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

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

  The CIA on Domestic Soil

  In August 1967, the same month Hoover launched COINTELPRO, CIA director Richard Helms inaugurated the agency’s aforementioned illegal domestic surveillance program, CHAOS, which also employed agents and informants to infiltrate “subversive” groups and then “neutralize” them.

  CHAOS was born of Lyndon Johnson’s neurosis. In the summer of ’67, the president was convinced that the divided, disorderly America he led couldn’t possibly be the product of his own policies. Foreign agents, and presumably foreign money, must be to blame. He ordered the CIA to prove that the nation’s dissidents, and especially its antiwar movement, had their origins abroad.

  Richard Helms complied without hesitation. In the six years that followed, the CIA tracked thousands of Americans, insulating its information gathering so thoroughly that even those at the top of its counterintelligence division were clueless about its domestic surveillance. CHAOS kept tabs on three hundred thousand people, more than seven thousand of them American citizens. The agency shared information with the FBI, the White House, and the Justice Department. At its peak, CHAOS had fifty-two dedicated agents, most of whom served to infiltrate antiwar groups, like their counterparts in the FBI. Undercover, they hoped to identify Russian instigators, although they never found any. With the Interdivision Intelligence Unit (IDIU), a new branch of the Justice Department outfitted with sophisticated computerized databases, they collaborated on a list of more than ten thousand names, all thought to be dangerous activists; the IDIU produced regular reports on these people, hoping to predict their activities.

  The journalist Seymour Hersh got wind of CHAOS late in 1974. He told James Jesus Angleton, the head of CIA counterintelligence, and William Colby, the director of the CIA, that he had a story “bigger than My Lai” about CIA domestic activities. Colby was forced to admit that Hersh’s findings were accurate, and Angleton resigned from the agency. The story broke on December 22, on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years.”

  The Church Committee probed the CIA’s illegal activities, as did a separate government investigation, the Rockefeller Commission—but neither was able to penetrate the agency’s veil of secrecy. Since the CIA has no right to operate on American soil, the program should have brought even more censure than COINTELPRO; instead, it drew only a muted response. CIA leadership stonewalled at every opportunity. Even if they hadn’t, investigators were crippled by the dearth of information. When Richard Helms had disbanded CHAOS before leaving office in 1973, he ordered the destruction of every file pertaining to it, and since the seventies, almost nothing has come out. The operation hardly left a footprint.

  Even if reams of paperwork had survived, the Rockefeller Commission was hardly willing to press the agency. While the commission made some shocking findings—evidence of wiretaps, bugging, and hidden burglaries, in addition to the extensive record keeping mentioned above—by the end of the seventies, well after it had disbanded, allegations arose that it had suppressed information. (Its chairman, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, had worked with the CIA in the late fifties.) In a memoir, former CIA director Colby later claimed that President Gerald Ford fired him for refusing to help Rockefeller sabotage his own investigation. According to Colby, CHAOS was so highly classified that even he, the director of the CIA, didn’t have access to it. “I found it impossible to do much about whatever was wrong with [CHAOS],” he wrote. “Its super-secrecy and extreme compartmentalization kept me very much on its periphery.”

  In the spring of ’78, the New York Times revealed that the investigations into CHAOS had been woefully inadequate. When one agent was asked why he hadn’t been more forthcoming, he said simply, “They didn’t ask.” The true extent of the agency’s domestic activities against dissidents would probably never be known, the Times declared—but the paper had been able to uncover CHAOS activities from the late sixties that had targeted the Black Panther party. Rockefeller’s commission failed to reveal that “between 150 and 200 CIA domestic files on Black dissidents had been destroyed,” the Times reported. “The CIA conducted at least two major programs involving the use of American blacks, when the Panthers, organized by young blacks in the mid-60s, were publicly advocating revolutionary change… Just how successful the CIA was in those alleged activities could not be determined.”

  Winning Hearts and Minds

  Knowing more about CHAOS and COINTELPRO, I felt that men like Reeve Whitson were potentially much more common than I’d anticipated, always in peripheral, undefined roles. Part of the reason that Whitson seemed like such a wild card to me was that he appeared to have walked on the scene from nowhere: an outré, worldly man suddenly hobnobbing with the LAPD’s top brass. I wanted others who fit that profile. To cover up an operation like CHAOS, the agency needed friends in law enforcement—insiders who could make arrests or, just as important, not make arrests.

  The most promising but frustrating of my inquiries concerned an LAPD officer named William W. Herrmann. I could never connect him to Whitson or Manson, but he certainly fit the profile of someone who’d helped with counterintelligence actions. When I was deep in the weeds of my CHAOS research, split between feeling that I was onto something or that I was risking my credibility, Herrmann’s was a name that came up several times—usually from sources I didn’t quite trust, or in arcane articles from the alternative press. What I heard about him was just plausible enough to get me to look closer. I’m glad I did. Herrmann’s story hints at how intelligence agencies may have collaborated with police in Los Angeles.

  A longtime lieutenant with the LAPD, Herrmann had an unusual background for law enforcement. He had a doctorate in psychology; he specialized in quelling insurgencies; he’d developed one of the first computer systems to track criminals and predict violent outbreaks in cities. Daryl Gates, the head of the LAPD from 1978 to 1992, hailed him as a “genius,” praising his technical aptitude in particular.

  But Herrmann’s work wasn’t limited to Los Angeles, or even to the United States. My FOIA request to the FBI yielded a collection of redacted documents detailing his extensive employment history. Concurrent with his time in the LAPD, he’d worked under contract for a dizzying list of American intelligence and military agencies: the air force, the Secret Service, the Treasury Department, the President’s Office of Science and Technology, the Institute for Defense Analysis, the Defense Industrial Security Clearance Office, and the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Most of his work for these groups remains classified.

  You’d think these projects wouldn’t have left much free time, but Herrmann piled on even more work, taking leaves of absence from the LAPD to pursue side gigs with defense firms. These had opaque, generic names like Electro-Dash Optical Systems, System Development Corp., and Control Data Corp. This last, a weapons manufacturer in Minneapolis, relied on Herrmann’s services for ten years, from 1961 to ’71—or so Herrmann told the FBI. When the Bureau went to Control Data Corp. for a background check, the company claimed that Herrmann never worked for them.

  You might have guessed: given Herrmann’s long list of government employers, I wondered if his work for these defense contractors could have been a front for the CIA, one of the few agencies that didn’t appear on his résumé. As usual, official channels were useless. My FOIA request to the CIA for Herrmann’s records yielded the same “neither confirm or deny” response that Reeve Whitson’s had.

  I did find, however, a record of Herrmann’s overseas work, much of which he conducted while still employed with the LAPD. Having spent four months in 1967 training Thai police in counterinsurgency tactics, Herrmann returned to Asia in September 1968 to join the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. Documents from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, listed him as a scientific “advisor” to the army. His responsibility was to train South Vietnamese police in “paramilitary techniques” to deploy against Viet Cong insurg
ents. None of the records described those techniques in any detail, but the mere mention of them was enough to make me put a few things together. The dates of Herrmann’s stint in Vietnam, his job description, his professional affiliations, and his training made it abundantly likely that he was working for a CIA project called Phoenix, one of the most controversial elements in the agency’s history.

  Richard Nixon had secretly authorized Phoenix in 1968; it was discontinued in early ’71. The agency described it as “a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.” Inside Vietnam, Phoenix operatives waged a campaign of terror against the Viet Cong guerrillas, with tactics including the assassination and torture of noncombatant civilians. According to a 1971 congressional investigation, the program violated the codes of the Geneva Conventions and rivaled the Viet Cong’s own terrorism in its mercilessness.

  During the Senate hearings, a number of Phoenix operatives admitted to massacring civilians and making it appear that the atrocities were the work of the Viet Cong. Their hope was to “win the hearts and minds” of neutral Vietnamese citizens, compelling them to turn away from the insurgency in revulsion. A Special Forces soldier, Anthony Herbert, the single most decorated combat veteran of Vietnam, published a bestselling book, Soldier, that detailed typical orders from his Phoenix superiors: “They wanted me to take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it appear as though the Viet Cong had done it themselves. The rationale was that the Viet Cong would see that other Viet Cong had killed their own and… make allegiance with us. The good guys.”

  Their attempts were sometimes even more unhinged. In 1968, CIA scientists at the Bien Hoa Prison outside Saigon surgically opened the skulls of three prisoners, implanted electrodes on their brains, gave them daggers, and left them alone in a room. They wanted to shock the prisoners into killing one another. When the effort failed, the prisoners were shot and their bodies burned.

  According to Seymour Hersh’s 1972 book, Cover-Up, Phoenix had “committees” set up across all forty-four provinces in South Vietnam. They kept blacklists of Viet Cong fighters and had strict orders to meet weekly or monthly quotas of “neutralizations.” The whole operation relied on computerized indexes. The identity of its CIA leader never came to light—but whoever he was, he was there ostensibly as part of the Agency for International Development (AID), later revealed as a CIA front.

  Herrmann, of course, was known for his aptitude with computers, and his time in Vietnam coincided almost exactly with Phoenix’s operations. The papers I found at the National Archives confirmed that he was a part of AID.

  I had no way to press him about any of this; he’d died in 1993. As I had with Whitson, I wondered whether his family could tell me more about him. I found one of his daughters, Cindy, a dog breeder in Spokane, Washington; she invited me to see her. Only a teenager in the sixties, she didn’t have many memories of her father’s work, but she was confident that much of it had been top-secret, and that he’d worked for the CIA. He never discussed his work with the family, not even her mother; she was instructed never to talk about her father with anyone, including extended family. She knew he did undercover work, both while he was with the LAPD and afterward. She showed me his passport. Visa stamps chronicled at least four trips to Vietnam between 1968 and ’70. Among his ID cards was one for “The Xuat Nhap Vietnam Cong HOA.”

  She also shared several documents confirming Herrmann’s participation in Phoenix. A framed memo from the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, dated September 9, 1968, advised all personnel that Herrmann was a “member of the Pacification Task Force working for Ambassador Komer.” Komer, first name Robert, was nicknamed “Blowtorch Bob” for his take-no-prisoners approach to warfare. He served fifteen years in the CIA before arriving in Vietnam to work on Phoenix; according to Senate testimony, he was behind the program’s notorious kill quotas. Even Herrmann’s ephemera captivated me. Cindy had held on to a photo of dozens of men on an airplane, captioned, “‘Bad guys’ leaving a bad spot after having been bad.”

  Once he returned from Vietnam, Herrmann retired from the LAPD after more than twenty years on the force, embarking on a series of “research” gigs for various federal agencies—again, all top-secret. With information from Cindy, a growing pile of press clippings, and the government documents I’d amassed, I tried to piece together Herrmann’s postretirement projects. Whatever he’d learned in Southeast Asia, he brought it back to L.A.—his work in California bore disturbing resemblances to the techniques he’d honed as part of the Phoenix project. In 1968, Governor Reagan appointed him to head a new Riots and Disorders Task Force, dedicated to studying urban unrest and devising ways to prevent future outbreaks of violence. But in a 1970 interview, Herrmann revealed, maybe by accident, that the task force was hardly the research-based enterprise it claimed to be.

  Herrmann didn’t give many interviews, but when he spoke to the London Observer’s Charles Foley in May 1970, he was apparently in a voluble mood. Discussing his work for the task force, he described a program of spying and infiltration far exceeding the “studies” that the group was committed to—his words sounded as if they’d been lifted from COINTELPRO and CHAOS manuals. (Both of those operations, of course, were well under way in Los Angeles.)

  Like Governor Reagan and President Johnson, Herrmann believed that California’s student dissidents were funded by foreign Communists. He told the Observer that he had a “secret plan” for “forestalling revolution in America.” The key was “to split off those bent on destroying the system from the mass of dissenters; then following classic guerilla warfare ‘theory’ to find means which will win their hearts and minds.” He called this plan, simply, “Saving America,” and it included strategies for “deeper penetration by undercover agents into dissenting groups,” such as “army agents pos[ing] as students and news reporters.” In a turn worthy of Minority Report, he wanted to use mathematical probability models to predict when and where violence would erupt. He also called for the use of long-range electronic surveillance devices; if informants had already penetrated any “dissenting groups,” they would “secretly record speeches and conversations.”

  What that information would be used for, and how, Herrmann didn’t say. He spoke of the task force in the future tense, making it hard to discern how operational its “Saving America” tactics were. Whatever the case, his brazen claims generated backlash from the left. His daughter showed me a flyer from the Students for a Democratic Society depicting him as a pig. Maybe he felt he’d said too much—or maybe his superiors told him so—but a few months later, he gave another, more circumspect interview. Talking this time to the Sacramento Bee, he walked back some of his more chilling claims about “Saving America.” “Herrmann bridles at an article in the London Observer,” the reporter wrote, quoting Herrmann: “The council could not set up a plan like that… We have a nonoperational role. All we can do is review and fund projects suggested by local authorities.”

  “Saving America” sounded a lot like COINTELPRO, which sounded a lot like CHAOS—they all ran together, in part, it seemed, because they’d all shared notes. In June 2002, the San Francisco Chronicle published an investigative series detailing Governor Reagan’s secret dealings with the CIA and the FBI, all part of his effort to halt what he construed as a Communist-sponsored antiwar movement in California. The Chronicle revealed an internal FBI memo from July 1969, when Herbert Ellinwood, one of the governor’s top advisors, visited FBI headquarters to discuss Reagan’s plans for the “destruction of disruptive elements on California campuses.” As the Chronicle reported, “Ellinwood asked the FBI for ‘intelligence’ information against protest groups… the FBI had secretly given the Reagan administration such assistance in the past.”

  J. Edgar Hoover himself approved the request. The FBI suggested that the California state government might attack dissidents through “a psychological warfare campaign.” If that’s what Reag
an wanted, he didn’t have to look far. In his own circle of advisors was Herrmann, the chairman of the Riots and Disorders Task Force, a veteran of Phoenix, and a man whose antileftist ideas jibed perfectly with the Reagan’s administration in Sacramento, to say nothing of the FBI’s and the CIA’s.

  In 1978, a congressional committee uncovered evidence that the CIA had “operatives” in at least one city’s district attorney’s office in the late sixties. I wondered if a similar situation existed in Los Angeles and, if so, who those operatives might have been.

  It wouldn’t have been too difficult an agency to penetrate. At the time of the Manson murders, in 1969, the district attorney of Los Angeles was Evelle Younger, whose résumé linked him to tons of intelligence work. Decades earlier, he’d been “one of the top agents” of Hoover’s FBI. In 1942, he left the Bureau to join the Office of Strategic Services. Trained in espionage and counterintelligence techniques, he opted to enroll in law school after the war.

  In the fifties, Younger was elected to the bench before becoming Los Angeles district attorney in 1964. A staunch Republican and a friend of Governor Reagan, he was appointed head of a federal law-and-order task force in January 1969, organized by incoming president Richard Nixon to crack down on crime and internal threats to the nation’s security. According to the 1974 book Big Brother and the Holding Company: The World Behind Watergate, the “politically ambitious” Younger advised Nixon to “appoint tougher judges, use more wiretaps, encourage ‘space age techniques and hardware,’ and support local police with better training and equipment.”

  Younger’s subordinates in the DA’s office referred to him as “the General.” In his obituary, the Los Angeles Times in 1989 noted that he was “the first prosecutor in America to undertake mass felony prosecutions of college campus demonstrators in the 1960s”; he’d prosecuted students who’d protested the absence of a black studies program at San Fernando Valley State College. The November 1969 trial resulted in twenty convictions, a coup for the up-and-coming deputy DA who tried the case: Vincent Bugliosi.