Was Charles Manson Part of a CIA MK-ULTRA Experiment with LSD?

I've wondered of late if the bizarre Charles Manson murders were somehow encouraged or orchestrated by forces—perhaps in the US government—aimed at discrediting the peaceful hippie movement and the drugs it favored, such as LSD. 

The gruesome Tate-LaBianca murders on August 9&10, 1969 are often cited as the death knell of the 60s, and this point is made in the 2018 documentary by Jakob Dylan, "Echo in the Canyon," which celebrates the musical culture of Laurel Canyon near Los Angeles, and also documents the grave effect the murders had on the scene there. 

A little Googling on the topic lead me to the 2019 book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by investigative journalist Tom O'Neill. While it doesn't provide a direct link between Manson and the CIA, there's a great preponderance of evidence to connect, in horrifying way, the CIA's secretive MK-ULTRA program which may have recruited Manson while he was serving time in federal prisons. 

The book takes the reader on a journey through 20 years of O'Neill's research and hundreds of interviews with movie industry players, police, surviving Manson Family members, relatives of their murder victims, and others, including LA DA Vince Bugliosi, who made his name and fortune with the book Helter Skelter about the murders (and threatened to sue O'Neill when he learned about his research). 

O'Neill begins the book poking huge holes in the official record and prosecutorial procedure around the Manson family. Chaos details how a huge raid by the LA County Sheriff's office on the Manson family ranch in the weeks following the Tate-LaBianca murders lead to no arrests, despite stolen property and guns being found. Manson was also freed later that August after being caught with a stash of marijuana joints while in bed with an underage, 17-year-old girl, despite being on federal parole. O'Neill began to wonder if Manson was somehow being used as an informant by police, and thus kept getting a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. 

Elke Sommer and Sharon Tate in The Wrecking Crew

The author interviewed friends of Sharon Tate, including actress Elke Sommer, who appeared with Tate in her last movie, The Wrecking Crew. Sommer said Roman Polanski was a controlling, abusive husband. A tape of Tate having sex with other men staged by Polanski, who forced her to do it, was found in their home after the murders, but dismissed as evidence by Bugliosi. At the time of the murders, Polanski, who is now living in exile from the US after being prosecuted in 1977 for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, was working in London, reportedly having affairs, and leaving his pregnant wife in their California house with cast of characters including drug dealers who cornered the market on MDA along with Wojciech Frykowski, one of the murder victims. 

O'Neill interviewed some of these characters and their associates, who bragged of connections to US intelligence that the author was able to confirm. Several times, they threatened to kill him in violent ways if he pursued his research, and said Bugliosi was fearful of them, which is why he changed their names in Helter Skelter. Two of these men were in Jamaica at the time of the murders, giving them an alibi but leaving open the possibility that they could have enlisted Manson to commit them. 

Soon, O'Neill's research pressed him to "broader connections and social implications" of politics in California. In Chapter 7, "Neutralizing the Left," O'Neill delves into efforts to defuse the Black Panther Party and how Manson might have connected with those efforts. He focused on "two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI's COINTELPRO and the CIA's CHAOS. Their primary objective, according to three congressional committees that investigated them in the mid-seventies, was to discredit the left-wing movement by any means necessary—an aim that, coincidentally or not, described the effect of the Manson murders."   

As O'Neill tells it, after UC Berkeley students protested HUAC hearings at San Francisco city hall in May 1960, the notorious committee was cowed into suspending its hearings; more student protests and sit-ins ensured to protest the Vietnam war and other social issues. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover responded in 1965 by meeting with CIA director James McCone and hatching a plan to smear UC Berkeley president Clark Kerr and other faculty supporters as Communist sympathizers. 

A few months later, McCone resigned from the CIA and took a position with Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial campaign, which sought to quell "the so-called New Left" including recruiting McCone to investigate campus malcontents, and bringing in the National Guard against protestors after Reagan took office. Meanwhile, LBJ approved CIA director Richard Helms's illegal domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, aimed at the anti-war movement. And Hoover revived the FBI's counterinsurgency program COINTELPRO, with both agencies opening offices in San Francisco in 1967. 

In a 1967 memo, Hoover wrote that COINTELPRO's new mission was, "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations." The bureau "went to extreme lengths to cultivate informants," including commuting prison sentences of willing infiltrators.  

The FBI's activities may never have come to light if now for a group calling themselves the Citizens' Committee to Investigate the FBI, which broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania in March 1971, stealing suitcases full of documents that they leaked to the press. Senator Frank Church of Idaho lead an investigation and its findings, published in 1976, concluded that, "FBI headquarters approved more than 2,300 actions in a campaign to disrupt and discredit American organizations raging from the Black Panthers to Antioch college." In January 1969, COINTELPRO had incited the murders of two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus, by lying to their rivals the US Organization, saying that the Panthers were planning to assassinate their members. 

The FBI was also concerned about the Panthers' popularity with liberal whites in Hollywood, among them Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg. 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," O'Neill writes.

In a November 1968 memo, an L.A. field agent "discussed new efforts to spread disinformation to Hollywood's liberal whites." The memo states that, "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." 

O'Neill was unable to find a direct connection to Manson and either COINTELPRO or CHAOS, the latter of which saw most of its records destroyed. But it was well known that Manson was a racist who expected an "apocalyptic race war" in a "Helter Skelter" scenario. He was convinced that Black Panthers were spying on the Family at Spahn Ranch, and planning an attack on him. 

A disturbing possible player was found by O'Neill in former LAPD officer William W. Herrmann, who worked for various US government operations, including the infamous Operation Phoenix, authorized by Richard Nixon in 1968 to "attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong," with tactics including the assassination and torture of noncombatant civilians. During 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." 

In 1968, Herrmann was appointed by Gov. Reagan to head a new "Riots and Disorders Task Force." Discussing his activities in a May 1970 interview with the London Observer, Herrmann said he had a "secret plan" called "Saving America" including "deeper penetration by undercover agents into dissenting groups." Including leading them assassinate, like Operation Phoenix did?  

O'Neill theorizes that as well as and instead of implicating the Black Panthers in the Manson murders, the motivation of the US government was to discredit the hippie movement, turning them from loveable peaceniks into drug-crazed killers in the public's eye. 

Dr. David Smith at the Haight 
Asbury Free Medical Clinic

CIA'S LSD EXPERIMENTS AND MANSON?
The Church Committee report also revealed to the public the existence of the CIA's Project MK-ULTRA, which from 1953-1973 used various methods to manipulate unwitting subjects' mental states, including dosing them with LSD, sometimes without their knowledge. The program was carried out at more than 80 institutions starting in federal prisons and the military, adding colleges and universities, and hospitals. Ken Kesey volunteered as a subject at what turned out to be an MK-ULTRA study at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, ultimately taking his psychoactive experiences on the road on the Magic Bus. 

Dr. Sidney Gottleib, a poison expert who was the mastermind behind MK-ULTRA, thought that "mind control" was the future. He claimed to be able to implant false memories in people, and erase true ones. The suggestibility of subjects using LSD was akin to hypnosis, it was thought, and LSD "trips" were largely being planned out and lead by people like Mortimer Hartman, Cary Grant's psychiatrist who took him on weekly trips for years. 

By this time Manson had spent half of his 32 years in federal prisons for crimes like auto theft, and committing crimes like rape (at knifepoint, of another boy, after he was also raped). Among the strange and suspicious aspects to the Manson case, he was permitted to move from LA to Berkeley and then to the Haight Ashbury area of San Francisco to serve his probation in 1967, the Summer of Love. It was there that he first took LSD, and founded The Family. 

Manson's probation officer Roger Smith was also a doctoral student at the Berkeley School of Criminology, studying the link between drug use and violent behavior in Oakland gang members. It's unclear whether or not Smith knew Manson before he was transferred to the Bay Area, where he was attached to Smith as part of the San Francisco Project, an experimental parole program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health that monitored the rehabilitative progress of newly released felons. "In 1976, a FOIA request forced NIMH to acknowledge that is allowed itself to be used by the CIA as a funding front in the sixties," O'Neill wrote.  A Congressional committee found in 1977 that some of the first MK-ULTRA experiments took place at the NIMH Addiction Research Center in Lexington, Kentucky.

"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 [in July 1967.]" Manson grew out his hair, played guitar, and "his world view suddenly was inflected with spiritualism," O'Neill wrote. (Indeed, Timothy Leary found that LSD experiences could reduce prison recidivism.) However, Manson soon "dropped acid on a daily basis" while living in the Haight, O'Neill writes. 

Roger worked out of the Haight Ashby Free Medical Clinic on his project ARP, the Amphetamine Research Project, also funded by NIMH. The clinic was founded by David [no relation] Smith, who had been chief of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Screening Unit at SF General Hospital while a doctoral student. David tried psychedelics himself and like them. Faced with a predicted influx of 100,000 young hippies to the Haight in 1967, Smith founded the HAFMC to provide health care to the newcomers, including taking nonjudgemental care of people experiences bad trips or drug overdoses. 

Manson was a frequent visitor at the HAFMC, either to visit Roger as his parole officer, or for other reasons. He began recruiting followers to his strange world philosophy, borrowed from sources like Robert Heinlein's book Stranger in a Strange Land, casting himself as the book's main character Valentine Michael Smith, and Roger as his enabler Jubal Harshaw. Many of his recruits were young women who were treated at HAFMC for pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Roger Smith was was instrumental in gaining the post-arrest freedom of several Manson Family members, including an episode in Ukiah, CA where "Charlie's girls" were caught enticing underage boys with joints laced with LSD. 

David Smith was also studying psychedelics and amphetamines on the hippie subculture that presented itself for care at the clinic, including Manson. Both Smiths wrote about (distanced themselves from?) their dealings with Manson in Love Needs Care, a book published in 1971. Regular use of LSD could be dangerous, especially in pre-psychotic people, Smith wrote. Manson, he said, began to develop a number of illusions as his involvement with LSD increased. 

Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West also had an office at HAFMC. West was famous for "de-programming" US servicemen who were reportedly brainwashed during the Korean War into claiming they dropped illegal biological weapons in Korea. He opened a fake a hippie "crash pad" in the Haight to study the hippies, their drug use, and behavior. It was reminiscent of a CIA project, a few years earlier, that opened a fake bordello in San Francisco at which would-be "johns" were unknowingly dosed with LSD. West denied until his dying day in 1999 having anything to do with MK-ULTRA, but O'Neill found evidence of his connection in West's papers at UCLA, in the form of letters to Sidney Gottleib that began just after the experiments started. 

O'Neill finds horrific parallels between West's writings and Roger Smith's studies of rats on LSD and meth to the behavior of the Manson Family.  A couple of people he interviewed recalled that Roger's ARP files were stolen in a burglary just after Manson's arrest in the Tate-LaBianca murders. Both Smiths denied they were stolen. 

David Smith told O'Neill that The Family got heavily involved with speed when they moved to Los Angeles. He said they got it from the Hell's Angels, trading it for sex. Susan Atkins told Smith in 1978 she thought that "Helter Skelter and the ultimate crime was a speed delusion." No mention of speed use was brought up at the Manson trial, but later Atkins and Tex Watson both said they had taken speed the night of the murders. Manson, they said, would take it for days at a time, "brooding on his delusions."

There's much more to the book, including links to the Kennedy assassinations (both Jack Ruby and Sirhan Sirhan claimed to have no recollection of the murders they committed). We may never know much more about MK-ULTRA and its ties to Manson and other dark moments in our history.

BUGLIOSI AND ME

A bit of full disclosure: Before I was a drug war activist, while working for a book publisher in Los Angeles, I was a line editor on Bugliosi's 1991 book "Drugs in America," in which he presented four possible solutions to the drug problem, including invoking posse comitatus to send troops into Mexico, and legalizing drugs. 

When I met him, I told him how I'd gone to hear him speak when I was in college, and the auditorium was so full that some of us had to sit on the floor in the lobby to hear his talk piped over loudspeakers. I recall he was asked about the Beatles connection with Helter Skelter, and he mostly dismissed it, seemingly annoyed at constantly answering that question. 

Of all the authors I worked with, he was by far the most perfectionistic. His book had sections throughout indented and in gray type for less-important ideas or facts, and he kept rewriting even after it was typeset. One Friday evening, I took some galleys home with me to proofread over the weekend, a tedious task for which I decided to get a little stoned. To my surprise, Bugliosi telephoned me to talk about some more changes he wanted to make in the book. We had a long, wide-ranging discussion, mostly about legalization (the solution I favored). 

When the book came out, he signed a copy for me with a florid inscription calling me "a joy to work with and a very intelligent young woman." I laughed to think he had made that assessment of me based on a conversation we'd had while I was high. 

Bugliosi ran for LA DA twice, but lost both times. He made a career writing about criminal cases, such as the O.J. Simpson trial. He is on record dismissing conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, but said during a civil trial for the RFK assassination, "We are talking about a conspiracy to commit murder...a conspiracy the prodigious dimensions of which would make Watergate look like a one-roach marijuana case."

As The Manchurian Candidate depicts, someone might theoretically be brainwashed into committing an assassination. Maybe Bugliosi learned more about mind control than he let on during the Manson trial. In 1996, strangely, he published a book titled, The Phoenix Solution: Getting Serious About Winning America's Drug War, harkening to the name of the Phoenix program in Korea. In that book Bugliosi dismisses legalization as an unworkable idea. (It seems his new editors weren't as pro-legalization as his former one.) Ironically, 1996 is the year that California voters legalized medical marijuana, starting the ball rolling towards medical and then recreational legalization across the nation.

We are now working as a society towards legalizing psychedelics only with strict rules about taking them in therapeutic settings, as in the current law in Oregon and a pending one in California. It underscores a dangerous dichotomy: those with the wherewithal to enter therapeutic treatment can do so, while others are left to the streets where excesses of the type that brought about the Manson murders could repeat. Except that I hope the US Government has learned its lesson about not meddling in the mix, even though the lesson they learned in the '60s about not educating a populace, lest they rise against you, is now playing out with disastrous consequences everywhere.