Sinaloa cartel used phone data and surveillance cameras to find FBI informants

Sunday, July 6th, 2025

A Sinaloa drug cartel hacker was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday:

The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.”

The report said “the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done

Saturday, July 5th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillAs Tom O’Neill (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) flipped through “Jolly” West’s papers, he found signs that the CIA psychiatrist was associated with the JFK assassination:

According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins’s, and again involving Lawrence Schiller—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.”

On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.” Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.”

Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. Three documents among his papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact never before made public.

[…]

Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the plum assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.)

[…]

West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.”

In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. “Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.”

West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. “He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.”

From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar diagnoses: he was delusional. West, however, was hardly the first to have evaluated him. By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially compos mentis. West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them until earlier today on the airplane. Tonight, my own findings make it clear that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these earlier studies were carried out.”

The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. In the preceding five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described. Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d clamored to see Ruby months earlier. After the judge heard West’s report, he ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of it.”

That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public, confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and “asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. He considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been tampered with or drugged by an outsider. “The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation.”

[…]

But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley, his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. Shurley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind.

“I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.” Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little problem with grandiosity. He would not be averse at all to having influenced American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or not… Jolly had a real streak of—I guess you’d call it patriotism. If the president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.”

“Even if it meant distorting American history?”

“I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”

[…]

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director. Kennedy had fired him two years earlier, after he’d bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion. Another was the official CIA liaison to the group, Richard Helms, soon to become the agency’s director. A protégé of Dulles, Helms was the longtime secret employer of Jolly West, and one of the few agency officials aware of MKULTRA. But no one else on the commission—except, presumably, Dulles, who started the program—was aware that a CIA “asset” trained in mind control had assumed responsibility for the psychiatric care of Jack Ruby, whom the commission regarded as their “most important witness.”

In June 1964, Earl Warren and others from the group flew to Dallas to give Ruby a hearing in the interrogation room of the county jail. The bulk of his testimony was a morass of paranoid rambling. He begged Warren to get him out of Dallas. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” he warned. “I know I won’t live to see you another time… Do I sound sort of screwy?” He demanded to speak with a Jew, whispering frantically, “You have to get me to Washington! They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso!”

[…]

The group was required to investigate the CIA as a routine suspect in the assassination of a sitting president. Neither Dulles nor Helms ever reported their knowledge of West’s employment by the CIA.

[…]

If the CIA wanted to shut Ruby up, what was it that he had on it? Burt Griffin, an attorney for the Warren Commission, appeared before the HSCA to say that he and his partner had nearly confirmed Ruby’s ties to gunrunning schemes by anti-Castro Cubans, who were shipping arms from the United States to Cuba in hopes of deposing the dictator.

At the time, Griffin had no idea that the CIA sponsored these gunrunning schemes. In March 1964—when Ruby was weeks away from his “examination” by Jolly West—Griffin and his partner approached Richard Helms, requesting all the information the CIA had on Ruby. They believed it was possible “that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald.”

Helms offered only a curt reply: “The CIA would be very limited in its possibility of assisting.” Griffin was baffled—this was someone who was supposed to be helping him. He appealed again. By the time Helms mustered a response, months had passed, and West had long since paid his fateful visit to Ruby. “An examination of Agency files,” Helms wrote, “has produced no information on Jack Ruby or his activities.”

As for Jolly West, he also did his part to keep Ruby untainted from any whiff of conspiracy. As the Warren Commission tried to divine Ruby’s motive, West sent a confidential letter to Earl Warren himself, a copy of which I discovered in the HSCA’s files. Dated June 23, 1964, and addressed to “My Dear Mr. Chief Justice,” West’s note contends that his “examinations” of Ruby gave him unique insight into the man’s “motivations for the murder.” (This despite the fact that West had said Ruby was “positively insane.”) He was confident that Ruby had acted in an “irrational and unpremeditated” manner when he shot Oswald, “wanting to prove that the Jews—through himself—loved their President and were not cowards.” Moreover, West asserted that Ruby “had never seen [Oswald] in his life” before his involvement in the Kennedy assassination broke. Without consent from his patient or his patient’s lawyers, West was offering confidential medical assessments tailored to political ends. “Please let me know if there is anything else that I can do to be of assistance,” he added.

The Curious Case of Jimmy Shaver

Saturday, June 28th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillTom O’Neill explores (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) the curious case of Jimmy Shaver:

After midnight on July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton disappeared outside the Lackland Air Force Base, where Jolly West was stationed. Horton’s parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.

Within an hour of Horton’s disappearance, the party came upon a car with her underwear hanging from the door. They heard shouting nearby. Two construction workers had been napping in a nearby gravel pit when a Lackland airman wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and “trance-like.”

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped. Deputies arrested the man.

His name was Jimmy Shaver. At twenty-nine, he was recently remarried, with two children, no criminal record, no history of violence. He’d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.

Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he “was not normal… he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.

Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10: 30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it.

Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision, subject to copious psychological tests. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, “truth serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.

While Shaver was under—with West injecting more truth serum to “deepen the trance”—Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he “had visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.” (This “Beth” was never sought for questioning.) At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense—they’d hoped he could get an acquittal on temporary insanity.

Instead, West’s testimony helped the prosecution. Here was a psychiatric expert who believed wholeheartedly that Shaver had committed the crime, and who’d gotten him to admit it in colorful detail. While West maintained that the airman had suffered a bout of temporary insanity, he also said that Shaver was “quite sane now.” In the courtroom, he didn’t look that way. One newspaper account said he “sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,” saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. “Some believe it’s an act,” the paper said, “others believe his demeanor is real.” West often treated Lackland airmen for neurological disorders. During the trial, it came out that Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that he’d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. He sought regular treatment, and the air force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor who’d attempted to recruit him was never named.

Shaver’s medical history was scrutinized at trial, but little mention was made of the base hospital where West had conducted his MKULTRA experiments on unwitting patients. On the stand, West said he’d never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated there. I checked—Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with “Sa” through “St” had vanished.

Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

This was all the more difficult to ignore after I got the transcript of Shaver’s truth-serum interview. West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. “Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,” he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: “Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?” Or: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”

“I never did take her clothes off,” Shaver said.

The interview was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the transcript said, “Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.”

West asked, “Now you remember it all, don’t you, Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir,” Shaver replied.

For West, this seems to have been business as usual, but it left an indelible mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it. When I reached Rose by phone in 2002, he said Shaver still haunted him.

“In my fifty years in the profession,” he said of the truth-serum interview, “that was the most dramatic moment ever—when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl.” But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. After I read Rose citations from articles, reports, and the transcript, he seemed to accept it, but he was adamant that West had never said anything—hypnotism was not part of the protocol.

He’d also never known how West had found out about the case right away.

“We were involved from the first day,” Rose recalled. “Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder,” Rose said, giving me flashbacks to Shahrokh Hatami’s memory of Reeve Whitson. “He initiated it.”

West may have shielded himself from scrutiny, but he made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court ruled that he’d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his thirty-third birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.

Was it possible that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong?

Saturday, June 21st, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillWith Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, Tom O’Neill (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) laid out a circumstantial case linking “Jolly” West to Charles Manson:

Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA experiment gone right.”

In the back of my mind was the most confounding passage in Helter Skelter—one that I’d underlined, highlighted, and finally torn out and taped above my computer. “The most puzzling question of all,” Bugliosi wrote, was how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseless killers. Even with the LSD, the sex, the isolation, the sleep deprivation, the social abandonment, there had to be “some intangible quality… It may be something that he learned from others.” Something that he learned from others. Those had become the six most pivotal words in the book for me.

His friends called him “Jolly”

Saturday, June 7th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillThrough his research on the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, Tom O’Neill learned that yet another shadowy researcher kept an office there — as he explains in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties — and this researcher’s work with LSD had clearer, more nefarious ties to the CIA than any of the others:

At least his name wasn’t Smith this time: he was Dr. Louis Jolyon West. His friends called him “Jolly,” for his middle name, his impressive girth, and his oversized personality.

[…]

Born in Brooklyn in 1924, West had enlisted in the army air force during World War II, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. He came to my interest when I learned that he’d accepted an office at the Haight-Ashbury clinic from David Smith himself to recruit subjects for LSD research.

Earlier in his career, West researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. During the Korean War, he helped to “deprogram” returning prisoners of war who’d allegedly been brainwashed. His success earned him national attention. Around the same time, he achieved still more fame when he joined civil rights activists like his friend the actor Charlton Heston, as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in marches demanding equal rights for African Americans. Ironically, while he was fighting for the rights of some, he was suspected of infringing on those of others. His detractors alleged that through the fifties and early sixties, at air force bases in Texas and Oklahoma, he performed experiments on unwitting subjects using LSD and hypnosis.

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, West psychiatrically examined Jack Ruby, who’d murdered Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Not long before Ruby was due to testify for the Warren Commission, West examined him alone in his jail cell. He emerged to report that Ruby had suffered an “acute psychotic break.” Sure enough, Ruby’s testimony before the commission succeeded only in making him sound unhinged. He could never fully explain why he’d decided to kill Oswald.

Through the seventies, journalists linked West to the CIA’s mind-control research program, MKULTRA. He denied all involvement, vigorously attacking anyone who suggested otherwise. He kept up those attacks until his death in 1999. Then seventy-four, he’d been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, and he prevailed on his son to help him commit suicide with a cocktail of pills.

[…]

West had spent the last decades of his career at UCLA, where he’d become something of an institution, heading the psychiatry department’s renowned neuroscience center; the university had named an auditorium in his honor. When I called the school, I learned that he’d donated his papers to them, but since no one had asked to see them, they’d never been processed. No one had so much as opened the first box. I would be the first reporter to look at them.

[…]

Late in the fall of 1966, Jolly West arrived in San Francisco to study hippies and LSD. The Bay Area had seen an unprecedented migration of middle-class youth and an explosion of recreational drug use. West felt he had to witness it firsthand. He secured a government grant and took a yearlong sabbatical from his professorship at the University of Oklahoma, nominally to pursue a fellowship at Stanford, although that school had no record of his participation in a program there.

West was a square—tall, broad, and crew cut, with an all-American look in keeping with his military past. If he wanted a good glimpse of the hippies, he’d have to blend in. He started cobbling together a new wardrobe and skipping haircuts.

At least he had a solid knowledge base. The summer of love had yet to come, and the Tate–LaBianca murders were still years away, but West would effectively predict them both. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, he’d contributed a chapter called “Hallucinogens,” warning students of a “remarkable substance” percolating through college campuses and into cities across the United States. It was LSD, known to leave users “unusually susceptible and emotionally labile” as it caused a “loosening of ego structure.” That language was reminiscent of the “reprogramming” spiel that Charles Manson would soon develop, urging his acid-tripping followers to “negate their egos.”

When West cautioned against the “LSD cults” springing up in America’s “bohemian” quarters, he described exactly the kind of disenchanted wanderers who’d flock to a personality like Manson’s in the years to come. West had a hunch that alienated kids “with a pathological desire to withdraw from reality” would crave “shared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging.”

Another paper by West, 1965’ s “Dangers of Hypnosis,” foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by “crackpots” who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. Contrary to the prevailing science at the time, West asserted that hypnosis could make people so pliable that they’d violate their moral codes. Scarier still, they’d have no memory of it afterward. Just because such outcomes were rare, he argued, didn’t mean they were impossible.

West cited two cases to back up his argument: a double murder in Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a “military offense” induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base. He “personally knew” of two other instances, and he’d “heard on excellent authority” of three more, but he didn’t elaborate. Later, I’d get a sense of what, or who, he might have had in mind.

When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, then, West was the only scientist in the world who’d predicted the emergence of potentially violent “LSD cults.” How had he learned so much about acid? You’d never know from his published writing that he’d conducted innumerable experiments with it. In San Francisco, he hoped to conduct more still.

In the Haight, West found a group of kindred spirits at David Smith’s new clinic, where plenty of shrinks from the “straight world” were basking in hippiedom. Getting his bearings at the HAFMC, he arranged for the use of a crumbling Victorian house on nearby Frederick Street, where he opened what he described as a “laboratory” disguised as a “hippie crash pad.” This would serve as a “semi-permanent observation post,” granting him an up-close-and-personal look at the youth. He installed six graduate students in the “pad,” telling them to “dress like hippies” and “lure” itinerant kids into the apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as they liked, as long as they didn’t mind grad students taking copious notes on their behavior.

The “pad” opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. West took pains to ensure that it felt realistic, decorating it “with posters, flowers and paint.” Thus was born the Haight-Ashbury Project, as he called it, or “HAP,” for short. For the next six months, he undertook “an ongoing program of intensive interdisciplinary study into the life and times of the hippies.”

To drum up hippie business, West stopped by the HAFMC, where David Smith could furnish willing subjects. Smith even gave him an office. Having a nationally recognized researcher like West working out of the HAFMC would attract sorely needed government funding.

“We helped him with research,” Smith told me. He was sympathetic to West’s project, even though he admitted that he never bothered to find out what it was, or what its objectives were. He assumed that West, like himself, was diagnosing “psychedelic patterns in the counterculture,” trends that others had dismissed as boorish fads.

“They came over and interviewed kids that came into our clinic,” Smith said of West and his students. “He wanted to know, ‘What is a hippie?’” Smith reminded me that “this was a very new population… the fact that large numbers of white middle-class kids would use illicit drugs was a total mindblower.”

Who was paying for all this? According to records in West’s files, his “crash pad” was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. For reasons soon to be clear, I concluded that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.

This wouldn’t have been the agency’s first “disguised laboratory” in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. White scrupulously observed the ensuing activities, whatever they were. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men—something of a psychedelic honeypot experiment. White so enjoyed the proceedings that he had a portable toilet and a mini-fridge installed on his side of the mirror, so he could watch the action and swill martinis without taking a bathroom break. He later wrote to his CIA handler, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder!”

West knew better than to commit such sentiments to paper, but by 1967 he’d “toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards,” too. Before he moved to the Haight, he’d supervised a similar study in Oklahoma City, hiring informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender “a fundamental change” in “basic moral, religious or political matters.” The title of the project was Mass Conversion. As I was soon to see, its funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb, the head of the CIA’s MKULTRA program.

[…]

Bob Conrich, a cofounder of the HAFMC, saw through the ruse right away. West “walked into the clinic one day and my first reaction was that he’d read too many Tim Leary interviews,” Conrich wrote to me. West was a careerist in hippies’ clothing. “What I remember is his enthusiasm for the whole ‘summer of love’ thing, which seemed exaggerated and insincere.”

[…]

He soon concluded that the constellation of sex, drugs, and communalism shining over the Haight that summer was “doomed to fail”: “The very chemicals they use will inevitably enervate them as individuals and bleed the energies of the hippie movement to its death.” He called this an “ineffable tragedy,” but it’s hard to imagine he saw it that way. For West, the failure of sixties idealism was the most desirable outcome—one that he was quite possibly working toward. A copy of his résumé from this period hints at the thrust of his research. He was at work on a book called Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States. But he never published it. Nor, on the surface, would “the induction of abnormal states” dovetail with the stated goals of his HAP. By the early seventies he removed the title from his résumé and never mentioned it again.

Stephen Pittel, the forensic psychologist, worked briefly with West in 1968 and referred to him as “the only benevolent psychopath I ever met.” The man could “charm the pants off of anyone, and manipulate people into doing all sorts of things they didn’t want to do.”

[…]

The grad students hired to man West’s “crash pad” laboratory were assigned to keep diaries of their work. In unguarded moments, nearly all these students admitted that something didn’t add up. They weren’t sure what they were supposed to be doing, or why West was there. And often he wasn’t there.

[…]

When West made one of his rare appearances, he was “dressed funny,” like a hippie; sometimes he would have friends in tow, costumed just as poorly. Collins wrote, “The rest of us tended to look to them in trying to understand what we were supposed to do or what Jolly wanted. Their general reply was that this was a good opportunity to have fun. I gather that they did. They spent a good deal of the time stoned.”

[…]

Pressed for specific guidelines, West exuded “phoniness and dishonesty,” suggesting that the students answer sweeping, high-flown questions about the Haight, such as “Is this an asphalt Sherwood Forest?” She “got the impression that this question had already been answered.”

[…]

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who’d discovered its hallucinogenic qualities in 1943, described it as a “sacred drug” that gestured toward “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.” The actor Cary Grant, on the advice of his shrink, took some one hundred LSD trips during their weekly meetings in the late fifties, experiencing a “rebirth” and picturing himself “as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”

Charles Fischer, a drug researcher who worked with David Smith, described to me the early perceptions of acid, when “trips” were planned like literal journeys. “Very few people took LSD without having somebody being a ‘trip leader,’” Fischer said. The suggestibility from LSD was akin to hypnosis—and Jolly West, of course, had known well enough to study the two in tandem. “You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else,” Fischer explained. “Hammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being… [It] could result in some violent activity, even though LSD was considered a love drug.”

[…]

Full-fledged U.S. research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence human behavior through drugs and hypnosis. The United States believed that the Soviets could extract information from people without their knowledge, program them to make false confessions, and perhaps persuade them to kill on command.

The CIA, then in its infancy, saw mind control as a natural extension of communism, spreading like fire where the forces of unreason prevailed. In 1949 it launched Operation Bluebird, a mind-control program whose chipper name belied its brutal ambitions and its propensity for trampling on human rights. In its yen to best the Soviets, the CIA tested drugs on American citizens—most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases—who didn’t even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they underwent.

Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that they’d sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed Communists: the POWs must have been “brainwashed.” The word, a literal translation of the Chinese xi nao, didn’t appear in English before 1950.

[…]

Once the Korean War was over and the American POWs returned, the army brought in a team of scientists to “deprogram” them. Among those scientists was a young psychiatrist from Cornell, Dr. Louis J. West. He would later claim to have studied eighty-three prisoners of war, fifty-six of whom had been forced to make false confessions. West interviewed them at length, undoing the treacheries of the “thought reform” they’d undergone in enemy hands. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their claims about having used biological weapons.

West’s success with the POWs gained him entrée to the upper echelons of the intelligence community. As the Cold War bred paranoia, the CIA accelerated its mind-control efforts, and West, I learned, carved out a niche he’d occupy for decades to come. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent further brainwashing by the Soviets. But the extraordinary power of psychotropic drugs, particularly LSD, was hard to ignore. Thus a defensive program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into Operation Artichoke, a search for an all-purpose truth serum.

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a poisons expert who headed the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, had convinced the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, that mind-control ops were the future. Gottlieb, whose aptitude and amorality had earned him the nickname the “Black Sorcerer,” developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste, poisoned handkerchiefs, poisoned cigars, poisoned anything. Mind control became Gottlieb’s pet project. Dulles, convinced that the American dream was at stake, ensured that Gottlieb was well funded. In a speech at Princeton University, Dulles warned that Communist spies could turn the American mind into “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.” Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion.

The project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.” Under its umbrella were 149 subprojects, many involving research that used unwitting participants. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.

In their defense, CIA spooks weren’t above experimenting on themselves. The same substance that held the promise of controlling minds and quashing communism was used in churlish office pranks, with agents quietly slipping LSD into their colleagues’ drinks to achieve much needed “firsthand knowledge.” A plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA Christmas party was quashed when higher-ups reminded the office that it could cause insanity.

The most sensitive work was conducted far from Langley—farmed out to scientists at colleges, hospitals, prisons, and military bases all over the United States and Canada. The CIA gave these scientists aliases, funneled money to them, and instructed them on how to conceal their research from prying eyes, including those of their unknowing subjects. Feeling that it was their patriotic duty, the scientists accepted their secret missions in defiance of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.”

In 1949, at the Nuremberg trials that adjudicated the crimes of World War II, the United States adopted the International Code for Human Experimentation: “A person must give full and informed consent before being used as a subject.” MKULTRA scientists flouted this code constantly, remorselessly—and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to “induced pain” and “psychosis.” They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches.

[…]

Operated on a strict need-to-know basis, MKULTRA was so highly classified that when John McCone succeeded Dulles as CIA director late in 1961 he was not informed of its existence. Fewer than half a dozen agency brass were aware of MKULTRA at any period during its twenty-year history. When Gottlieb retired, in 1972 or ’73, the project retired with him.

[…]

Director Richard Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all MKULTRA files. In January 1973, the Technical Services Staff shredded countless documents describing the use of hallucinogens, including every known copy of a manual called “LSD: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications.”

[…]

In their haste to purge their misdeeds, the agents forgot about a cache of some sixteen thousand additional papers in an off-site warehouse. Even internally, those files would remain undiscovered for several years, but it was only a matter of time until the story broke; MKULTRA had become fodder for rumors around Washington.

In December 1974, the project finally came to light in a terrific flash of headlines and intrigue. Seymour Hersh reported it on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces.”

[…]

First came the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, each mentioned earlier regarding CHAOS and COINTELPRO. The Church Committee’s final report unveiled a 1957 internal evaluation of MKULTRA by the CIA’s inspector general. “Precautions must be taken,” the document warned, “to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions.” A 1963 review from the inspector general put it even more gravely: “A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.”

In fact, as the Church Committee’s report went on, MKULTRA had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a psychiatric patient who’d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a CIA-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for “treatment.” (Continued investigation by Olson’s son, Eric, strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide; they threw him out of the window themselves out of fear that he would blow the whistle on MKULTRA and the military’s use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)

[…]

Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye subpoenaed a number of CIA spooks. Among them was Gottlieb, rousted from his retirement in California and forced to defend his actions before the Senate. Or rather, before some of the Senate. Gottlieb claimed that his heart condition precluded the possibility of his addressing the whole chamber; instead, he was installed in an anteroom, where he answered questions from a select group while the masses listened over a public address system.

As the New York Times pointed out, Gottlieb “managed to elude the lights and microphones and the crush of reporters waiting for him in the Senate hearing room.” He was spared the sight of the incredulity that spread over their faces as he admitted that he had destroyed MKULTRA’s files not to cover up “illegal activity,” but “because this material was sensitive and capable of being misunderstood.” He resented the harm done to his reputation, and he was loath to provide specifics about MKULTRA experiments, saying that he’d never witnessed any himself.

Gottlieb’s destruction of the MKULTRA files was a federal crime. It was investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times, “quietly dropped.” His brutal courses of experimentation broke any number of laws, and his perjury that day did, too. But he was never prosecuted. He’d testified before the Senate only under the condition that he receive total criminal immunity.

[…]

Surviving records named eighty institutions, including forty-four universities and colleges, and 185 researchers, among them Louis J. West. The New York Times identified him, in a front-page lead story, no less, as one of seven suspected scientists who’d secretly participated in MKULTRA under academic cover. And yet not one researcher was ever federally investigated, and only two victims were ever notified. The Times had called MKULTRA “a secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind.” It looked like no one would suffer any consequences for it.

Griffin Bell, the Attorney General at the time of the revelations, told me the files never arrived at the Justice Department, despite Stansfield Turner’s sworn claim to the contrary. Bell said they must’ve just “fall[ en] through the cracks.” As for Turner himself, he told me he could no longer remember having testified that the CIA sent the files. “I’m just drawing a total blank here,” he said. I read his remarks back to him. “I guess I did testify about this,” he said. “Somebody fed me the stuff and I played it back.”

The New York Times ran twenty-seven stories on MKULTRA, eight on the front page. But no one in the press corps, and none of the senators involved, followed up to see that the promised investigations took place.

[…]

West’s archive comprised two hundred boxes, most of them full of ephemera. There were tons of press clippings. West had tracked the media’s coverage of assassinations, the CIA, aggression in cats, psychosurgery, capital punishment, alcoholism among Native Americans, behavior modification, and the civil rights movement, among other subjects. I was intrigued to see many clippings on the Manson murders, and papers by Roger Smith, David Smith, and Alan Rose.

[…]

On August 25, among a batch of research papers on hypnosis, I found them: letters between West and his CIA handler, “Sherman Grifford.”

I didn’t recognize the name, so as soon as I got home, I began tearing through every book I had that mentioned MKULTRA, hoping that it would jump out at me. In the first and most definitive of the bunch, John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, there it was, buried in a footnote: “CIA operators and agents all had cover names,” it said, “even in classified documents. Gottlieb was ‘Sherman R. Grifford.’”

So West really had lied all those years. Not only was he a part of MKULTRA, he’d corresponded with the “Black Sorcerer” of MKULTRA himself. Preserved in his files, the letters picked up midstream, with no prologue or preliminaries. The first one was dated June 11, 1953, a mere two months after MKULTRA started. West was then chief of psychiatric service at the airbase at Lackland, Texas.

Addressing Gottlieb as “S.G.,” he outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis. Enumerating short-and long-term goals, he offered a nine-point list, beginning with a plan to discover “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/ or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew.” Another item proposed honing “techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects… or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.” West wanted to reverse someone’s belief system without his knowledge, and make it stick. He hoped to create “couriers” who would carry “a long and complex message” embedded secretly in their minds, and to study “the induction of trance-states by drugs.” 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.

“Needless to say,” West added, the experiments “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

West’s colleagues wouldn’t approve of his activities. He yearned to “cut down considerably the number of people who can properly call me to account.” Because he’d be using drugs that were “not on the Air Force list of standard preparations,” he wanted to secure “some sort of carte blanche.” (He would go on to suggest a number of security measures in his letters, including disguised funding, double envelopes, and false names.)

Next West addressed a sensitive matter: who would the guinea pigs be? He listed four groups—basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and “others, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.” Only the volunteers would be paid. The others could be unwilling, and, though it wasn’t spelled out, unwitting. It’d be easier to preserve his secrecy if he was “inducing specific mental disorders” in people who already exhibited them. “Certain patients requiring hypnosis in therapy, or suffering from dissociative disorders (trances, fugues, amnesias, etc.) might lend themselves to our experiments.”

As if to prove his thoroughness, he affixed two addenda to his four-page letter, begging Gottlieb to get one of his superiors, a Major Robert Williams, “transferred to another base.” Williams was “an uncomfortably close scrutinizer of all my activities” who believed that hypnosis was “tampering with the soul,” West complained.

Gottlieb’s reply came on letterhead from “Chemrophyl Associates,” a front company he used to correspond with MKULTRA subcontractors. “My Good Friend,” he wrote, “I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real… you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful.” He would arrange top-secret clearances for anyone who might become ensnared in their work, giving West “a separate sum” for the purchase of materials.

Gottlieb saluted his new recruit: “We have developed quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.”

West returned the camaraderie. “It makes me very happy to realize that you consider me ‘an asset,’” he replied. “Surely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.”

With that, the record of their correspondence ceased for nearly nine months. When it resumed, in April 1954, West had begun arrangements to relocate to the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, which wanted him to head its psychiatry department. He would be a civilian again. Gottlieb commended his “new look,” noting, “it appears at the moment to be a move which would in the long run be beneficial for us.” He signed off intimately, “Give my regards to your family.”

West had lied to his prospective employer, writing, “My present job is purely clinical and I have been doing no research, classified or otherwise.” The university took him at his word. Now performing his duties for Gottlieb at both the university and the air force base, West asked the judge advocate at Lackland for permission to accept money from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which he called “a non-profit private research foundation.” In fact, as the CIA later acknowledged, Geschickter was another of Gottlieb’s fictions, enabling him to keep West and other researchers properly paid.

[…]

In 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.”

The document, marked “classified,” was right there in West’s files; I had to assume that the CIA had destroyed any copies. They’ve never publicly acknowledged West’s groundbreaking deed. He’d done it, he claimed, by administering “new drugs” effective in “speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.”

As in his initial experiments, West performed most of these psychiatric feats on mental health patients. “The necessity to obtain most of the subject material from a population of psychiatry patients made standardized observations very difficult,” he groused. In the report, which doubled as a request for continued funding—a successful request; West received government backing through 1965 at the least—he enthusiastically described a high-tech laboratory he planned to construct at Oklahoma. It would include “a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated.”

West had hypnotized mental patients and “normal subjects” and exposed them to a host of drugs, including chlorpromazine, reserpine, amphetamines, and LSD—the same ones that David Smith would inject in his confined rodents about a decade later. Of course, at least two of these, LSD especially, would prove instrumental in the Manson Family’s group psychology.

[…]

Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation. Using hypnotic suggestion, he claimed, “a person can be told that it is now a year later and during the course of this year many changes have taken place… so that it is now acceptable for him to discuss matters that he previously felt he should not discuss… An individual who insists he desires to do one thing will reveal that secretly he wishes just the opposite.”

Since West’s paper was light on specifics, it’s hard to know if it was only a ploy for more funding.

[…]

At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility” that the CIA had turned over to the Senate. West’s name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But what shocked me was that the Senate’s version didn’t include West’s nine-page attachment, but rather an unsigned summary. There was no mention of West’s triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of “the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual” with a “fictional event.”

In sworn testimony, the CIA said that everything it shared with Congress was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names. Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely misrepresented its contents.

The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to

Saturday, May 24th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillThe story of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic is a confusing story to tell, because it involves two Smiths who ran in the same circles, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, and David Smith, no relation, the charismatic creator of the clinic:

David Elvin Smith grew up in the dusty farm community of Bakersfield, California, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. When he moved to the Bay Area in 1960 to study at UC Berkeley, Smith was, by his own admission, a hick. He’d never traveled much beyond his backwoods town, and he lacked the political and intellectual curiosity that animated Berkeley’s sophisticated, international student body. Had it not been for his pushy peers, always scolding him for missing their sit-ins and marches, Smith probably wouldn’t have noticed the dawn of the Free Speech movement on his own campus. Later, he liked to remember a teaching assistant who canceled class so he and the other students could head to a protest downtown. Smith refused to join. He wanted to study for an upcoming test. The TA told him he’d never get an A if he didn’t go.

Smith has been open about his louche behavior in this period: an inveterate womanizer and a binge drinker, he disappeared for days at a time on benders, nevertheless graduating at the top of his class. At the end of 1965, a debilitating blackout and a messy breakup led him to give up alcohol. By then, Smith, a raffish, good-looking man of twenty-six, was a postdoctoral student at UC San Francisco and the chief of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Screening Unit at San Francisco General Hospital. Later he remembered his curiosity flaring as his research collided with the city’s cultural upheaval. “I was injecting white rats with LSD in the lab,” he said, “and then I’d walk home past the Haight, where I’d see kids who were high on the same substance.”

He began to experiment with psychedelics himself, and he liked them. The lifestyle brought new friends and new politics. He and his friends tracked the burgeoning counterculture in the Haight, where some were predicting an influx of 100,000 young people in the coming year. Smith, who felt that health care was a right, wondered where the newcomers would receive medical attention, and how they would afford it. He moved to Haight-Ashbury himself with plans to found a free clinic.

When it opened at 558 Clayton Street in June 1967, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) was an immediate sensation. Staffed entirely by volunteers and unauthorized by the city health department, it treated hundreds of patients a day, offering nonjudgmental care for those suffering from bad trips, overdoses, sexually transmitted diseases, and malnourishment, or for those who just needed a kind ear. Lines at the HAFMC sometimes stretched around the block with hippies waiting to ascend the creaky wooden stairs to its second-floor office. Inside, loitering was encouraged. The clinic did everything it could to advertise its psychedelic affinities. Exam rooms were painted in aqua and Day-Glo orange; one of them was wallpapered with a vibrant collage of peace signs, naked bodies, and hypnotic swirls. Even as Smith struggled to pay the rent and keep the cops at bay, he reveled in his creation. Few things so perfectly encapsulated the utopian ideals of the summer of love.

As faces filed in and out of the clinic that summer, Smith and his colleagues befriended the repeat visitors, and the HAFMC became a scene within a scene. It could be hard to tell the hippies apart, with their long, beflowered hair, their upstart communes, their shifting legions of followers and leaders. But decades later, no one at the clinic had any trouble remembering Charlie Manson and his girls.

In 1971, David Smith published Love Needs Care, a memoir of the HAFMC’s germinal years. I found it rife with details about Manson and the Family, and about the very period that Bugliosi had omitted from Helter Skelter: the summer of love, when Manson, apparently at his most charismatic, began to attract followers and ensure their unconditional devotion. Better still, Love Needs Care had a few contributions from Roger Smith, offering his own appraisal of Manson.

[…]

Love Needs Care attempts the delicate task of elucidating the Smiths’ relationships to Manson while making it seem as if they had no idea that he and his followers would someday erupt into unconscionable violence.

David Smith described the Family’s frequent trips to the HAFMC, where “Charlie’s girls,” as they were known around the halls, were treated for sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. The girls tended to Manson’s every need, never speaking unless spoken to. They referred to him as Christ, or “J.C.”

When the Family moved to an apartment on Cole Street, Manson began in earnest to “reprogram” his followers. David had an elaborate sense of Manson’s tactics, although he never explained where he got it. Using a combination of LSD and mind games, Manson forced his followers to submit to “unconventional sexual practices,” Smith wrote; he would invoke mysticism and pop psychology as the acid took hold, saying, “You have to negate your ego.” Treating the girls “like objects,” he eroded their independence, turning them “into self-acknowledged ‘computers,’ empty vessels that would accept almost anything he poured in.” Before long, they obeyed him unquestioningly.

Acid was unmistakably essential to the process. Manson’s insistence on it sometimes put him at odds with trends in the Haight, David thought. Typically, hippies who dropped a lot of acid eventually moved on to speed. A schism grew in the scene. The “acid heads” (a phrase David claims to have coined) favored nonviolence, whereas the “speed freaks” (ditto) caused the rash of violence that destroyed the Haight’s live-and-let-live ethos. But Manson had an aversion to needles; he wouldn’t use amphetamines. The Family’s drug pattern was effectively reversed, with Manson urging his disciples to relinquish speed and embrace acid. Weaning his recruits from amphetamines reduced the chance of interference with his induction process.

Speed became a part of the Family’s lifestyle only later, David told me, when it came time to kill in Los Angeles. He’d heard this from Susan Atkins herself, when she asked him to assess her mental health for a parole hearing in 1978. “When they went to the south, they got very deeply involved in speed,” he said. They got it from the Hells Angels. “They were trading sex for speed, and [Atkins] thinks that Helter Skelter and the ultimate crime was a paranoid speed delusion.”

[…]

Both the Smiths have said that Manson’s fear of needles made speed a nonissue, but obviously speed can be taken orally or snorted. Over the years, a smattering of evidence and firsthand recollections has suggested that the Family used amphetamines more often than was suggested at the time. In a 2009 documentary, Linda Kasabian claimed that she and her companions each swallowed a “capsule” of speed before leaving for Cielo Drive on the night of Sharon Tate’s murder. (At the trial, she testified that she hadn’t taken any drugs around the time of the murders.) In books and at parole hearings, Susan Atkins also later copped to taking speed before the Tate murders. Tex Watson wrote that he frequently snorted it with the group, and that he, too, took it on both nights of the murders. Others added that the Family kept an abundance of speed at the Spahn Ranch toward the end of their time there, and that Manson himself wasn’t above taking it, especially as he grew more paranoid. He would use it to stay up for days at a time, brooding on his delusions.

Remember, Manson lived in the Haight because Roger Smith sent him there, thinking its “vibes” would assuage the ex-con’s hostility. And make no mistake: Roger did believe that Manson was hostile. In a short essay for Life magazine published months after the murders, Roger offered his first-ever insights about Manson. (“ He speaks of Manson here out of his extensive unofficial contact with him,” the magazine noted, without describing the nature of that contact or any potential conflict with Smith’s parole duties.) “Charlie was the most hostile parolee I’ve ever come across,” Roger wrote. “He told me right off there was no way he could keep the terms of his parole. He was headed back to the joint and there was no way out of it.”

[…]

But his remark about Manson’s hostility always stayed with me. I’d already seen, after all, how he’d characterized Manson in official parole documents as a well-behaved guy making “excellent progress.” The disparity suggested that Roger had been willing to sweep Manson’s “hostility” under the rug.

In a passage he contributed to Love Needs Care, Roger did his best to support the idea that the bizarreries of the Haight suited an ex-con like Manson. Daily LSD trips made him mellower, more thoughtful. He still had the slick duplicitousness of a con man, and he was still a master manipulator, but he was suddenly fond of vacuous self-help bromides like “If you love everything, you don’t need to think about what bothers you.”

Roger Smith couldn’t seem too credulous, so he made sure to note the “messianic” tilt of Manson’s acid days—an oblique acknowledgment of Charlie’s growing megalomania. David Smith mirrored the sentiment, writing that Manson’s LSD trips replaced his “underlying depression with a manic smile” that sometimes betrayed darker philosophies. David admitted that Manson “began to develop a number of delusions as his involvement with LSD progressed.” He fantasized about the Beatles ordaining him their musical equal; he imagined a Judgment Day when blacks would slaughter whites.

Some of Roger’s familiars, including his wife, couldn’t understand his affinity for Manson. Roger was “pretty much in awe of Charlie’s ability to draw these women to him,” one said. Another thought that he “was always kind of fascinated” with “the charming charismatic sociopath.”

The three deadliest weapons in the world today

Sunday, May 18th, 2025

The deadliest weapon in American history, Kulak notes, is the handgun, because more Americans have been killed in ordinary criminal homicides than all the wars America has fought:

Applying the logic which we have already seen, that outside of the most war-ravaged countries ordinary homicide, gang wars, feuds, and clasdestine actions are VASTLY more likely to kill people than high intensity warfare, you quickly notice a trend.

The three deadliest weapons in the world today in terms of body-count (your likelihood to be killed by them) varies between

  • Handguns in the New World where guns are plentiful but open carry of rifles is not the norm
  • Auto and semiautomatic (and previously bolt-action) rifles in the third world of Africa and failed parts of the Middle-East where it is perfectly acceptable for gangs to walk about with AK-47s in their arms
  • Knives and bladed weapons in Gun restrictionist jurisdictions (Europe), Asia, Prisons, etc.

If you die a violent death, dear reader, whether in the killing fields of darkest Africa, darkest Detroit, the trenches of forever war or the smuggling tunnels of Mexico, to an enemy you’ve never spoken a word to or to a spouse you said just one word too many to, it will almost certainly be to one of these 3. Even in the age of FPV Drones, IEDs, cluster munitions, and thermobaric rocket artillery, a super-majority of the time the person who decides you need to die will be within 2-200 meters of you, see you with their bare eye or possibly a simple optic, and decide in sight of your face to end your life with the tool they have at hand: knife, handgun, or rifle.

And it’s very hard to tell which of the three actually leads the pack globally.

In the US where guns are widely available knife homicides are only about 10–15% of what firearm homicides are, In the UK this is reversed, and firearm related murders are 10% of knife murders.

Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines

Saturday, May 17th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillRoger Smith, the academic who became Charles Manson’s parole officer, may have had ulterior motives, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), when he told Manson to move to Haight-Ashbury:

As part of his criminology research, he’d been tapped to lead a study on amphetamines and their role in the violent behavior of Haight-Ashbury hippies. The National Institute of Mental Health funded this study, as they had the San Francisco Project. In 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.

Smith hoped to learn why some people, but not others, became psychotically violent on amphetamines—and to see if this violence could be controlled. The goals of the Amphetamine Research Project (ARP), as he dubbed it, were to “illuminate three major areas” of the “speed scene” in the Haight: the “individual” experience, the “collective or group experience,” and the “way in which violence is generated within the speed marketplace.” Smith studied hippie collectives by observing them in their daily routines, and he enjoined his researchers to participate, too. He later recalled that when he was appointed to lead the study, “[ I] took off my gray-flannel suit and my wing-tip shoes and grew a moustache. Soon the kids on Haight Street were calling me the Friendly Fed and asking me to help them with the law.”

There’s no indication that his technique proved useful—because there’s not much indication that the ARP ever happened at all. Smith never published his research. Two papers about the ARP were scheduled to appear in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, but they never materialized. The closest thing to a record of the ARP is Smith’s unpublished dissertation, submitted to Berkeley a month before the Manson murders. Even this, however, contains no actual “participation-observation” data—it is mainly secondhand anecdotes and statistical analysis.

[…]

To ensure success, Smith argued, researchers had to protect their subjects from criminal prosecution, concealing their activities from the police and granting them anonymity in all reports. The ARP, then, had something resembling police immunity baked into its very mission.

Smith ran the ARP out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC), which had just opened the previous summer. Soon, he was spending so much time there that he made a proposition to his only parole client: instead of meeting with Manson in downtown San Francisco, where Smith had an office, why not just meet at the clinic? It was more convenient for both of them, and anyway, by that time Manson and “his girls” had started to contract sexually transmitted diseases; the clinic could treat those for free.

Soon Manson became a mainstay at the HAFMC. Between visiting Smith and receiving medical care, there were some weeks when he appeared at the clinic every day. He became a familiar presence to a number of the doctors there, including several who, like Smith, had received federal funds to research drug use among hippies.

Smith got the ARP off the ground at the same time he was supervising Manson for the San Francisco Project. It was during this overlap that the record of Manson’s parole supervision was either spotty, nonexistent, or later expunged. This funny, scruffy little visitor to the clinic, always with his retinue of girls, was taking a ton of drugs and forming the Family. By the time he and his followers turned up in that ditch by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in April 1968, the girls had traded the flowers in their hair for steel knives, sheathed in leather and strapped to their thighs beneath long flowing dresses.

He arrived there an ex-con and left a confident, long-haired cult leader

Saturday, May 10th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillFrom the late spring of 1967 to June 1968, Manson lived in Haight-Ashbury, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), the hotbed of the counterculture:

Given how often Manson is characterized as a curdled hippie—a perversion of the principles of free love—you’d think his year in the Haight would attract more attention. It was the crucible in which his identity was forged. He arrived there an ex-con and left a confident, long-haired cult leader. It was in the Haight that he began to use LSD. He learned how to attract weak, susceptible people, and how to use drugs to keep them under his thumb. And he internalized the psychological methods that would make his followers do anything for him. This would’ve been all but impossible without Roger Smith.

The two came together in a roundabout way. Manson had been released from Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles County on March 21, 1967. He’d served seven and a half years for forging a government check. When he stepped out that day, he was thirty-two, and he’d spent nearly half his life in prisons and juvenile detention centers. As Bugliosi would marvel in Helter Skelter, prison supervisors had largely assessed Manson as nonviolent. Though he’d faced juvenile convictions of armed robbery and homosexual rape, and had beaten his wife, these didn’t add up, in the eyes of the state, to a “sustained history of violence.” Nor, as Bugliosi noted, did they fit the profile of a mass murderer in 1969.

Another peculiarity: all of Manson’s prison time was at the federal level. Bugliosi found this startling. “Probably ninety-nine out of one-hundred criminals never see the inside of a federal court,” he noted. Manson had been described as “criminally sophisticated,” but had he been convicted at the state level, he would’ve faced a fraction of the time behind bars—maybe less than five years, versus seventeen.

Within days of his release, Manson violated his parole. Unless he had explicit permission, he was supposed to stay put; he was forbidden from leaving Los Angeles under penalty of automatic repatriation to prison. But practically immediately, he headed to Berkeley, California.

Years earlier, Manson had had his parole revoked just for failing to report to his supervisor. Now, for some reason, the police bureaucracy of an entirely different city welcomed him with open arms. When he called up the San Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce himself, they simply filed some routine paperwork transferring him to the supervision of Roger Smith, an officer and a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology.

[…]

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.

There’s no saying who might have read the book to him or told him about it, but in its hero, Valentine Michael, Manson recognized himself, so much so that he named his first child after him. Roger Smith got a nickname from Manson, too: “Jubal Harshaw,” the most important character in the hero’s life, his lawyer, teacher, protector, and spiritual guide on Earth.

The plot of Stranger in a Strange Land has eerie parallels to Manson’s rise, so much so that, after the murders, fans of the novel went out of their way to disavow Manson’s connection to it. Valentine Michael, a human raised on Mars, is endowed with hypnotic powers. He descends to Earth to foster a new and perfect race. Guarded by Jubal, he assembles a “nest” with about twenty others, almost all women, whom he initiates through sex. He demands that his followers surrender their egos to him in a spirit of total submission. They worship the innocence of children and yearn to exist in a state of such pure consciousness that they can communicate telepathically. The group sleeps and eats together; one of their most sacred rituals is the act of “sharing water,” which takes on vaguely druggy undertones. In Valentine Michael’s philosophy, there is no death, only “discorporation”; killing people saves their souls, giving them a second chance through reincarnation. The group begins to discorporate their enemies with impunity. In time, Valentine Michael draws strength from the “nest” and, like Christ, saves the world.

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.”

[…]

Manson had been assigned to him as a part of the so-called San Francisco Project, an experimental parole program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health that monitored the rehabilitative progress of newly released felons. When Manson arrived in the Bay Area in March 1967, he was attached to the program—and to Roger Smith.

Manson’s participation in the San Francisco Project has never been reported. In part, it explains why the two men had developed such a powerful bond—because Smith spent much more time with Manson than the average parole officer would. The project studied the relationship between federal parolees and their supervisors; researchers wanted to know how varying degrees of oversight affected recidivism rates. The six participating parole officers, all of whom had advanced degrees in criminology, were assigned one of three caseloads: “normal,” averaging about one hundred clients; “ideal,” numbering forty clients; or “intensive,” twenty clients.

Roger Smith fell into the middle group. He met with his clients once a week, per project guidelines. But at some point, his “ideal” caseload became even more intense than his colleagues’ “intensives.” By the end of ’67, he’d winnowed his set of parolees from forty down to just one: Manson.

I was shocked that Manson had become Smith’s one and only client, but I could never figure out why. Hoping to learn more, I interviewed Smith’s research assistant from that time, Gail Sadalla. Although Smith had assured me that he’d never met Manson before becoming his parole officer, Sadalla had a different recollection. Smith told her in 1968 that Manson became his charge because he’d already been his probation officer years earlier—in the early sixties, at the Joliet Federal Prison in Illinois. Admittedly, this seemed all but impossible. Manson had never been in the Illinois parole system, and he’d only been incarcerated in the state for a few days in 1956. But Sadalla was convinced that the two had met previously. When I told her that her former boss had no memory of meeting Manson before March 1967, she was stunned.

“He didn’t remember that?” she asked. “I’m surprised… It was always my understanding. That’s why there was this connection.”

[…]

As a doctoral student at the Berkeley School of Criminology, Roger Smith studied the link between drug use and violent behavior in Oakland gang members. In April 1967, the study had seen enough success to merit a press conference. As the New York Times reported, Smith and his colleagues had found that a gang’s drug use, rather than “mellowing them out,” more often triggered violent behavior. The students wanted to distinguish between gang members who fell into violence because of inherent sociopathic tendencies and those who became sociopathic because of drugs.

Smith conducted research through his own “immersion.” He and the other researchers created “outposts” in the Oakland slums, hanging around at community centers and churches, befriending gang members under less-than-transparent circumstances. They embraced a “participant-observer” approach to social research, which Smith would further incorporate into his methods in the years to come.

By 1967, Smith was regarded as an expert on gangs, collective behavior, violence, and drugs. Manson, his one and only parole supervisee, would go on to control the collective behavior of a gang through violence and drugs.

Smith described himself to me as a “rock-ribbed Republican”—he never struck me as someone with much tolerance for the counterculture. And yet it was his idea, he admitted, to send Manson to live in the Haight. He hoped that Manson could “soak up” some of the “vibes” of the peace and love movement exploding in the district that summer. Maybe it would allay some of Manson’s hostility.

[…]

It was a concerted, grassroots effort to reject middle-class morality. But where some saw earthshaking radicalism, others saw only Dionysian excess. George Harrison, of Manson’s life-defining band, the Beatles, stopped by the Haight that summer and came away unimpressed: “The summer of love was just a bunch of spotty kids on drugs,” he said. A press release for the Human Be-In, a sprawling gathering a few months before Manson came to town, gives a sense of the era’s transformative rhetoric: “A new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old… Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”

When Manson went to wipe his eyes and see, he wasted no time adopting the folkways and postures of the flower children. Once he landed in the Haight, he dropped acid on a daily basis. It took just one trip to foment the most abrupt change that Roger Smith had ever witnessed in one of his charges. Manson “seemed to accept the world” after LSD, Smith wrote. Seemingly overnight, he transformed himself into an archetypal hippie, his worldview suddenly inflected with spiritualism. He grew out his hair and played guitar in the street, panhandling and scrounging for food. Although only in his early thirties, he presented himself as a father figure, attracting young, down-and-out men and women as they embarked on the spiritual quest that had led them to the Haight.

[…]

It would be surprising if Smith didn’t know that his ward was breaking the law—a lot. But he had only praise for his sole client. “Mr. Manson has made excellent progress,” he wrote in one of several reports he made to the head parole office in Washington, D.C. “He appears to be in better shape personally than he has been in a long time.”

Smith wrote those words on July 31, 1967. At the time, Manson was sitting in a jail cell. A few days earlier, in Ukiah, he’d been convicted of interfering with a police officer in the line of duty—a felony. He’d been trying to prevent the arrest of Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka Ouisch, one of his newly recruited underage girls. Though the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, Manson was given a thirty-day suspended sentence and three years’ probation.

]…]

Instead of being sent back to prison, Manson, who’d been out for only four months then, was back on the streets again in a few days.

That incident continued the distressing pattern of amnesty that Roger Smith could never explain. In part, Smith benefited, and continues to benefit, from a veil of secrecy. Manson’s complete parole file has never been released. It wasn’t even permitted into evidence during the trial. During the death-penalty phase, the defense’s Irving Kanarek had subpoenaed the file, hoping he could use some part of it to argue for his client’s life. Not only did the United States Attorney General, John Mitchell, refuse to release it, he dispatched David Anderson, an official from the Justice Department, to aid Bugliosi in his effort to quash the subpoena.

[…]

The fifty-five parole documents turned over to me (later sixty-nine, after exhaustive FOIA appeals) by the federal Parole Commission represent only a sliver of Manson’s total file, which was described as “four inches thick” at his trial. Still, those pages have enough raw data to show that during Manson’s first fourteen months of freedom in San Francisco—months during which he attracted the followers that became the Family—he was given virtual immunity from parole revocation by Roger Smith. Under Smith’s supervision, Manson was repeatedly arrested and even convicted without ever being sent back to prison. It was up to Smith to revoke Manson’s parole—it was ultimately his decision. But he never even reported any of his client’s violations to his supervisors.

In interviews with me, Smith claimed not to have known about Manson’s conviction in Ukiah, even though it had occurred under his watch. In fact, in the same July 1967 letter that should have mentioned Manson’s conviction—the letter that lauded his “excellent progress”—Smith requested permission for Manson to travel to Mexico, where he would’ve been totally unsupervised, for a gig with a hotel band. (Smith failed to note the fact that Manson had been arrested in Mexico in 1959, resulting in his deportation to the United States and the revocation of his federal probation.)

“Manson is not to leave the Northern District of California,” the parole board responded, noting that Manson’s “history does not mention any employment as musician,” and that his record was “lengthy and serious.”

And yet, two weeks later, Smith tried again—he really wanted to send Manson to Mexico. He told the parole board that Manson had been offered a second job there by “a general distributor for the Perma-Guard Corporation of Phoenix Arizona named Mr. Dean Moorehouse,” who wanted Manson to survey “the market for insecticides, soil additives and mineral food supplements.” Smith neglected to mention that Moorehouse was on probation—regulations barred associations between parolees and probationers—and one of Manson’s newest recruits, the father of the fifteen-year-old whose arrest Manson had tried to prevent three weeks earlier.

The parole board rejected this second request, too. Interestingly, at the same time Smith made these requests, he’d launched a criminological study of Mexican drug trafficking for the federal government. He’d attempted to send Manson to Mazatlán, which was the main port city of Sinaloa, the drug trafficking capital of Central America in the 1960s.

[…]

After those two Mexico requests, Smith generated only two more documents regarding Manson for another five months. Both were simple form letters authorizing Manson to travel to Florida to meet with “recording agents.”

Those interested me for several reasons. First, they violated Smith’s orders from Washington—he was to forbid Manson from leaving the Northern District of California under any circumstances. Second, Smith had postdated them, suggesting that he wrote them after Manson had already left town, safeguarding him from another potential violation. And third, there’s no sign that Manson and the Family ever actually went to Florida. If they went anywhere, the only available evidence suggests, it was to Mexico.

Smith’s letters are from November 1967. On the very day that Susan Atkins’s probation officers were frantically trying to prevent her from traveling, she, Manson, and the others were pulling out of San Francisco in their big yellow bus with permission from Roger Smith.

Manson was required to send postcards to Smith; there’s no record that he did. Later, probation reports noted that Atkins and Mary Brunner had said they spent quite a bit of time in Mexico with Manson that winter. Otherwise, their whereabouts for November and December 1967 are entirely unaccounted for.

[…]

I knew there had to be more papers from Smith’s time as Manson’s parole officer. Remember, under oath at the trial, Barrett had described Manson’s parole file as “about four inches thick.” I asked the Parole Commission spokesperson, Pamela A. Posch, how it could have been reduced to what I’d been told was only 138 pages, and why I could see only 69 of these, extensively redacted. The Bureau of Prisons “apparently did not retain all of the parole documents pertaining to Mr. Manson,” Posch wrote, conceding that this was unusual. The bureau had a policy to preserve the files of “notorious felons” for history’s sake. Manson was about as notorious as a felon could be.

[…]

In April 1968, Smith’s carelessness blew up in his face when, yet again, Manson was arrested. And there was no covering it up this time—too many papers had gotten the story. When Smith’s colleagues at the parole office read about it, they flipped out and tried to do what Smith hadn’t: send Manson back to prison.

The headline in the Los Angeles Times read, “Wayward Bus Stuck in Ditch: Deputy Finds Nude Hippies Asleep in Weeds.” Other papers picked up the news, too. Their articles were the first to describe what the world would soon know as the Manson Family.

The Times staff writer Charles Hillinger described an Oxnard deputy on a late-night patrol who stumbled on a broken-down bus in a ditch by the Pacific Coast Highway. When he saw the bodies scattered in the weeds—nine women, five men—he thought they were dead. Then he realized they were only sleeping. After running a check on the bus’s tags, he learned it had been reported stolen from Haight-Ashbury. Waking the group, he told them to get dressed and wait for the county bus he’d ordered, which would take them all to jail. Before they left, one of the women (later identified as Mary Brunner) said, “Wait, my baby’s on the bus.” She went back to pick up her child, then only a week old. He was sick, with grime and open sores all over his body.

The article identified the “self-proclaimed leader of the band of wanderers” as Charles Manson, adding that he was booked on suspicion of grand theft. Brunner was charged with endangering the life of a child. She was later convicted and received two years’ probation.

Within several days, the chief of the San Francisco probation office, Albert Wahl, was alerted to an article about the arrest in the Oakland Tribune: “14 Nude Hippies Found Beside Wayward Bus.” Of course, one of those hippies was a parolee under his office’s supervision.

Throughout the sixties, their journalism had often gotten them mixed up in furtive arrangements

Saturday, May 3rd, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillBefore 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.

It was warm and sticky and nice

Saturday, April 26th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’Neill Ronald Ross, the deputy DA in Santa Monica, was just back from vacation, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), in early September, 1969:

The horrors of the Tate–LaBianca murders, then only a month old, still dominated the news. The killers remained at large, and no one even knew who they were. Ross was struck by reports that they’d left the bloody word “Pig” in conspicuous areas of both the Tate and LaBianca homes. His Hinman murder scene featured such writing, too. He took one look at the case and immediately connected it to the unsolved Tate–LaBianca murders. “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to,” he said.

[…]

In Independence, California, the group of twenty-some bedraggled hippies [from the Manson “family”] sat in the cramped county jail [for auto theft]. LASO detectives Guenther and Whiteley drove 225 miles to the dusty desert town to seek out a possible witness in the Hinman murder.

[…]

Atkins agreed to speak to the detectives without an attorney present. They told her that her fingerprints had been found at the Hinman crime scene and that Beausoleil had already ratted on her—both lies, but they got her talking about the crime. Atkins admitted to having held Hinman while Beausoleil stabbed him, but she claimed she never hurt him. She was booked on a first-degree-murder charge and transferred to the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, in downtown Los Angeles.

Atkins’s cellmate was a longtime con artist and call girl who went by Ronnie Howard. The two became fast friends. Almost immediately, Atkins was telling Howard and another inmate, Virginia Graham, all about her role in the Tate–LaBianca murders. She had personally stabbed Sharon Tate to death, she bragged, as Tate begged for the life of her unborn baby. After Tate died, Atkins said she’d tasted the dead actress’s blood; it was “warm and sticky and nice.”

Whatever he’d learned in Southeast Asia, he brought it back to L.A.

Saturday, April 19th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’Neill 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.”

They’re arguments that could be defused but aren’t

Monday, April 14th, 2025

Unforgiving Places by Jens LudwigTyler Cowen cites “the new and interesting” Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, by Jens Ludwig:

An estimated 80 percent [of U.S.gun shootings] seem to instead be crimes of passion — including rage.  They’re arguments that could be defused but aren’t, then end in tragedy because someone has a gun.  Most violent crimes are the result of human behavior gone temporarily haywire, not premeditated acts for financial benefit.

I can’t be sure if his surprise is feigned or sincere.

CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis

Saturday, April 12th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillThe Church Committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO actions in L.A., Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), 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.

In August 1967, the same month Hoover launched COINTELPRO, CIA director Richard Helms inaugurated the agency’s domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, which also infiltrated “subversive” groups and “neutralized” them:

CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis. In the summer of ’67, the president was convinced that the divided, disorderly America he led couldn’t possibly be the product of his own policies. Foreign agents, and presumably foreign money, must be to blame. He ordered the CIA to prove that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their origins abroad.

Richard Helms complied without hesitation. In the six years that followed, the CIA tracked thousands of Americans, insulating its information gathering so thoroughly that even those at the top of its counterintelligence division were clueless about its domestic surveillance. CHAOS kept tabs on three hundred thousand people, more than seven thousand of them American citizens. The agency shared information with the FBI, the White House, and the Justice Department. At its peak, CHAOS had fifty-two dedicated agents, most of whom served to infiltrate antiwar groups, like their counterparts in the FBI. Undercover, they hoped to identify Russian instigators, although they never found any. With the Interdivision Intelligence Unit (IDIU), a new branch of the Justice Department outfitted with sophisticated computerized databases, they collaborated on a list of more than ten thousand names, all thought to be dangerous activists; the IDIU produced regular reports on these people, hoping to predict their activities.

The journalist Seymour Hersh got wind of CHAOS late in 1974. He told James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence, and William Colby, the director of the CIA, that he had a story “bigger than My Lai” about CIA domestic activities. Colby was forced to admit that Hersh’s findings were accurate, and Angleton resigned from the agency. The story broke on December 22, on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.”

The Church Committee probed the CIA’s illegal activities, as did a separate government investigation, the Rockefeller Commission—but neither was able to penetrate the agency’s veil of secrecy. Since the CIA has no right to operate on American soil, the program should have brought even more censure than COINTELPRO; instead, it drew only a muted response. CIA leadership stonewalled at every opportunity. Even if they hadn’t, investigators were crippled by the dearth of information. When Richard Helms had disbanded CHAOS before leaving office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of every file pertaining to it, and since the seventies, almost nothing has come out. The operation hardly left a footprint.

[…]

In a memoir, former CIA director Colby later claimed that President Gerald Ford fired him for refusing to help Rockefeller sabotage his own investigation. According to Colby, CHAOS was so highly classified that even he, the director of the CIA, didn’t have access to it. “I found it impossible to do much about whatever was wrong with [CHAOS],” he wrote. “Its super-secrecy and extreme compartmentalization kept me very much on its periphery.”

Two years later, the Panthers had become almost synonymous with Hollywood’s liberal elite

Saturday, April 5th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillWhen Hoover reconstituted COINTELPRO, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), he was already worried that America’s black militants would be embraced by liberal whites, especially in a left-leaning place like Hollywood:

In the August 1967 memo reanimating the counterintelligence program, he’d noted the importance of “prevent[ing] militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability”: “they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to the ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes.”

Two years later, the Panthers had become almost synonymous with Hollywood’s liberal elite. Actresses such as Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg appeared at their rallies. Hoover felt he had to widen the chasm between blacks and whites in Los Angeles. In a November 1968 memo, an L.A. field agent discussed new efforts to spread disinformation to Hollywood’s liberal whites.

In the context of the Tate–LaBianca murders, the memo is chilling. Remember, the Tate house by then had become a high-profile gathering place for liberal Hollywood—among others, for Fonda, Cass Elliot, and Warren Beatty, all three of whom were under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, who would die at the hands of the Family, was an outspoken civil rights activist. That year she campaigned for Tom Bradley, the first African American candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Many in the Polanski–Tate crowd belonged to the White Panther party, explicit allies of the Black Panthers, or to the Peace and Freedom Party of California, which also voiced its support. The FBI, according to the memo, planned to generate distrust through disinformation:

The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) has been furnishing the BPP with financial assistance. An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of PFP in which it is set forth that the BPP has made statements in closed meetings that when the armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.

[…]

Less than a year after this memo was written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.