Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Squeaky mailed me her drawing in red ink of a woman’s face with a pair of hands coming out of her mouth. Written in script was the song lyric: “Makes me wanna holler, throw up both my hands . . .”

  “Charles Manson was a patsy,” Mae Brussell told me—“identical with Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and James Earl Ray. The Manson thing was a hidden war against the youth culture. People sharing their housing, their food, their cars, recycling their old clothes. Make your own candles and turn off the electricity. It was an economic revolution, affecting everything from the cosmetic industry to the churches.”

  She believed that Tex Watson, the Manson family member who led the others on the night of the murders, had played a bigger part in planning the massacre than generally believed. Charlie had instructed the girls to do whatever Tex told them. When Manson was charged, Watson was also charged, but federal authorities held Watson in a Texas prison with no explanation—not even his own lawyers were allowed to see him—while Vincent Bugliosi prosecuted the Manson trial in California.

  In order to find Manson guilty, the jury had to be convinced that Charlie’s girls were zombies who followed his orders without question. However, in order to find Watson guilty, another jury had to be convinced that he was not a zombie at all and knew exactly what he was doing.

  Mae gave me the heaviest lead in my Manson research. She told me that an agent for Naval Intelligence, Nathaniel Dight (not his real name), had been meeting with Tex Watson. Naval Intelligence—of course! L. Ron Hubbard was in Naval Intelligence. During World War II, imprisoned Mafia boss Lucky Luciano was pardoned at the urgent request of Naval Intelligence. The Committee to Investigate Assassinations stated that Lee Harvey Oswald had worked in Naval Intelligence. Even the infamous Zodiac Killer used obsolete Naval Intelligence ciphers in his notes.

  Nathaniel Dight was taking courses at Naval Postgraduate School, and Mae claimed that only intelligence officers could do that. Mae said Dight had posed as a hippie artist, orchestrating the scenario of violence and witchcraft in meetings with Tex Watson, who then fulfilled the prophecy of this agent provocateur with all that shooting and stabbing.

  Dight had done the artwork for a magazine which predicted that the counterculture would turn to violence and witchcraft. It was published by a corporation, which, Mae said, “was a conduit of CIA funds for medical research in mind control, intelligence money for electrode implants, and for LSD experiments, according to documents I got from the Pentagon.”

  Mae introduced me to Louise, a neighbor of Dight’s, who told me she had recognized Tex Watson’s photo in the newspaper as the one who had visited him. She told me about Dight’s alleged strange behavior: “I would occasionally find a noose in my backyard, and it was always hanging from a tree or shrub. The nooses were made of a nylon type rope or cord, and were of varied weights. The nooses gradually crept closer to my house. The closer they were placed the smaller they became.”

  Although my interview with former deputy sheriff Preston Guillory had prepared me to accept Mae’s theory on Dight, Guillory didn’t recognize the name. Manson wouldn’t answer any of my questions about him. “Brother,” he wrote, “names to me are like past dreams and my thought doesn’t live in time. Much moves that I can never put on paper or express in words.” Instead he discussed the jailhouse code against snitching.

  I wrote back that there was good snitching and bad snitching—giving, as an example of the former, Daniel Ellsberg—but Charlie wasn’t persuaded. I had also been corresponding with another prisoner at San Quentin, convicted mass killer John Linley Frazier, who wrote, “Me and Charlie are still trying to figure out how long our leashes are and who’s been pissin’ on ’em.” Nor was I able to find anyone in the Manson family who could provide confirmation about Nathaniel Dight. Squeaky, Sandy, and Brenda had never heard of him.

  Then came a break. My friend and Watsonville neighbor Jackie Christeve, who had started the first women’s studies program in the country at San Diego State College, introduced me to Karlene Faith. They were both graduate students in the History of Consciousness Department at the Santa Cruz campus of the University of California.

  Karlene invited me to participate in her activist thesis. She was writing a paper based on her project of bringing outside educators into the California Institute for Women at Frontera. I would conduct a workshop in creative journalism. Our visit to the prison was extended to include the Special Security Unit, which housed a trio of convicted killers—Manson family members Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie van Houten.

  When we met them, Patricia and Leslie were needle-pointing a colorful dragon on muslin the size of a bedsheet. They had named the dragon Mao. “In case the Chinese take over,” Patricia Krenwinkel explained, “we want to be ready.” Jackie had brought an old film about dating that was more campy than instructional. She asked if they were interested in seeing it. “Yes,” replied Leslie van Houten. “Anything with touching.”

  She said it with such tenderness, and yet they had used knives to butcher people to death—the ultimate perversion of touching. Later, we talked about the murders. “It was their karma,” Susan Atkins reasoned. “In another life, our karma could have been reversed.” That was the key to this puzzle. The Manson family had simply taken other people’s karma into their own hands.

  I asked if anyone there had ever met Nathaniel Dight. Susan replied, “Oh, yeah, Tex took me to sleep with him. And he gave us dope.” Keeping my adrenaline rush anchored, I explained who he actually was. The others teased her. “Ha, ha, you slept with a CIA guy.”

  They asked me who really ran the country. I was carrying around in my pocket a pyramid-shaped seashell I had picked up on the beach. Using that as a model, I outlined the power structure of secret societies, culminating with an unholy coalition at the top—organized crime, military intelligence, and corporate greed. The three women passed the seashell around, caressing it with their fingers as if trying to capture the sensuality for future reference. I should’ve left it with them.

  The next time I saw Squeaky, I told her about the meeting and gave her the seashell. She held it in her palm and rubbed it against her cheek.

  “Wow,” she said, “I can feel their energy.”

  Ed Sanders wrote in The Family, in reference to the Process cult, to which Charles Manson had ties:It is possible that the Process had a baleful influence on Sirhan Sirhan, since Sirhan is known, in the spring of ’68, to have frequented clubs in Hollywood in the same turf as the Process was proselytizing. Sirhan was very involved in occult pursuits. He had talked several times subsequent to Robert Kennedy’s death about an occult group from London which he knew about and which he really wanted to go to London to see.

  The Process was an offshoot of Scientology. Could this be a case of satirical prophecy? I was tempted to return to my original premise involving Sirhan, but it was too late. I had already become obsessed with the Manson case.

  In the summer of ’68, while the Yippies were planning a Festival of Life at the Chicago convention, some zealots from the Process visited me in New York. They were hyper-anxious to meet Tim Leary and pestered me for his phone number. They were also busy recruiting new members. When a teenager known as Gloria Yippie became a Process initiate, she had to wear all black clothing with a silver cross around her neck, and she was required to be celibate. She explained to me that this temporary restraint on her libido was “just testing my obedience.”

  The Process first came to the United States in 1967. Members were called “mind benders” and proclaimed their “dedication to the elimination of the gray forces.” They became the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a New Orleans–based religious corporation. They claimed to be in direct contact with both Jesus and Lucifer, and had wanted to be called the Church of the Process of Unification of Christ and Satan, but local officials presumably objected to their taking the name of Satan in vain.

  The Process struck me as a group of occult provocateurs, using radical Ch
ristianity as a front. They were adamantly interested in Yippie politics. They boasted to me of various rallies which their vibrations alone had transformed into riots. They implied that there was some kind of connection between the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and their mere presence on the scene. On the evening that Kennedy was killed at the Ambassador Hotel, he had been to a dinner party with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.

  Bernard Fensterwald, head of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, told me that Sirhan Sirhan had some involvement with the Process. Peter Chang, the district attorney of Santa Cruz, showed me a letter from a Los Angeles police official to the chief of police in San Jose, warning him that the Process had infiltrated biker gangs and hippie communes.

  In 1972, Paulette Cooper, author of The Scandal of Scientology, put me in touch with Lee Cole, a former Scientologist who was now working with the Process Church. I contacted him and flew to Chicago. Cole met me at the airport with a couple of huge men whose demeanor was somewhat frightening.

  They drove me to a motel, where I checked in, paying cash in advance. Cole arranged for a meeting with Sherman Skolnick, a local conspiracy researcher. He was in a wheelchair. Two men, one with a metal hook in place of his hand, carried him up the back stairs to my motel room. Lee Cole kept peeking out the window for suspicious-looking cars. It was becoming more surrealistic every minute.

  Early the next morning, the phone rang. It was Sherman Skolnick. “Paul, I’m sorry to wake you, but you’re in extreme danger.” My heart started pounding, and I put my socks on. “That fellow from last night, Lee Cole, he’s CIA.” I got dressed faster than I had ever gotten dressed in my life, packed my stuff, and ran down the back steps of the motel without even checking out.

  There was a cab outside. I got in and said, “NBC, please,” because I knew somebody who worked there. The driver said, “Where’s that?” If this were a movie, he wouldn’t have spoken, he would’ve just started driving away, and then I’d say, “Hey, wait a minute, this isn’t the way to NBC,” so actually I was relieved that he didn’t know where it was.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Do you know where the Playboy Building is?” And the driver knew. I’m sure he heard my sigh of relief. I was hoping to see Arthur Kretchmer, a friend who was the editor of Playboy, but this was Saturday and the offices were closed. I called him at home, and he said he’d be right there. While I was waiting, I called Ed Sanders in New York.

  “I’m scared,” I told him.

  “Aw,” he said, “they’re just punks.”

  Somehow, that felt reassuring. After all, what exactly was I so afraid of? I met with Kretchmer, then decided to go ahead with my original plan, and he drove me to another motel. There, I called up Lee Cole. Of course he denied being with the CIA. We made an appointment to visit the Process headquarters. “And this time,” I said—with Clint Eastwood bravado—“you can leave those goons of yours at home.”

  The Process men were dressed all in black, with silver crosses hanging from their necks. They called each other “brother” and they had German shepherds that appeared menacing. They tried to convince me that Scientology, not the Process, was responsible for creating Charles Manson. But what else could I have expected? Lee Cole’s role was to provide information on Scientology to the Process.

  To prove that he wasn’t with the CIA, he told me stuff about Scientology. He described their plan to kidnap former boxing champion Joe Louis from a mental hospital, so that Scientology could get the credit for curing him. Back in San Francisco, I asked journalist Roland Jacopetti to check that out, and he discovered that Scientology actually did have such a plan, although it had been aborted.

  Not that belonging to the CIA and Scientology were mutually exclusive, but I called Sherman Skolnick, and he apologized for scaring me. “You know us conspiracy researchers,” he chuckled, “we’re paranoid.” Actually, conspiracy research had become his religious pursuit. He once called me up with a new piece of evidence and proclaimed: “I’ve discovered the holy of holies.”

  No wonder Mae Brussell was so excited. The attempted burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. in June 1972 had suddenly brought her eight-and-a-half years of dedicated conspiracy research to an astounding climax. She recognized names, methodology, patterns of cover-up. She could trace linear connections leading inevitably from the assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, and all the killings in between.

  There was, for example, the murder of Ruben Salazar, a Los Angeles Times reporter, at the first Chicano-sponsored antiwar protest. Salazar had been working on an exposé of law enforcement, which would reveal secret alliances among the CIA, the army, the FBI, California’s attorney general, and local police authorities.

  L.A. District Attorney Robert Meyer received a phone call from L. Patrick Gray—who had recently become acting head of the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover’s death—telling him to stop the investigation. Meyer did quit, saying it was like the “kiss of death” to work with these people. Mae called Meyer, asking if he would help with her research. She wanted to find out why the Justice Department in Washington was stopping a D.A. in Los Angeles from investigating the killing of a reporter. A month later, Meyer was found dead in a parking lot in Pasadena.

  And now L. Patrick Gray was involved in an even bigger cover-up. A year before the Watergate break-in, E. Howard Hunt, who had worked for the CIA for twenty-one years, proposed a “bag job”—a surreptitious entry—into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who had refused to cooperate with FBI agents investigating one of his patients, Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. It was the function of the White House “plumbers” to plug such leaks.

  The burglars, led by G. Gordon Liddy, scattered pills around the office to make it look like a junkie had been responsible. The police assured Dr. Fielding that the break-in was made in search of drugs, even though he found Ellsberg’s records removed from their folder. An innocent black man, Elmer Davis, was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison, while Liddy remained silent. Mae Brussell corresponded with Davis, and after he finished serving Liddy’s time behind bars, he ended up living with Mae. It was a romance made in Conspiracy Heaven.

  Hunt also masterminded the Watergate break-in. Three weeks later—while Richard Nixon was pressing for the postponement of an investigation until after the election, and the mainstream press was still referring to the incident as a “caper” and a “third-rate burglary”—Mae Brussell completed a lengthy article for The Realist, documenting the conspiracy and listing the players, from the burglars all the way up to FBI Director Gray, Attorney General John Mitchell, and President Nixon.

  “The significance of the Watergate affair,” she wrote, “is that every element essential for a political coup d’état in the United States was assembled at the time of their arrest.”

  Mae proceeded to delineate the details of a plot so insidious and yet so logical that the typesetter wrote bravo! at the end of her manuscript. However, instead of my usual credit arrangement, the printer insisted on $5,000 cash in advance before this issue could go to press. I didn’t have the money, and I had no idea how I would get it, but as I left the printing plant, I was filled with an inexplicable sense of confidence. When I got home, the phone rang. It was Yoko Ono.

  I had known her in the ’60s as an avant-garde conceptual artist. She had one project which took place on a wooden platform in The Paradox, a macrobiotic restaurant a few blocks from my loft. People would climb inside these huge black burlap bags, singly or with a partner, and then do whatever they wanted, providing a floor show for patrons while they ate their brown rice and sprout salad. I had helped support theatrical groups —the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Free Southern Theater—but Yoko’s project was so absurd that I gave her some money too.

  As a token of appreciation, she presented me with a personally revised alarm clock. On the face of the clock, there was a blue sky with white clouds, but there were no hands. I w
ound that clock every day, leaving the alarm knob up, blindly changing the time it would go off so that I would have no way of telling when it would, but trying always to be psychically prepared.

  It was just a Zen Bastard’s way of learning to pay attention to the moment. I planned to do this for a whole year, but I decided to stop several months into it, on the day that I was in the middle of performing cunnilingus on a temporary soul mate on my vibrating chair when the alarm clock went off and we both screamed out loud in unison. I took that as an omen.

  Yoko had since married John Lennon. Now they had arrived in San Francisco and invited me to lunch. At the time, the Nixon administration was trying to deport Lennon, ostensibly for an old marijuana bust, but actually because they were afraid he was planning to perform for protesters at the Republican convention that summer.

  I brought the galleys of Mae Brussell’s article, which provided a context for John and Yoko’s current harassment. I mentioned my printer’s ultimatum, and they immediately took me to a local branch of the Bank of Tokyo and withdrew $5,000 in cash. I had never intended for the money I once gave to Yoko in New York to serve as bread cast upon the water, but now it had come back all nice and soggy, so precisely when I needed it that my personal boundaries of Coincidence were stretched to infinity.

  I could rationalize my ass off—after all, Yoko and Lennon had been driven across the country by their assistant, Peter, and they just happened to arrive in San Francisco at that particular moment—but the timing was so exquisite that Coincidence and Mysticism became the same process for me. John Lilly even told me about the Earth Coincidence Control Office—extraterrestrial guardians who protected him by manipulating human events so that he could carry out their higher purpose. At first I thought he intended this as a clever metaphor. Then I realized he meant it literally. And if they were doing it for him, maybe they were doing it for me.