Was Charles Manson linked to the CIA?
(Credits: Far Out / State of California, San Quentin Prison / CIA)
In stark contrast to the flower power movement, Charles Manson and his “family” of followers cast a dark shadow over the counterculture, effectively undermining the promise it initially held. By orchestrating a series of brutal killings during a time of intense socio-political strife and Cold War paranoia, the failed musician and his deranged acolytes only deepened the cultural turmoil of America. In the years following the tragic 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders, the official narrative surrounding Manson and his cult has been the subject of increasing scrutiny and speculation.
Several critics have contested prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s account, but one of the most persuasive voices comes from investigative journalist Tom O’Neill. In his 2019 work CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, O’Neill presents compelling and remarkable arguments challenging Bugliosi’s narrative.
In his work, compiled after 20 years of meticulous research, O’Neill focuses on the infamous Helter Skelter scenario that Vincent Bugliosi introduced during the Manson trials and elaborated in his 1974 book Helter Skelter, co-authored with Curt Gentry. While O’Neill acknowledges that Manson did indeed preach an apocalyptic race-war scenario to his followers, he contends that this narrative was exaggerated and manipulated to obscure a deeper, more complex truth about Manson’s true motivations.
Spinning a web of intrigue surrounding Manson’s life and convictions before the murders, O’Neill draws on shadowy governmental programs such as the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, both of which sought to infiltrate and disrupt subversive political campaigns such as civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement. Piquing the interest of conspiracy theorists, O’Neill also pays attention to the CIA’s nefarious mind-control experiment, Project MKUltra.
Looking beyond the famous argument that Manson’s killing spree began because he didn’t secure the record deal with the superproducer and son of Doris Day, Terry Melcher, O’Neill claims that Bugliosi told a pair of journalists after the trial that he didn’t think that Manson believed in Helter Skelter at all. He was too intelligent for it, apparently, but he used the fictional scenario to persuade his family to follow his orders. O’Neill’s primary question is why the cult leader sent his followers to kill people if he didn’t want to start a race war. This is the source of much puzzlement and a reasonable point, positing that Bugliosi had political ambitions and wanted to use the trial as a starting point.
Scrutinising Manson’s complex pre-murder period, O’Neill notes that before the guilty family members were sent down for good, they were released several times from prison. He claims that Roger Smith, Manson’s parole officer, looked the other way when he was committing crimes, such as drug use and prostitution, leading up to the murders. Not only should Smith have sent him back to prison after recommending a revocation of parole, but thanks to reading Manson’s parole file after years of Freedom of Information Act requests, O’Neill found that Smith wrote to his superiors suggesting Manson be allowed to live in Mexico, where he’d be free of supervision. They did not share his view.
Furthermore, he claims that the parole officers of Susan Atkins, one of the main Tate murderers, recommended the revocation of her parole and later probation due to carefree and regular violation. However, on both occasions, when put before the original judges, they decided to end parole and probation early.
O’Neill argues that he presented his findings to a retired deputy DA, who suggested that a powerful and secretive figure had worked to keep Manson out of jail between 1967 and 1969. This claim introduces the conspiracy theories surrounding COINTELPRO and CHAOS, though these connections are somewhat speculative. According to O’Neill, CHAOS, a covert FBI operation, was deployed in the Bay Area starting in 1967, at the height of the counterculture movement. Focusing on COINTELPRO, he also claims that the FBI orchestrated the murder of two members of the Satan’s Slaves group on the UCLA campus by tricking their rivals, the Black Panthers, into believing they were being lured into a trap.
O’Neill maintains that he cannot prove Manson had any involvement with either program but does claim his operations aligned with their objectives in light of wanting to combat hippies. Furthermore, COINTELPRO had the Black Panthers in its crosshairs, and according to Bugliosi, the Manson Family murders were committed to implicate them and ignite his race war. He does not finish upon any tangible connection in the book but instead presents his findings and leaves the reader to draw their own conclusions.
Elsewhere, it is reported that Reeve Whitson, also known as ‘Walter Kern’, who investigated the Tate murders with Sharon Tate’s father, Paul, was always one step ahead of the LAPD team. O’Neill claims that a dying Whitson told his attorney and some family members that his life regret was his work in the operation against the left-wing movement and infiltration of the Manson Family and that he felt he could have prevented the Tate-LaBianca deaths. Allegedly, he conceded he had been at the crime scenes before the news had broken.
But where does MKUltra come into play? When the program was first exposed in 1976 by a whistleblower in a New York Times article, it named people who the CIA had allegedly contracted to conduct their experiments. Among them was Dr Louis ‘Jolly’ West, who denied his involvement for the rest of his life, which has also never been proven.
However, O’Neill says he discovered that West had been in the exact location at the same time as Manson. After West died, he contacted UCLA, where he worked, gained access to his papers, and found correspondence between him and Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra. O’Neill maintains that what he found showed the CIA had funded West for around two decades to experiment on people and that in 1967, he opened a location in Haight-Ashbury, the epicentre of hippiedom and Bay Area. His office at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, where he recruited subjects, was the same place Manson visited weekly to meet Smith.
Adding another layer, O’Neill claims that Smith was executing amphetamine research at the Free Clinic during his time supervising Manson. Confusingly, the Free Clinic was run by David Smith – no relation to the parole officer – and O’Neill claims funding papers show both were bankrolled by the government for their research. Allegedly, Manson was even on location daily.
While much of O’Neill’s case might seem circumstantial, several elements of the story are thought-provoking. In an era marked by political deceit and manipulation, distinguishing truth from fiction becomes a daunting challenge, especially when the figures involved are already larger-than-life.
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