The most promising but frustrating of his inquiries, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), concerned an LAPD officer named William W. Herrmann:
Herrmann’s story hints at how intelligence agencies may have collaborated with police in Los Angeles.
A longtime lieutenant with the LAPD, Herrmann had an unusual background for law enforcement. He had a doctorate in psychology; he specialized in quelling insurgencies; he’d developed one of the first computer systems to track criminals and predict violent outbreaks in cities. Daryl Gates, the head of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, hailed him as a “genius,” praising his technical aptitude in particular.
[…]
Concurrent with his time in the LAPD, he’d worked under contract for a dizzying list of American intelligence and military agencies: the air force, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the President’s Office of Science and Technology, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Most of his work for these groups remains classified.
You’d think these projects wouldn’t have left much free time, but Herrmann piled on even more work, taking leaves of absence from the LAPD to pursue side gigs with defense firms. These had opaque, generic names like Electro-Dash Optical Systems, System Development Corp., and Control Data Corp. This last, a supercomputer development firm in Minneapolis with military contracts, relied on Herrmann’s services for ten years, from 1961 to ’71—or so Herrmann told the FBI. When the Bureau went to Control Data Corp. for a background check, the company claimed that Herrmann never worked for them.
[…]
Having spent four months in 1967 training Thai police in counterinsurgency tactics, Herrmann returned to Asia in September 1968 to join the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. Documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, listed him as a scientific “advisor” to the army. His responsibility was to train South Vietnamese police in “paramilitary techniques” to deploy against Viet Cong insurgents. None of the records described those techniques in any detail, but the mere mention of them was enough to make me put a few things together. The dates of Herrmann’s stint in Vietnam, his job description, his professional affiliations, and his training made it abundantly likely that he was working for a CIA project called Phoenix, one of the most controversial elements in the agency’s history.
Lyndon Johnson had secretly authorized Phoenix in 1968; it was discontinued in early ’71.
[…]
During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives admitted to massacring civilians and making it appear that the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong. Their hope was to “win the hearts and minds” of neutral Vietnamese citizens, compelling them to turn away from the insurgency in revulsion.
[…]
In 1968, CIA scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically opened the skulls of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their brains, gave them daggers, and left them alone in a room. They wanted to shock the prisoners into killing one another. When the effort failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies burned.
According to Seymour Hersh’s 1972 book, Cover-Up, Phoenix had “committees” set up across all forty-four provinces in South Vietnam. They kept blacklists of Viet Cong fighters and had strict orders to meet weekly or monthly quotas of “neutralizations.” The whole operation relied on computerized indexes. The identity of its CIA leader never came to light—but whoever he was, he was there ostensibly as part of the Agency for International Development (AID), later revealed as a CIA front.
[…]
Whatever he’d learned in Southeast Asia, he brought it back to L.A.—his work in California bore disturbing resemblances to the techniques he’d honed as part of the Phoenix project.
[…]
Herrmann didn’t give many interviews, but when he spoke to the London Observer’s Charles Foley in May 1970, he was apparently in a voluble mood. Discussing his work for the task force, he described a program of spying and infiltration far exceeding the “studies” that the group was committed to—his words sounded as if they’d been lifted from COINTELPRO and CHAOS manuals. (Both of those operations, of course, were well under way in Los Angeles.)
Like Governor Reagan and President Johnson, Herrmann believed that California’s student dissidents were funded by foreign Communists. He told the Observer that he had a “secret plan” for “forestalling revolution in America.” The key was “to split off those bent on destroying the system from the mass of dissenters; then following classic guerilla warfare ‘theory’ to find means which will win their hearts and minds.” He called this plan, simply, “Saving America,” and it included strategies for “deeper penetration by undercover agents into dissenting groups,” such as “army agents pos[ ing] as students and news reporters.” In a turn worthy of Minority Report, he wanted to use mathematical probability models to predict when and where violence would erupt. He also called for the use of long-range electronic surveillance devices; if informants had already penetrated any “dissenting groups,” they would “secretly record speeches and conversations.”
[…]
I found a letter that Compton wrote to Herrmann on March 14, 1969, five months before the Tate–LaBianca murders, thanking him for “obtaining good advance intelligence… on subversives and militants.” The two had served together on the LAPD in the fifties, so I wasn’t surprised that they knew each other. I was surprised that Compton had written a note that all but proved that he and Herrmann were operating beyond their remit for the State of California. Neither man had any business gathering “advance intelligence” on “subversives and militants”—or on anyone else, for that matter. The DA’s office was supposed to prosecute crimes, not prevent them. And Herrmann, in his strenuous correction to the London Observer article, had stressed that his role was “nonoperational.”