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

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

  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.

  Still, when the Watergate scandal, and the CIA’s involvement in it, consumed the nation in the early seventies, it occurred to agency leadership that it would be prudent to cover their tracks. Director Richard Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all MKULTRA files. In January 1973, the Technical Services Staff shredded countless documents describing the use of hallucinogens, including every known copy of a manual called “LSD: Some Un-Psychedelic Implications.” MKULTRA evaporated.

  Grandiose and Sinister

  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.

  In December 1974, the project finally came to light in a terrific flash of headlines and intrigue. Seymour Hersh reported it on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces.” Three government investigations followed, all hobbled by the CIA’s destruction of its files. When records were available, they were redacted; when witnesses were summoned, they were forgetful.

  First came the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission, each mentioned earlier regarding CHAOS and COINTELPRO. The Church Committee’s final report unveiled a 1957 internal evaluation of MKULTRA by the CIA’s inspector general. “Precautions must be taken,” the document warned, “to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions.” A 1963 review from the inspector general put it even more gravely: “A final phase of the testing of MKULTRA products places the rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy.”

  In fact, as the Church Committee’s report went on, MKULTRA had caused the deaths of at least two American citizens. One was a doctor who’d been injected with a synthetic mescaline derivative. The other was Frank Olson, a CIA-contracted scientist who’d been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a small agency gathering in the backwoods of Maryland presided over by Gottlieb himself. Olson fell into an irreparable depression afterward, which led him to hurl himself out the window of a New York City hotel where agents had brought him for “treatment.” (Continued investigation by Olson’s son, Eric, strongly suggests that the CIA arranged for the agents to fake his suicide; they threw him out of the window themselves out of fear that he would blow the whistle on MKULTRA and the military’s use of biological weapons in the Korean War.)

  The news of Olson’s death shocked a nation already reeling from Watergate, and now less inclined than ever to trust its institutions. The government tried to quell the controversy by passing new regulations on human experimentation. But scrutiny and internal pressure on the CIA continued to mount until the agency was forced to make an admission: It hadn’t destroyed everything. It had come to their attention that thousands of pages about MKULTRA were collecting dust in the off-site warehouse.

  So came another congressional investigation, more robust than the last, with sixteen thousand additional pages of documentation at its disposal. Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye subpoenaed a number of CIA spooks. Among them was Gottlieb, rousted from his retirement in California and forced to defend his actions before the Senate. Or rather, before some of the Senate. Gottlieb claimed that his heart condition precluded the possibility of his addressing the whole chamber; instead, he was installed in an anteroom, where he answered questions from a select group while the masses listened over a public address system.

  As the New York Times pointed out, Gottlieb “managed to elude the lights and microphones and the crush of reporters waiting for him in the Senate hearing room.” He was spared the sight of the incredulity that spread over their faces as he admitted that he had destroyed MKULTRA’s files not to cover up “illegal activity,” but “because this material was sensitive and capable of being misunderstood.” He resented the harm done to his reputation, and he was loath to provide specifics about MKULTRA experiments, saying that he’d never witnessed any himself.

  Gottlieb’s destruction of the MKULTRA files was a federal crime. It was investigated by the Justice Department in 1976, but, according to the Times, “quietly dropped.” His brutal courses of experimentation broke any number of laws, and his perjury that day did, too. But he was never prosecuted. He’d testified before the Senate only under the condition that he receive total criminal immunity.

  As for those sixteen thousand new pages, they were mainly financial records, but a few more tantalizing documents found the CIA explicating its ambitions. “Can we obtain control of the future activities (physical and mental) of any individual, willing or unwilling… with a guarantee of amnesia?” they asked. “Can we force an individual to act against his own moral concepts?” And: “Can an individual… be made to perform an act of attempted assassination?”

  Senate investigators condemned MKULTRA unanimously. Kennedy branded it “perverse” and “corrupt,” an erosion of the “freedom of individuals and institutions in the name of national security.” Inouye called it “grandiose and sinister.” The CIA’s new director, Stansfield Turner, swore that he’d sent all existing MKULTRA files to the Justice Department, which would mount a thorough investigation.

  Still, between the destruction of records and the subpoenaed agents’ sudden memory lapses, everyone knew that “the full facts,” as the New York Times editorialized, “may never come out.” The Senate demanded the formation of a federal program to locate the victims of MKULTRA experiments, and to pursue criminal charges against the perpetrators. That program never coalesced. Surviving records named eighty institutions, including forty-four universities and colleges, and 185 researchers, among them Louis J. West. The New York Times identified him, in a front-page lead story, no less, as one of seven suspected scientists who’d secretly participated in MKULTRA under academic cover. And yet not one researcher was ever federally investigated, and only two victims were ever notified. The Times had called MKULTRA “a secret twenty-five year, twenty-five million dollar effort by the CIA to learn how to control the human mind.” It looked like no one would suffer any consequences for it.

  Griffin Bell, the Attorney General at the time of the revelations, told me the files never arrived at the Justice Department, despite Stansfield Turner’s sworn claim to the contrary. Bell said they must’ve just “fall[en] through the cracks.” As for Turner himself, he told me he could no longer remember having testified that the CIA sent the files. “I’m just drawing a total blank here,” he said. I read his remarks back to him. “I guess I did testify about this,” he said. “Somebody fed me the stuff and I played it back.”

  The New York Times ran twenty-seven stories on MKULTRA, eight on the front page. But no one in the press corps, and none of the senators involved, followed up to see that the promised investigations took place. Since then, the program’s bewildering significance has been engulfed many times over by other controversies. Receding in the rearview mirror, it looks like just another example of the CIA’s megalomania at the zenith of the Cold War.

  Jolly West, CIA Asset

  When I started visiting the UCLA library, I had no idea that Jolly West had created a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad” in the Haight. I’d found early research papers of his, but not much else. And for a long while, my days in the library were fruitless. West’s archive comprised two hundred boxes, most of them full of ephemera. There were tons of p
ress clippings. West had tracked the media’s coverage of assassinations, the CIA, aggression in cats, psychosurgery, capital punishment, alcoholism among Native Americans, behavior modification, and the civil rights movement, among other subjects. I was intrigued to see many clippings on the Manson murders, and papers by Roger Smith, David Smith, and Alan Rose.

  Part of the reason that West became my white whale was that, improbably enough, I’d already interviewed him once in 1995, a few years before his death, when I was still reporting celebrity features for Us and Premiere. I was doing a piece on the uptick in celebrity stalkers, and West was one of the scientific “experts” I consulted. When I’d spoken with psychiatrists before, I was the one who did all the talking—this time it was all West, who droned on for so long that I cut the interview short.

  Now that felt like a lifetime ago. As I settled in for the long haul at the library, my early certainty began to falter. My first visit had been on June 12, 2001. I’d leave the campus every evening wondering if I was wasting my time, having found nothing and gotten no closer to wrapping up my reporting. 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.”

  I didn’t recognize the name, so as soon as I got home, I began tearing through every book I had that mentioned MKULTRA, hoping that it would jump out at me. In the first and most definitive of the bunch, John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, there it was, buried in a footnote: “CIA operators and agents all had cover names,” it said, “even in classified documents. Gottlieb was ‘Sherman R. Grifford.’”

  So West really had lied all those years. Not only was he a part of MKULTRA, he’d corresponded with the “Black Sorcerer” of MKULTRA himself. Preserved in his files, the letters picked up midstream, with no prologue or preliminaries. The first one was dated June 11, 1953, a mere two months after MKULTRA started. West was then chief of psychiatric service at the airbase at Lackland, Texas.

  Addressing Gottlieb as “S.G.,” he outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis. Enumerating short- and long-term goals, he offered a nine-point list, beginning with a plan to discover “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew.” Another item proposed honing “techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects… or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.” West wanted to reverse someone’s belief system without his knowledge, and make it stick. He hoped to create “couriers” who would carry “a long and complex message” embedded secretly in their minds, and to study “the induction of trance-states by drugs.” All of these were the goals of MKULTRA, and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.

  “Needless to say,” West added, the experiments “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

  West’s colleagues wouldn’t approve of his activities. He yearned to “cut down considerably the number of people who can properly call me to account.” Because he’d be using drugs that were “not on the Air Force list of standard preparations,” he wanted to secure “some sort of carte blanche.” (He would go on to suggest a number of security measures in his letters, including disguised funding, double envelopes, and false names.)

  Next West addressed a sensitive matter: who would the guinea pigs be? He listed four groups—basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and “others, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade.” Only the volunteers would be paid. The others could be unwilling, and, though it wasn’t spelled out, unwitting. It’d be easier to preserve his secrecy if he was “inducing specific mental disorders” in people who already exhibited them. “Certain patients requiring hypnosis in therapy, or suffering from dissociative disorders (trances, fugues, amnesias, etc.) might lend themselves to our experiments.”

  As if to prove his thoroughness, he affixed two addenda to his four-page letter, begging Gottlieb to get one of his superiors, a Major Robert Williams, “transferred to another base.” Williams was “an uncomfortably close scrutinizer of all my activities” who believed that hypnosis was “tampering with the soul,” West complained.

  Gottlieb’s reply came on letterhead from “Chemrophyl Associates,” a front company he used to correspond with MKULTRA subcontractors. “My Good Friend,” he wrote, “I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real… you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful.” He would arrange top-secret clearances for anyone who might become ensnared in their work, giving West “a separate sum” for the purchase of materials.

  Gottlieb saluted his new recruit: “We have developed quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.”

  West returned the camaraderie. “It makes me very happy to realize that you consider me ‘an asset,’” he replied. “Surely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.”

  With that, the record of their correspondence ceased for nearly nine months. When it resumed, in April 1954, West had begun arrangements to relocate to the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, which wanted him to head its psychiatry department. He would be a civilian again. Gottlieb commended his “new look,” noting, “it appears at the moment to be a move which would in the long run be beneficial for us.” He signed off intimately, “Give my regards to your family.”

  West had lied to his prospective employer, writing, “My present job is purely clinical and I have been doing no research, classified or otherwise.” The university took him at his word. Now performing his duties for Gottlieb at both the university and the air force base, West asked the judge advocate at Lackland for permission to accept money from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which he called “a non-profit private research foundation.” In fact, as the CIA later acknowledged, Geschickter was another of Gottlieb’s fictions, enabling him to keep West and other researchers properly paid.

  By April 1955, West had moved permanently to Oklahoma City. But the air force insisted he return to Lackland weekly to serve out the remainder of his contract. Gottlieb, who’d evidently attempted to pull some strings, wrote in September 1954 to relay some frustrating news: “The Air Force will not release you… Although this rather adequately stops our present effort, it does not erase the need for research in the field. I’m suggesting therefore that you give some thought to the period some 20 months hence and the plans which might be made in the interim.”

  Twenty months would’ve put them in April 1956. That year, West reported back to the CIA that the experiments he’d begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. He was ensconced in a civilian institution, and evidently he found it a less oppressive setting than Lackland had been. In a paper titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” he claimed to have achieved the impossible: he knew how to replace “true memories” with “false ones” in human beings without their knowledge. In case the CIA didn’t grasp the significance of this, he put it in layman’s terms: “It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur.”

  The document, marked “classified,” was right there in West’s files; I had to assume that the CIA had destroyed any copies. They’ve never publicly acknowledged West’s groundbreaking deed. He’d done it, he claimed, by administering “new drugs” effective in “speeding the
induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.”

  As in his initial experiments, West performed most of these psychiatric feats on mental health patients. “The necessity to obtain most of the subject material from a population of psychiatry patients made standardized observations very difficult,” he groused. In the report, which doubled as a request for continued funding—a successful request; West received government backing through 1965 at the least—he enthusiastically described a high-tech laboratory he planned to construct at Oklahoma. It would include “a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacologic, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated.”

  West had hypnotized mental patients and “normal subjects” and exposed them to a host of drugs, including chlorpromazine, reserpine, amphetamines, and LSD—the same ones that David Smith would inject in his confined rodents about a decade later. Of course, at least two of these, LSD especially, would prove instrumental in the Manson Family’s group psychology.

  But when it came to elaborating on his findings about implanting memories and controlling thoughts, West skimped on the details. He seemed to have been in a rudimentary phase of his research. Acid, he wrote, made people more difficult to hypnotize; it was better to pair hypnosis with long bouts of isolation and sleep deprivation. Using hypnotic suggestion, he claimed, “a person can be told that it is now a year later and during the course of this year many changes have taken place… so that it is now acceptable for him to discuss matters that he previously felt he should not discuss… An individual who insists he desires to do one thing will reveal that secretly he wishes just the opposite.”