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

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

  “Hoover lied his eyes out,” the Warren Commission’s Hale Boggs later testified in HSCA hearings, “on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it.”

  Dulles was no less complicit. He’d urged the Warren Commission to limit itself to reviewing the FBI’s investigation, rather than mounting its own. In secret, he met with Helms and other CIA officials to coach them on what questions the commission planned to ask.

  Faced with these revelations, the HSCA could only conclude that intelligence groups were hiding their links to Oswald and Ruby, if not a CIA effort to assassinate Castro. Some believed that the plot on Castro may have been turned on Kennedy, after his Bay of Pigs invasion failed and he embraced other policy changes that curtailed the agency’s influence, like reducing the U.S. presence in Vietnam, warming diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and decreasing military spending. Even President Johnson had his doubts. “The President felt that [the] CIA had had something to do with the plot,” said an Oval Office memo from ’67.

  If the CIA wanted to shut Ruby up, what was it that he had on it? Burt Griffin, an attorney for the Warren Commission, appeared before the HSCA to say that he and his partner had nearly confirmed Ruby’s ties to gunrunning schemes by anti-Castro Cubans, who were shipping arms from the United States to Cuba in hopes of deposing the dictator.

  At the time, Griffin had no idea that the CIA sponsored these gunrunning schemes. In March 1964—when Ruby was weeks away from his “examination” by Jolly West—Griffin and his partner approached Richard Helms, requesting all the information the CIA had on Ruby. They believed it was possible “that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald.”

  Helms offered only a curt reply: “The CIA would be very limited in its possibility of assisting.” Griffin was baffled—this was someone who was supposed to be helping him. He appealed again. By the time Helms mustered a response, months had passed, and West had long since paid his fateful visit to Ruby. “An examination of Agency files,” Helms wrote, “has produced no information on Jack Ruby or his activities.”

  As for Jolly West, he also did his part to keep Ruby untainted from any whiff of conspiracy. As the Warren Commission tried to divine Ruby’s motive, West sent a confidential letter to Earl Warren himself, a copy of which I discovered in the HSCA’s files. Dated June 23, 1964, and addressed to “My Dear Mr. Chief Justice,” West’s note contends that his “examinations” of Ruby gave him unique insight into the man’s “motivations for the murder.” (This despite the fact that West had said Ruby was “positively insane.”) He was confident that Ruby had acted in an “irrational and unpremeditated” manner when he shot Oswald, “wanting to prove that the Jews—through himself—loved their President and were not cowards.” Moreover, West asserted that Ruby “had never seen [Oswald] in his life” before his involvement in the Kennedy assassination broke. Without consent from his patient or his patient’s lawyers, West was offering confidential medical assessments tailored to political ends. “Please let me know if there is anything else that I can do to be of assistance,” he added. Warren didn’t. In an internal note, he dismissed the psychiatrist as an “interloper,” writing, “I see no need to do anything with this material.” Had he known of West’s CIA connections, he may have reacted differently.

  If West couldn’t foist his version of events onto the Warren Commission, he could at least make sure that no compromising information about Ruby emerged. At his urging, a psychiatrist named Dr. Werner Tuteur examined Ruby in July 1965 to prepare for an upcoming hearing on his sanity. Tuteur submitted a twelve-page report to West—it was there in his files, bundled with an edited version that West had submitted to the court. He struck just one passage, the most vital: “There is considerable guilt about the fact that he sent guns to Cuba,” Tuteur had written. “He feels he ‘helped the enemy’ and incriminated himself. ‘They got what they wanted on me.’” Erasing those lines, West expunged the very evidence Griffin had been looking for.

  West kept meticulous notes on the Ruby case, all dutifully filed. As investigators, scholars, and journalists struggled to piece together the puzzle, he watched from afar, compiling records for his own book about Ruby. He never ended up writing it, but he paid close attention to an exhaustive 1965 volume, The Trial of Jack Ruby, by John Kaplan and Jon R. Waltz. They wrote, “The fact is that nobody knows why Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald—and this includes Jack Ruby.”

  Jolly West had jotted down that line with a note to himself: “good quote.” It was, until now, the closest he ever came to receiving public credit for his work.

  Coda: “The Data-Spew”

  Libra, Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel about Lee Harvey Oswald, features a character named Nicholas Branch—a retired CIA analyst tasked with internally reviewing the agency’s conduct in the JFK assassination, once and for all. The assignment swallows him for fifteen years. The agency pays for the construction of a lavish, fireproof home office, which becomes, to Branch, “the book-filled room, the room of documents, the room of theories and dreams.” He reposes in “a glove-leather armchair,” surrounded by shelves and filing cabinets bursting with folders, cassettes, legal pads, and books. Branch “sits in the data-spew of hundreds of lives.” He comes to feel that “the past is changing as he writes.” And his ultimate subject, he knows, isn’t crime or politics. It’s “men in small rooms.”

  Although I had a sagging sofa instead of a glove-leather armchair, and while nothing in my apartment was fire-insured, let alone fireproof, I identified a lot with Nicholas Branch. I was immersed in records, voices from the past, competing narratives, complexity that sometimes seemed to multiply for its own sake. No matter which way I moved, the stories shifted beneath my feet. I was a man in a small room reading about men in small rooms. But where Nicholas Branch had the full backing of the CIA, I had only myself.

  As I worked to fill out my book proposal and, I hoped, draw my reporting to a close, I had dreams of sharing my findings with the members of the Warren Commission, brandishing evidence they’d never been able to prize out of the CIA. But most of the commission’s members were long dead. Gerald Ford wasn’t, but he wanted nothing to do with me. Burt Griffin, who’d been responsible for handling the Ruby aspect of the investigation, said in a phone interview that my findings were “very scary stuff,” and that West’s relationship with the CIA “should be investigated.” But he was long retired—if anyone was going to launch an investigation, it wouldn’t be him.

  I had better luck with Arlen Specter, then the senior senator from my home state of Pennsylvania. Late in 2002, visiting my parents in Philadelphia, I decided to see if he was interested in the papers I’d uncovered.

  Specter had joined the Warren Commission as a young investigative attorney. He’d participated in Ruby’s appearances before the commission. When Ruby dilated on his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, he thought he had an ally in Specter, one of the commission’s only Jewish staff members. Specter was also responsible for the Warren Commission’s controversial “single bullet theory,” which argued that one bullet had taken a circuitous route through the bodies of John F. Kennedy and Governor John Connally, who had been sitting in front of Kennedy when he was shot. This theory ruled out the possibility of a second gunman, and Specter regarded it as gospel truth; he referred to it as the Single Bullet Conclusion. Since his role in the commission had launched his career, Specter had been unusually forthcoming about it over the years, eager to defend his position and to remind voters of his role in a seminal chapter of American history.

  Getting Specter’s attention took months. Through his aides, I wrangled what was supposed to be a two-minute phone interview. He called me from the Senate floor. I laid out my case as quickly as possible, with background on West, his involvement with the CIA’s MKULTRA experiments, and his examination of Ruby.

  Specter was intrigued. Our call ended up running to twenty minutes. Though he had no knowledge of the
agency’s mind-control program or the congressional investigation into it, he seemed open to the possibility that West could have tampered with Ruby and, thus, with the Warren Commission’s findings.

  “Can you fax me these documents?” he asked, offering to approach the CIA about them.

  I wanted him to see them in person. Once they were out of my hands, there was no telling where they might end up, and alerting the CIA to them right away might not be in the best interest of my reporting. Specter sighed.

  Knowing that congressmen usually went home for weekends, I took a chance: “If you’re going to be in Philadelphia…”

  He had a squash match that Saturday at the Wyndham Plaza Hotel. He suggested I meet him there. His aide would call to set it up.

  I was thrilled—a sitting senator, a key investigator for the Warren Commission, was willing to hear me out in person. I followed up with a fax sharing some of the New York Times’s reporting on MKULTRA and more information on West.

  And then I got paranoid.

  I hadn’t gone through every box of West’s files yet. What if divulging my findings to Specter jeopardized my access to those? Someone could get there first and remove anything incriminating.

  But that was outlandish, I thought. I was flying back to L.A. at the end of the weekend. If I went to the UCLA files right away, I’d be fine—even the CIA couldn’t act so quickly.

  And yet the more I thought about it, the more distrustful I got. Why was Specter so eager to see the documents? He didn’t seem to care a whit about my credentials, or lack thereof. And could it really be true that a longtime senator had never heard of MKULTRA? Specter was the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the same group that had investigated MKULTRA back in the day. He had the power to open doors for me, but if he was bent on upholding the Warren Commission’s findings, wouldn’t he just as soon close those doors?

  I was overthinking everything, and then overthinking my overthinking. At the end of the day, I decided to err on the side of caution and postpone our meeting. Maybe in the future I could have an attorney accompany me, or some impartial observer.

  The next morning, I left messages at Specter’s hotel and with his press office: I was profoundly sorry, but an emergency had come up, and I really had to leave for L.A. that afternoon. I went to run a few errands, trying to convince myself I hadn’t made a huge mistake. To this day, I wonder about that.

  While I was out, the phone rang and my mom picked up. It was Arlen Specter, sounding confused. Having been briefed on my plan, my mom told Specter I was on my way to the airport. (Her feelings were mixed, she told me later—her son was important enough to merit a call from a senator on a weekend, but her son had also made her lie to that senator.)

  Specter was gobsmacked. “So he’s not going to meet with me?”

  “I’m afraid not,” my mom said.

  I tried to reschedule our meeting for years. When I finally got him on the phone again, I was so shocked to have gotten through that I realized I’d long since stopped preparing for our talk. It had been months since I’d rehearsed the particulars of West and Ruby. I was much less convincing. He wasn’t interested in seeing any of my papers.

  “I just don’t see where this all leads,” Specter said. That was a phrase I’d be hearing a lot in the coming years.

  12

  Where Does It All Go?

  Writing the Music

  Jolly West’s MKULTRA letters were my biggest discovery, I thought. If there were an answer to that question of questions—how Manson got his followers to kill—I felt it had to be there. I marshaled my energy in the hopes of discovering that they’d crossed paths, or that Manson’s enormous success in creating the Family had some debt to the CIA’s mind-control techniques. Even if I turned up nothing, I thought considering Manson and West in parallel was a worthy effort. Theirs was one of the great non sequiturs of the sixties. Manson, the ex-con, the Hollywood striver, the oversexed, unwashed guru who’d been discarded from society, had used LSD to collect and reprogram his followers. In the summer of love, he walked the same streets and frequented the same clinic as Jolly West, the upright air force officer, the world-renowned psychiatrist, the eloquent hypnotist who wrote to his CIA handler that there was “no more vital undertaking conceivable” than to dose unwitting research subjects with LSD and replace their memories.

  Both men were moralizers, hypocrites, and narcissists. And both were determined to make their presence felt in an America they felt had gone rotten. On the stand at his own trial, Manson said, “Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment?… It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says rise, it says kill. Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.” On some level, he was right.

  I resumed work on my proposal feeling that I had enough to make even hardened skeptics doubt themselves a little bit. Though it took me years to get all my words in fighting condition, I finally finished in 2005. It came in at a whopping eighty thousand words, as long as many actual books. On the merits of the proposal, Penguin Press agreed to publish the book. I was elated, and more than a little relieved. I hadn’t known whether any respectable publisher would vouch for a project that mentioned Manson, Jack Ruby, and CIA mind control in the same breath. Penguin’s support was vindicating, and the advance payment it offered was more than enough to let me tie up my reporting.

  The complete manuscript was due in early 2008, a little less than three years away. Now all I had to do was finish my reporting and write the thing. The following year would be the thirtieth anniversary of the murders—I’d only missed my Premiere deadline by a decade. But that had been a magazine story. This would be a book.

  I had big plans for the money from my advance, which was more lucrative than I’d allowed myself to imagine it could be. I upgraded my computer, junked my old Acura, and bought… a used ’85 Volvo, for four hundred bucks. Everything else would go back into the book. Although my friends advised me to buy property and take an exotic vacation, I didn’t even consider it. I had at least three years of rigorous reporting and writing ahead of me. The money could help me accomplish what had been too costly or labor-intensive before. I hired two research assistants to help me get organized. They transcribed the endless hours of taped interviews I’d amassed—more than two hundred cassettes by then, most of their ninety minutes completely filled. They helped type out the handwritten notes on my sixty legal pads and thirty notebooks, and some of the passages I’d highlighted in some three hundred books. Most of my papers were in one of the 190 binders I had, and yet I’d allowed a half dozen stacks of unfiled documents to grow to about four feet high apiece. (At least they were separated by subject.) Reviewing the massive material record of my work was unsettling. I was rediscovering the fragments, micro-obsessions, and niggling questions that had tugged me onward when I began my reporting. Many I’d simply forgotten about; others were unresolved and probably always would be. But a few started to tempt me again. Now that I was finalizing everything, I had to be sure I hadn’t missed a lead. If a doubt sat in the back of my mind long enough, I added it to my to-do list. Soon it was dangerously long for someone with a book to write.

  One of the most basic problems I’d had over the years was tracking people down. Many former members of the Family had gone to great lengths to make themselves unreachable: they’d changed their names and severed ties with anyone who might’ve known about their pasts. At least the celebrities who’d said no to me once upon a time could be reached through publicists. Now I was looking for people who’d gone off the grid. I didn’t necessarily want to force anyone to speak to me. But what if someone in the Family remembered Jolly West, or Reeve Whitson, or any of the shadowy figures I’d investigated? What if, like the detective Charlie Guenther, they had something they’d wanted to get off their chest for thirty years? Some of my hostile interviewees had thawed when they saw that I didn’t have the sensational, tabloid-style agenda
that fueled most reporting on Manson.

  So I also hired a private detective, a retired LASO deputy nicknamed Moon, who worked out of an office in Arizona. To this day, I’ve never met him, though we’ve shared thousands of emails and calls. Moon found people and police records I never could’ve turned up on my own. He’d participated in the LASO raid of the Spahn Ranch, and he reached out to other retired cops, urging them to speak to me. He also schooled me in skip tracing, the art of finding people who don’t want to be found. Before long I was paying to access digitized cross-directories and databases, including one called Merlin that required a PI license to use. (Moon took care of that for me.) Between the two of us, Moon and I located just about everyone who’d hung around with Manson, most of them scattered up and down the West Coast. I added them to my interview list, along with the usual mix of cops, lawyers, drug dealers, researchers, Hollywood has-beens, and congressmen.

  The extra help freed me up to do what I did best: dive into the archives. I had about a dozen places I needed to visit to fill in holes in my paper trail. There were old LAPD and LASO homicide detectives; district attorneys who’d offered to show me their stuff; files on the Family from courts, police departments, parks departments, and highway patrols that I’d persuaded the state of California to let me see for the first time; and personal files from reporters who’d long ago tried to investigate the same stuff I was after, most of them hitting the same dead ends.

  My to-do list was now as long as it’d been in the heaviest days of my reporting. And sometimes, behind my excitement and anxiety, I could feel a lower, deeper dread. Even if I could strengthen the bridge between Manson and West, I didn’t have a smoking gun—some fabled needle at the Spahn Ranch with Jolly West’s fingerprints on it, or a classified memo from the Los Angeles DA’s office to the FBI. I worried I never would. The evidence I’d amassed against the official version of the Manson murders was so voluminous, from so many angles, that it was overdetermined. I could poke a thousand holes in the story, but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact, the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another. It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies with Hollywood elite, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers, an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD mind-control experiments tested in the field… could it? There was no way. To imagine state, local, and federal law enforcement cooperating in perfect harmony, with the courts backing them up—it made no sense. What I’d uncovered was something closer to an improvised, shambolic effort to contain the fallout from the murders. I couldn’t walk myself through the sequence of events without tripping on something. I was a lousy conspiracy theorist, at the end of the day, because I wanted nothing left to the realm of the theoretical.