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

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

  “A Totally Irresponsible Individual”

  Even before I got the probation records, I was convinced that something was off about Roger Smith’s relationship with the Family. My interest in the federal officer coincided with my deep dive into COINTELPRO and CHAOS, both of which were active in the Bay Area in 1967.

  I wanted to know everything about Smith and Manson. How had Smith become Manson’s parole officer? Why were they so close? And what made Smith so inclined to treat Manson like a harmless hippie rather than a dangerous ex-con?

  The answers came mainly from a pivotal chapter of Manson’s life, one that Bugliosi glossed over in Helter Skelter: the summer of love. From the late spring of 1967 to June 1968, Manson lived in Haight-Ashbury, the hotbed of the counterculture. Given how often Manson is characterized as a curdled hippie—a perversion of the principles of free love—you’d think his year in the Haight would attract more attention. It was the crucible in which his identity was forged. He arrived there an ex-con and left a confident, long-haired cult leader. It was in the Haight that he began to use LSD. He learned how to attract weak, susceptible people, and how to use drugs to keep them under his thumb. And he internalized the psychological methods that would make his followers do anything for him.

  This would’ve been all but impossible without Roger Smith.

  The two came together in a roundabout way. Manson had been released from Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles County on March 21, 1967. He’d served seven and a half years for forging a government check. When he stepped out that day, he was thirty-two, and he’d spent nearly half his life in prisons and juvenile detention centers. As Bugliosi would marvel in Helter Skelter, prison supervisors had largely assessed Manson as nonviolent. Though he’d faced juvenile convictions of armed robbery and homosexual rape, and had beaten his wife, these didn’t add up, in the eyes of the state, to a “sustained history of violence.” Nor, as Bugliosi noted, did they fit the profile of a mass murderer in 1969.

  Another peculiarity: all of Manson’s prison time was at the federal level. Bugliosi found this startling. “Probably ninety-nine out of one-hundred criminals never see the inside of a federal court,” he noted. Manson had been described as “criminally sophisticated,” but had he been convicted at the state level, he would’ve faced a fraction of the time behind bars—maybe less than five years, versus seventeen.

  Within days of his release, Manson violated his parole. Unless he had explicit permission, he was supposed to stay put; he was forbidden from leaving Los Angeles under penalty of automatic repatriation to prison. But practically immediately, he headed to Berkeley, California.

  Years earlier, Manson had had his parole revoked just for failing to report to his supervisor. Now, for some reason, the police bureaucracy of an entirely different city welcomed him with open arms. When he called up the San Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce himself, they simply filed some routine paperwork transferring him to the supervision of Roger Smith, an officer and a student at UC Berkeley’s School of Criminology.

  Helter Skelter is deeply misleading on this point. Bugliosi writes simply that Manson “requested and received permission to go to San Francisco.” The prosecutor had a copy of Manson’s parole file, so he knew this wasn’t true.

  I wanted that file, too. After a FOIA request and months of negotiations and appeals, I received a portion of it in 2000. It contained a letter from the San Francisco parole office to the Los Angeles office, dated April 11, 1967—three weeks after Manson’s release. “This man called our San Francisco Federal Parole Office to announce that he had been paroled and was now within the city of Berkeley, California,” the letter begins.

  He had no parole documents (he impresses as a totally irresponsible individual)… the institution at Terminal Island tells us that this man was paroled on March 21, 1967, to the Central District of California (Los Angeles). Since this man indicates his intention to stay within the San Francisco Metropolitan area for the indefinite future we now indicate our willingness to accept transfer of supervision to this Northern District of California.

  And so began Manson’s assignment to Roger Smith, whom the ex-con came to revere.

  As the months passed, Manson granted Smith a special role as “protector” in the abstruse mythology he’d begun to construct around himself. The Haight had introduced him to Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein’s provocative 1961 sci-fi novel. Manson was obsessed with the book. He carried a worn copy with him at all times, and though he was barely literate, he seemed to grasp the nuances of its dense narrative and its invented language.

  There’s no saying who might have read the book to him or told him about it, but in its hero, Valentine Michael, Manson recognized himself, so much so that he named his first child after him. Roger Smith got a nickname from Manson, too: “Jubal Harshaw,” the most important character in the hero’s life, his lawyer, teacher, protector, and spiritual guide on Earth.

  The plot of Stranger in a Strange Land has eerie parallels to Manson’s rise, so much so that, after the murders, fans of the novel went out of their way to disavow Manson’s connection to it. Valentine Michael, a human raised on Mars, is endowed with hypnotic powers. He descends to Earth to foster a new and perfect race. Guarded by Jubal, he assembles a “nest” with about twenty others, almost all women, whom he initiates through sex. He demands that his followers surrender their egos to him in a spirit of total submission. They worship the innocence of children and yearn to exist in a state of such pure consciousness that they can communicate telepathically. The group sleeps and eats together; one of their most sacred rituals is the act of “sharing water,” which takes on vaguely druggy undertones. In Valentine Michael’s philosophy, there is no death, only “discorporation”; killing people saves their souls, giving them a second chance through reincarnation. The group begins to discorporate their enemies with impunity. In time, Valentine Michael draws strength from the “nest” and, like Christ, saves the world.

  After the Family was caught, Time magazine picked up on the bizarre parallels between Stranger in a Strange Land and Manson’s own “nest.” In January 1970, it ran a piece called “A Martian Model?” arguing that Manson had “no powers of invention at all… He may have murdered by the book.”

  But Roger Smith approved of Manson’s fascination with the novel. He thought it was good that Manson saw his own fantasies in it; there was no harm in his desire to become a savior. If that meant that Smith himself took on the role of Jubal, so be it.

  When we spoke, Smith was hazy on the details of how he became Manson’s parole officer. Manson had been assigned to him as a part of the so-called San Francisco Project, an experimental parole program funded by the National Institute of Mental Health that monitored the rehabilitative progress of newly released felons. When Manson arrived in the Bay Area in March 1967, he was attached to the program—and to Roger Smith.

  Manson’s participation in the San Francisco Project has never been reported. In part, it explains why the two men had developed such a powerful bond—because Smith spent much more time with Manson than the average parole officer would. The project studied the relationship between federal parolees and their supervisors; researchers wanted to know how varying degrees of oversight affected recidivism rates. The six participating parole officers, all of whom had advanced degrees in criminology, were assigned one of three caseloads: “normal,” averaging about one hundred clients; “ideal,” numbering forty clients; or “intensive,” twenty clients.

  Roger Smith fell into the middle group. He met with his clients once a week, per project guidelines. But at some point, his “ideal” caseload became even more intense than his colleagues’ “intensives.” By the end of ’67, he’d winnowed his set of parolees from forty down to just one: Manson.

  I was shocked that Manson had become Smith’s one and only client, but I could never figure out why. Hoping to learn more, I interviewed Smith’s research assistant from that time, Gail Sadalla. Althou
gh Smith had assured me that he’d never met Manson before becoming his parole officer, Sadalla had a different recollection. Smith told her in 1968 that Manson became his charge because he’d already been his probation officer years earlier—in the early sixties, at the Joliet Federal Prison in Illinois. Admittedly, this seemed all but impossible. Manson had never been in the Illinois parole system, and he’d only been incarcerated in the state for a few days in 1956. But Sadalla was convinced that the two had met previously. When I told her that her former boss had no memory of meeting Manson before March 1967, she was stunned.

  “He didn’t remember that?” she asked. “I’m surprised… It was always my understanding. That’s why there was this connection.”

  I didn’t know what to believe, but if Sadalla was correct, it might explain how Manson was able to move to San Francisco without being sent back to prison for violating the terms of his parole: he may have been sent there.

  “Wipe Your Eyes and See”

  As a doctoral student at the Berkeley School of Criminology, Roger Smith studied the link between drug use and violent behavior in Oakland gang members. In April 1967, the study had seen enough success to merit a press conference. As the New York Times reported, Smith and his colleagues had found that a gang’s drug use, rather than “mellowing them out,” more often triggered violent behavior. The students wanted to distinguish between gang members who fell into violence because of inherent sociopathic tendencies and those who became sociopathic because of drugs.

  Smith conducted research through his own “immersion.” He and the other researchers created “outposts” in the Oakland slums, hanging around at community centers and churches, befriending gang members under less-than-transparent circumstances. They embraced a “participant-observer” approach to social research, which Smith would further incorporate into his methods in the years to come.

  By 1967, Smith was regarded as an expert on gangs, collective behavior, violence, and drugs. Manson, his one and only parole supervisee, would go on to control the collective behavior of a gang through violence and drugs.

  Smith described himself to me as a “rock-ribbed Republican”—he never struck me as someone with much tolerance for the counterculture. And yet it was his idea, he admitted, to send Manson to live in the Haight. He hoped that Manson could “soak up” some of the “vibes” of the peace and love movement exploding in the district that summer. Maybe it would allay some of Manson’s hostility.

  So Manson moved from Berkeley to Haight-Ashbury, crashing wherever he could and never paying rent. The hippie movement was nearing its high point. Bohemians were dispensing with boundaries, giving away clothes, drugs, sex, music, and hours of talk about tolerance. Anarchists called for the end of racism, capitalism, and imperialism; the mere act of picking up a guitar had a new ideological voltage. The length of your hair said everything about you. Drawn by the psychedelic aesthetic, teens flocked from around the country to get laid, to try to bring enduring peace to the world, or to try pot and LSD, the latter of which had only recently been made illegal in California.

  It was a concerted, grassroots effort to reject middle-class morality. But where some saw earthshaking radicalism, others saw only Dionysian excess. George Harrison, of Manson’s life-defining band, the Beatles, stopped by the Haight that summer and came away unimpressed: “The summer of love was just a bunch of spotty kids on drugs,” he said. A press release for the Human Be-In, a sprawling gathering a few months before Manson came to town, gives a sense of the era’s transformative rhetoric: “A new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old… Hang your fear at the door and join the future. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.”

  When Manson went to wipe his eyes and see, he wasted no time adopting the folkways and postures of the flower children. Once he landed in the Haight, he dropped acid on a daily basis. It took just one trip to foment the most abrupt change that Roger Smith had ever witnessed in one of his charges. Manson “seemed to accept the world” after LSD, Smith wrote. Seemingly overnight, he transformed himself into an archetypal hippie, his worldview suddenly inflected with spiritualism. He grew out his hair and played guitar in the street, panhandling and scrounging for food. Although only in his early thirties, he presented himself as a father figure, attracting young, down-and-out men and women as they embarked on the spiritual quest that had led them to the Haight.

  If Manson was eager to portray himself as Jesus, then Roger Smith would’ve been John. According to one of my sources, no one knew Manson better than his parole officer did. It would be surprising if Smith didn’t know that his ward was breaking the law—a lot. But he had only praise for his sole client. “Mr. Manson has made excellent progress,” he wrote in one of several reports he made to the head parole office in Washington, D.C. “He appears to be in better shape personally than he has been in a long time.”

  Smith wrote those words on July 31, 1967. At the time, Manson was sitting in a jail cell. A few days earlier, in Ukiah, he’d been convicted of interfering with a police officer in the line of duty—a felony. He’d been trying to prevent the arrest of Ruth Ann Moorehouse, aka Ouisch, one of his newly recruited underage girls. Though the charge was reduced to a misdemeanor, Manson was given a thirty-day suspended sentence and three years’ probation. (The arrest merited only a footnote in Helter Skelter—and Bugliosi didn’t say that it resulted in a conviction.) Instead of being sent back to prison, Manson, who’d been out for only four months then, was back on the streets again in a few days.

  That incident continued the distressing pattern of amnesty that Roger Smith could never explain. In part, Smith benefited, and continues to benefit, from a veil of secrecy. Manson’s complete parole file has never been released. It wasn’t even permitted into evidence during the trial. During the death-penalty phase, the defense’s Irving Kanarek had subpoenaed the file, hoping he could use some part of it to argue for his client’s life. Not only did the United States Attorney General, John Mitchell, refuse to release it, he dispatched David Anderson, an official from the Justice Department, to aid Bugliosi in his effort to quash the subpoena. It was an almost unprecedented action. During death-penalty arguments, when a defendant’s life hangs in the balance, anything that could be introduced to save that life is routinely allowed into evidence. In the courtroom, stunned that the government wouldn’t allow Manson access to his own file, Kanarek asked Anderson if it contained information that would “incriminate the Attorney General.” Bugliosi objected; the judge sustained, and Anderson didn’t have to answer. Ultimately, the judge upheld the prosecution’s motion to quash the subpoena. The file was never allowed into evidence, and the whole episode was excluded from Helter Skelter.

  The fifty-five parole documents turned over to me (later sixty-nine, after exhaustive FOIA appeals) by the federal Parole Commission represent only a sliver of Manson’s total file, which was described as “four inches thick” at his trial. Still, those pages have enough raw data to show that during Manson’s first fourteen months of freedom in San Francisco—months during which he attracted the followers that became the Family—he was given virtual immunity from parole revocation by Roger Smith. Under Smith’s supervision, Manson was repeatedly arrested and even convicted without ever being sent back to prison. It was up to Smith to revoke Manson’s parole—it was ultimately his decision. But he never even reported any of his client’s violations to his supervisors.

  In interviews with me, Smith claimed not to have known about Manson’s conviction in Ukiah, even though it had occurred under his watch. In fact, in the same July 1967 letter that should have mentioned Manson’s conviction—the letter that lauded his “excellent progress”—Smith requested permission for Manson to travel to Mexico, where he would’ve been totally unsupervised, for a gig with a hotel band. (Smith failed to note the fact that Manson had been arrested in Mexico in 1959, resulting in his deportation to the United States and the revocation of his federal probation.)

  “Mans
on is not to leave the Northern District of California,” the parole board responded, noting that Manson’s “history does not mention any employment as musician,” and that his record was “lengthy and serious.”

  And yet, two weeks later, Smith tried again—he really wanted to send Manson to Mexico. He told the parole board that Manson had been offered a second job there by “a general distributor for the Perma-Guard Corporation of Phoenix Arizona named Mr. Dean Moorehouse,” who wanted Manson to survey “the market for insecticides, soil additives and mineral food supplements.” Smith neglected to mention that Moorehouse was on probation—regulations barred associations between parolees and probationers—and one of Manson’s newest recruits, the father of the fifteen-year-old whose arrest Manson had tried to prevent three weeks earlier.

  The parole board rejected this second request, too. Interestingly, at the same time Smith made these requests, he’d launched a criminological study of Mexican drug trafficking for the federal government. He’d attempted to send Manson to Mazatlán, which was the main port city of Sinaloa, the drug trafficking capital of Central America in the 1960s.

  “In hindsight,” Smith told me when I presented him with the documents, “it was not a good decision.” Then he reversed course a bit, saying that he probably made the requests “just to show Manson they wouldn’t let him go.”

  “But, twice?” I asked. “And at the expense of your own credibility?”