Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

The cognitive dissonance was intense. These weren’t the faces of hardened criminals or escaped lunatics. They were hippies, stereotypical flower children, in the bloom of wide-eyed youth: the men unshaven and long-haired, wearing beads and buckskin jackets; the women in blue jeans and tie-dyed tops, no bras, their hair tangled and unwashed.

The Family, with its starry-eyed communalism, sexual frankness, and veneration of LSD, offered a screen onto which anyone could project his insecurities about the era’s politics and pressures. The promise of the hippie movement had been in its willingness to forgo cherished institutions in favor of the new and untested. After the Tate murders, it seemed that hippies and freaks were more than a risible sideshow: they could really undermine the status quo. Their promiscuity had always earned a lot of finger wagging from concerned moralists, while others had looked on with thinly veiled envy. Parents were worried that their kids would drop out, become hippies, and never get decent jobs. Everywhere, kids were hitchhiking. The consensus from the straight world was that hippies were mostly harmless—but you didn’t want to be one. (View Highlight)

Even when they act as if they love, they can be totally devoid of true compassion. That is the reason why they can kill so matter-of-factly… Many hippies are socially almost dead inside. Some require massive emotions to feel anything at all. They need bizarre, intensive acts to feel alive—sexual acts, acts of violence, nudity, every kind of Dionysian thrill. (View Highlight)

Manson was an avid follower of the Beatles and believed that they were speaking to him through the lyrics of their songs… “Helter Skelter,” the title of one of the Beatles’ songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race, that is, with the exception of Manson and his chosen followers, who intended to “escape” from Helter Skelter by going to the desert and living in the Bottomless Pit, a place Manson derived from Revelation 9. (View Highlight)

Bugliosi called the defendants “bloodthirsty robots”—a grandiloquent phrase, but an apt one. It captured the unsettling duality of the killers: at once animal and artificial, divorced from emotion and yet capable of executing the most intimate, visceral form of murder imaginable. Tex Watson would later hymn the detached, automated ecstasy of stabbing: “Over and over, again and again, my arm like a machine, at one with the blade.” Susan Atkins told a cellmate that plunging the knife into Tate’s pregnant belly was “like a sexual release. Especially when you see the blood spurting out. It’s better than a climax.” And behind them was Manson, who lived for sex even as he described himself as “the mechanical boy.” (View Highlight)

Their case, and the defense’s counterarguments, led to some of the most unnerving testimony yet, including a kind of symposium on LSD—not as a recreational drug, but as an agent of mind control. (View Highlight)

Almost unblinkingly, Susan Atkins recalled how Tex Watson had told her to murder Tate: “He looked at her and he said, ‘Kill her.’ And I killed her… I just stabbed her and she fell, and I stabbed her again. I don’t know how many times I stabbed her.” Did she feel animosity toward Tate or the others? She shrugged. “I didn’t know any of them. How could I have felt any emotion without knowing them?” She knew that what she was doing “was right,” she added, “because it felt good.”

The defense argued that the women were merely pawns. Manson had used an almost technologically precise combination of drugs, hypnotism, and coercion to transform these formerly nonviolent people into frenzied, psychopathic killers. At that point, scientists in the United States had been studying LSD for only a little more than a decade—it was far from a known quantity. Manson, the defense said, had used the drug to ply his impressionable followers, accessing the innermost chambers of their minds and molding them to his designs.

Charlie might dance around, everyone else following, like a train. As he’d take off his clothes, all the rest would take off their clothes… Charlie would direct the orgy, arranging bodies, combinations, positions. “He’d set it all up in a beautiful way like he was creating a masterpiece in sculpture,” Watkins said, “but instead of clay he was using warm bodies.” (View Highlight)

If any of those bodies had “hang-ups” or inhibitions, Manson would eliminate them. He’d force someone to do whatever he or she most resisted doing. “One thirteen-year-old girl’s initiation into the Family consisted of her being sodomized by Manson while the others watched,” Bugliosi wrote. “Manson also ‘went down on’ a young boy to show the others he had rid himself of all inhibitions.”

Their induction was complete after they participated in lengthy LSD sessions—often stretching over consecutive days, with no breaks—during which Manson only pretended to take the drug, or took a much smaller dose. Clearheaded, he manipulated their minds with elaborate word games and sensory techniques he’d developed in the two years since his release from prison. With only negligible downtime between acid trips, detachment was all the easier. Every experience led the Family to drift further from reality until, eventually, even basic contradictions seemed tenable: death was the same as life, good was no different from bad, and God was inseparable from Satan. (View Highlight)

Dr. Joel Fort, a research psychiatrist who’d opened the nation’s first LSD treatment center, was one of the defense witnesses. He believed that Manson had used LSD to produce “a new pattern of behavior for the girls,” resulting in “a totally neutral system which saw death or killing in a completely different way than a normal person sees it,” free of “social concern, compassion, [and] moral values.”

“When you take LSD enough times you reach a stage of nothing,” Manson had said in court. “You reach a stage of no thought.” No one wanted to dwell on that. Ingrained evil, teased out of young women by a mastermind—that was something. And something was better than “a stage of nothing.” (View Highlight)

“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.”

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. (View Highlight)

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.

Collins was right. West was interested in drugs. His professional fascination with LSD was practically as old as the substance itself, and he was one of an elite cadre of scientists using it in top-secret research. Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in 1938 by chemists at Switzerland’s Sandoz Industries, but it was not introduced as a pharmaceutical until 1947. In the fifties, when the CIA began to experiment on humans with it, it was a very new substance. Be that as it may, the agency was not inclined to exercise caution.

The global superpowers considered it anything but. 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. (View Highlight)

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. (View Highlight)

Just days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion.

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. By then it had been pared down to almost nothing, as the agency focused on other ways to halt communism and sway policy making abroad and at home. (View Highlight)

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.

The basement of the library came to feel like my underground bunker. More than two months went by. I kept sifting and taking notes. On August 25, among a batch of research papers on hypnosis, I found them: letters between West and his CIA handler, “Sherman Grifford.”

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 remorseful 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.

West claimed he was in the courtroom the day Shaver was sentenced to death. Around this time, he became vehemently against capital punishment. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was because he knew his experiments might’ve led to the execution of an innocent man and the death of a child. What if his correspondence with Gottlieb, predating the crime by just a year, had been presented at trial? Would the outcome have been the same? (View Highlight)

But West had miscalculated the dosage. Tusko weighed a whopping 7000 pounds. West shot him with 2800 milligrams of acid, about 1400 times the quantity given to a human to produce “a marked mental disturbance,” by West’s measurement. “Five minutes after the injection,” West later wrote, “Tusko trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated and went into status epilepticus,” a respiratory seizure resulting in death. (View Highlight)

In the seventies, when Congress looked into abuses by intelligence agencies, it found evidence that the CIA and FBI had obstructed the Kennedy investigation. Dulles and Helms had deliberately concealed failed CIA plots to assassinate Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro. Allegedly, the CIA had aligned with organized crime figures, many sworn enemies of President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy; they teamed up with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami and New Orleans to assassinate the dictator. (View Highlight)