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

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

“I apologize,” I said. “I didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Bye, bye.” And that was the end of my relationship with Paul Tate, the man who knew better than anyone what Reeve Whitson was up to. He died in 2005.

  The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

  Helder had written that Whitson “knew just about everyone on the wrong side of the tracks.” The opposite was true, too—he knew how to pull the levers of power. Colonel Tate was just one of his friends in high places. Usually, in the same breath, Whitson’s friends named another military bigwig: General Curtis LeMay.

  As discussed earlier, LeMay was part of the unsettling story I’d heard from Jay Sebring’s barber, Little Joe. One of Sebring’s clients, the mobster Charlie Baron, had called Joe after Sebring’s murder, pledging that no harm would come to the barber. Charlie Baron was a friend of Curtis LeMay, too. Meetings between the two were noted by the FBI, who surveilled Baron for decades. LeMay, a former air-force officer nicknamed “Bombs Away LeMay,” had retired in ’65 and turned to defense contracting, where one critic feared that he “could be more dangerous than when he was air force chief of staff.” He moved to L.A. to become the vice president of a missile-parts manufacturer, but it fizzled, as did LeMay’s brief political career. After that, Mr. Bombs Away had spent his retirement roaming the city with Mr. Anonymous.

  I added a few more connective arrows to the big whiteboard on my wall, realizing more than ever that its tangle of lines and circles made sense only to me. Though I never figured out what LeMay and Whitson got up to together, it was plausible that they were tied up in Charlie Baron’s cabal of right-wing Hollywood friends, the ones who, Little Joe told me, had “done terrible things to black people.” (George Wallace, who’d chosen LeMay as his running mate in his ’68 presidential bid, was among the nation’s most notorious racists.)

  “I’m sure he knew Baron,” Whitson’s friend John Irvin told me. A British film director who himself claimed to have ties to MI5, Irvin said that Whitson got meetings “within minutes” at “the highest levels of the defense industry—it was amazing.” He was “on the fringes of very far-out research” for the government, “not discussed openly because it verges on the occult.” He added that Whitson “had very good connections with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office” and pull with immigration officials, as Shahrokh Hatami had said. But Irvin couldn’t elaborate on any of this.

  Then came Otto and Ilse Skorzeny, the most sinister of Whitson’s friends. They were Nazis—genuine, German, dyed-in-the-wool Nazis. The United Nations listed Otto Skorzeny as a war criminal. He’d been one of Hitler’s most trusted operatives, leading the manhunt of one of the Führer’s would-be assassins and spearheading a secret mission to rescue Mussolini. After the Third Reich fell, Skorzeny safeguarded the wealth of countless Nazis and helped disgraced war criminals settle into new lives around the world. Brought to trial before a U.S. military court, Skorzeny was alleged to be “the most dangerous man in Europe”—but he was acquitted, having made himself an asset to U.S. intelligence. His wife, the Countess Ilse von Finkelstein, was once a member of the Hitler Youth; a shrewd businesswoman known for her beauty and charm, she negotiated arms deals and contracts for German engineering companies. Irvin had met Ilse many times through Whitson. When she got drunk, he said, “she was always doing Heil Hitler salutes!”

  Whitson could look past any ideology, no matter how abhorrent, if someone proved useful to him. His friends construed him as the purest form of Cold Warrior, lifted from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He carried an outmoded fifties-era politics into the future, masquerading as a hippie, infiltrating an LSD cult, and befriending Nazis to eliminate the scourge of communism and narcotics—the latter being, to his mind, a direct extension of the former.

  “He believed there was an operation to destabilize American youth,” one friend told me. “Russians were bringing drugs in to battle the American system from within.”

  Having worked in South America, Whitson believed “we should kill the drug lords in Bolivia and their whole families… If there’s a baby, you kill the baby. I don’t think he would say something like that and not be capable of doing it. He didn’t believe in the individual, but in the larger picture.” Another acquaintance recalled, “The entire Manson situation, the Black Panther movement, and probably similar other movements… people like that were discredited by certain things that, according to Reeve, may have been staged or done by government authorities in order to make them look bad.”

  If I could find out where Whitson’s money came from, I might be closer to understanding what he actually did. His résumé was scant from the fifties through the seventies, after which it covered more ground than seemed possible for a single life. He was the special advisor to the chairman of the board of Thyssen, among the largest corporations in Germany. He sank years into a scheme to construct a maglev monorail train stretching from Las Vegas to Pasadena. He wanted to build a Brigadoon theme park in Scotland. He was involved in weapons manufacturing, early iterations of the Miss Universe pageant, and a new variety of childproof medicine bottle. And he had a passion for race cars—building them, selling them, driving them—which may explain how he befriended Jay Sebring, another racing enthusiast.

  These ventures had one thing in common: they fell through. The easiest explanation, of course, was that they were covers, and sometimes Whitson told his friends as much. So where did his money come from? No one knew. He always paid in cash—he stowed it in his freezer—and when he had it, he was quick to settle a tab. Whitson dressed in gabardine suits, but for much of his adult life, an ex-girlfriend recalled, he lived “like a hermit,” sleeping “on a cot in his parents’ kitchen.” The man who loved fast cars drove an economical Ford Pinto.

  In his final years, Whitson was destitute and disgruntled, telling rueful stories of the “Quarry”—his term for the section of the CIA he worked for—and trash-talking the agency. Once you’re in, he told one friend, “You really are a pawn.” In his dying days, the government had said, “You didn’t even exist to us.” Even the movies were no reprieve, offering reminders of his glory days. About a year before he died, seeing the thriller The Pelican Brief, Whitson leaned over in the dark of the cinema and told a friend, “I wrote the yellow papers on everything that happened.” With a hint of nostalgia, he explained that “yellow papers” detailed interrogation techniques, including a procedure in which a man had a plastic tube inserted in his rectum, peanut butter smeared on his scrotum, and a rat dropped in the tube.

  Whitson died at the relatively young age of sixty-three. With no health insurance, he left behind an enormous unpaid hospital bill, something to the tune of half a million dollars. A few of my sources felt there may have been foul play. He’d given conflicting explanations for his health problems: a heart attack, or a spider bite, or a brain tumor, or lymphoma. “I think he committed suicide,” his daughter told me. “His greatest fear was to be a vegetable.”

  Coda: Neither Confirm nor Deny

  Reeve Whitson “was a walk-in,” as one of my sources put it, “an extraterrestrial.” Once he consumed me, I found myself fixating on possibilities that I would’ve dismissed as insane only months before. His life opened onto a vantage of intrigue, where Manson and the sixties counterculture were just one element in a political struggle that encompassed Nazis, Cuba, Vietnam, South America, military intelligence, and byzantine matters of national security.

  But Whitson was too much the mystery man he was said to be. He brought my reporting to a standstill. At a certain point, I felt I’d learned everything I could about him without tapping official sources. I’d attempted to find his tax records and asked reporters with stronger connections at Langley if they could look him up. They never found anything. FOIAs to the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEA, the ATF, the IRS, and the military all got responses that said they’d had nothing to do with him. It was only the CIA that gave me the “neither confirm nor deny” response. Later,
responding to my appeal, it wrote that Whitson had “no open or officially acknowledged relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  I worry that I’ll never know the truth about Reeve Whitson. There is, of course, the possibility that he was little more than an effective con artist, someone who weaseled his way into a minor role in the Manson investigation by sweet-talking people in power. Someone who’s constantly implying to his friends that he’s in the CIA might not be very effective as an undercover agent. If Whitson were truly a high-functioning member of the intelligence community, would anyone have had any idea?

  On the other hand, maybe the stories I heard are fundamentally correct—Whitson was an intelligence agent who led a storied international career, and he wasn’t exaggerating when he said that he could’ve stopped the Manson murders. If that was true—what then? Why would the CIA, or any intelligence group, have had Whitson infiltrate the Family, and what did Manson know about it? The bottom line was that I’d learned just enough about Whitson to dwell on him. It was as his daughter said: “He gives a little and then he goes away.”

  7

  Neutralizing the Left

  Dawn of the “Campus Malcontents”

  I couldn’t expect to report on the likes of Reeve Whitson, or on outrageous claims about intelligence connections and military figures, until I learned more about the politics and pressures of California in the sixties. My research was pushing me toward broader connections and social implications, and I didn’t always know what to do with them. If Preston Guillory was correct, for instance, then LASO knew about Manson’s plan to attack the Black Panthers. How could the police have known, and why would they have wanted that attack to happen? I had vague notions of the tension between the Panthers and the government, but I couldn’t say how it fit in the larger context of protest in the sixties, when the nation’s unrest had crystallized in California. The state was the epicenter of the summer of love, but it had also seen the ascent of Reagan and Nixon. It had seen the Watts riots, the birth of the antiwar movement, and the Altamont concert disaster, the Free Speech movement and the Hells Angels. Here, defense contractors, Cold Warriors, and nascent tech companies lived just down the road from hippie communes, love-ins, and surf shops.

  If there was any truth to Reeve Whitson’s story, I needed a crash course in the government’s involvement in antileft action in California, and solid sources to tell me how Manson could have been swept up in it. I focused on two secret intelligence operations that were under way in Los Angeles in 1969: the FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s CHAOS. Their primary objective, according to three congressional committees that investigated them in the midseventies, was to discredit the left-wing movement by any means necessary—an aim that, coincidentally or not, described exactly the effect of the Manson murders.

  The sixties youth movement was born on May 13, 1960, when hundreds of demonstrators, most of them UC Berkeley students, began a two-day protest at San Francisco’s City Hall. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) had convened a series of hearings there, and students were chagrined to learn that they were barred from the proceedings. A riot broke out as police turned firehoses on the protesters, the intense pressure forcing them down the building’s imposing marble stairway. Police clubbed protesters and made sixty-one arrests, including more than thirty students.

  “Black Friday,” as it came to be known, marked the end of the fifties, the dawn of a new age of dissent. The following day, the demonstrators returned undeterred, this time totaling more than five thousand. The HCUA was cowed—never again did it conduct hearings beyond the Capitol. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, couldn’t believe the left had such strength in numbers. He was convinced that foreign Communists sponsored the movement. Thus began a pitched battle between federal law enforcement and young “subversives.”

  In the midsixties, with the war in Vietnam escalating, Berkeley became a hotbed of antiwar activity. Sit-ins were staged on campus; rallies were held throughout the Bay Area, each growing in size and fervor. Late in 1964, some fifteen hundred students crowded into Berkeley’s Sproul Hall to protest the university’s mistreatment of campus activists. More than seven hundred of them were arrested that day.

  On January 28, 1965, a distraught Hoover met with the director of the CIA, John McCone, hatching a plan to take “corrective action” at Berkeley. The CIA’s charter prohibited the agency from domestic operations, but McCone collaborated with Hoover nonetheless, hoping to quash the protests. One of their targets was Clark Kerr, the president of UC Berkeley, who was widely perceived as sympathetic to the protesters. McCone and Hoover circulated false information claiming that he had Communist ties. They also targeted faculty supporters of the demonstrators and the student leaders themselves.

  A few months later, McCone resigned from the CIA, having felt unappreciated by President Lyndon Johnson. His next job brought him back to California: he took a post on Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign, shoring up the candidate’s credibility with right-leaning voters. Reagan campaigned fervently against “the so-called New Left,” vowing a swift end to California’s burgeoning antiwar movement. Without citing evidence, he claimed that Berkeley had suffered reduced enrollment as a result of the protesters’ “destructive conduct.” If elected, he said, he would appoint McCone to lead a formal investigation of the university’s “campus malcontents and filthy speech advocates.” Reagan won by a landslide. As he cemented his power, antiwar sentiment continued to flower at Berkeley. In April 1970, soon to win a second term, Reagan famously declared war against the movement. “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with,” he announced. “No more appeasement.”

  The Oval Office was similarly disturbed by the rise of student activism. By 1967, Lyndon Johnson believed that the country was on the verge of a political revolution that could topple him from power. Having mired the nation even further in the Vietnam War, he faced constant jeers at rallies: “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” As antiwar demonstrations spilled from campuses into the streets, Johnson ordered the FBI and the CIA to take action. That August, with the president’s approval, CIA director Richard Helms authorized an illegal domestic surveillance program, code-named CHAOS. Meanwhile, J. Edgar Hoover revived the FBI’s dormant counterinsurgency program, COINTELPRO. Both agencies opened the first offices of their respective operations in San Francisco—still considered ground zero for the revolution, especially since the founding of the Black Panther party in nearby Oakland the previous summer.

  Thanks to these two secret programs and their network of well-placed informants, there was an all-out war raging in California by the summer of ’69. The FBI and CIA had induced the left to feed on itself; among competing factions, what had been sectarian strife had devolved into outright violence. The more I read about it, the more I saw how someone like Charles Manson could fit into a scheme like this. I was only speculating, but I knew that he’d spent a lot of time in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, often inveighing against the Black Panthers; and I had reliable sources suggesting that he was an informant, or at least hanging around with others who could’ve been.

  It struck me that the Tate–LaBianca murders had been so often invoked as the death knell of the sixties. Arguably, they did more than any other event to turn the public opinion against hippies, recasting the peace-and-love flower-power ethos as a thing of latent, drug-addled criminality. As the writer Todd Gitlin noted, “For the mass media, the acid-head Charles Manson was readymade as the monster lurking in the heart of every longhair.” Wasn’t this the goal of CHAOS and COINTELPRO?

  It was a sound connection in theory. To report it, to take it out of the realm of the hypothetical, seemed an impossible task for someone with no background in national security. But I had to try. And so, feeling the line between “researcher” and “conspiracy theorist” blurring before me, I hunkered down in the library to read about the many ways our government has deceived us.

 
“Fomenting Violence and Unrest”

  The FBI and the CIA launched their counterintelligence programs in the same month. On August 25, 1967, J. Edgar Hoover issued a memorandum to the chiefs of each of his FBI field offices in the United States, outlining the objective of COINTELPRO. (The name was an abridgment of Counter Intelligence Program.) First launched in 1956 to “increase factionalism” among Communists in the United States, COINTELPRO had been activated on and off throughout the early sixties, often to vilify civil rights leaders—Martin Luther King Jr. most prominent among them. In his ’67 memo, Hoover formed a new branch of the operation, aiming

  to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations… The activities of all such groups of intelligence interest to this Bureau must be followed on a continuous basis… Efforts of various groups to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or youthful adherents must be frustrated. No opportunity should be missed to exploit… the organizational and personal conflicts of the leaderships of the groups… [and] to capitalize upon existing conflicts between competing black nationalist organizations.

  Hoover specified more than twenty cities where COINTELPRO methods could be put to effective use, Los Angeles among them. In a later memo, he ordered the Bureau to “pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercised their potential for violence.”

  Informants were COINTELPRO’s lifeblood, providing the only effective way for the FBI to learn about, and exert influence on, the groups it hoped to discredit. The Bureau went to extreme lengths to cultivate solid informants; if it found a convict willing to infiltrate a political group, it would commute his prison sentence. In Quantico, Virginia, at the sprawling marine corps base where the FBI would soon open its own academy, a less-formal “Hoover University” trained agents in the delicate art of passing as leftists. They grew unkempt beards, refrained from bathing for days at a time, parroted radical talking points, got stoned, and tripped on acid.