Before her murder trial, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Susan Atkins somehow ended up telling her story to reporters:
Lawrence Schiller wouldn’t talk to me, either, and Jerry Cohen had died by his own hand, in 1993. Looking into those two men, I found that throughout the sixties, their journalism had often gotten them mixed up in furtive arrangements. In ’67, Schiller had published the first book to attack the conspiracy theorists around John F. Kennedy’s assassination, staunchly supporting the official explanation for JFK’s death. That same year, foreshadowing his feat at Sybil Brand, Schiller wormed his way into the Dallas hospital room of Jack Ruby, who’d killed Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. The reporter emerged with the only recording ever made of Ruby’s confessing to the murder. Schiller released it on vinyl that year. Notably, he’d taped Ruby saying that he hadn’t killed Oswald as part of a conspiracy, thus shoring up the government’s official line.
During a congressional investigation of the CIA’s illegal domestic operations, the agency admitted that it had more than 250 “assets” in the American media in the 1960s. Their identities were never revealed. Mark Lane, who’d written the first book questioning the findings of the Warren Commission—the investigative committee appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, which concluded that Kennedy was killed by a lone assassin—believed Schiller was one of those assets, and Jerry Cohen, too. Lane believed they’d been tasked with disrupting investigations of the Kennedy assassination. In testimony before Congress, Lane charged that the CIA had paid Cohen to “smear” him in the press.
I could never prove that, but I did find a trove of documents in the National Archives showing that Schiller had been acting as an informant for the FBI in 1967 and 1968, sharing confidential information with the Bureau about Mark Lane’s sources. His work as an informant continued under the cloak of his “reporting” for Life magazine, which was later named in a 1977 Rolling Stone story as one of the publications that provided CIA employees with cover. Schiller tracked down authorities who were investigating potential malfeasance in the Kennedy assassination, using his press credentials to obtain interviews and then sharing his findings with the FBI. He’d written to J. Edgar Hoover to say that he was “in possession of the names and whereabouts of [the] confidential informant whom Mr. [Mark] Lane refused to identify” in his testimony to the Warren Commission. Schiller dug up information about officials looking into the CIA’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination. According to memos, the FBI eagerly awaited Schiller’s information. Others had made similar claims about Cohen and Schiller. Pete Noyes, a TV investigative reporter who’d written a book on the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, said that Cohen, a friend, had pressured him to abandon the project. If Noyes dropped the publication of the book, Cohen promised him a plum job at the Los Angeles Times. Noyes declined the offer, but he was disturbed by how much Cohen knew about his unpublished work. A few weeks later, he was fired from his job at CBS News. Cohen was “a strange little guy,” Noyes told me. He wondered why his onetime friend tried to quash his book, and he suspected that Cohen had played a role in his firing, too. Although he could never prove it, Noyes was fairly certain that Cohen was a CIA asset.