski remembered “so many strange people” coming and going from the house on Cielo Drive, where he would sometimes stay with Frykowski for days at a stretch. “I didn’t trust them,” he said of the guests. “They walked so freely through the place.” He would ask Frykowski who these people were, and the answer always came with degrees of removal — they were friends of this guy, or friends of friends of so-and-so. That was why, after the murders, he felt he’d gotten a bead on who the killers were: the same set of drug dealers that Bugliosi mentions passingly in Helter Skelter.

“I remember Voytek telling me that they threw Pic Dawson out of a party,” he said, taking a sip of wine. “They told Pic Dawson to take his backpack and fuck off.” Kaczanowski remembered another party, a few weeks before the murders, where he’d had to kick out two very drunk guys. At the gate, “they were standing on the other side, looking at Voytek and me, and they said, ‘You sons of bitches, we will be back, and we will kill you.’”

All the months of partying with Frykowski had a cumulative effect. He met so many threatening characters that, when his friend turned up dead, he was convinced one or more of them was to blame.

[…]

Tate had been horrified at the scene that greeted her upon her return to Los Angeles. She was leery of Folger and especially of Frykowski, whom she suspected of drug dealing — she wanted the couple, and the crowd attached to them, out of her house. As I won the confidence of some of her closest friends, they came out with intensely disturbing stories. Her marriage was in shambles, they said, and many of them didn’t want her to fix it — they wanted her to leave it.

Polanski had established a pattern of abuse, emotional and physical. The Sharon Tate they knew, warm and vivacious, was diminished in his presence. “The difference in Sharon was incredible,” said Elke Sommer, the German actress who appeared with her in The Wrecking Crew. She “just wasn’t herself when she was with him. She was in awe, or frightened; he had an awesome charisma.”

That meant that Polanski could walk all over her. One friend, who called him “one of the most evil people I ever met,” said that he had smashed Tate’s face into a mirror, and, on another occasion, forced her to watch a recording of him having sex with another woman. He cheated on her constantly, and he made sure she knew about it. Another friend remembered an incident in which Polanski had asked his wife to wear the same dress that one of his other lovers had worn; when she appeared in her own dress instead, he threw her into the pool in front of their friends. Others said that Polanski hosted orgies at the house without his wife’s knowledge or consent.

Dominick Dunne, who’d been close to Tate, Polanski, and Jay Sebring, was confident on that point. “I never went to their orgies, but I know they existed, and I think Jay was in on it, too,” he said to me. The director James Toback — who would himself be disgraced, nearly twenty years later, by more than two hundred allegations of sexual assault — was even more certain. One night, Warren Beatty had invited him to a party at the Tate house. Toback brought Jim Brown, a football all-star who’d become an action-film hero. At the party, people began to whisper about an orgy. “I was going to be included because I was with Jim,” Toback told me, “and I was certainly up for it, but Jim declined.”

And yet: “James Toback is full of shit and always has been,” Paul Sylbert, a production designer and a friend of Polanski, told me. “Nothing crazy went on up there. There were no orgies, not that I ever have been to, and I was up there frequently.” He conceded that Polanski was “peculiar,” but “whatever his kinkiness was, it was on a small scale and quite private. He might’ve been hinting at orgies, but there were never any.”

Orgies or no, at a certain point Tate felt that she’d suffered enough. As the humiliations accumulated, she approached Elke Sommer for her advice. Sommer remembered telling her, “I’d take the next heavy object, whether it’s an iron or a frying pan or a spade out in the yard, and I’d just brain him.”

Tate wasn’t about to do that, but she did, on a few occasions, warm to the idea of leaving Polanski. Sommer thought she was always too much in her husband’s thrall to follow through. “There was a tremendous sickness when I worked with Sharon,” Sommer said, “a horrendous sickness surrounding her relationship. She was quite lost.”

A number of Tate’s friends were quick to mention the undesirable company she kept — with Frykowski and Folger at the top of the list.

Tate “couldn’t stand them,” said Joanna Pettet, another actress who’d become close to her. The two had had lunch together at the house on the day of the murders. Pettet was surprised to see Frykowski and Folger, whom she’d never met before, walking around like they owned the place. “I asked, who are these people? Why are they here? She said, ‘Roman didn’t want me to be alone.’” Tate tolerated the pair only because her husband insisted on it. On the phone with Polanski, so depressed that she fell into tears, she complained that the two had brought too many drugs into the house, too much chaos. But Polanski refused to turn them out. She asked constantly when he would come home, but he kept postponing his return trip. Moreover, she’d tried to stay with him in London, and he wouldn’t let her — he didn’t want her there.

I’d gone to great lengths to track down Pettet, who had quit the movie business in the nineties. She lived in the high desert beyond Palm Springs, where she was something of a recluse, with no phone. It had dawned on me that I might be able to reach her through the Screen Actors Guild — they would have her address on file, since they were responsible for mailing her residual checks. Through them, I sent her a long letter, and she agreed to meet me for lunch at a strip mall near her house. She was slightly apprehensive when she first arrived. Then fifty-seven, she cut a striking figure, dressed head to toe in denim, with dark glasses that obscured her piercing eyes, until she felt comfortable enough to remove them.

“I lost it when Sharon was killed,” she said. “I had to be hospitalized and missed the funeral.” She made no attempt to conceal her contempt for Polanski. “I hated him,” she said flatly. As others had, Pettet described a marriage in which he exuded an almost casual cruelty toward his wife. For four months in the summer of ’67, Pettet had stayed with the couple at a rented beach house, and she began to notice how often Polanski bossed Tate around. He had a malicious streak; sometimes it reached Pettet herself. “He would throw a brick in the pool and watch my dog dive for it and try to retrieve it. He stood there laughing. The dog wouldn’t give up.”

After Sharon’s funeral, Polanski called Pettet. “On the phone he was strange with me, cold as ice. There was no despair. And I was sobbing.” He wanted to know what she’d told the police. It made her wonder what was behind her friend’s murder. “At the time I suspected it was maybe friends of his who did it. All I know is, he never came [when she asked him to come back], and she was here.”

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