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

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

  Tusko Goes Down

  If the Shaver incident was the most harrowing chapter of West’s career, the most surreal belonged to Tusko: an elephant. Of all West’s experiments, this one netted the most press, much of it scathing. But the public didn’t know that the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb had funded it.

  On August 2, 1962, West headed to Oklahoma City’s Lincoln Park Zoo, where he’d invited a crowd of eager onlookers to watch his latest test. To their delight, he’d secured an Asian elephant named Tusko, an exotic specimen in Oklahoma. West would attempt, he explained, to induce musth, “a form of madness” that occurred in male elephants during the rutting season. Musth caused violent behavioral changes. “Normally cooperative and tamable, the elephant now runs berserk for a period of about two weeks, during which time he may attack or destroy anything in his path,” West explained, claiming that whole villages had been wiped out by a single musthing animal. In his rage, the elephant secreted “a mysterious fluid,” brown and sticky, from his temporal gland. Could it prove medically useful? He intended to find out. His method was simple: he would simulate musth by injecting the elephant with a lot of LSD.

  But West had miscalculated the dosage. Tusko weighed a whopping 7000 pounds. West shot him with 2800 milligrams of acid, about 1400 times the quantity given to a human to produce “a marked mental disturbance,” by West’s measurement. “Five minutes after the injection,” West later wrote, “Tusko trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated and went into status epilepticus,” a respiratory seizure resulting in death.

  The next morning’s paper featured a front-page photo of the portly psychiatrist bent over the deceased pachyderm. There were no animal-rights groups then—Tusko’s death was received more as comedy than tragedy. For a time, West became the laughingstock of the scientific community, and he was soon making fun of the mishap himself; he liked to inform his lecture audiences that he was the doctor famous for killing an elephant with LSD. When I asked Roger Smith about West, he exclaimed, “He’s the guy that killed the elephant. Great story. Wonderful story. He always told it!”

  The mystery behind the joke was why LSD had been used on an elephant in the first place. What good did it do to simulate musth? West, true to form, never gave the same explanation twice. Speaking to an interviewer from the Medical Tribune, and to another from the Daily Oklahoman, West said his objective was to find an “animal model” for “recurring psychoses in humans.” Elephant brains were useful analogs for the human mind: they had excellent memories, “creative judgment,” sophisticated problem-solving abilities, and even an “individual personality.” Looking at elephant violence offered an opportunity “to learn what changes are correlated with this gross behavior,” and to see if those changes happened in people, too.

  And yet in a December 1962 article for the journal Science, West and his coresearcher acted as if their ambitions were purely zoological. If they surgically removed an elephant’s glands before puberty, “he might grow up to be a sexually capable but behaviorally tractable animal.”

  Their recommendations were so preposterous that they occasioned an avalanche of letters to Science. Outraged scientists questioned West’s true objectives, labeling him “capricious” and “irresponsible.” “I fail to see any scientific merit,” one wrote, “or purpose.”

  West left his position at the University of Oklahoma in January 1969. His successor, Dr. Gordon Deckert, found records in the department’s files about the Tusko debacle. “When [the elephant] died, the department was worried: How in the world are we going to pay for that?” Deckert recalled. “All Jolly would say to anybody was that he would find a way to pay for it. I learned then, when I became chair, that the source was payment from the CIA.” Having known about West’s involvement in “the so-called brainwashing issue in the Korean War,” Deckert conceded that he “wasn’t terribly surprised.” The financial cover was the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc.: the same group that paid for West’s Haight-Ashbury Project.

  Jack Ruby’s Psychotic Break

  At UCLA, I kept requesting boxes of West’s papers, and they kept leading me over trapdoors. Next they dropped me into a quagmire I wanted no part of: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, an event that plausibly qualified as the most discussed crime of all time. Certainly it had bred more conspiracy theories, skepticism, and enmity than any other incident in U.S. history, altering the way Americans digested their news, and breaking the nation’s belief in its institutions. I flipped through West’s pages cautiously, hoping that his involvement was peripheral. It wasn’t. Down through the trapdoor I went.

  Kennedy was shot as his motorcade passed through Dallas’s Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Two days later, at the Dallas police headquarters, officers escorted Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to an armored car that would drive him to the county jail. A man stepped out from the crowd and aimed a revolver at Oswald’s chest. It was Jack Ruby, a nightclub proprietor with connections to Cuban political groups and organized crime. He fired once at point-blank range, sending a fatal bullet into Oswald’s stomach.

  According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins’s, and again involving Lawrence Schiller—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.”

  On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.” Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.”

  Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. Three documents among his papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact never before made public.

  The judge turned him down. For the moment, it seemed, West would be getting nowhere near Ruby, who was soon convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Ruby was reportedly unmoored by the news. He’d killed the president’s assassin, and the citizens of Dallas had rewarded him with a trip to the gallows. He fired his attorney and hired Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist with a law degree who’d assisted in the trial, to represent him on appeal.

  Meanwhile, at Langley, the CIA’s Richard Helms was making the case that MKULTRA’s human guinea pigs had to be entirely unaware of the experiments performed on them. This was “the only realistic method,” he wrote, “to influence human behavior as the operational targets will certainly be unwitting.”

  Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the p
lum assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.)

  And so, on April 26, 1964, West boarded a plane bound for Dallas. He was scheduled to examine Jack Ruby in the county jail that afternoon.

  The Dallas papers reported it in their final editions that evening: West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.”

  In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. “Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.”

  West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. “He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.”

  From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar diagnoses: he was delusional. West, however, was hardly the first to have evaluated him. By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially compos mentis. West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them until earlier today on the airplane. Tonight, my own findings make it clear that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these earlier studies were carried out.”

  The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. In the preceding five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described. Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d clamored to see Ruby months earlier. After the judge heard West’s report, he ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of it.”

  That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public, confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and “asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. He considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been tampered with or drugged by an outsider. “The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation.”

  The truth, by that point, was sealed up behind West. Beavers couldn’t have known that one of his fellow caregivers was capable of anything so diabolical as inducing mental illness in a patient. His report would have turned out differently, no doubt, if he’d been apprised of West’s unorthodox fortes, and his long relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Dozens of West’s colleagues offered me assessments of his character. There was praise, especially from those who’d worked with him at UCLA, but there was also condemnation, most of it from his former colleagues at Oklahoma, where he’d done the bulk of his MKULTRA research. He was a “devious man,” “egotistical,” an inveterate “narcissist” and “womanizer.” The few who hadn’t already suspected his involvement with the CIA accepted it readily. But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley, his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. Shurley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind.

  “I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.” Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little problem with grandiosity. He would not be averse at all to having influenced American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or not… Jolly had a real streak of—I guess you’d call it patriotism. If the president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.”

  “Even if it meant distorting American history?”

  “I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”

  “A Deliberate Gangland Killing”

  West’s “fearless” intervention set the stage for decades of confusion and conspiracy in Washington. A week after Kennedy’s assassination, the newly installed president, Lyndon Johnson, hand-selected a group of thirteen men to investigate the crime. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director. Kennedy had fired him two years earlier, after he’d bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion. Another was the official CIA liaison to the group, Richard Helms, soon to become the agency’s director. A protégé of Dulles, Helms was the longtime secret employer of Jolly West, and one of the few agency officials aware of MKULTRA. But no one else on the commission—except, presumably, Dulles, who started the program—was aware that a CIA “asset” trained in mind control had assumed responsibility for the psychiatric care of Jack Ruby, whom the commission regarded as their “most important witness.”

  In June 1964, Earl Warren and others from the group flew to Dallas to give Ruby a hearing in the interrogation room of the county jail. The bulk of his testimony was a morass of paranoid rambling. He begged Warren to get him out of Dallas. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” he warned. “I know I won’t live to see you another time… Do I sound sort of screwy?” He demanded to speak with a Jew, whispering frantically, “You have to get me to Washington! They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso!”

  The commission, unable to extract a cogent account from their main witness, concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy, and that Ruby did not act in a conspiracy to silence Oswald. Although they saw no evidence of a secret plot, they couldn’t definitively rule out such a thing. But their integrity was compromised the minute West set foot in Ruby’s jail cell. The group was required to investigate the CIA as a routine suspect in the assassination of a sitting president. Neither Dulles nor Helms ever reported their knowledge of West’s employment by the CIA. And soon Jack Ruby was no longer around to tell his own story. He died in 1967 of complications from lung cancer.

  In the seventies, when Congress looked into abuses by intelligence agencies, it found evidence that the CIA and FBI had obstructed the Kennedy investigation. Dulles and Helms had deliberately concealed failed CIA plots to assassinate Cuba’s dictator, Fidel Castro. Allegedly, the CIA had aligned with organized crime figures, many sworn enemies of President Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy; they teamed up with anti-Castro Cubans in Miami and New Orleans to assassinate
the dictator. Helms had personally overseen those schemes.

  The evidence, wrote House officials, “impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination.” Feeling it had no choice but to start over again, the House voted overwhelmingly to impanel the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) and reinvestigate.

  The HSCA openly aspired to make the Warren Report “persuasive.” Its final five-volume report—arriving in 1979, after two and a half years and $5.4 million in taxpayer money—did just the opposite. Based on new ballistic evidence of a second gunman in Dallas, the HSCA rejected the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald had acted alone. There was a “probable conspiracy,” it announced, to assassinate the president.

  The committee had to be measured; it didn’t identify any potential coconspirators in the president’s murder. A few years later, freed of their congressional restraints, the committee’s G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings published The Plot to Kill the President, an unmuzzled account of the investigation. “The murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby had all the earmarks of an organized crime hit, an action to silence the assassin, so he could never reveal the conspiracy,” they wrote. “Jack Ruby, working for the mob, after stalking Oswald for two days, silenced him forever. This was a deliberate gangland killing.”

  The coauthors saw no evidence implicating the CIA, but they remained suspicious. Their suspicions were borne out in the hulking twenty-seven-volume appendix of the HSCA witnesses’ published testimony, which described behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Dulles and Helms to obstruct the Warren Commission. Along with the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, Dulles and Helms were determined to present Oswald as a crazed lone assassin and Ruby as a distraught citizen. Hoover released the FBI’s initial findings just two weeks after the killing, concluding that Oswald acted alone.