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

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

  7 and skipping haircuts: West, letter to Fred Pumpian-Mindlin (one of the researchers), June 20, 1967, West Archive.

  8 a “remarkable substance”: West and A. Mandell, “Hallucinogens,” Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, ed. Alfred M. Freedman and Harold I. Kaplan (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1967), 247–53. According to the book’s editors, West’s chapter was completed in 1966.

  9 “negate their egos”: David E. Smith and John Luce, Love Needs Care (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 259.

  10 in America’s “bohemian” quarters: West and Mandell, “Hallucinogens,” 252.

  11 “crackpots” who hypnotized: West and Gordon H. Deckert, “Dangers of Hypnosis,” Journal of the American Medical Association 192, no. 1 (Apr. 1965): 9–12.

  12 You’d never know from his published writing: In the many papers written by West, he never once mentioned his own drug experiments with human subjects, just those conducted by other researchers.

  13 a crumbling Victorian house: West published several academic papers about the Haight-Ashbury Project, all of which will be cited in this section, but the most relevant information was obtained from his archive at UCLA, which contains the diaries of many of the researchers who participated in the program. I interviewed several of the researchers as well as others who knew of the project through their work with West at the HAFMC that summer.

  14 a “laboratory” disguised as a “hippie crash pad”: West and James R. Allen, “Flight from Violence: Hippies and the Green Rebellion,” American Journal of Psychiatry 125, no. 3 (Sept. 1968): 365; West, James R. Allen, and Joshua Kaufman, “Runaways, Hippies and Marijuana,” American Journal of Psychiatry 126, no. 5 (Nov. 1969): 163.

  15 “semi-permanent observation post”: West and James R. Allen, “The Green Rebellion,” Sooner, Nov. 1967, 6.

  16 “with posters, flowers and paint”: Ibid.

  17 could furnish willing subjects: Author interview with David Smith; author interview with James Allen.

  18 records in West’s files: See, for instance, West, Allen, and Kaufman, “Runaways, Hippies and Marijuana,” which contains this acknowledgment: “This study was supported in part by a grant from the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, by a fellowship award from the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, Calif., awarded to Dr. West, and by Public Health Service Grant MH-35063 from National Institute of Mental Health.”

  19 the agency’s first “disguised laboratory”: The first and still definitive book on the MKULTRA program is by the former State Department official who compelled the agency to release its financial records: John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Norton, 1979). I also reviewed Marks’s files (CIA Behavior Experiments Collection—John Marks Donation, National Security Archive, Gehlman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.); for records of “Operation Midnight Climax,” the “safe house” projects run by George Hunter White in New York City and San Francisco in the 1960s, I reviewed White’s papers (George White Papers, 1932–1970, collection no. M1111), at Stanford University, in the library’s department of special collections. Other invaluable books on MKULTRA include Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985); Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (London: Verso, 1998); and Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, The Mind Manipulators (New York: Paddington Press, 1978). An additional resource was the published transcripts of Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, Joint Hearing Before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Human Resources, U.S. Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Sess., Aug. 3, 1977 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1977); and Human Drug Testing by the CIA, 1977, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, U.S. Senate, 95th Congress, 1st Sess., Sept. 20–21, 1977 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1977); hereafter referred to as the Kennedy-Inouye Hearings. The information that follows comes primarily from these sources.

  20 “I was a very minor missionary”: Troy Hooper, “Operation Midnight Climax: How the CIA Dosed S.F. Citizens with LSD,” S.F. Weekly, Mar. 14, 2012.

  21 Mass Conversion: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 170. A sanitized description of the project was released to the university by the CIA in 1977 (CIA MORI DocID: 17358); see Mick Hinton, “1950s OU Study Funded by CIA,” Oklahoman, Sept. 21, 1977, 4.

  22 funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 170; Hinton, “1950s OU Study,” 4. As both Marks and Hinton reported—and I documented in West’s files—the research was paid for by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (also called the Human Ecology Fund), run by an air force colonel named James Monroe, and by the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, both exposed during the 1970s congressional investigations as “cut-outs” for the CIA’s MKULTRA program.

  23 “bleed the energies of the hippie movement”: West and Allen, “The Green Rebellion,” 32.

  24 He was at work on a book: Memorandum of Agreement: Louis Jolyon West and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, for a work entitled Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States, Aug. 27, 1968, West Archive.

  25 By the early seventies he removed the title: I found the book listed as “in preparation” in a curriculum vitae dated Apr. 10, 1967 and another dated with just the year 1968, but in no version of West’s CVs after that (West Archive).

  26 Kathy Collins: All the information regarding Collins’s experience is taken directly from her diary, which is in the West Archive. I searched for Collins for years, only to learn in 2012 that she died around 2007.

  27 When West made one of his rare appearances: Ibid., entry of July 11, 1969.

  28 the CIA began to experiment on humans: Much of the information in this section comes from the books cited above: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate; Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams; Scheflin and Opton, The Mind Manipulators; and Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout. Also indispensable were the files of John Marks at the National Security Archive; the Rockefeller Commission report: The President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975); the Church Committee report: The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1976); and the transcripts of the Kennedy-Inouye Hearings from 1977.

  29 “deeper, comprehensive reality”: Albert Hofmann, LSD My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism and Science (MAPS.org., 2009), 209.

  30 “from Earth like a spaceship”: Xan Brooks, “Cary Grant: How 100 Acid Trips in Tinseltown ‘Changed My Life,’” The Guardian, May 12, 2017.

  31 forced to make false confessions: West, I. E. Farber, and Harry F. Harlow, “Brainwashing, Conditioning and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread),” Sociometry 20 (1957): 271–83. The information in this section about West’s work with POWs is from this paper.

  32 the “Black Sorcerer”: Kris Hollington, Wolves, Jackals, and Foxes: The Assassins Who Changed History (New York: St. Martin’s, 2015), 34.

  33 “a phonograph playing a disc”: Lee and Shlain, Acid Dreams, 27.

  34 “to influence human behavior”: Kennedy-Inouye Hearings, Aug. 3, 1977, Appendix A, 82.

  35 hypno-programmed assassins: Nicholas M. Horrock, “C.I.A. Documents Tell of 1954 Project to Create Involuntary Assassins,” New York Times, Feb. 9, 1978, A17.

  36 In December 1974: Seymour Hersh, “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces,” New York Times, Dec. 22, 1974.

  37 “Precautions must be taken”: Church Committee, Book 1, XVII, 391.

  38 “rights and interests of U.S. citizens in jeopardy”: Ibid., 390.

  39 deaths of at least two American citizens: Ibid., 386.

  40 The other was Frank Olson: Ibid. (“The Death of Dr. Frank Olson”), 394–403.

 
; 41 strongly suggests that the CIA: Eric Olson, personal communications with author; Wormwood, Netflix (Errol Morris, dir.), 2017.

  42 “waiting for him in the Senate hearing room”: Jo Thomas, “Key Witness Testifies in Private on C.I.A. Drug Tests,” New York Times, Sept. 22, 1977, 1.

  43 “quietly dropped”: Anthony Marro, “C.I.A. Head Offers Drug-Test Files If Justice Department Has Inquiry,” New York Times, Aug. 10, 1977, 1.

  44 receive total criminal immunity: Thomas, “Key Witness Testifies,” 1.

  45 “Can we obtain control”: “Objectives and Agencies” (CIA document), May 23, 1951, 1, 7, CIA Behavior Experiments Collection—John Marks Donation, National Security Archive, Gehlman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

  46 “Can we force an individual to act”: Untitled CIA document, 1952, ibid.

  47 “an act of attempted assassination?”: Untitled CIA document, Jan. 1954, ibid.

  48 “perverse” and “corrupt”: Kennedy-Inouye Hearings, 1st Sess., Aug. 3, 1977, 16.

  49 “freedom of individual and institutions”: Ibid., Sept. 20, 1977, 1.

  50 Inouye called it “grandiose and sinister”: Ibid., Aug. 3, 1977, 13.

  51 Stansfield Turner, swore: Ibid., Sept. 20, 1977, 145.

  52 “may never come out”: “Control C.I.A., Not Behavior,” editorial, New York Times, Aug. 5, 1977, 16.

  53 That program never coalesced: The closest thing was an in-house investigation by the CIA, called the Victims Task Force. Unsurprisingly, the three-man team of agents (two from the CIA, one from the DEA) turned up only two victims of MKULTRA, both women. Each had been unwittingly dosed with LSD at a party in Greenwich Village on January 11, 1953 (one of the women received a $15,000 settlement from the federal government, the other was deceased).

  54 The New York Times identified him: Nicholas M. Horrock, “Private Institutions Used in C.I.A. Effort to Control Behavior: $25 Million Program,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 1977, A-1.

  55 not one researcher: Further, I spoke to Robert H. Wiltse and Frank Laubinger, the two CIA agents on the task force, and they told me they never even contacted a university or other facility where MKULTRA research had occurred. Their seven-month investigation consisted of contacting less than half a dozen people who were named in the diary of George H. White, the CIA agent who conducted experiments in safe houses in New York and San Francisco between 1953 and 1965. When I asked Wiltse why the academic institutions and federal facilities where most of the MKULTRA research occurred had been ignored, he replied that he “didn’t know.” When pressed, he said it “didn’t seem necessary,” adding that he never even left the CIA headquarters in Langley, during the investigation. Laubinger told me that he was the one who investigated the safe houses operated by White, and that he believed Wiltse was responsible for investigating the academic institutions. Laubinger called Gottlieb “an honorable man who was dealt a blow” by the congressional investigations. He said if the communists had mind control technology in their arsenal, “Well, maybe we ought to have it too.”

  56 “a secret twenty-five year”: Horrock, “Private Institutions.”

  57 “I’m just drawing a total blank here”: Author interview with Stansfield Turner.

  58 “CIA operators and agents”: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 97.

  59 The first one was dated June 11, 1953: All the information that follows is taken directly from this document in the West Archive.

  60 “My Good Friend”: “Sherman R. Grifford,” letter to West, July 2, 1953, West Archive.

  61 “you consider me ‘an asset’”: West, letter to “Sherman R. Grifford,” July 7, 1953, ibid.

  62 his “new look”: “Sherman R. Grifford,” letter to West, Apr. 21, 1954, ibid.

  63 “I have been doing no research”: West, letter to Dr. Mark R. Everett, Dean, University of Oklahoma, School of Medicine, June 8, 1954, ibid.

  64 “a non-profit private research foundation”: West to Staff Judge Advocate, Lackland Air Force Base, Dec. 13, 1954, ibid.

  65 keep West and other researchers properly paid: Marks, Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 63.

  66 “The Air Force will not release you”: “Sherman R. Grifford,” letter to West, Sept. 16, 1954, West Archive.

  67 he claimed to have achieved: West, “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” n.d., 1–5, ibid. I found this five-page document in the West Archive attached to a nine-page paper called “Report on Research in Hypnosis.”

  68 “true memories” with “false ones”: West, “Report on Research in Hypnosis,” 6–7, ibid.

  69 “a different (fictional) event actually did occur”: Ibid., 7.

  70 “deepening the trance that can be produced”: West, “Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” 2.

  71 “made standardized observations very difficult”: West, “Report on Research in Hypnosis,” 8.

  72 “sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated”: West, “Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility,” 5.

  73 chlorpromazine, reserpine: West, “Report on Research in Hypnosis,” 2–4.

  74 “he wishes just the opposite”: Ibid., 7.

  75 that the CIA had turned over to the Senate: CIA MORI DocID: 17441.

  76 “The effects of these agents”: CIA Document 43-18.

  77 mocking headlines like the “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight”: Bill Richards, “The Gang That Couldn’t Spray Straight,” Washington Post, Sept. 21, 1977, A-1. Richards described the previous day’s testimony as “more a portrayal of a group of bumbling amateurs than of American James Bonds.”

  78 inducing insanity in the lab: Ross Corduff, “Driving of Patient to Insanity to Perfect Treatment Explained,” Corvallis Gazette-Times, Oct. 5, 1963.

  79 “mental derangement in the laboratory”: Marge Davenport, “Sleep Linked to Sanity of Humans,” Oregon Journal, Oct. 4, 1963, 2.

  80 “had been confined to animals”: United Press International, “C.I.A. Tells Oklahoma U. of Mind-Research Role,” New York Times, Sept. 3, 1977; see also John Greiner, “Ex-OU Psychiatrist Reports Contact with CIA Mind Control Research,” Sunday Oklahoman, Aug. 21, 1977, 1; Mick Hinton, “O.U. Mind Control Experiments Bared: School Told CIA Funded Secret Tests,” Saturday Oklahoman and Times, Sept. 3, 1977.

  81 were CIA fronts: “C.I.A. Tells Oklahoma U.”; Hinton, “O.U. Mind Control Experiments Bared”; Andy Rieger, “Sharp Informed of CIA Projects,” Oklahoma Daily, Sept. 30, 1977, 1.

  82 Oklahoma revealed a heavily redacted memo: Rieger, “Sharp Informed of CIA Projects,” 1; Steve Walden, “CIA Grants Shown: Report ‘Heavily Censored,’” Oklahoma Daily, Oct. 1, 1977, 1–2.

  83 through his retirement in 1988: West, letter to the editor, San Francisco Examiner, Mar. 31, 1988, 1–3, West Archive. “The statement that I was a paid consultant to the CIA and one of its ‘top hypnotists’ is false,” wrote West. A few months later, West wrote to another magazine: “I have never worked for the CIA” (West, letter to Michael Sigman, editor of LA Weekly, June 2, 1988, West Archive).

  84 “sought and received my counsel”: West, letter to Marvin Karno, M.D., Robert O. Pasnau, M.D., and Joel Yager, M.D., Jan. 15, 1991, ibid.

  85 “in Goebbels’ tradition of the Big Lie”: West, letter to the editor, Summer Bruin, June 27, 1993, 2, ibid.

  86 “The Center for the Story and Reduction of Violence”: The information about West’s Violence Center is from news articles; congressional and state assembly testimony; interviews with colleagues of West (both involved in the proposed project and opposed to it); and, most prominently, several drafts of the project in West’s hand from his files in the West Archive—these documents reveal his efforts to tamp down the project’s more radical objectives in response to the growing public outcry.

  87 Governor Ronald Reagan: Reagan unveiled West’s plan in his State of the State address to the legislature on January 11, 1973. See William Endicott,
“$850 Million Surplus in Taxes Told; Reagan Calls for Refunds,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 12, 1973, A-1.

  88 “remote monitoring devices”: West, “Center for Prevention of Violence, Neuropsychiatric Institute, UCLA,” Sept. 1, 1972 (first draft of project proposal), 5, West Archive; Staff of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Committee of the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 93rd Congress, 2nd Sess., Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification (Washington, D.C.: GPO, November 1974), 13, 35–37.

  89 threatened “privacy and self-determination”: Individual Rights and the Federal Role, 34.

  90 helped to prosecute Manson: Among the agencies contacted by West for help in “developing plans” for the Violence Center were the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, and the office of California Attorney General Evelle Younger (ibid., 348).

  91 He’d appeared as a witness many times: West’s highest profile appearance as an expert witness in a brainwashing case came later, however, at the trial of kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst in 1976. Two of West’s staff at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, Keith Ditman and Joel Hochman, testified for the defense during the death-penalty phase of the Tate–LaBianca trial (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, Helter Skelter [New York: Norton, 1994], 572–79).

  92 “that it can be done”: Author interview with D. Smith. In the same interview, Smith expressed surprise when I mentioned MKULTRA, saying he’d never heard of it—or that the CIA gave LSD to citizens, even in San Francisco, without their knowledge.

  93 so often described as “hypnotic”: Bugliosi and Gentry, Helter Skelter, 615.

  94 taught Manson how to hypnotize: Ed Sanders, The Family, 3rd ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), 43.

  95 Deanyer had learned hypnosis in the navy: A FOIA to the FBI resulted in the release of forty-seven heavily redacted pages of a forty-nine-page file (FOIPA no. 0961945-000). The file confirmed that Deanyer, born Burnie William Smith Jr., on June 3, 1934, in Wheeling, West Virginia, learned hypnotism while stationed in Pearl Harbor with the U.S. Navy, between 1942 and 1946. After changing his name and opening the Deanyer School of Hypnotism in Honolulu, he was indicted in 1956 on charges of sex trafficking underage girls. At his trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he’d used hypnotism to induce female students at his school to become prostitutes. Several police officers testified that when they interviewed the victims they still “appeared to be in a trance and would say nothing [redacted] and refused to testify against him.”