Chaos : Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (9780316529211)

by O'Neill, Tom; Piepenbring, Dan (CON)

  Whenever I reread my interview transcripts, I wince at moments like this. I prepared diligently for these conversations, especially in cases where I thought the right questions could bring major new revelations. Reliving marathon interviews like this, I sometimes kick myself even for having had to stop the conversation to go to the bathroom—maybe if I hadn’t taken a break, things would’ve gone differently.

  Even now, I wonder what could’ve happened if I’d held off on confronting Smith until I’d marshaled every possible resource. In 2001, for example, I hadn’t yet found the glowing recommendation he’d provided for Susan Atkins, effectively winning her probation a year before the murders. If I’d had that, I could’ve challenged a bunch of the assertions he made about Atkins that night—he called her a “hard, hard lady,” and he hoped that she never got out of prison. “She was scary. She was aggressive. I thought she was sort of Charlie’s operative.” Quite an about-face from the man who’d claimed in 1968 that Atkins would “comply willingly with any probationary conditions aimed at her rehabilitation.”

  I pointed out that Manson had apparently continued to invoke Smith’s name after their parole relationship dissolved. Manson and the girls continued visiting him at his office at the HAFMC, and even at his home. I told Smith, “I think he was still trying to pass you off as his PO.”

  But all he had to say on the subject was: “Oh, really!”

  When Smith said he’d never been asked to testify at the trial, despite having served as “an expert witness in lots and lots of trials,” I told him and his wife how much that baffled me. They seemed perplexed, too. I asked, “Was there something going on behind the scenes that your testifying would have exposed, a Big Picture, that they didn’t want exposed? Maybe like in L.A., where they kept releasing him for offenses without charging him when they had evidence against him?”

  For the first time, Smith lost his temper. “Okay, you’re operating from the theory that he was tied in—something else was going on. Tom, I can’t help you. I don’t know.” His face reddened, and he shouted, “I really don’t know!”

  “Because you were part of his gestating phase in San Francisco, I thought maybe you might have an indication.”

  “Yeah, I saw his talent. I saw his bullshit. He was very glib,” Smith said. “I had known for a long time how powerful his effect was on people… his particular brand of psychobabble was as persuasive as anybody on the street.”

  He reminded me that San Francisco in the late sixties may as well have been another country, so different were its customs and mores. I was sympathetic, to a point. By then I’d spoken to so many people about this period that it felt at once totally near and completely alien. So many of my sources, even the most reliable, had trouble explaining their feelings and motivations, not just because so much time had passed but because some schism stood between them and the past. It was irreparable—wherever the sixties had come from, they were gone, even in memory.

  As we refilled our wineglasses, Smith conjured the scene: “It was a time when birth control pills first became widely available… You will find this absolutely stupid—women used to walk around and pull up their sweaters to show that they didn’t have bras and they would actually seek you out to have sex. Unheard-of.” He continued, “Then comes the whole drug thing. Then comes the Haight-Ashbury. The whole Bay Area was one of the most electric places you could possibly be… It was like a magnet.”

  Manson, he said, had arrived at the tail end of this innocence. When Smith traded his parole job for the ARP, he remembered the Haight already yielding to speed, “the beginning of one of the most incredibly destructive patterns of drug use I’d ever seen… The first six months I was there, there were thirty murders within, like, a six-block radius of the office we had. It was middle-class, totally naive kids… it was the worst maudlin, stupid theater that you’ve ever seen.”

  In a scene like that, the Charlie Mansons of the world were a dime a dozen. The Haight was so flooded with weirdos, seekers, addicts, and guru figures that no one batted an eye at him. If anything, Smith said, Manson was a little more respectable than many of them, insofar as he eschewed speed and asked his followers to do the same.

  “He was very odd. He was a hippie, it was clear. He was very manipulative—but was he highly dangerous? Didn’t see it… I did let him travel, and there were some checks and balances. Basically, when he was in the Bay Area, he was in my office every week. I saw him a lot. Not only in the office… he came in with his girls after a while and I think that became kind of an annoyance to the office.”

  I made a mental note of that comment. It seemed to confirm that Manson was visiting Smith for official parole meetings at the HAFMC. Later, he backed away from it.

  “My association with the clinic really was pretty intermittent,” he said. “It wasn’t until after I left federal probation that I came down there.”

  “The chronology confuses me,” I said. “The people at the clinic all thought he was coming in for probation.”

  “No, no, no, I had left probation.”

  “So he was just coming in to say hello?”

  “First of all, he didn’t come in that often,” Smith said. “I never saw him in any official way and I also never invited him.” There could be nothing untoward about Manson’s appearances at the HAFMC, he implied, because a conspiracy takes careful planning, and no one there had the capacity to plan anything. “Nothing happened according to schedule in the Haight-Ashbury. You had people walking around jacked up on two grams of speed tempered out with heroin and people carrying guns and tweaking on acid and it was absolutely crazy. Actually, Charlie and his girls were the sanest people around in some ways.”

  That claim shouldn’t have surprised me. Manson had endeared himself to Smith; they were close enough that Smith felt comfortable taking care of Manson’s baby. He’d looked after the child for “a couple of months, I think. I know it was long enough to have the baby circumcised, which I think really pissed him off.”

  When we’d finished our pizza and made our way through most of the final bottle of wine, I steered Smith back toward the subject of Manson’s psychology. I still felt that he was trying to have it both ways: to acknowledge Manson’s anger and instability and, sometimes in the same breath, to downplay the eccentricities of a man who’d started a cult as Smith watched on.

  “There was this unquestioned loyalty to Charlie while they were in San Francisco, [but] there was almost a good-natured quality to it,” Smith told me. “There was still the ability to joke with him, and push him.” In his mind, the move to the Spahn Ranch was fatal, in that it took the Family out of society. “They were isolated. They were doing acid every day and they were essentially without any reality checks at all… There’s a time when everything flips. And I don’t know when that was, but it sure as hell wasn’t when he was in San Francisco.”

  Explaining why he refused to talk about Manson for more than twenty-five years, he said, “There were a lot of people who became overnight experts on Manson… particularly back then. Even now. I’m prepared to tell you to get the fuck out of here at some point. You understand what I’m doing here and what’s important, which is me. The thing is, Tom, as I look back on that time I don’t know what else I could have done… I felt real sadness about it—I don’t feel any culpability.”

  That about summed it up. Soon I thanked Smith and his wife for their generosity and got to my feet. We’d all had some wine, and there was a warmth, if not a trust, in their rustic old farmhouse. I remembered suddenly that it was almost Christmas. They led me to the back door, both of them waving as they saw me out, flakes of snow still falling from the night sky. In my rental car, I took the old highway back past the prison that Smith worked at; apparently he’d personally planned their new, ten-million-dollar mental health care facility. The thought of it made me feel small.

  He’d been more than accommodating, hadn’t he? And he’d taken a serious look at the papers I’d found, had given serio
us consideration to my questions… On the face of it, I had no reason to be dissatisfied, having just gotten hours of tape from one of the most reclusive officials connected to Charles Manson.

  And yet, as I dwelled on it, the interview felt strange and inconclusive. The closer I got to my motel, the sadder I got. I wasn’t finished with the story, or even close to finished. I’d gone to Michigan expecting to shock Roger Smith with incontrovertible evidence of everything he’d overlooked. He had reacted, basically, with six hours of shrugging and some free wine and pizza.

  Soon enough, I’d transcribe the interview and start to work away at the little inconsistencies and contradictions in Smith’s account, but at the moment I was crestfallen. Even supposing I could find something to push back on, was I right about any of it? Or had Smith entertained six hours of questioning from someone peddling conspiracy theories? His denials felt wrong to me, but I’d had hours to prove my case to him, to get him to break, and I hadn’t.

  I headed back home to Philadelphia for the holidays. No one knows me better than my family, and over the Christmas break, they noticed right away that something was off. I was aloof, skipping meals to work on the book proposal and figure out my next moves. Stuck in my own head, going through the paces of my story, I tried to construct a coherent narrative out of interview transcripts and dozens of discarded drafts of my dead Premiere piece. With no new revelations from Roger Smith, the ending was a big blank.

  I’d also told my father, sheepishly, that I was running out of money. He generously offered me a loan, as much as I needed to keep me afloat—and I accepted. I meant it when I promised I’d pay him back.

  My father was a tax attorney and law professor, and I realized that I’d never given him a full debriefing on my reporting, even as it became increasingly legalistic. That Christmas I filled him in on everything I’d learned, walking him through my collection of three-ring binders, their pages now dog-eared and marked with a rainbow of neon highlights and plastic reference tabs.

  To my relief, I watched as my sober-minded father transitioned to my thinking. He’d told me that he never trusted Bugliosi—too arrogant, too flamboyant—and now he was ready to roll up his sleeves, take out his red pen, and help me in the best way he knew how, by arguing with the U.S. government for records. With his legal knowledge, he helped me fill out new FOIA requests and file appeals to old ones. In the coming months, and for several years, he accomplished what I’d been unable to, forcing unwilling bureaucrats to fill in redacted documents and release information in dribs and drabs. It wasn’t enough, of course, to fill in all the gaps, but it got me closer to the truth—and it would never have been possible if I hadn’t won over my old buttoned-up dad. He believed in what I’d found. He had the same questions that I did, especially about the parole board’s reluctance to release Manson’s file. Why were they hiding all this? Everything about the case should be publicly available, he thought. His skepticism kept me going.

  After the new year, he drove me to the airport so I could fly back to L.A. I’ll never forget the father-son pep talk he gave me. It doesn’t matter to us, he said, if you’re never able to prove all of this. The fact that you tried so hard is all that matters to us. I headed back to the West Coast feeling reinvigorated, aware of how lucky I was to have my family behind me. At least, I thought, I could have my book out in time for the fortieth anniversary of the murders, in 2009.

  11

  Mind Control

  Off the Deep End

  I can still remember the email I sent to my agent. I’d made peace with the fact that I’d never reach a firm conclusion on Manson’s involvement with the Smiths. I’d accepted that I had to break off my reporting and move ahead on my book proposal. I’d even taken a full week off—for the first time since I’d started in ’99—to clear my head. And then Jolly West happened.

  “You’re not gonna like this,” I wrote to my agent, pausing before I typed the next line: “but I think the JFK assassination is involved.” I paused again. “And the CIA’s mind-control experiments.”

  I rewrote it a bunch of different ways, trying to make myself sound less insane, but when I hit send, I still wished right away that I hadn’t. I might lose the one publishing professional I had in my corner. And at this point I’d understand if he cut and ran. He always seemed to hold his breath when I mentioned a new “finding,” but now I knew I was pressing my luck.

  What I’d written was true, though, and I was confident he’d understand. Through my research on the HAFMC, I’d learned that yet another shadowy researcher kept an office there—and that his LSD research 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. Pursuing West felt like the logical thing to do, but it also meant swimming deeper into the waters of conspiracy, where, as near as I could tell, only the real nut jobs had wandered before me. I thought of Bill Nelson, the creepy Manson memorabilia dealer I’d once met at a Denny’s. Was there something about the isolation and intensity of this work that appealed to me when it pushed most people away?

  I’d dared to tell my agent about any of this only because I’d found firm documentation for a long whispered rumor about West. He’d used drugs and hypnosis to conduct behavior-control experiments on Americans without their knowledge or consent. That allegation had landed on the front page of the New York Times in 1977, but West had denied it until the day he died, and no one had ever proven the charge. I could, and I thought it was my biggest scoop yet. West’s résumé was so chockablock with intrigue and mad-scientist larks that even someone like Reeve Whitson, who behaved like a spy out of a GQ spread, paled in comparison.

  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.

  I had only a fraction of that information at my disposal when I first heard about West, but you can see why I felt I had to expand the frame of my reporting—yet again—just when I’d promised myself to narrow it. Nearly every psychiatrist and researcher I spoke to from Haight-Ashbury had invoked his name, often unfavorably. When I saw that he’d been accused of conducting mind-control experiments, I second-guessed myself; this was not an excursion to
be taken lightly.

  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.

  For weeks I convinced myself to leave well enough alone. There was more than enough to fill out my book proposal. I didn’t need to involve something as vast and intractable as secret government-sponsored mind-control experiments. But I had a gut feeling that something important was in those files. It gnawed at me.

  One day I ran out of willpower. I hopped in my car and drove to the library. Soon I was showing up every day when the building opened, staying for hours to read in the basement, and leaving only when they kicked me out at closing time.

  Faking a “Hippie Crash Pad”

  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.