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

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

  In the Black Panther party and, in Los Angeles, the US Organization, informants were instrumental in fomenting violence. They would spread disinformation to catalyze an intergroup rivalry, or they’d simply arrange for the bloodshed themselves.

  Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (commonly known as the Black Panther party) had become the bête noire of federal law enforcement. From Hoover on down, the FBI’s ranks saw the group as a threat to the national order rivaled only by communism and nuclear holocaust. Originally, the Panthers served to safeguard Oakland’s black residents from overzealous policing. They promoted lawful, armed self-defense in inner-city neighborhoods, and their social outreach programs brought meals and health care to those who couldn’t afford them. Their Ten-Point Program demanded “power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.”

  But as the party grew in size and prominence, opening chapters in nearly every major city in the United States and abroad, it embraced more militant action against the long arm of law enforcement, starting in Oakland. In 1967, Newton shot and killed a cop during a traffic stop. In ’68, Eldridge Cleaver, who headed the Panthers’ Ministry of Information, was in a firefight during which he and two cops suffered gunshot wounds and a seventeen-year-old Panther was killed. That same year, the violence found its way to Los Angeles, as gunfights led to four Panther deaths.

  By 1969, the Panthers had been involved in more than a dozen shoot-outs with police, some the result of ambushes. Fearing infiltration by informants, the party began to implode, purging members and, in one notorious case, torturing and killing a nineteen-year-old member suspected of being a snitch. Their paranoia was far from unfounded. Hoover’s FBI chalked up the internal strife, not to mention the rash of deaths, as a victory.

  COINTELPRO promised the violent repudiation of what Hoover had dubbed a “hate-type organization.” The Bureau’s strategy was merciless, its results disastrous but effective. In Chicago, famously, the FBI recruited William O’Neal, recently charged with impersonating a federal officer and driving a stolen car across state lines, to infiltrate the Panthers’ Illinois chapter, forgiving those charges in exchange for his services. Soon O’Neal became the personal bodyguard for Fred Hampton, the chapter’s chairman. O’Neal’s post allowed him to provide the Bureau with a steady stream of intelligence, including detailed floor plans of Hampton’s apartment. Although he found no evidence that Hampton or the group posed a threat to anyone’s safety, O’Neal continued to inform. In December 1969—days, coincidentally, after Manson was charged in the Tate–LaBianca murders—O’Neal slipped a barbiturate into Hampton’s drink over dinner. By the end of the night, the police had raided Hampton’s apartment and shot him twice in the head at point-blank range.

  O’Neal was one of many such informants around the country, and Hampton’s death one of many such deaths. The FBI’s role may never have come to light if not for the Citizens’ Committee to Investigate the FBI, an audacious crew of activist-burglars who took it upon themselves to break into a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, just west of Philadelphia. One night in March 1971, the group took a crowbar to that office’s dead-bolted door, stuffing suitcases with papers revealing the FBI’s domestic spying, which they soon parceled out to the press.

  Hoover was in high dudgeon: the group’s methods were straight out of the FBI playbook. They’d cased the office for months, sending in a woman disguised as a college student to get a sense of the building’s security. In his fury, Hoover allocated some two hundred agents to track down the burglars, but they were never found; only in 2014 did they reveal themselves. They were motivated, they said, by a sense that the government had lied to them about Vietnam, and that conventional protests had proven useless.

  The existence of COINTELPRO was the single most earthshaking revelation in the stolen documents, among which was Hoover’s incendiary ’67 COINTELPRO memo, the one in which he pledged to “discredit” and “neutralize” leftist organizations. With his pet project exposed, Hoover took steps to end COINTELPRO. But the burglary inaugurated a spate of whistle-blowing that undermined the FBI’s credibility over the next few years. Congressman Hale Boggs, the House Majority Leader, compared the FBI to the “secret police,” conceding that even Congress lived in fear of them, and that they’d “hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny.” Lawsuits brought under the Freedom of Information Act forced the attorney general to reveal more incriminating FBI files. By 1975, anti-intelligence sentiment was so high that Congress formed a committee to scrutinize the Bureau.

  Led by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, the committee’s investigation exposed FBI duplicity on a scale that had been unthinkable even after the Pennsylvania burglary. The Church Committee’s findings, published in ’76, gave the nation its first glimpse of the astonishing success that Hoover’s counterintelligence operation had seen. As reported in the New York Times that May, the committee’s final report determined that “FBI headquarters approved more than 2,300 actions in a campaign to disrupt and discredit American organizations ranging from the Black Panthers to Antioch College,” and that the Bureau “may have violated specific criminal statutes” in pursuing actions that “involved risk of serious bodily injury or death to targets.”

  The Church Committee noted that COINTELPRO encompassed “a staggering range of targets,” and that the FBI’s deployment of “dangerous, degrading, or blatantly unconstitutional techniques appears to have become less restrained with each subsequent program.” Hoover had specifically requested that these techniques be “imaginative and hard-hitting,” and they were—the FBI tried seemingly everything, from gossip to gunfights. The Bureau mailed pejorative articles and newspaper clippings to college administrators. Its agents tried to destroy marriages by writing unsigned, malicious, rumor-mongering letters. They smeared leftists as informants when they weren’t, and they stoked the flames of internecine conflicts until they grew into feuds.

  The committee detailed several of the FBI’s exploits in Los Angeles, and by now I wasn’t surprised by the scope of the mayhem. The operations described, especially the deadly ones, were equal parts sophisticated and reckless, with the Bureau taking great pains to install informants and incite violence with no care for the consequences. I looked for any signs of Manson, no matter how tangential—any pattern among law enforcement, any familiar name.

  The most conspiratorial possibility, of course, would be that the FBI had carefully groomed Manson and pressed him into service as a COINTELPRO informant—but I knew that was the longest of long shots, and if the facts didn’t lead me there, I had no desire to force the connection. Given the FBI’s sloppiness, I wondered if Manson could have been implicated in other, more indirect ways, willingly or not. Maybe he wasn’t an informant but had been close to someone who was; maybe someone like Reeve Whitson had influenced his actions from two or three degrees of removal; maybe someone at the sheriff’s office had assisted the FBI.

  I was encouraged by one simple fact: the FBI had behaved conspiratorially with COINTELPRO, early and often. One of its greatest coups came in January 1969, when G-men had incited the murders of two Black Panthers on the UCLA campus. FBI infiltrators had lied to the Panthers’ rivals, the US Organization, telling them that the Panthers were meeting on the campus to plan their assassinations. US responded by ambushing two Panthers at a Black Student Union meeting and shooting them dead.

  LASO knew that the Panthers were murdered because of the FBI’s meddling. They didn’t care. In fact, they hid the FBI’s role in the violence. In their eyes, the most desirable outcome had been achieved: two Panthers were dead, three US gang members were in jail, and the American public was more fearful of black militants. The FBI used the incident to spur more violence between US and the Panthers, according to a 1970 memo from the Los Angeles Field Office:

  The Los Angeles Division is aware of mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity
to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that the US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP [Black Panther party] activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.

  That emphasis comes from the Church Committee, who noted that “due course,” in this case, meant nothing less than first-degree murder. The committee’s final report blasted the FBI for its complicity in the deaths of the Panthers. “The chief investigative branch of the Federal Government engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest,” it wrote. “Equally disturbing is the pride which those officials took in claiming credit for the bloodshed that occurred.”

  Indeed, it seemed that whenever the FBI made headway with its tactics, it doubled down. Rather than halt its provocations as the Panthers and the US Organization claimed each other’s lives, the FBI escalated the campaign, spreading propaganda, including political cartoons, designed to inflame the violence. “The FBI viewed this carnage as a positive development,” the Church Committee wrote.

  Maybe the most lacerating testimony came from William Sullivan, a high-ranking FBI official who’d helped implement COINTELPRO before Hoover fired him in 1971. Sullivan had masterminded an episode in which Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife, received a recording in which her husband could be heard flirting with other women. Sullivan had deemed King “a fraud, demagogue, and scoundrel.” Now, before the Church Committee, he allowed that the FBI’s ruthless pragmatism had obscured any sense of morality he and his colleagues might’ve had. “Never once,” he said, “did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the question: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’… The one thing we were concerned about was this: ‘Will this course of action work? Will it get us what we want?’”

  COINTELPRO’s excesses were well documented, but the FBI’s director—Clarence M. Kelley, who’d succeeded Hoover—refused to admit wrongdoing, defending the operations as a necessary precaution against violent extremists who hoped to “bring America to its knees.” He added, “For the FBI to have done less under the circumstances would have been an abdication of its responsibilities to the American people.”

  “Lined Up Against the Wall with the Rest of the Whites”

  When Hoover reconstituted COINTELPRO, he was already worried that America’s black militants would be embraced by liberal whites, especially in a left-leaning place like Hollywood. In the August 1967 memo reanimating the counterintelligence program, he’d noted the importance of “prevent[ing] militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability”: “they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to the ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalists simply because they are Negroes.”

  Two years later, the Panthers had become almost synonymous with Hollywood’s liberal elite. Actresses such as Jane Fonda and Jean Seberg appeared at their rallies. Hoover felt he had to widen the chasm between blacks and whites in Los Angeles. In a November 1968 memo, an L.A. field agent discussed new efforts to spread disinformation to Hollywood’s liberal whites.

  In the context of the Tate–LaBianca murders, the memo is chilling. Remember, the Tate house by then had become a high-profile gathering place for liberal Hollywood—among others, for Fonda, Cass Elliot, and Warren Beatty, all three of whom were under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, who would die at the hands of the Family, was an outspoken civil rights activist. That year she campaigned for Tom Bradley, the first African American candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Many in the Polanski–Tate crowd belonged to the White Panther party, explicit allies of the Black Panthers, or to the Peace and Freedom Party of California, which also voiced its support. The FBI, according to the memo, planned to generate distrust through disinformation:

  The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) has been furnishing the BPP with financial assistance. An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of PFP in which it is set forth that the BPP has made statements in closed meetings that when the armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.

  Emphasis mine. The FBI would make it seem as if even sympathetic leftists were in the Panthers’ crosshairs. Less than a year after this memo was written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.

  Of course, the FBI couldn’t have done this work alone. They needed local law enforcement on their side, and, according to the Church Committee, they got it.

  The committee looked into one of the most notorious COINTELPRO actions in L.A., the framing of Gerard “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther and a decorated Vietnam vet. Pratt would be imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a murder the FBI knew he didn’t commit. He was in Oakland at the time of the crime, four hundred miles away, at a Black Panther house that the Bureau had wiretapped. It had transcripts of a call he’d made to the Panther headquarters in Los Angeles just hours before the murder. Still, Bureau agents enlisted a federal informant to lie on the stand about Pratt’s involvement. Even before the frame-up, FBI gunmen had attempted to kill Pratt by shooting at him through the window of his apartment; he survived only because a spine injury he’d sustained in the war made it more comfortable to sleep on the floor.

  Pratt was serving a life sentence when the Church Committee released its landmark findings, confirming what he’d long suspected: LASO and the LAPD were complicit in the COINTELPRO operation. The committee quoted a report that the FBI’s Los Angeles outpost had sent to Hoover himself, advising that “the Los Angeles [Field] Office [of the FBI] is furnishing on a daily basis information to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office Intelligence Division and the Los Angeles Police Department Intelligence and Criminal Conspiracy Divisions concerning the activities of black nationalist groups in the anticipation that such information might lead to the arrest of the militants.” By the Church Committee’s estimation, this meant that Los Angeles law enforcement was guilty of obstructing justice and hindering prosecution.

  Manson the Race Warrior

  If there was a bridge between the Family and COINTELPRO, I thought it probably stemmed from this basic fact: Charles Manson was a racist. According to Gregg Jakobson, Manson sincerely believed that “the black man’s sole purpose on earth was to serve the white man.” Another member of the Family recalled that Manson looked forward to the day when, having survived the apocalyptic race war, he could “scratch blackie’s fuzzy head and kick him in the butt and tell him to go pick the cotton.”

  And at the start of ’69, as COINTELPRO provoked black militants in L.A., Manson’s bigotry reached a delusional fever pitch. He became convinced, seemingly without a shred of evidence, that the Black Panthers were spying on the Family at the Spahn Ranch, planning an attack on him. His paranoia mounting, Manson placed armed guards at every entrance to the ranch, sending lookouts to the mountains with powerful telescopes.

  His fear was self-fulfilling, in a way. On July 1, 1969, during a dispute over drug money in a Hollywood apartment, Manson shot Bernard “Lotsapoppa” Crowe, a black drug dealer. According to Helter Skelter, the dealer had told Manson that he was a Panther, and that his “brothers” would “come and get” Manson at the ranch if he didn’t pay up. Manson shot Crowe in the chest and fled the scene, believing he’d killed the dealer. Back at the ranch, Manson was sure that Crowe’s friends were readying their attack. In Bugliosi’s account, this contributed to Manson’s decision a month later to “speed along the race war” by inciting “Helter Skelter”: the Tate–LaBianca murders would sow racial discord.

  But Bernard Crowe wasn’t a Black Panther. And he survived after Manson shot him—Bugliosi even called him to the stand during t
he trial. Bugliosi chalked it up to a misunderstanding on Manson’s part, but the more I thought about it, especially in light of what I’d learned about COINTELPRO, the more I wondered if there was more to the story. The prosecutor reported that Manson was already frightened of the Black Panthers before the Crowe shooting. If Manson were truly scared of the Panthers, the last thing he would have done is shoot a man whom he believed to be a Panther—a man who’d already told his “brothers” where Manson lived, and made a threat to kill him. True, Manson hoped to launch a race war, but he didn’t want to be caught in its crossfire. That was a fate he wished on other whites, but never on himself.

  Furthermore, Tex Watson’s girlfriend and three of Crowe’s friends had witnessed the shooting; they called an ambulance after Manson made his getaway. At the hospital, Crowe refused to tell the police who’d shot him. Wouldn’t the police have questioned the four witnesses? Did Crowe even say who they were? Why didn’t the police pursue a near fatal shooting with plenty of witnesses, especially when the alleged shooter was a paroled ex-con? We might never know—Bugliosi doesn’t clarify any of it in Helter Skelter.

  I’d always considered the Crowe shooting an inexplicable sideshow in the Manson circus. It took on grander proportions after I’d learned about the FBI’s disinformation campaign against the Panthers—at this same time, this same place. Less than a week after the Tate murders, further COINTELPRO provocations led to the shootings of three more Panthers, one of them fatal.