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

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

  A few of the people I’d met in California told me that he had a Swedish ex-wife, as well as a daughter. Their very existence was speculative, because he was so reluctant to disclose anything about them. The family had lived together in America briefly, until, in 1962, after the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a head, he’d sent them back to Sweden, certain that the United States was on the brink of nuclear war. All of this sounded far-fetched to me, too, but what didn’t, with Whitson?

  Sure enough, I reached his ex-wife, Ellen Josefson (née Nylund), by phone in Sweden. Josefson didn’t beat around the bush.

  “He was working for the CIA,” she said. “That is why I am worried to talk to you.”

  Was she sure about that?

  “Yes, I am sure.” She and Reeve had met in Sweden in ’61, she explained. They fell in love in an instant. Before the end of the year they’d married and moved to New York. In those days he was undercover as a journalist, producing pro-Communist pieces as a ploy to meet radicals. This, he seems to have hoped, would lead to more contacts in Russia. It was a scheme so elaborate that someone from the Polish embassy was involved, she remembered, and in due time Whitson was bringing Russians to their place.

  “I got furious with him,” she said. “I was very anti-Communist.” How could she have married a pinko? That’s when Whitson felt he had to pull the curtain back. He explained that it was just part of his work for the agency—something he was otherwise ill inclined to discuss.

  In October 1962, Josefson said, she gave birth to their daughter, Liza. By then, she had misgivings about her marriage; the bloom was off the rose. Reeve’s job jeopardized her life, and now her daughter’s, too. And it made him hard to love. He would be dispatched to remote areas of the world for months at a time, returning with no explanation for where he’d been or what he’d been doing. In 1962, he was always going off to Cuba, and after the missile crisis he decided it would be best to send his family back to Sweden. They returned to Ellen’s homeland sometime before JFK died, as she recalled. And then—radio silence.

  “I didn’t hear anything from him,” Ellen said. When he did resurface, it was to demand a divorce. The legalities dragged on for two or three years. “I had to be nice,” she said. “He said that things could happen to me if I didn’t divorce him.”

  After the divorce was finalized, neither she nor Liza heard from Whitson for some fifteen years. He reappeared in the late seventies or early eighties, saying that he’d retired and that he wanted to atone in some way for his absence. Although they spoke only a few more times, Ellen did remember his bringing up Manson and the Family.

  “He said that his mother and Sharon Tate’s mother were close,” she said, “and that’s why he had to go back to it, to help… I never wanted to have any details. I was scared. He said, ‘It’s best for you to not know.’”

  On Ellen’s advice, I got ahold of Liza, her daughter, who’d met Whitson for the first time since her infancy when she was eighteen. In several long phone calls, she filled in more biographical blanks about him. Now a married nurse living in Sweden, she had trouble reconciling her father’s intense secrecy with his role in her life. She found him inexplicable, opaque.

  “I could never understand how he got to know all these important people,” she told me. “He told me that he worked within the Central Intelligence Agency. And he was in a part of the agency that was absolutely nonexistent. He did not exist.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “Yes,” she said. “My existence was kept a secret to all his friends.” When she made a trip to California to see him, he told some friends that she was coming. They “were absolutely convinced that he was just making a practical joke, like he always did. When I came through the door, I had two people just staring at me! They were so stunned.” Whitson told her that he’d kept her at arm’s length for so long because “he lived his life in complete control over other people, and I was the only one that he could not control.” If people wanted to hurt him, “they could get me,” she said. “My mother and my grandparents in Sweden feared that I was going to be kidnapped because I was his daughter.” Even after her father retired, they had a difficult relationship. He still wouldn’t discuss his past, and his politics bothered her—he was an archconservative with a rabid disdain for leftists.

  When Whitson died, Liza flew to Los Angeles to attend his funeral and was astonished to see how many powerful friends he had, and how few of them knew much about him beyond his or her personal experience. “He kept his friends apart,” she said. Hoping to recover any mementos, she went to his sparsely furnished apartment, finding nothing of any sentimental value. He did leave behind a few photos, which surprised her—Whitson had always refused to be photographed. One of them caught her off guard. It was a black-and-white picture of her father with long, flowing hair—not a wig, by all appearances—and bell-bottoms. “He looks like he could’ve been one of the Manson Family members,” she told me.

  She sent me the photograph, which, sure enough, showed a grimacing Whitson dressed as a hippie, not flamboyantly, but plausibly, in blue jeans and a wide belt, his shirt open at the neck. Liza was convinced that it was from one of his undercover operations. My impression was that the photo dated to about the mid-1960s; the cars in the background were from that period. I wondered if the disguise could have been related to Manson at all. She couldn’t say. Although he’d told her that he played some role in the case, “I never figured out why he was involved,” she said. “He was a master of telling you things but not really spelling it out.”

  Whitson had a large extended family. Many of his “cousins” weren’t even related by blood, but they’d bonded with him anyway. As Frank Rosenfelt told me, “He had a strange habit of getting in touch with people named Whitson and saying they were his cousins.”

  Linda Ruby, however, was a real cousin of his—Liza had put me in touch—and she presented another side of Whitson’s activities during and after the Tate murders.

  In August 1969, Ruby told me, Whitson was living with his parents in L.A. On the day the bodies were discovered at the Tate house, she said, he went missing. His father, her uncle Buddy, had told her this story. The morning after the murders—around the same time Whitson would’ve placed his call to Hatami—Buddy woke up and discovered that Reeve hadn’t come home that night. When news of the murders flashed on the radio, Buddy got nervous. He knew that Reeve had planned to visit the Cielo house the night before, and early reports said that one of the bodies there had yet to be identified. (It was Steven Parent, who wasn’t IDed until eight that night.)

  Fearing that his son had been murdered, Buddy Whitson called the cops, who sprang into action. “The police set up a nerve center at their house,” Ruby said. They remained there, manning the telephones, until Reeve finally returned home late that night, at which point they eagerly debriefed him.

  Ruby couldn’t understand why the police would set up a command center at the home of an anonymous Los Angeles resident. Why not just check to see if the unidentified body was his? Making things weirder still, Whitson himself was present when his father told her the story—he was sitting right there, she remembered, quietly refusing to clarify or contribute. He never even said where he was during the hours he was missing.

  Another friend summed it up nicely: “He always wanted to go to restaurants that no one went to. He said, ‘I have to keep a low profile.’ It was so low that there was no profile.”

  “Mr. Anonymous”

  As usual, I was anxious to find some way to verify everything I’d heard. With Whitson, especially, my reporting had crossed the line into conspiratorial territory, and I would be hard-pressed to convert skeptics on the merits of my interviews alone. Of course, clandestine intelligence agents are exactly the sort of people who don’t leave a lot of paper behind, and Whitson, by all accounts, was so savvy that he didn’t need to take notes. I’d filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) with the CIA, asking for any information on him. Their r
esponse said that they could “neither confirm nor deny” Whitson’s connection to the agency. FOIA specialists told me that this is the closest one can get to confirmation that someone worked for the CIA.

  I did, eventually, find corroboration in print, but it came in a strange form: a manuscript for an unpublished book called Five Down on Cielo Drive. Written around 1974 or ’75—before Helter Skelter, and thus before Bugliosi’s telling of the Manson story had ossified into the “official” narrative—the book had a tortured history, not least because it involved at least three authors. The most prominent was Lieutenant Robert Helder, who’d headed the LAPD’s investigation into the Tate murders. Another contributor was Sharon Tate’s father, Colonel Paul Tate. The third author was Roger “Frenchie” LaJeunesse, an FBI agent who’d “unofficially” assisted the LAPD.

  It’s not hard to see the appeal of the book, especially before Helter Skelter. Here were three authorities on the case who could give a rich account of it when no such account existed. They secured a contract with a publisher. When too much time passed without a viable book, a ghostwriter came on board, but by the time the manuscript was ready, Bugliosi had beaten them to the punch, and Helter Skelter had claimed the mantle of “official” Manson book. The deal fell through. In the ensuing years, the Five Down manuscript gained a reputation among researchers and obsessives. It was exceptionally rare—hardly anyone other than its authors had read it—and even though it was apparently tedious, it was rumored to have the most complete account of the LAPD’s investigation, false leads and all.

  Another journalist passed me a copy. I read the parts about Colonel Tate especially closely. A retired military intelligence officer, Tate had mounted his own inquiry into his daughter’s death, separate from but parallel to the LAPD’s. Many had told me that Whitson was under his wing. You wouldn’t think that LAPD detectives would have been so keen on two outsiders helping them, especially given those outsiders’ connections to intelligence—but a LASO detective told me that Colonel Tate “appeared to be running the LAPD.”

  Then in his midforties, Tate had only recently left the army. To mount his “independent” investigation, he tried to masquerade as a laid-back Californian, growing a beard and long hair. But he retained the upright carriage of a military officer as he wandered into hippie clubs and drug dens in search of his daughter’s murderer, offering a lavish reward to anyone who would help.

  How did Whitson play into this? The Five Down manuscript refers to a Walter Kern, “a somewhat shady character who can best be described as a ‘police groupie.’ Apparently he had been a friend of Jay Sebring… and wanted to help in any way he could.” “Kern” was always one step ahead of the other investigators. Helder wrote, “In this business, as you might imagine, a policeman gets to meet many strange people. Kern was among the strangest. No one knew what he did for a living, yet he always seemed to have money and knew just about everyone on the wrong side of the tracks. I didn’t like him but he was useful.”

  And he kept popping up. When Helder arrived to interview Roman Polanski at the Paramount lot where he was sequestered with Witold Kaczanowski, Kern was there, “lurking in the shadows. He sure did get around.” Believing that Voytek Frykowski was involved with drug dealers who may have murdered him, Helder instructed Kern to cozy up to anyone who might know them, especially those in Mama Cass’s circle.

  In another section of the manuscript, a “Hollywood hooker” is said to have spoken to Kern, “who by now was well-known as an amateur sleuth on the case.” Kern shared leads and took orders, and yet the man was so shrouded in mystery that Helder referred to him as “Mr. Anonymous.”

  It seemed likely to me that there was more to “Mr. Anonymous” than Helder had shared. By that point, Helder had died, but I’d already spoken to Frenchie LaJeunesse, the FBI agent who’d contributed to Five Down. I called him again to ask whether Walter Kern was really Reeve Whitson.

  His answer: “Yes.” In fact, the publishing deal couldn’t have happened without Whitson, LaJeunesse said. “Reeve Whitson was a part of putting the book together, the linchpin between all of us.”

  It was Lieutenant Helder, the lead investigator for the LAPD, who’d assigned Whitson the pseudonym of Walter Kern, to protect his undercover status—hardly a step one would take with an ordinary “amateur sleuth.” “Reeve didn’t want his name associated with a book,” LaJeunesse said, even long after the Manson case had been solved. “Not on the jacket, not even in contracts—he didn’t even want money.”

  In effect, I now had written proof from the LAPD’s head investigator, and from Sharon Tate’s own father, that Reeve Whitson was smack in the middle of the Manson investigation from the start. LaJeunesse didn’t know who Whitson worked for, just that he was an “astounding fellow” who’d been an informant of some kind. He “wanted to project an aura of mystery,” LaJeunesse said. But the heart of his motivation was an antidrug conservatism. He was “interested in keeping young people away from the curse of narcotics.”

  Mike McGann, the LAPD detective whom I’d interviewed about the early days of the investigation, remembered Whitson’s involvement, too.

  “He was heavily involved,” McGann said. “And he had no need for money.” McGann was nearly certain that Whitson was in the CIA, and found him “very credible.” Still, when I said that Whitson had reportedly believed he could’ve stopped the murders, McGann laughed. “Bullshit. He’d talk for three hours and never say anything. Typical government employee—a real good line of bullshit.”

  If I could prove once and for all that Whitson was working for the CIA, even McGann might admit I had a story on my hands. The CIA wasn’t even supposed to operate on domestic soil. What could they have been doing messing around with an acid-soaked cult in Los Angeles? And if Whitson had been close enough to the murders to stop them, why didn’t he?

  Everyone agreed that Paul Tate was the key to understanding Whitson. I knew that Tate was still alive, but getting him to open up would be a long shot.

  His wife and Sharon’s mother, Doris, had been comfortable discussing the murder. She’d formed a national victims’ rights advocacy group and mobilized it whenever anyone from the Family was eligible for parole. Her friends said she believed there was something deeper than Helter Skelter behind the murders. Like her husband, she’d conducted her own investigation through the years, becoming convinced that the Cielo house was under surveillance by some type of law enforcement at the time of the murders. (Whether she knew that Reeve Whitson had claimed to be watching the house, we’ll never know.) She was also sure that her daughter wasn’t supposed to be home when the killers arrived that night. Whoever was watching the house, she believed, had noticed that Sharon’s red Ferrari wasn’t in the driveway—it was in the repair shop—and concluded that she wasn’t there. She’d planned to write a book about her theories, but she never got to: she was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1992.

  Paul Tate, rumor had it, had never discussed the case with his wife. Before she died, they’d barely spoken to each other, having taken up in separate parts of their house. He hadn’t spoken publicly about Sharon’s death since Manson had been captured, and he’d already declined an interview with me once. But I phoned him again in May 2000, telling him I’d gotten a copy of Five Down on Cielo Drive and planned to quote it.

  That got him to agree to meet with me. But as the date approached, he canceled on me; we rescheduled, and he canceled again. When he called to cancel yet another meeting, I tried to butt in with a question about Reeve Whitson before he could get off the phone. He was receptive—at first, anyway.

  “Reeve was my main person to help me,” Tate said. “He’s been a friend of Roman Polanski and Sharon and mine and Jay Sebring… He was very, very helpful.”

  Even so, Tate found it ridiculous that Whitson’s friends were going around saying that he could have prevented the murders. That simply wasn’t true, he said. Could he help me clear it up, having contributed so much to the investigation
?

  “I contributed, just—put in there I contributed nothing.”

  “But you were involved in the investigation,” I said. “You wrote a book about it!”

  “Yeah, well…”

  “Did you ask Reeve to do the undercover work or did someone else?”

  “I’m not gonna answer those questions,” he said, impatience creeping into his voice.

  Could he at least tell me who Whitson worked for? He refused.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t have to tell you that!” he nearly shouted.

  Out of desperation, I made a foolish mistake. Sometimes, when I sensed that someone was withholding something sensitive, I’d remind the person that, in all the speculation about Manson himself, the basic, brutal loss of human life was too often the first thing people stopped thinking about. So I said, “Just out of respect to the victims, don’t you think—”

  Paul Tate sounded a million miles away to me, and he had a gruff, emotionally detached tone befitting his military background. But he was, first and foremost, Sharon Tate’s father: a man who’d lost a child to an unimaginable horror, who’d seen her death become a kind of shorthand for tabloid atrocities. I’d forgotten that truth, and my comment understandably upset him. I regretted it right away.

  “Out of respect for the victims!” he shouted. “What kind of fuck do you think I am?” He laughed bitterly. “You go ahead and do whatever you want to do, but… if any son of a bitch ever had respect for the victims, it was me.”