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

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

  Since West’s paper was light on specifics, it’s hard to know if it was only a ploy for more funding. Whatever it was, the CIA felt it had to keep it under wraps. When the agency was forced to disclose MKULTRA to the public, they submitted an expurgated version of West’s paper to Congress, an act of deception that’s never been exposed. At the National Security Archives in D.C., I found the version of “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility” that the CIA had turned over to the Senate. West’s name and affiliation were redacted, as expected. But what shocked me was that the Senate’s version didn’t include West’s nine-page attachment, but rather an unsigned summary. There was no mention of West’s triumphant accomplishment, the replacement of “the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual” with a “fictional event.”

  In sworn testimony, the CIA said that everything it shared with Congress was intact except for the redactions of researchers’ and institutions’ names. Now it turned out they hadn’t just censored West’s report; they’d completely misrepresented its contents. The one-page summary of West’s accomplishments in the lab doesn’t exist in West’s original. The new page was only a theoretical discussion of LSD—of its possible effects on “dissociative states.” It concluded, “The effects of these agents [LSD and other drugs] upon the production, maintenance, and manifestations of disassociated states has never been studied.”

  West, of course, had studied those effects for years and years. I could only conclude that the CIA misrepresented the original document to mislead the Senate committee, thus striking West’s research from the official record. As was my habit whenever I found hard evidence of a cover-up, I started dwelling on one question after another. Didn’t this counterfeit paper cast doubt on the entire cache of documents released to the Senate in 1977? If West’s authentic paper had been so fuzzy about the effects of drugs, including LSD, on dissociative states, why had the CIA felt the need to generate a fake version?

  Maybe because West had achieved one of MKULTRA’s most coveted goals. Despite testimony to the contrary, the CIA had, in fact, learned how to manipulate people’s memories without their knowledge. Agency officials claimed the program had been a colossal failure, leading newspapers to run mocking headlines like “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight.” It could’ve been exactly what the agency wanted—for the world to assume MKULTRA was a bust, and forget the whole thing. One thing was indisputable: The CIA’s falsified documents invalidated the Senate investigation’s findings. The agency lied, obstructed justice, and tampered with evidence, and the West documents prove it.

  Given the furtive nature of his research, West could be surprisingly garrulous. Among the press clippings in his file were two items from Portland, Oregon, newspapers, both dated October 1963—the murky period between his Oklahoma hypnosis studies and the Haight-Ashbury Project. West had given an address to the Mental Health Association of Oregon, letting it slip that he was inducing insanity in the lab. He framed these studies as positive developments: they might someday cure mental illness.

  “We are at the dawning of a new era,” West told the crowd, “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.” The Oregon Journal noted that West “listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation as some of the things that [he was] using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people.” Reporting that West had done “extensive work” with LSD, the Journal continued: “The most important contribution of the drug so far is in producing model mental illnesses.”

  Almost fifteen years later, besieged by reporters after the New York Times alleged that he’d taken part in MKULTRA’s secret LSD experimentation program, West insisted that all of his LSD work “had been confined to animals,” denying any CIA affiliation. When reporters pointed out that he’d received an awful lot of money from the agency, he retorted that he’d had no idea that the Geschickter Fund and other sources were CIA fronts. Legally, the CIA was obligated to tell the University of Oklahoma that one of its faculty had been on the agency payroll. Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo saying that an unnamed professor—West, I confirmed through financial records—had been investigating “a number of dissociative phenomena” on humans “in the lab,” including an exceptionally rare clinical disorder known as “latah,” “a neurotic condition marked by automatic obedience.”

  None of the allegations harmed West’s reputation. By then he’d left Oklahoma for UCLA, where he offered a steady stream of denials and continued to thrive through his retirement in 1988. Irascible and arrogant, he was quick to threaten lawsuits when anyone brought up the charges. Sometimes he threw in diversionary tactics: in a 1991 rebuttal, he claimed, “My secret connection to Washington, D.C. is not as a spook, but rather as a confidential advisor to Presidents… From Eisenhower to Bush, Democrat and Republican Presidents alike have freely sought and received my counsel.” In a 1993 letter to the editor of the UCLA Bruin, he had the temerity to compare his accusers to Nazi propagandists “in Goebbels’ tradition of the Big Lie.” West added, “I have never taken part in ‘mind-control’ experiments funded by the CIA or anybody else”: a statement belied by his own files.

  The Misadventures of Jolly West

  Even before his CIA connections came out, West’s experiments got him in plenty of trouble. In 1972, he announced plans to build a lab in an abandoned Nike Missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. He would call it “The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence,” or the Violence Center, for short. There, in perfect isolation, he could study the origins and control of human violence by experimenting on prisoners. Governor Ronald Reagan gave the Violence Center a full-throated endorsement.

  But West’s proposal for grant money landed him in hot water. He planned to test radical forms of behavior modification, implanting electrodes and “remote monitoring devices” in prisoners’ brains. A federal investigation concluded that the program involved “coercive methods” that threatened “privacy and self-determination.”

  The committee’s disclosures stymied the Violence Center before it got past the planning stages. The California legislature vetoed the project; UCLA’s student body rose up in protest of West. And this, to reiterate, was before anyone had a clue about his CIA work.

  Now I could tie West to the highest, most clandestine echelons of the Central Intelligence Agency. I could tie him to both of the Smiths, the authority figures from Manson’s lost year in San Francisco. And through his efforts to open the Violence Center, I could tie him to bigwigs in the LAPD and the DA’s office who’d helped to prosecute Manson. But I could never prove that he’d examined Manson himself—or even that they’d ever met. Nor had West taken part in Manson’s trial. His absence was conspicuous. One of the world’s leading experts on brainwashing and cults, he was hardly averse to publicity. He’d appeared as a witness many times before. Manson was tried in his own backyard; the proceedings were international news. Yet West went nowhere near them.

  I told David Smith about the CIA’s research and its parallels with Manson: the agency had wanted to accomplish exactly what Manson succeeded in doing with the girls. I was wondering whether someone in the CIA influenced Manson while he was in San Francisco.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but the military experiments are added proof that my hypothesis is correct—that it can be done.”

  “That you can brainwash with LSD?”

  He nodded.

  “The CIA maintained that they never were able to accomplish it,” I said.

  “In part because they were basically taking normal subjects,” he said, “not susceptible girls in a reinforcing environment.” When he’d evaluated Susan Atkins for a parole hearing ten years after she’d separated from Manson, she was still under his control. “I can’t get him out of my head!” she told him. “He’s still in my brain!”

  But was brainwashing really even possible? I’d always believed that Cold War�
��era paranoia had overstated the potential for “Manchurian Candidates” taught to kill by dastardly commies. On the other hand, I accepted that Charles Manson had altered his followers’ minds, and that LSD did a lot of the heavy lifting. He’d seemed to have an endless supply of the drug, though no one said how he got it. Plus, he was so often described as “hypnotic.” Ed Sanders had written in The Family of a hypnotist, William Deanyer, who managed a Sunset Strip club and alleged that he’d taught Manson how to hypnotize. It seemed dubious. But I confirmed that Deanyer had learned hypnosis in the navy. And his daughter told me she’d seen her father teaching Manson at the club.

  With Alan Scheflin, a forensic psychologist and law professor who’d written a book on MKULTRA, I laid out a circumstantial case linking West to Manson. Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA experiment gone right.”

  In the back of my mind was the most confounding passage in Helter Skelter—one that I’d underlined, highlighted, and finally torn out and taped above my computer. “The most puzzling question of all,” Bugliosi wrote, was how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseful killers. Even with the LSD, the sex, the isolation, the sleep deprivation, the social abandonment, there had to be “some intangible quality… It may be something that he learned from others.” Something that he learned from others. Those had become the six most pivotal words in the book for me.

  I was more compelled than ever to peel back every layer of West’s past, hoping that some tie to Manson would come out, or that I’d get the name of someone who knew the name of someone who could confirm that the two had met. On the way, I discovered some fearsome episodes from West’s past. As a self-styled brainwashing expert, he’d been present whenever mind control reared its ugly head in American culture. Murders, assassinations, kidnappings, cults, prisoners of war—his fingerprints were on all of them.

  The Curious Case of Jimmy Shaver

  After midnight on July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton disappeared outside the Lackland Air Force Base, where Jolly West was stationed. Horton’s parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.

  Within an hour of Horton’s disappearance, the party came upon a car with her underwear hanging from the door. They heard shouting nearby. Two construction workers had been napping in a nearby gravel pit when a Lackland airman wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and “trance-like.”

  “What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped. Deputies arrested the man.

  His name was Jimmy Shaver. At twenty-nine, he was recently remarried, with two children, no criminal record, no history of violence. He’d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.

  Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he “was not normal… he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.

  Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10:30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it.

  Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision, subject to copious psychological tests. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, “truth serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.

  While Shaver was under—with West injecting more truth serum to “deepen the trance”—Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he “had visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.” (This “Beth” was never sought for questioning.) At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense—they’d hoped he could get an acquittal on temporary insanity.

  Instead, West’s testimony helped the prosecution. Here was a psychiatric expert who believed wholeheartedly that Shaver had committed the crime, and who’d gotten him to admit it in colorful detail. While West maintained that the airman had suffered a bout of temporary insanity, he also said that Shaver was “quite sane now.” In the courtroom, he didn’t look that way. One newspaper account said he “sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,” saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. “Some believe it’s an act,” the paper said, “others believe his demeanor is real.”

  West often treated Lackland airmen for neurological disorders. During the trial, it came out that Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that he’d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. He sought regular treatment, and the air force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor who’d attempted to recruit him was never named.

  Shaver’s medical history was scrutinized at trial, but little mention was made of the base hospital, Wilford Hall, where West had conducted his MKULTRA experiments on unwitting patients. On the stand, West said he’d never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated there. I checked—Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with “Sa” through “St” had vanished.

  Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

  This was all the more difficult to ignore after I got the transcript of Shaver’s truth-serum interview. West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. “Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,” he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: “Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?” Or: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”

  “I never did take her clothes off,” Shaver said.

  The interview was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the transcript said, “Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.”

  West asked, “Now you remember it all, don’t you, Jimmy?”

  “Yes, sir,” Shaver replied.

  For West, this seems to have been business as usual, but it left an indelib
le mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it. When I reached Rose by phone in 2002, he said Shaver still haunted him.

  “In my fifty years in the profession,” he said of the truth-serum interview, “that was the most dramatic moment ever—when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl.” But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. After I read Rose citations from articles, reports, and the transcript, he seemed to accept it, but he was adamant that West had never said anything—hypnotism was not part of the protocol.

  He’d also never known how West had found out about the case right away.

  “We were involved from the first day,” Rose recalled. “Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder,” Rose said, giving me flashbacks to Shahrokh Hatami’s memory of Reeve Whitson. “He initiated it.”

  West may have shielded himself from scrutiny, but he made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court ruled that he’d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his thirty-third birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.

  West claimed he was in the courtroom the day Shaver was sentenced to death. Around this time, he became vehemently against capital punishment. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was because he knew his experiments might’ve led to the execution of an innocent man and the death of a child. What if his correspondence with Gottlieb, predating the crime by just a year, had been presented at trial? Would the outcome have been the same?