Chapo Trap House - Bonus Interview: Tom O'Neill and Chaos

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

We talk to journalist Tom O'Neill about his book uncovering new theories on Charles Manson, MKUltra, the CIA, and the war against counter-culture & the left in the 1960's. Featuring special guest host Noah Kulwin, an editor at The Outline.

Hello everybody, it's Shapo here with a special bonus episode for you. We've got a hot interview for you that I think will serve as a really good companion piece to our recent JFK episode and our ongoing Epstein-induced mania. We were talking with the journalist Tom O'Neill about his book Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60s and this is a book that I think totally reconfigures like everything that we think we know about the Manson case and without providing any definitive

like bulletproof, conclusive proof begins to point towards a story that is really about the kind of secret wars that the CIA and FBI were waging in the 60s against the left and the counterculture. Also as a special treat, we have a guest co-host It's Noah Cohen back again. Hi everybody. Noah, you're here because you've actually read the entire book. I am like a fucking nerd. Yes, and I loved it. It's

the background to this book is also fascinating and he goes very deep into it in in in the book, which is that this story that he initially was going to write about Charles Manson began as a magazine article for Premier magazine, a Hollywood trade publication in 1999 for the 30th anniversary of the Manson murder of the Manson Tate-Lobianco murders and he ended up blowing that deadline. In fact, blew the deadline so long that Premier magazine closed and one book deal fell through and then this summer he finally was able to get the book out. Yeah, this is a this is a

journalistic labor of love that has taken it as 20 years in the making and you know, again, I think this really lines up with a lot of you know, the I guess conspiracy stuff that we've been talking about recently and Noah, when I was talking to you about it like it really gets to this larger question about the sort of these yawning chasms and gaps between stories where we know the official story is bullshit, but what begins to take its place doesn't officially meet like the capital T

journalistic definition of like the truth or like you can't really report on it But like how do you begin to tell a story in such a way that's responsible where like you know that you're never really going to know The answer to anything, but you know for sure that the official version is fiction I mean we has still have there's so many Stories that we can all think of I mean Epstein obviously being the biggest one where we have every reason to doubt the official narrative I think that this book is a great example of how to sort of responsibly and rigorously examine one of those instances and and perhaps the biggest one of all given the significance both culturally and also ultimately politically that

the These murders gave to just sort of crush the counterculture and inspire you know a whole another number of years worth of anti left-wing Government activity from the intelligence community all the way down. I mean This story you've got rogue prosecutors. You've got government informants. You've got dr. Sydney Gottlieb You've got the MK ultra program. You have a guy I've never even heard of called Jolly West like I basically dr. Herbert West reanimator LSD

De-animator of a precious zoo elephant With LSD and he did it like he brought like a crowd to watch him do it because he thought it would be like a cool thing And he literally just murdered an elephant with LSD fuck Thomas Edison. Dr. Herbert West the fucking Trump kids What is it about? Irredeemable psychopathic sadist and murdering elephants. It's a ritual. It's a ritual A violation It's a highlander complex Eventually there will be only one elephant

Sorry to start to bring it down before we talk about the men's Hello, all right. Well without much further ado Tom O'Neill and chaos So like to kick things off when you first started looking into this case the Manson murders and everything surrounding it What would you say was like the sort of established narrative that most people understood about the Manson family and the murders? They committed in 1969 Basically in a nutshell. It's that Manson

ordered his followers to kill the people at the Tate House and the next night at the lobby Anka house In order to to ignite a race war that he called Helter Skelter He wanted them his killers to leave signs Implicating the panthe black Panthers and the murders and what he had told them was that that would cause an uprising when the blacks were mistakenly accused and They would rise up against the whites. There'd be this world-ending race war that the blacks would Eventually win during that whole time

He said he would hide his family in a bottomless pit in the desert of Death Valley that he'd located with Rivers of running running rivers of honey and 12 different kinds of fruit trees After the blacks had killed all the whites then he and the family would emerge from this hole and And subjugate the blacks and then repopulate the planet with their perfect white ops offspring I'm already beginning to see a problem with this narrative you know How he would immediately take over after the race war is a bit iffy but so but an interesting part of the book is

The this the Helter Skelter ideology like this idea that these murders were carried out to Foment a race war Where did that first like how was that first established and how did the prosecutor Vincent Boogliosi? Like what role did he play in sort of creating this narrative? Well, if you read Helter Skelter his book that he published after the case was Tried he discovered by interviewing family members that there was a philosophy of Helter Skelter at the family What I believe and I contend in my book is that he embellished and blew that way out of proportion To create a much more sensational case in trial because he knew that this was going to be his ticket to success as far as being an author And while I do believe that there was some talk of race war there and impending apocalypse

I don't think that it was behind the murders He even said as much later in interviews that he never believed Manson believed in the Helter Skelter Theory for the murders that he just used that to get these people to kill for him The problem was When he said that and the three other interviews I've located each interview didn't follow up by asking him Well, if he didn't do it for that reason, then why did he send those people or sent his followers to kill those people? Unfortunately, if you read the book, you'll see that he and I fell out pretty Dramatically and he wouldn't talk to me anymore. So I could never ask that follow-up question

I mean bookly OC becomes something for Not just a curator of the official Manson narrative, but something of a villain himself in this book. Would you say? Yeah, it wasn't how it was intended, but it became that When I began I thought he was gonna be, you know, this began as a magazine story assignment 1999 20 years ago, and I was just supposed to write a piece Commemorating what was then gonna be the 30th anniversary of the crime and he was one of my first interviews And he very generously gave me six hours of his time I thought he was gonna be the hero of my piece, but things turned out rather differently

What was the first clue that you had that stuff wasn't totally above board with the story that boogly OC was telling? well During that first day that first visit I Realized at the end of the six hours I'd spent with him again He was very generous with his time But he hadn't told me anything new or original everything was just a rehash of what he'd written in his book and said in a million interviews So at the end I did what we call the Hail Mary pass which is I Asked him if there was anything he could tell me about the case that he knew but that had never been reported before and I said

If it's something you want off the record in other words not attributed to you I'd be happy to do that So he thought a minute and then he said turn it off turn it off referring to my tape recorder I turned off the tape recorder and he told me something pretty sensational that hadn't been reported before it had been reported But in a very different way And that kind of put me down a rabbit hole and if your listeners read the book They'll find out towards the end what that was because you'll also see why the off the record promise was no longer Kept by me and he understood as well that I didn't have to keep it anymore

but that kind of was the first card of the deck to fall and Once I looked into that I started looking into more discrepancies and idiosyncrasies and his official case and discovered more and more malfeasance on the prosecutors part from subordinate perjury withholding evidence from the defense and the jury and even planting Prosecutor a former prosecutor in the defense on in the first defendant Susan Ackens Before she was even indicted or any of the family was publicized as suspects for the killers. They basically had her

legally appointed a Quarter-pointed defense attorney removed by a judge who was complicit in this conspiracy and replaced by a former prosecutor So they could write that the whole script for the trial Which is what they did and you know, I mean this was the like probably the most sensational murder case of the time Like it could capture the nation's imagination It was this like true life horror story that you know supposedly spoke to everything dark and Terrifying about the counterculture and the hippies to you know broader mainstream America What was it about and you know like I could imagine that the pressure of prosecutors were under to bring this not just to a resolution

But to a Resolution that made sense in a way to the the country at large What do you think it was about the helter-skelter sort of race war ideology and narrative like what like what? What use did that serve for them like in terms of prosecuting this case or making it make sense in a way to people? Well bullios he had to convict Manson of murdering people whose killings he didn't actually Participate in he had to convict him of conspiracy because he told his followers to go to the house that Terry Melcher used to live in who who was someone who had Rejected Manson in a music deal

So without Manson being at the scene and actually actually plunging a knife into anyone He had to create a reason for why he did this why he created that He's taken that secret to his grave. I have a couple theories one of them is he had a book deal Prior to even this trial beginning and he had a co-author Who was given a front-row seat to the whole trial? So he was playing to a larger audience and the jury he was paying to playing to his future reading audience and To create a sensational a trial as possible benefited him get a conflict of interest What's interesting is here his original co-prosecutor on the case Aaron Stovitz told me in an interview

He never believed in the helter-skelter motive as did just about every cop that worked the case and pretty much every prosecutor who worked the case Also told me they didn't believe in it except for Steven Kaye who was Vince's co-prosecutor After Stovitz was taken off and Steven Kaye six years later told me when I presented him with all this information the bullios He had lied manipulated suborn perjury He told me after seeing these documents kind of one of my smoking guns But now he didn't know what to think about this case He thought he knew so well and as he said to me that day on tape on the record

He said everything I thought I know about this case. I now Question one of the things then that sort of I guess comes into focus and that you talk about Quite eloquently in your book is that this case sort of represented an opportunity for personal advancement for bulliosi But that it also sort of became as will referenced earlier this kind of Wave for the broader for society at large to become totally disenchanted with the counterculture It's become such a cultural touchstone to sing to signal the end of the 60s I was correct I was kind of curious if you could sort of expand on that and how the trial was sort of shaped and marketed as that

Well, I mean there was a secret war going on at the time that people didn't know about because it was a secret The federal government had two different organizations two agencies working to kind of De-stabilize and neutralize the left-wing movement meaning the anti-war People the black Panthers black militants free speech people the whole hippie movement in general They felt was a threat to national security when I say they I mean J. Edgar Hoover who was the head of the FBI Ronald Reagan who was a governor of the state of California Sam Yordi who was the mayor of Los Angeles and Lyndon Johnson who was a president until 68 and the Nixon came in in January of 69 and he embraced these two programs one was called chaos

Which is part of the title of my book and that was a CIA program that was organized and initiated in San Francisco in 67 the same time Manson showed up there and And a partner program by the FBI but acting independently was co-intel pro Both of them had the same objective and that was to basically crush the left wing movement The entire umbrella, you know, everyone beneath that umbrella because they thought it was gonna cause a revolution or a civil war and When this murder happened in 1969 and these people were finally Kind of announced by the LAPD as the suspects and these horrific, you know

Murders that were committed for no sensical reason whatsoever That kind of made people really for the first time terrified of hippies Terrified of what acid might do to their kids Terrified of what, you know, communal living, you know, no rules free love all that kind of stuff came to a screeching hall There were other events, you know, Altamont and some murders and stuff that happened But nothing with the kind of impact that the Tate-LaBianca murders had especially after These people were arrested and the first pictures you saw on the front pages of the newspapers and on the television broadcasts Were these long-haired people that look like the hippies, you know sat in the center of your town playing guitar

I mean one one thing that I just before we go too deep in the CIA rabbit hole Which is very very easy to get lost in is one thing in your book that you sort of set up that I had never encountered before and I thought was really fascinating was you very You with like incredible texture Reconstructed the vibe at Cielo Drive and what was going on in that house prior to the murders with Polansky's friends there and the people that were staying with Sharon Tate. Could you talk a little bit about what that was like? Well, I mean again, bullio see presents the in the beginning of the book a similar scene But he really downplayed the violence and the drug trafficking and the sadism that was going on in the house and

Sharon Tate and Roman as far as I know didn't have anything to do with that. They were gone You know, they moved into that house in January of 9th or February of 1969 And about six weeks later, they both left Los Angeles Roman to London to scout locations for Day of the Dolphin which he was supposed to direct and What that I never heard that either Yeah, yeah, and then Sharon was making a movie and in Italy. So they were gone and during the period they were gone Abigail Folger who was a coffee heiress and her boyfriend boy check for Kowski who was an aspiring screenwriter kind of

Hanger on to the Hollywood scene through through Polansky He knew Polansky from Poland they house that at C. L. O. Drive where the murders ended up happening and I don't want to I don't know that it was Abigail. I think it was more Vojtek He started allowing this element into that house of you know, pretty scary drug dealers and Violent rough guys and and when Sharon came back You know, she was pregnant and at about eight months. She had to get back to Los Angeles to have her baby She couldn't even fly then because she was so pregnant. So she took a liner back

and They were supposed to leave and a couple of her friends were gonna stay with her But for some reason Roman wanted Abigail and Vojtek to stay there and Sharon was there from about the day before the moon Landing which I think was about July 20th till her murder, you know on August overnight hours of August 8th and During that period she witnessed all of that and according to some of her friends who I interviewed She was really terrified and upset and she was calling Roman and begging him To make them move out of the house because she didn't like what she was basically seeing in her own home every day

Yeah, and Polansky was I mean he was I believe I mean maybe I'm overstating a little but he was like torturing it Don't like there was it seemed like there was like a real kind of dark vibe to Yeah, yeah, I have a bunch of that in the book too a lot of people did think that Polansky didn't treat Sharon well Even though publicly after her death like I guess Any widow or worry he talked about how much in love that he was with her and I can't judge either way But I do know that from what her close friends told me there were some pretty horrible things he had done to her So it's that's laid out. There's the there's the murders themselves There's the investigation and the trial and like as you begin to recount this story

Like again, this is originally supposed to be for the 30th anniversary of the killings it for premier magazine You dream on magazine assignment that turns into yeah, 20 years You know you begin to notice these discrepancies Both in the investigation of the case and the prosecution itself Then like the book becomes about like really something larger than the murders themselves Which is like you said this kind of secret history of the 1960s that you alluded to via Quintelpro and chaos What was it like? Where did you first get on to that part of this story then like was like this is about something larger than the murders themselves and this is

Really about a kind of secret government program of a kind of I guess soft counterinsurgency against the left in this country Well, it was a process. There were stages and about a year into My reporting or more. I Couldn't understand why Manson had been arrested several times and not either been charged with the crime that he was clearly Guilty of when he was picked up or the very least violated. He was on federal parole So I started a Freedom of Information Act requests process with the Bureau US Bureau probation for his federal file and it took about a year to get what I got

And I only got about two-thirds of it I think and there were a lot of redactions But what I saw was not only they're the two to three arrests that I had gotten from the public, you know Database, you know bullio sees book and newspaper reports but I found out that it was much more extensive than that that there were more arrests there was more evidence against him and Even has his arrests accelerated in in severity He got even more impunity. I mean, it was like he had a catch-and-release And I took all of this stuff all of these documents to a retired DA who had also been a judge

in the late 60s and 70s and You know, he knew how the courts operated then how the police operated then and that's something You have to be very careful with when you're doing this kind of reporting if you're if you're looking at stuff that happened all those years ago, they had a different rules then so he was perfect because he understood what the laws were then and What the procedures were when he looked at the documents that I put in front of him that day He just started shaking his head and saying chicken shit chicken shit. This is all chicken shit What are you saying that his name was Lewis Watnick? What are you saying? Mr. Watnick? And he said this guy should have been violated two years before he was

He goes there's a clear deliberate pattern of catch-and-release. He said they wanted him outside They said he said they he was more important to them outside than inside and I was like who's they and he said I can't tell you that I go you you're not allowed to he goes. No, I don't know He goes that's why they call them informants he goes but he was clearly being protected by someone because he was valuable and they wanted him out on the street with either Information he was sharing something he was providing and he said to me It could have been the FBI a federal agency. It could have been local law enforcement state Los Angeles police Los Angeles Sheriff's but somebody wanted this man out

Leading up to enduring and after the murders were committed So it's like either he had the world's most lenient parole officer or yeah Or you know like the more logical explanation like there was a reason he wasn't being violated and sent back to prison numerous times Yeah, and in the book you actually end up getting to meet and in interview the world's most lenient parole officer Who was Manson's parole officer who even at one point looked after he and his wife looked after the child of somebody in the family? Yeah, that was Roger Smith He was Manson's parole officer from his release well, he violated Vincent violated his parole the day he was released in Los Angeles in March of 67 by

immediately traveling to San Francisco the Bay Area and Reporting to a parole office there and saying hey, I'm paroled in LA But I don't want to be there. I want to be here and I have the documents the letters were they were gonna violate him immediately They you know the head of the parole office reported that he was gonna have him sent back to LA and or sent to prison And then they're missing documents That's the frustration because I couldn't get his entire file and all of a sudden He's assigned to something called the San Francisco project a month later under this the patronage of Roger Smith Who's a criminologist?

PhD student from Berkeley and also a drug researcher and his special area of drug research was gangs collective behavior violence and amphetamine Epidemines and during this period Manson started Seeing his parole officer at the Hade Ashbury free medical clinic in the summer of 67 the height of the summer of love Because Roger Smith told him just meet me there. That's where I'm setting up my drug research anyway so that opens a whole new chapter of the book of Navy Manson had some help and learning how to create the

Programmable killers that he did well. Yeah, okay now this is where we get into sort of some of the more spine tingling aspects of this story So like a big part of the Manson Murders and the family and the overall counterculture of the 60s was LSD and at the same time that you saw this like huge explosion of LSD is this kind of Libertory like you know something to unlock spiritual and mental You know new horizons for spiritual and creative energy That the counterculture was very interested at the exact same time There was another group of people who were just as interested in LSD and the things that could do with them

And that was basically the CIA and the intelligence community, right? Yeah, they actually predated the hippies exposure to it They were testing it, you know in prison populations and in the public without their knowledge What they called safe houses they set up starting in the early 1950s in Some New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco. They had a bunch of Johnny acid seeds as it were Sending it all over the country, right? Yeah, they had subcontracted employees who were working in prisons or universities Who were doing this research undercover for them and you know the research

violated every code that was set at Nuremberg after the Nazi trials, you know In every oath that a doctor takes you know not to perform any kinds of procedure give any kind of medication to a patient without their full and Consent and knowledge and these guys were giving acid to people that had no idea They were being given acid and just just what did the intelligence community and like, you know, there are cases of this where they would Give it to US service members and then covertly Surveil how they reacted to being ghost of the LSD without their knowledge. It led to several deaths They set up a brothel a brothel. Yeah operation midnight climate. Maybe well, no

Coincidentally, you know my book really only has a chapter, but it's the longest chapter in the book devoted to this CIA program MK ultra and the doctor that ran at Sydney Gottlieb But a book came out two or three days ago by a New York Times reporter called Poisoner and Chief and it's the first really full-fledged biography of this mad scientist Dr. Gottlieb and what I found was that one of his contracted researchers was working in close proximity to Manson at the Haydash Berry free medical clinic doing This this research is not unconsenting drug study for the CIA While Manson was appearing there almost every day with the girls for different medical treatments You know that they had STDs and pregnancies and he was ordered to go there once a week by his federal parole officer

It was his petric disc disc of kind of nasty research that was going on and from that Manson emerged as the person That we're all familiar with today, you know this messiah messianic Guru of evil and and You know metaphor for evil as bullio see called him with this Uncomprehensive a comprehensible command of his followers, you know, he could get them to kill strangers Just by telling them to do it one of the things that you also sort of talk about in this scene in the book when Manson is in San Francisco and You have the the MK MK MK ultra research happening there and people affiliated with MK ultra

One of the things that you sort of describe is that there's also a moment that changes in San Francisco a transition more and more people using amphetamines violence increasing and Sort of I guess I was curious how does Manson sort of fit into that and how does sort of the increasingly violent nature of this research? Ultimately play in as you know time marches on and you get closer and closer to the Tate Lou Bianco murders. Well, that's what's interesting is bullio see in his book in a trial said that Manson didn't allow Amphetamines to be used by the group that he had an aversion to needles I personally think Manson didn't use amphetamines on his own

But all the followers did and they were all using amphetamines mixed with LSD through the whole two years that they were You know with him And amphetamines and LSD are not a good mixture and it's precisely what Roger Smith was studying Manson's parole officer, you know why some people became violent after using amphetamines, you know When others didn't, you know, what were the environmental factors the psychological factors that contributed to that? All of that research that was being done in that one year at the clinic in San Francisco where Manson left there with a bunch of people who were basically you know frenzied psychopathic

robotic killers I Present not a definitive case, but a highly circumstantial case that Manson and at the very least been influenced by what he was told saw Experience who knows what I'm hoping that more and more evidence and information will come out now that the book has been published Because the CIA destroyed all the records of this I have actually The only intact records of Gottlieb's plans with the psychiatrist Lewis J. West to create these Manchurian candidates I got all the documents from the psychiatrist files after he died Yeah, could you talk a little bit more about?

Who Sydney Gottlieb was I mean he really is kind of like a an American Mengele figure like an MK ultra is something that is like a huge sort of north star of I guess conspiracy lore and Conspiracy mythology, but it was a real program. What do we know of MK ultra and the person who actually ran it? Sydney Gottlieb well what we know is that in 1973 when Richard Helms who ran both MK ultra and the CIA was leaving the CIA He had his subordinate Gottlieb who was a scientific director of MK ultra destroy all the files and all the records and Nobody at that point in the public and a lot of people the CIA weren't even aware of this by then 23 or four-year program that the CIA ran which the New York Times said it was its most expensive program and

Top-secret program to that date was also illegal because it operated on domestic soil and by charter the CIA is now How to do anything in the United States? but Seymour Hirsch the journalist discovered it By getting access to some profiles that have been left and another archive or another holding area that the CIA had forgotten about Financial records. He reported on it in 74. There was the Rockefeller Commission Investigated it then the Frank Church Senate Committee investigated it and then there was a actual MK ultra hearings chaired by Senator Ted Kennedy and Daniel in UA. All this stuff came out

They had Gottlieb and other people testified The CIA people said they couldn't really remember what they'd done. They were The LSD Exactly exactly so they basically admitted that we probably never really know Who who these experiments were conducted on what the outcomes were or how long and where they? You know been practiced except you'll see in the book I've got a pretty long timeline of West and the experiments he was doing and who else he was involved with besides Peripherally the Manson family at least. Yeah, well we experimented on some folks

I mean one of the things that you go into this book is that in this character has come up a few times in our conversation now is this one Dr. Lewis West and he seems to be sort of a central figure in the story of MK ultra and San Francisco and the government and intelligence community research into psychedelics But he has a long rap sheet and you you just mentioned Manchurian candidate of a moment ago And I was wondering if you could sort of elaborate a bit on how Lewis West fits into this and sort of where he comes from Well, Lewis West was a colonel in the Air Force and in 1952-53

At during the Korean War, that's when Americans for the first time heard about even a concept of brainwashing using drugs and hypnosis when Flyers American pilots who were captured in Korea during the war While they were in prison They did radio broadcasts where they admitted that they were violating the codes of you know international codes by spraying civilian populations with poison germs germ warfare and The Americans said that they had learned that these men have been brainwashed that the Soviets and the Chinese Communists who were aiding the North Koreans in the war had learned how to get people to do false confessions and

That spurred the interest of the CIA First in a defensive way like if they can do this we need to know how to prevent it from happening to our airmen when they're Captured when they learned how effective it was it became offensive and that's when MK ultra was created in 1953, but West kind of Singled himself out as one of the early researchers into brainwashing when he was assigned with five other scientists To deprogram these pilots when they were actually returned to the United States And they all ended up confessing that they had made everything up under the duress of being imprisoned and Isolated and hypnosis etc

so That caught the attention of the CIA and that's when West contracted To start doing what the CIA was trying to do which was to create programed assassins careers who would be amnesiac of what they were You know that whatever messages they were taking from one place to another they would be able to wipe them clean They wanted to induce insanity and people without the people realizing that they had been given drugs They were going to do that against foreign leaders It was a real it almost made the Nazi experiments look childlike

What because the mind is really the most fragile thing a human a human being has and if you're not in control of what you're thinking and perceiving That's pretty scary and by 1955 according to the documents I found in his own files and again West denied to the day of his death in 1999 ever participating in this program by 1955 he reported to the 56 he reported to the CIA that he had developed the technology to replace true mad true memories and a person with false memories and the person Would not have any Recollection of even their programming and he could advance them in time or grasp them in time all using combinations of LSD

Hypnosis and other drugs that weren't named around the time of the Korean War this idea begins to percolate that like oh my god Like through hypnosis or the use of drugs people can be programmed to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do or have memories Erase is there any evidence that any of these programs could actually deliver on these promises well West wrote a paper in 1962 I believe for an academic journal and He wrote of one well-known case in Copenhagen Where a man was programmed to kill and he did and he said he knew of three other

Military cases which were classified that he couldn't discuss So in other words, he was saying and this was in a public forum and an academic not that he had done any of this But he was aware of it through his his research. Okay, so you you mentioned how like Once you start looking at anything in this case, you know, there goes 20 years Work and a good example of this or like I can see how easily it is to like follow these all these digressions That it once you start looking at it. Could you talk a little bit about Dr. West's connection to Jack Ruby the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald? Well, yeah, I mean again, that's public knowledge after Ruby was convicted of killing Oswald a year later He was tried he never testified in his defense

He maintained his innocence his lawyer said he had an epileptic fit and was amnesiac of Of shooting Oswald and that he didn't stalk him. Well, that was 1965 and at that point West Entered the case has his personal psychiatrist to do a mental Diagnosis because he had to testify to the Warren Commission and he was also seeking a retrial So they wanted him to you know diagnose whether he was insane or not and from the day that West First examined Ruby in the Dallas jail Ruby lost his mind As West reported to the media when he left his first meeting

Sometime in the preceding 48 hours. This man has had a psychotic break with with reality that he might never recover from At times during our meeting He hid under the table because he thought there were other people in the room trying to kill him He confided in me that he could hear Jewish children being boiled alive outside his jail cell at night In other words, he became mentally ill and for the very first time after West encountered him And if you recall Ruby had not testified to the Warren Commission It was gonna be the first time he told the Warren Commission Who were investigating and trying to determine whether Oswald acted alone or not?

It was gonna be the first time Ruby ever told his story of how he how he came to kill Oswald Well from that point forward since West infiltrated his his security and now we do know that during that period West was contracted by the CIA To do exactly what happened to Jack Ruby if that's what happened induce insanity in person without their awareness I think it should upend the whole Warren Commission conclusion because they identified Jack Ruby as their most important witness In their investigation because he was the one who silenced, you know their main suspect well in there's I mean of the other reasons to sort of be skeptical of the The predominant narrative about the JFK assassination are rubies own links to organized crime and when you look at the Warren condition

Warren Commission the presence of a dullest brother and I believe another CIA official or a connection who served on the Commission at the same time That a CIA contracted psychiatrist was the last person to see Jack Ruby before he had a psychotic break Exactly and Richard Helms at the Ellen Dulles was the CIA director who was fired by Kennedy a little less than a year before Kennedy was assassinated and Kenny announced that he was gonna I think he said shatter the the CIA and it's Miller He wanted to discontinue it so Alan Helms was on the Warren Commission and the liaison between the CIA and The Commission was Richard Helms who wasn't the director yet He was an associate term, but he was also he knew exactly who West was and what West did and what West's talents were So yeah, none of that was disclosed to the Commission or you know if it was they didn't act on it

Just one more a quick thing about the this idea of like the Manchurian candidate and like how that sort of seeped into popular Culture either through the movie, but also from the you know real incidences of American POWs appearing in you know propaganda films, you know while they were Captured by the Chinese and North Koreans What are we to make of the idea that like at the same time that American pilots are Confessing certainly under duress, but confessing to violating the Geneva Convention and testing biological weapons on the civilian population of Korea is at the same time in which this idea becomes very popular that Oh, like you can hypnotize people to give them completely false

Memories or thoughts and get them to do and say things that they normally otherwise wouldn't do was that happening at the same time you're saying I'm just saying like what are we to make of like the idea that like these American pilots confess to Committing war crimes and using biological weapons on the people of Korea again under duress as POWs but at the same like at the exact same moment we begin to see the like the creation of this idea that They that you can program a human being into doing and saying and remembering things that haven't happened Yeah, well, they went hand in hand the the MK ultra project kind of evolved out of the CIA at the federal government's fear that those guys

Have been brainwashed or again, there's an alternate scenario Maybe they were telling the truth But the CIA wanted to brainwash them when they came back using people like West. That's kind of what I'm getting at Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the most interesting things and unfortunately It's just an end note in the book It should have been in the main body, but we ran out of space is there were five doctors who examined the The return POWs in the early 50s. One of those was a woman named Margaret Thayer. Oh gosh. No, I forgot her last name

But she was one of West's closest friends and she was a professor at Berkeley retired And I went to interview her early on and when I showed her the documents Showing that West had worked for MK ultra despite denying it all those years. She said you cannot publish this She said if you do you'll destroy all the good work Jolly Bob Lifton the other doctors she worked with all of us achieved if you'll destroy everything and I said, hey It raises questions about everything you guys did if he if you were also doing this kind of work I mean, it's also quite clear that West's reputation More broadly and for decades has not been any of this. It's that he I mean, there's a building named after him at UCLA, right?

Yeah, an auditorium. It's he's he's a like considered like a respected and influential figure I mean one of the things then that sort of just to sort of recalibrate What West's role is in the Bay Area and the mind control experiments and how it relates to the Manson family because one of the things That you get into in your book is that a lot of the purposes and sort of operation Of MK ultra and what it sought to accomplish resembled quite strikingly what the family was and what it did Exactly. Yeah, I mean, they were kind of the creation of the nightmare of MK ultra gone gone crazy You know, I asked the guy named Alan Sheffelin who wrote kind of the second book on on MK ultra after John Marx wrote the first and most definitive the search for the Manchurian candidate

Ellen Sheffelin, I showed him everything I had and I said is it is it possible that this was an MK ultra Experiment gone wrong meaning the Tate lobby uncle murders by the Manson family thinking that yeah, maybe that these people have been given Drugs and they were being experimented on without their knowledge at the clinic and they became something Monstrous like this and he said no, I think it's an MK ultra experiment gone right and that was kind of chilling to hear Well, why would why was it gone right because from any, you know, normal moral position like murders are a bad thing Why would the Tate and lovey-onco murders? What what why was it? Why would why would we say that they went right? Well, I think his point of view was it achieved the larger goal Which was to alienate and make the hippie group movement left-wing movement the boogie the boogie man, you know, the other

dangerous and To sacrifice a bunch of people in a house or two houses. Well, it was worth it I mean if you do really look closely at what these doctors were doing and what the CIA admitted they were doing they were testing drugs on Psychiatric patients people who had gone to them for for for healing and hospitals and West wrote in one of his letters that It would be easier to experiment on psychiatric patients because their behavior was already abnormal So nobody would be able to detect they're making them do other things But he also said we have to take this out into the field and it's that's one of the most chilling lines in one of his letters

To Gottlieb he says eventually we have to take these experiments out into the field meaning into the general population So that's as bad in my mind as killing people, you know playing with people's minds and memories and and actions and taking over Their souls more or less if you're taking over their mind getting back to like Manson himself and like the the sort of the Seed of like all of this lies in the like the utterly Inexplicable way in which like he was allowed to violate his parole Which would seem to imply that like someone or something larger than himself wanted him to be in the field Shall we say as an informant or as a test subject in one of these experiments? one of the one of the threads that's also teased out in this book is the idea of

long like people who are in for Informants for law enforcement agencies being one of the most dangerous things that can possibly exist Because you talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, I mean when you talk to law enforcement they're always kind of writing a tightrope there because they say without informants we can't gather information and informants are by Definition criminals who are committing crimes so you have to find the lesser of two evils Can we you know use the information from somebody who's breaking the law if it's gonna get the bigger players?

You know then they have to balance that out and decide just how far to go and in the late 1960s in Los Angeles particularly There were tons of infiltrators into the left into like the any war movement. This isn't my reporting I mean there's been books and articles LA Times has done series on it about people who were Posing as hippies and infiltrating different activist groups and also provoking them to commit crimes and to get a little more dangerous So they could be arrested and or blow themselves up speaking of you know informants Whitey bulger a famous Informant it was you know

Carrying out many of his most vicious crimes while he was being protected by the FBI as one of their most prized informants because you know He was ratting on every single person he did business with a new in the organized crime He also claimed to have been a guinea pig in these same LSD mind control experiments as a young man when he was in prison Yeah Interestingly enough. I tried to stay away from those revelations came out for the first time a few years ago I'm not even sure if he died yet. I think it was before he died and at that point. I was so late with a book I thought I can't look at that I can't go down that hole because it'll be another 20 years

Since my book came out. I've been contacted by someone and I mean she hasn't not given me permission to share who she is But let's just say she was very very close to him And she's providing a lot of original stuff that he shared with her before his death that she wants me to publicize and And I'm good. I'm considering doing something with that. I haven't I told her I go Please give me till October She sent me a bunch of letters and documents and things and I haven't looked at them yet because I want to get through this Publicity part of the book without as little distraction as possible. Yeah, I mean, it's also I think for the listeners at home It's worth reminding reminding that whitey bulger died because he was killed immediately after a prison transfer

Murdered by another vicious psycho who supposedly hated snitches. Well, I mean, he sort of was a snitch so Hard to say I guess getting back to like the the murderers themselves and This idea that that the what was it basically accepted as the Established narrative of like the helter-skelter as the motivation for these killings If that falls apart under scrutiny Like what again like I think your your book is very careful not to You know claim any kind of definitive conclusion or sort of grand unified theory of this case and all of the weird connections That you spin out of it

but like if we accept that the it just as face value that the official narrative is fiction what begins to look like a more accurate description of like the motivation or Reasons for why these killings were carried out well, my hope is that the readers when they get to the end of the book will reach their own conclusion because I present a couple different possibilities and Since I can't prove any of them definitively and it might sound like a cop out to you guys I don't like to say what I think I believe really happened because I don't want

Readers or listeners to be any more biased than they are I mean anytime you write a book you're gonna have inherent biases But I really work so hard to be just present this information as objectively as possible And I really want the readers to walk away from the book It's what I've been hearing in the feedback. Some people are convinced it happened for reason a some people for reason B Some people for reason C But most people who've read the book from cover to cover don't believe that it happened the way bullios He said it did anymore and the way we've been told all these years well

I guess that this gets into like a sort of like a larger thing or like if we can bring it into the present day and it's just the nature of these real and terrifying Events in American life of which we all know on some level the official stories to varying degrees to be fictions and we know like you can kind of like Begin to surmise that the truth behind them hints at something a whole lot darker But at the same time we're also aware that we'll never really truly be able to make all the pieces fit or get any kind of Really satisfying conclusion to any of it and I'm just wondering like do you see any parallels between like the work

you're doing on this case or the way that it became something that took over 20 years of your life and Just you know other things that in in current day Events that are continued to obsess and kind of Fascinate us and I'm thinking particularly about the the Jeffrey Epstein case and the way Yeah, I Mean I can't tell you how many people have reached out to me thinking that I'd want to do anything on that case after what I've been through And I don't have you know any kind of network of information on on him, so I that's not my area But yeah, I mean when governments operate in secrecy and you know

There's an argument to be made for why that when it's necessary and when it's not it's hard to know Who to trust and when to trust I mean there are ways you you know the Kennedy John of Kennedy assassination files were supposed to have been released by now and the government keeps extending a deadline that was already Approved by Congress, which was I think a year or two ago and then Trump stopped it In my book. I am my book writing about these tape recordings It's the first recorded account of the murders by one of the murders before he was even identified as a suspect That was Tex Watson who basically you know inflicted most of the stab wounds on all of the victims and kind of Did all the supervision at the murder scenes?

When he was arrested or turned himself in in Texas before he was extradited to Los Angeles and A week before the family was identified by the Los Angeles Police Department as suspects He told his lawyer in on audio tape How and why the murders were committed that lawyer made the mistake of talking to these to me about these tapes in 2008 And telling me that not only did they contain the truth about the case, but also that Watson described other murders Of victims that had never been discovered The bodies hadn't been discovered the police hadn't connected them and he didn't understand until after he said it that he had just violated You know his his client's right to privilege

And Because of that I tried really hard to get these tapes. He still had them and it's a long to I mean you see the story in the chapter But long story short I started sharing the information with the district attorney's office in Los Angeles who I thought were my friends mistakenly and Once they I helped them they got involved and they actually Went to court to get the tapes a lawyer had died the tapes ended up at a trustee's office Because his firm had gone bankrupt and they fought Watson for a year in court in Texas And they won and as soon as they got the tapes despite promising me that I'd be allowed to hear them the entire tapes

Not only wasn't I allowed to hear them. They won't tell me what's on them. They won't tell anyone what's on them You know, it's a tape recording that's 50 years old now and it's really I think the blueprint for the act of the case And for the answers to all the questions that I raise in my book I think everything is on those tapes and that's why the DA's has have locked them down since getting them in 2014 You know your your book arrives at a time in which you know The Manson family and the Manson murders are really experiencing a renaissance in American culture There's been like I think just like at least three movies over the last year or so That are all surround either Sharon Tate or the Manson murders and I'm guess up like what do you why do you think?

Like we see this resurgence and interest in this case and finally have you seen the Tarantino movie? Oh well the first question Every anniversary and five-year increments. There's a lot of press, but you're right This was a 50 year anniversary and I don't know if Tarantino's movie Created more projects, you know that once it was announced two years ago other people got on that bandwagon Ironically my book was supposed to commemorate the 30th anniversary and it was actually the magazine article I swear to God. I did not wait for the 50 year anniversary It wouldn't have been worth it to do this for 20 years. You have no idea how much I lost You do have an idea if you read the book

financially psychologically, etc but I think Tarantino did create a lot more interest in it, and I don't want to When you ask what I thought of the movie, I don't want to do a spoiler We've seen it. Yeah, what about your listeners? Well, we've spoiled it already for them. Yeah Yeah, I mean I was really disturbed by the I mean I know what I'm getting when I see a Tarantino film So I know there's going to be that kind of gratuitous violence

But there was something obscene to me about the joy that the audience took in the violence Not because I had any sympathy for that the Manson family who was so brutally Killed by those people But more because it seemed to me to kind of minimize what the real victims the horror that happened to the real victims So that bothered me so much that I thought it ruined the movie for me But I wasn't going to walk out because I just don't do that I always want to wait till the end of a movie, but I was offended enough to consider it Then I have to say that ending was so poignant

When the group gathered in the driveway and sharing came out and the camera pulls away That and you see the title come up once upon a time in Hollywood that that bastard Tarantino, you know He pulled a pretty amazing magic trick there that made me really kind of moved and It was the first time I've left a movie in a long long time Where I really needed to be alone and process it and I still can't decide whether I hated or love it But I want to see it again I mean I really did enjoy everything up until that and I knew I mean I tried to know as little as possible I knew that he was going to fictionalize the ending. I just didn't know to what degree

He has my book. We have a mutual friend and she gave it to him I think about a week before the movie came out and I'm she said he'll definitely read it She's that close to him, but I have a feeling he hasn't had a chance yet But I'd love to hear what he thinks of the book. I guess. Okay, just one final question Any advice you can give us or any of our listeners who are either teetering on the edge of or fully fallen down the hole of the Jeffrey Epstein case how not to I don't know lose your life and Or mind to the maddening contradictions and complexities of such a thing. I don't know what he's talking about. That's not a real thing One of one of you guys is

Most everyone we know That's why I'm trying to read as little about it as possible I was actually a couple blocks away from the jail when he either committed suicide or whatever happened that night I was in a hotel doing promotional stuff and I walked over and I saw the TV vans and the police and I just turned around and walked in the other direction I didn't want to see anything more because I knew that I could go down that hole I would say don't do it unless somebody's paying you to do it and then if someone's paying you to do it. Enjoy it Tom O'Neill, that's the perfect place to end. I want to thank you so much for your time talking to us

The book is chaos Charles Manson the CIA and the secret history of the 60s. We believe me We have only scratched the surface of this book I would highly recommend that you pick up a copy if you're interested in any of this any of this stuff But again, yeah, keep keep Tom's advice in mind at the end there Yeah, Tom again. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks for having me and good luck with Epstein I'll listen to the next broadcast you do on it Thanks. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye Front

No, it's in the back No, it's in the front No, it's in the back They shoved it in the back They put it in the back all the love in the back in the back All the love get in the back boy And they call it Your subconscious

Remember Friday And the front is your computer and I call him Oh, he go is it too much thing? Oh, he go is it too much thing? You make it for yourself. You'll think you're somebody else. A guy bow. Whoa, the trouble you bring Makes you want to jump on a fan fight and you can't stand not to be right It'll make you lie make you cheat just so you won't be beat It'll make you get on outside

You get afraid you're gonna act like a clown and you get mad when somebody put you down Your hearts are pumping and your panties are jumping. Look out. He go is it too much thing? When everything seems going so fine Oh, he go puts his cell phone in a bank When your certainty turns it out and then you start living out then you ease on out of your mind You