CHAOS: CHARLES MANSON, THE C.I.A. AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES - TOM O’NEILL

Full confession: I’m not a Manson guy. I’m obviously not old enough to have experienced the Manso thing first hand, nor to really to mourn the world that his crimes supposedly ended, so it was never an option to be that sort of first-order Manson guy. However, there is a type of person, my age and older (are there young Manson guys? Or any non-male ones? I would guess that the sheer volume of lurid crime stories nowadays would make any potential gen z Manson guy pick another big-media-story atrocity to fixate on) who’s really into the crime and into Manson’s persona. I definitely knew these people in High School and College into his music and general vibe as a killer hippy (his racism was never brought up by these people). Second to the Kennedy Assassination (which, of course, come up in this book), Manson is the number one boomer conspiracy obession. I didn’t think I liked Manson at all, it always seemed weird but contained, a crazy guy got a lot of very stoned young people to do something awful, but then I listened to the You Must Remember This season about Manson and was intrigued. There’s so many characters in the Manson thing, and so many of them or either famous or so deeply bizarre (towards the end of the book, part of a conspiracy revolves around the facts that a) a body was discovered without pubic hair and b) there was someone in Manson’s orbit famous for having a vest made of pubic hair) it’s fertile ground to go deep. And man, does O’Neill go deep. The book stems from an article he was originally assigned for the 30 year anniversary in ‘99. Instead of making his deadline, he developed Manson-Brain and stayed caught in the web, catching the Tarintino lead 50 year anniversary “nostalgia”.

 And the book is really built around this: O’Neill’s development of a Manson obsession. It’s a book about putting together this book; we follow O’Neill piecing things together and pulling back layers, not the crime and surrounding milieu from start to finish. Which is why we get all these weird cul-de-sacs, like the first 150 pages where it seems like O’Neill is pursuing a theory that Manson didn’t do it (the Tate killings) because Jay Sebring and Wojciech Frykowski (2 of the victims) assaulted and raped a drug dealer in the Cielo house earlier and the famous slaughter was revenge. There’s also a lot of time spent trying to confirm a rumor and then uncover a cover-up w/r/t Terry Melcher hanging out with Manson (specifically several people report a tableau in which Melcher was tripping and begging on his knees at Manson’s feet) and a general sense that someone was covering for Manson because he’s technically on Federal Parole this whole time and he keeps avoiding trouble. Here I’m pretty sympathetic to the conspiracy that the LAPD and the LACS were lenient at best with Manson because he was a racist prison nut and violently anti-Black Panther and they (the authorities) were maybe hoping he’d not be all talk and try to start a fight with the Panthers.       Of course the LA Panthers were famously the target of a murderous COINTELPRO operation, very much along the lines of what O’Neill’s alleging in the book. My favorite section is the book focuses on the less famous CIA counterpart to the FBI’s COINTELPRO, CHAOS. In this section we learn about doctors in the Haight during the Summer of Love who were CIA connected. The guy who ran the Haigh Ashberry Free clinic seems to have gotten CIA money and did a lot of, what I would consider very obvious, research about how confining rats crowded conditions then subjecting them to doses of LSD and then Speed would make them violent. Manson apparently frequented the clinic with his girls for STD treatments. Dr. Jolly West, the famous MKULTRA evil acid doctor, was around in scene too, apparently doing research on implaning or erasing memories and getting people to kill. Clearly all of this is evocative but he can’t make the final connection and show the two together, beyond both being the San Francisco at the same time, both up to no good. There’s a great rundown of all the shady shit Jolly West was involved in, though I believe I’ve read about most of it elsewhere. O’Neill claims that he proves for the first time the West was definitely involved with MKULTRA, which I didn’t know was up for debate. There’s a few more people in Manson’s orbit that O’Neill pegs as CIA (or con-men who are telling people they’re in the CIA). I love all the crazy CIA spy conspiracy stuff and the LSD mind-control angle but even O’Neill admits that he can’t finally connect it all. He includes pictures in the book of his work space which is strewn with overstuff files and folders and feature literal white-boards with spider-web connections between names, the classic conspiracy nut decoration. We get interviews with major figures that stall out or end with them refusing to talk. We get the sense that this quest will go on forever. Either way, the CIA really was drugging people and trying to control their minds and all sorts of wild sci-fi shit. I wish I could believe that Manson was a CIA experiment gone wrong, or perhaps the model (since he could order his followers to kill on command and without remorse) for a particular CIA project but I’ll have to settle with what we do know for sure, which is already beyond the pale. 69 Political Piggies