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

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

  West was a square—tall, broad, and crew cut, with an all-American look in keeping with his military past. If he wanted a good glimpse of the hippies, he’d have to blend in. He started cobbling together a new wardrobe and skipping haircuts.

  At least he had a solid knowledge base. The summer of love had yet to come, and the Tate–LaBianca murders were still years away, but West would effectively predict them both. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, he’d contributed a chapter called “Hallucinogens,” warning students of a “remarkable substance” percolating through college campuses and into cities across the United States. It was LSD, known to leave users “unusually susceptible and emotionally labile” as it caused a “loosening of ego structure.” That language was reminiscent of the “reprogramming” spiel that Charles Manson would soon develop, urging his acid-tripping followers to “negate their egos.”

  When West cautioned against the “LSD cults” springing up in America’s “bohemian” quarters, he described exactly the kind of disenchanted wanderers who’d flock to a personality like Manson’s in the years to come. West had a hunch that alienated kids “with a pathological desire to withdraw from reality” would crave “shared forbidden activity in a group setting to provide a sense of belonging.”

  Another paper by West, 1965’s “Dangers of Hypnosis,” foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by “crackpots” who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. Contrary to the prevailing science at the time, West asserted that hypnosis could make people so pliable that they’d violate their moral codes. Scarier still, they’d have no memory of it afterward. Just because such outcomes were rare, he argued, didn’t mean they were impossible.

  West cited two cases to back up his argument: a double murder in Copenhagen committed by a hypno-programmed man, and a “military offense” induced experimentally at an undisclosed U.S. Army base. He “personally knew” of two other instances, and he’d “heard on excellent authority” of three more, but he didn’t elaborate. Later, I’d get a sense of what, or who, he might have had in mind.

  When he arrived in Haight-Ashbury, then, West was the only scientist in the world who’d predicted the emergence of potentially violent “LSD cults.” How had he learned so much about acid? You’d never know from his published writing that he’d conducted innumerable experiments with it. In San Francisco, he hoped to conduct more still.

  In the Haight, West found a group of kindred spirits at David Smith’s new clinic, where plenty of shrinks from the “straight world” were basking in hippiedom. Getting his bearings at the HAFMC, he arranged for the use of a crumbling Victorian house on nearby Frederick Street, where he opened what he described as a “laboratory” disguised as a “hippie crash pad.” This would serve as a “semi-permanent observation post,” granting him an up-close-and-personal look at the youth. He installed six graduate students in the “pad,” telling them to “dress like hippies” and “lure” itinerant kids into the apartment. Passersby were welcome to do as they pleased and stay as long as they liked, as long as they didn’t mind grad students taking copious notes on their behavior.

  The “pad” opened in June 1967, at the dawn of the summer of love. West took pains to ensure that it felt realistic, decorating it “with posters, flowers and paint.” Thus was born the Haight-Ashbury Project, as he called it, or “HAP,” for short. For the next six months, he undertook “an ongoing program of intensive interdisciplinary study into the life and times of the hippies.”

  To drum up hippie business, West stopped by the HAFMC, where David Smith could furnish willing subjects. Smith even gave him an office. Having a nationally recognized researcher like West working out of the HAFMC would attract sorely needed government funding.

  “We helped him with research,” Smith told me. He was sympathetic to West’s project, even though he admitted that he never bothered to find out what it was, or what its objectives were. He assumed that West, like himself, was diagnosing “psychedelic patterns in the counterculture,” trends that others had dismissed as boorish fads.

  “They came over and interviewed kids that came into our clinic,” Smith said of West and his students. “He wanted to know, ‘What is a hippie?’” Smith reminded me that “this was a very new population… the fact that large numbers of white middle-class kids would use illicit drugs was a total mindblower.”

  Who was paying for all this? According to records in West’s files, his “crash pad” was funded by the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc., which had bankrolled a number of his other projects, too, across decades and institutions. For reasons soon to be clear, I concluded that the Foundations Fund was a front for the CIA.

  This wouldn’t have been the agency’s first “disguised laboratory” in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. White scrupulously observed the ensuing activities, whatever they were. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex, could be used to coax sensitive information from the men—something of a psychedelic honeypot experiment. White so enjoyed the proceedings that he had a portable toilet and a mini-fridge installed on his side of the mirror, so he could watch the action and swill martinis without taking a bathroom break. He later wrote to his CIA handler, “I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder!”

  West knew better than to commit such sentiments to paper, but by 1967 he’d “toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards,” too. Before he moved to the Haight, he’d supervised a similar study in Oklahoma City, hiring informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender “a fundamental change” in “basic moral, religious or political matters.” The title of the project was Mass Conversion. As I was soon to see, its funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb, the head of the CIA’s MKULTRA program.

  In other words, as I said to David Smith, it was all but certain that Jolly West came to the Haight to answer a more ignoble question than “What is a hippie?”

  “That would be a cover project,” I told Smith.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  “Is This an Asphalt Sherwood Forest?”

  What was Jolly West really up to in San Francisco? Hanging out at his “crash pad” and roaming the streets of the Haight, he tried to pass as an apostle of free love, but few were fooled. Bob Conrich, a cofounder of the HAFMC, saw through the ruse right away. West “walked into the clinic one day and my first reaction was that he’d read too many Tim Leary interviews,” Conrich wrote to me. West was a careerist in hippies’ clothing. “What I remember is his enthusiasm for the whole ‘summer of love’ thing, which seemed exaggerated and insincere.”

  Conrich was right. West’s excitement was a sham, his feelings for hippies dripping with condescension. He soon concluded that the constellation of sex, drugs, and communalism shining over the Haight that summer was “doomed to fail”: “The very chemicals they use will inevitably enervate them as individuals and bleed the energies of the hippie movement to its death.” He called this an “ineffable tragedy,” but it’s hard to imagine he saw it that way. For West, the failure of sixties idealism was the most desirable outcome—one that he was quite possibly working toward. A copy of his résumé from this period hints at the thrust of his research. He was at work on a book called Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States. But he never published it. Nor, on the surface, would “the induction of abnormal states” dovetail with the stated goals of his HAP. By the early seventies he removed the title from his résumé and never mentioned it again.
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br />   Stephen Pittel, the forensic psychologist, worked briefly with West in 1968 and referred to him as “the only benevolent psychopath I ever met.” The man could “charm the pants off of anyone, and manipulate people into doing all sorts of things they didn’t want to do.”

  At the HAP, though, West’s motives were so vague that even his charm didn’t suffice. No one had a firm grasp of the project’s purpose—even those involved in it. The grad students hired to man West’s “crash pad” laboratory were assigned to keep diaries of their work. In unguarded moments, nearly all these students admitted that something didn’t add up. They weren’t sure what they were supposed to be doing, or why West was there. And often he wasn’t there. Unlike the grad students, he didn’t live at the pad. But he wasn’t putting in long hours at the HAFMC, either. Those who knew him at both places—and elsewhere in his long career—recalled his chronic absenteeism.

  One of the diaries in West’s files belonged to Kathy Collins, a Stanford psychology grad student who lived at the HAP pad that summer. The experience was a huge letdown for her, aimless to the point of worthlessness. She was getting paid to do nothing. When “crashers” showed up, “no one made much of a point of finding out about [them],” she put down in neat handwriting. More often, hippies failed to show up at all, since many of them apparently looked on the pad with suspicion. “What the hell have I gotten myself into and what the hell is Jolly doing, it is like a zoo. Is he studying us or them?”

  When West made one of his rare appearances, he was “dressed funny,” like a hippie; sometimes he would have friends in tow, costumed just as poorly. Collins wrote, “The rest of us tended to look to them in trying to understand what we were supposed to do or what Jolly wanted. Their general reply was that this was a good opportunity to have fun. I gather that they did. They spent a good deal of the time stoned.”

  Ennui set in. Hoping to feel useful, Collins and the others made inquiries about helping out at the HAFMC. They were swiftly rebuffed. Pressed for specific guidelines, West exuded “phoniness and dishonesty,” suggesting that the students answer sweeping, high-flown questions about the Haight, such as “Is this an asphalt Sherwood Forest?” She “got the impression that this question had already been answered.”

  At the height of her frustration, Collins wrote like someone trapped in an existentialist drama. “I really don’t know whether to laugh at Jolly or take him seriously,” she fumed. “I feel like no one is being honest and straight and the whole thing is a gigantic put on… What is he trying to prove? He is interested in drugs, that is clear. What else?”

  Brainwashing with the Love Drug

  Collins was right. West was interested in drugs. His professional fascination with LSD was practically as old as the substance itself, and he was one of an elite cadre of scientists using it in top-secret research. Lysergic acid diethylamide was synthesized in 1938 by chemists at Switzerland’s Sandoz Industries, but it was not introduced as a pharmaceutical until 1947. In the fifties, when the CIA began to experiment on humans with it, it was a very new substance. Be that as it may, the agency was not inclined to exercise caution.

  Almost right away, government scientists saw LSD as a potential Cold War miracle drug, the key to eradicating communism and seeding global democracy. Its effects on individual minds were extrapolated onto groups, voting blocs, and entire populations. Among psychiatrists, artists, and curious recreational users, LSD augured a different sort of liberty, but they, too, regarded it with awe. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientist who’d discovered its hallucinogenic qualities in 1943, described it as a “sacred drug” that gestured toward “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality.” The actor Cary Grant, on the advice of his shrink, took some one hundred LSD trips during their weekly meetings in the late fifties, experiencing a “rebirth” and picturing himself “as a giant penis launching off from Earth like a spaceship.”

  Charles Fischer, a drug researcher who worked with David Smith, described to me the early perceptions of acid, when “trips” were planned like literal journeys. “Very few people took LSD without having somebody being a ‘trip leader,’” Fischer said. The suggestibility from LSD was akin to hypnosis—and Jolly West, of course, had known well enough to study the two in tandem. “You can tell somebody to hurt somebody, but you call it something else,” Fischer explained. “Hammer the nail into the wood, and the wood, perhaps, is a human being… [It] could result in some violent activity, even though LSD was considered a love drug.”

  The global superpowers considered it anything but. Full-fledged U.S. research into LSD began soon after the end of World War II, when American intelligence learned that the USSR was developing a program to influence human behavior through drugs and hypnosis. The United States believed that the Soviets could extract information from people without their knowledge, program them to make false confessions, and perhaps persuade them to kill on command.

  The CIA, then in its infancy, saw mind control as a natural extension of communism, spreading like fire where the forces of unreason prevailed. In 1949 it launched Operation Bluebird, a mind-control program whose chipper name belied its brutal ambitions and its propensity for trampling on human rights. In its yen to best the Soviets, the CIA tested drugs on American citizens—most in federal penitentiaries or on military bases—who didn’t even know about, let alone consent to, the battery of procedures they underwent.

  Their abuse found further justification in 1952, when, in Korea, captured American pilots admitted on national radio that they’d sprayed the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. It was a confession so beyond the pale that the CIA blamed Communists: the POWs must have been “brainwashed.” The word, a literal translation of the Chinese xi nao, didn’t appear in English before 1950. It articulated a set of fears that had coalesced in postwar America. Soviets were using guile to force an evil philosophy on the world. Technology had destabilized every atom of human nature, and a new class of chemicals with unpronounceable names could reduce people to machines. The human mind, like any other appliance, could be rewired and automated.

  Once the Korean War was over and the American POWs returned, the army brought in a team of scientists to “deprogram” them. Among those scientists was a young psychiatrist from Cornell, Dr. Louis J. West. He would later claim to have studied eighty-three prisoners of war, fifty-six of whom had been forced to make false confessions. West interviewed them at length, undoing the treacheries of the “thought reform” they’d undergone in enemy hands. He and his colleagues were credited with reintegrating the POWs into Western society and, maybe more important, getting them to renounce their claims about having used biological weapons.

  West’s success with the POWs gained him entrée to the upper echelons of the intelligence community. As the Cold War bred paranoia, the CIA accelerated its mind-control efforts, and West, I learned, carved out a niche he’d occupy for decades to come. Initially, the agency wanted only to prevent further brainwashing by the Soviets. But the extraordinary power of psychotropic drugs, particularly LSD, was hard to ignore. Thus a defensive program became an offensive one. Operation Bluebird morphed into Operation Artichoke, a search for an all-purpose truth serum.

  Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a poisons expert who headed the chemical division of the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, had convinced the agency’s director, Allen Dulles, that mind-control ops were the future. Gottlieb, whose aptitude and amorality had earned him the nickname the “Black Sorcerer,” developed gadgetry straight out of schlocky sci-fi: high-potency stink bombs, swizzle sticks laced with drugs, exploding seashells, poisoned toothpaste, poisoned handkerchiefs, poisoned cigars, poisoned anything. Mind control became Gottlieb’s pet project. Dulles, convinced that the American dream was at stake, ensured that Gottlieb was well funded. In a speech at Princeton University, Dulles warned that Communist spies could turn the American mind into “a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.” Jus
t days after those remarks, on April 13, 1953, he officially set Project MKULTRA into motion.

  The project’s broadest goal was “to influence human behavior.” Under its umbrella were 149 subprojects, many involving research that used unwitting participants. Having persuaded an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company to replicate the Swiss formula for LSD, the CIA had a limitless domestic supply of its favorite new drug. The agency hoped to produce couriers who could embed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins.

  In their defense, CIA spooks weren’t above experimenting on themselves. The same substance that held the promise of controlling minds and quashing communism was used in churlish office pranks, with agents quietly slipping LSD into their colleagues’ drinks to achieve much needed “firsthand knowledge.” A plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA Christmas party was quashed when higher-ups reminded the office that it could cause insanity.

  The most sensitive work was conducted far from Langley—farmed out to scientists at colleges, hospitals, prisons, and military bases all over the United States and Canada. The CIA gave these scientists aliases, funneled money to them, and instructed them on how to conceal their research from prying eyes, including those of their unknowing subjects. Feeling that it was their patriotic duty, the scientists accepted their secret missions in defiance of the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm.”

  In 1949, at the Nuremberg trials that adjudicated the crimes of World War II, the United States adopted the International Code for Human Experimentation: “A person must give full and informed consent before being used as a subject.” MKULTRA scientists flouted this code constantly, remorselessly—and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to “induced pain” and “psychosis.” They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try to master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields.