Tom O'Neill (4)

The Tate-La Bianca Murders, orchestrated at the behest of crazed LSD cult leader Charles Manson, are one of the defining crimes of the 20th century, ending the innocence of the 60s in an orgy of violence. Tom O'Neill was assigned to write a magazine piece in 1999 on the 30th anniversary of the murders. His reporting lead him into a wilderness of mirrors, of uncanny coincidences and official denials, that crosses into the land of conspiracy. In this book, O'Neill takes us through his journey show more down the rabbit hole.

The book opens with a 2006 confrontation between O'Neill and Manson family prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. Bugliosi was a politically ambitious district attorney who's 1974 book Helter Skelter is the best selling true crime book of all time and defined the basic premises of the case: Manson's charismatic domination of his followers, his twinned motives of terrifying record producer Terry Melcher and sparking an apocalyptic race war as prophesied in The Beatles White Album. Proving Manson's culpability is not all that straight forward. While his followers gleefully confessed, the case had to thread a needle that proved Manson's direct responsibility via his powers of mental domination and the culpability of the people who wielded the knives. Helter Skelter was a best seller, and as O'Neill did his research, he discovered that Bugliosi's book, and more importantly, case were full of holes, errors in timelines, and key omissions.

The first section of the book focuses on Hollywood in the 60s, and the "live freaky die freaky" attitude of the community towards Tate and Polanski. Roman Polanski was an abusive husband, and the scene at Cielo Drive was much uglier than popular memory depicts. In this swirl of gossip, with drug deals and mob ties, the key fact that O'Neill uncovered is that contrary to Bugliosi, Terry Melcher knew Manson more closely than he stated on the stand. Melcher never signed Manson to a record deal, but he saw Manson multiple times after the murders, and witnesses remember him begging for forgiveness.

The second weirdness is around the police. Prior to the murders, Manson had spent years in Federal prison. He was out on parole, a known figure of interest, and he should have been in jail for numerous mundane crimes like car theft, drug possession, shooting a drug dealer, and the whole underage-rape-sex-cult thing. The LA Sheriff Department made a massive raid on Spahn Ranch, where The Family was hiding, days after the murder, but Manson and his followers were not held, and spent months on the lam in Death Valley.

Police incompetence is not a surprise, but this is a lot. O'Neill argues that Manson had legal protection and that he was likely an informant. Records of this, if they still exist, have not been released, but even fear of reputational damage seems excessive. What is known in general terms is that multiple police and intelligence agencies, including locals in LA, the FBI through COINTELPRO, and the CIA through a project called CHAOS, all had efforts to infiltrate Leftist groups and sabotage/neutralize them. Getting the Black Panthers to trade shots with anyone and everyone was a key strategic objective across the forces of law and order.

And then the story gets uncanny. Manson was on parole, and his parole officer was Dr Robert Smith, a San Francisco-based pharmacologist working at UC Berkeley on the effects of LSD and amphetamines on violence in rodents, with a sideline in the practical applications of this research. Robert Smith was one of the founders of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) in 1967, and Manson became Manson during the summer of love, spending a lot of time dropping acid and hanging around the clinic with Smith and his girls. Robert Smith was unusually lenient and protective of Manson for a parole officer, and in a six hour interview offered vague denials for his actions during this period.

At the same time during the Summer of Love, the HAFMC hosted Dr Louis "Jolly" West, who is one of the more shadowy figures of the 20th century. O'Neill dug through West's papers at UCLA, finding a smoking gun of ties between West and Sidney Gottlieb, the director of the CIA's MKULTRA. West was one of the foremost researchers on mind control and on the use of LSD to erase memories, implant false memories.

There's no evidence that West and Manson ever met, unfortunately, but West was connected with a lot of weird incidents (which by the way did not come up in Lemov's "The Instability of Truth", which covered quite a lot of West's career.) West was an expert witness in the trial of Jimmy Shaver, an Air Force technician who was convicted of raping and murdering a three year old girl in 1954. Shaver had no memories of the incident, which West recovered with hypnosis and sodium pentothal. Shaver also suffered from migraine headaches, and the base psychiatrist was one Dr. Louis "Jolly" West. Again, there's no evidence for direct involvement, the Lackland Air Base medical records for 1954 are incomplete, with last names S-Sh missing. West also showed up in a similar way during the Kennedy assassination. He interviewed Jack Ruby, the man who shot Oswald. According to O'Neill, prior to contact with West, Ruby had no memory or motive for why he show Oswald, but was otherwise coherent. After meeting West, Ruby was broken, paranoid, psychotic. Could West have manipulated Manson as well?

The book closes out with likely cover-up on another murder near Death Valley, where a young Italian man's death was recorded as a suicide by local cops, despite numerous inconsistencies in the record.

O'Neill describes himself as a lousy conspiracy theorist. He admits any explanation of the Manson murders is overdetermined: Can it plausibly be a drug deal gone wrong, LAPD counter-insurgency, and CIA mind control all at once? Not really, but the "official" story is somehow even less true. I wonder if Manson is a uniquely unstable historical nexus, or if somehow any event disintegrates under close examination? Unfortunately, we'll likely never know, as old age comes for the remaining witnesses.

Utterly compelling, Chaos is a unique study of both the 60s and the research process. show less

There are two stories running concurrently in 'Chaos'. One is an investigation into past investigations of the Manson murders leading to new and disturbing findings. The other is a story of obsession and an insight into the mind of that dying breed, the investigative journalist.

The two stories are as important as each other and in no way could it be said that O'Neill is expressing any form of gonzo narcissism in describing his processes. On the contrary, he is self-critical and well aware of show more the dangers of falling down the conspiracist's rabbit-hole.

Don't be fooled by the publicity either ... it tells some truths about the Manson murders but not the truth because no one knows the truth and any role oforthe CIA remains speculative and not quite proven at the end of the day. O'Neill would not claim otherwise.

The point though is that O'Neill does demonstrate the moral turpitude of the American State and CIA, does have evidence of some link between Manson and the shenanigans of its representatives and does shatter the standard narrative about the murders and their motivation.

If you are expecting some final revelation that is proven, dried and dusted off, forget it. What you get above all is an evidenced chipping away at the given Bugliosi narrative until it no longer stands up. Bugliosi looks increasingly like an ambitious chancer.

He was certainly not a very nice person. O'Neill demonstrates this without rancour yet one can see how a relatively young and ambitious prosecutor constructed a narrative to enhance his career and then assumed no one would be energetic or fool enough to go much deeper.

O'Neill is that energetic fool. He finds not so much evidence for one explanation as sufficient evidence for Bugliosi's narrative to be misleading, a rather sad assessment since the possibility of a final truth has probably been buried along with so many now-aged actors in this horrible story.

The past is another country, it was once famously said. The Hollywood of the 1960s is barely recoverable to the reader of the twenty-first century yet O'Neill perhaps could have made more of one salient fact - the players were all very young, unmoored and mostly immature.

Once you know this, then the world of Polanski and Melcher and Dennis Wilson looks more like a lot of young men who are quite simply out of their depth with too much cash in hand, creating a honey pot for yet another set of chancers like Manson and Beausoleil.

However, O'Neill manages to sow a reasonable distrust of all previously given narratives by finding evidence of a whole range of new possibilities and probabilities that may or may not be significant or connected to each other but offer far more plausible leads than those offered in the past.

We are reminded of the JFK assassination narrative where a convenient tale designed to shut investigation down and control a situation starts to unravel as more evidence comes to light, not only about the crime but the handling of the crime by the authorities.

Because the book reads like a thriller and because the unfolding of the story is part of the pleasure (a grim pleasure perhaps), I am reluctant to say too much in case of spoilers but the presentation of hard facts about psychological experimentation in Haight-Ashbury must be noted.

The biggest elephant in this zoo full of weighty creatures is the question of how a small-time crook developed the ability to bind so many people to him in ways that lasted long after conviction and were to result in appalling crimes. This problem is not solved by the book.

What we come to see is that (circumstantially) Manson is to be found connected to whatever the sociopathic Dr. Louis West may have been doing in Haight-Ashbury prior to the murders. For a considerable period of time, Manson also seemed to be highly protected from parole officers.

Was this incompetence or was it just the ineptitude of a sleepy system with more limited technological capability than authority has access to today or was it part of some programme that ran interference with the law enforcement system?

I tend to go with incompetence as explanation of such things but O'Neill's list of failures and intrusions pile up in chapter after chapter to make one question the sheer scale of the necessary incompetence and laziness and draw one towards something more structured and sinister.

There are other issues raised - the degree to which Manson was integrated into a Hollywood circle, the strange connections of the family connections of that circle in the subsequent investigation and the convenient manipulations of legal counsel and hiding of evidence from the defence.

The amount of paper evidence destroyed reminds me of the similar mass destruction of evidence related to alleged state-tolerated child abuse in the UK while, as in that case, the authorities appear to have been doing a lot of arse-covering in attempting to restrict access to what is now available.

What O'Neill does uncover is quite impressive - not enough to join all the dots to something final and fully coherent but enough to justify his title of investigative journalist. This man is not only not a conspiracy theorist, he bends over backwards not to join the dots too readily.

Which brings us on to the second story. O'Neill's journey tells us that obsession with a story can come close to neurosis in some journalists (though he never goes over the edge) and that proper investigation of wrong-doing is very time and cash expensive.

The 'system' (such as it is) has its strongest defence not in its blundering destruction of data, the insiders who draft cover up narratives or the self-interest of the authorities in restricting material but in the sheer cost of investigation for investigators, not only in money and time but in lifestyle.

Investigation into state-tolerated child abuse in the UK ran into the sand for many reasons - kicking the problem upstairs to be buried in an official inquiry, document destruction, blunders by journalists in dealing with agent provocateurs but the cost of investigation was the killer punch.

In this case, the Manson crimes took place over half a century ago (the child abuse allegations relate to a period only slightly more recent). People get old and are reluctant to give the reasons for their small complicities. Perhaps they may risk a pension. Many are dead.

Was it all worth it for O'Neill to spend two decades getting into debt simply to destroy the prevailing narrative without firmly establishing an alternative one? Only he can say but I, for one, am grateful for his efforts if not only for the obvious reason of true crime entertainment.

People like O'Neill ensure that the villains, the ambitious, the corrupt, the corporate, the system,, the state-sociopath may 'get away with it' (they generally do) but that they do not do so unharmed. There is enough information here to undermine their claims to be decent and competent.

This is what it is important to understand - that the individual sociopath and the state-sponsored sociopath are often two sides of the same social coin and that it is important for investigators to explore those times in history when they overlap and then expose those connections.

America as a soi-disant free society seems to be a natural home for that overlap - the historic connections between organised crime and the State, the secret state's experimentation on private citizens and many other examples should be proof-positive of that.

Of course, to be fair, all societies and systems - including churches and corporations and probably most NGOs and activist groups - are structured to offer opportunities for sociopaths and sociopaths are happy to use not only true innocents but their counterparts outside.

O'Neill does not say this (though he does find a suggestive direct link between one character and the JFK story) but the circumstantial parallels between the state and the worlds of Manson and Lee Harvey Oswald gave me some pause for thought.

But of course that was then and this is now. Surely, with so much congressional scrutiny and our new liberal view of accountability and human rights, nothing bad could ever happen again. Surely a Manson could not today slip through the parole net. I am not so sure.

My take is that State manipulative technologies centred on drugs, hypnosis and similar techniques, 'scientific' in the 1950s and 1960s because that is what behaviourism told them was going to work, are now surplus to requirements.

Today, the behavioural sciences are very different in orientation. Ask yourself how much funding goes into government-funded psychological operations and then ask yourself why you do not know what it is spent on and whether you are not perhaps the subject of those operations.

Drugging people and experiments in Haight-Ashbury are no longer required in a world of suggestion, media manipulation, surveillance, algorithms and more subtle forms of social control. Perhaps a future O'Neill will uncover something to shock us ... in 2071.

But let's be clear about what this story is not saying. It is not a conspiracy story about a strong evil State and a nasty charismatic sociopath but about a weak inept, amoral and unaccountable state filled with moral cowards who create the space for sociopaths and moral weaklings to thrive.

That is the service O'Neill and good investigative journalists (so very few of them) provide, often at huge cost to themselves - proof that the units of the great system in which we are embedded are fundamentally inept because human nature is what it is, weak, rather dim and often cowardly.

Thus has it been, thus it probably is and thus it is likely always to be. Even if not entirely conclusive, 'Chaos' is a text for political scientists as much as for historians of America and true crime aficionados. It helps to stop us taking all the nonsense we are fed at face value. show less

An absolutely compelling read, which depressing lacks the killer evidential blow needed to change minds in the mainstream. However the links are pretty clear and the circumstantial evidence is stacked up. If only we could understand more how it happened and what really went on in the MKULTRA / CHAOS illegal experimentation world. This books shows that beyond doubt Manson and the Family's convictions could have been overturned because of prosecutorial malfeasance, and that there is so much show more dodgy stuff and cover-ups and rabbit holes that you have to ask what really happened. Who was being protected? Why were famous people allowed to remove and keep evidence? Why were so many police and judicial staff nobbled? Who was Manson informing on? Why were the Family let off time and time again? Why weren't they arresed weeks earler? So on and so forth... show less

Chaos Charles Manson the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties
is nonfiction book by Tom O'Neill and published in 2019. It is a rambling book--the author clearly lost control of the many narratives. He initially started the book as an article for [[Premiere Magazine]]. He kept researching and researching, and eventually, the Publisher was fired, and he lost the contract. He next signed a book contract with Penguin, they gave him a co-author who quit and he researched and interviewed and show more was eventually in a legal battle over his advance. I sympathized with his editors--sometimes an author just can't settle down and write a book. The book is sort of a mess--it starts out being about the Manson family and refuting claims by Vincent Bugliosi's book Helter Skelter, but then we get into 60s hippie culture and CIA mind control experiments. Chaos is an apt title, and even though everything I wrote seems like a negative, I enjoyed this book. It's like opening up a writer's ADHD mind of loose threads unraveling and tying around other threads. As someone who likes to start things but never finishes them, and who is a big believer in the journey I took along the way, I can relate. It would be fun to go through O'Neill's archives, and I hope they end up at a library or national archive. I certainly did learn enough about the Manson family, which led me to rewatch Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That film is a masterpiece. And you can really enjoy the ending of that film after reading all about how the murders went down. show less