Book Review: 'Chaos' & The CIA's Shadow Role In The Charles Manson Murders

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Was the Central Intelligence Agency an invisible hand in arguably the most infamous of American crimes -- the murders of actress Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, and three friends at an isolated Beverly Hills estate, on August 8, 1969? While that once would have seemed preposterous, it is considerably less so in an era when we mistrust government institutions with considerable justification, although the linkage between the spy agency and the horrific crime masterminded by Charles Manson still is, in the jargon of the Sixties, a mindblower.    

Journalist Tom O'Neill, writing in collaboration with The New Yorker contributor Dan Piepenbring, makes that case in the recently published Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and succeeds because he doesn't try to offer a unified theory of the crime and motivations as have so many others. 

The murders, which were bookended by at least four other killings carried out by The Family, a zombie-like group of flower children controlled by Manson, who considered himself to be Jesus Christ and Satan, are much in the news because of our penchant for anniversaries -- it is the 50th of what have become known collectively as the Tate-LaBianca murders -- and release of Quentin Tarantino's magnificent Once Upon a Time . . . In Hollywood, which riffs on Manson, The Family and their rampage at 10050 Cielo Drive in a way that further confirms the director's cinematic genius.    

Chief among those offering that unified theory was Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Manson and wrote Helter Skelter, his 1974 account of the investigation, arrest and trial of Manson and three female followers for the murders of Tate (photo, below), her unborn child, Tate's former lover Jay Sebring, and Wojciech Frykowski and Frykowski's lover Abigail Folger, heiress to the Folger coffee fortune, and the largely forgotten and murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night.  

(Bugliosi's book takes its title from the apocalyptic race war than Manson believed would occur, which in turn took its name from the Beatles' song "Helter Skelter."  A misspelled "Healter Skelter" was written in the LaBianca's blood on their refrigerator door while "Pig" was most famously written in Tate's blood on the front door at Cielo Drive.)    

Helter Skelter remains the bestselling true crime book of all time at a robust 7 million copies and the de facto, which is to say widely accepted, version of the case, although O'Neill builds considerably on Bugliosi's lesser known reputation as an evidence withholding manipulator and perjurer who lied under oath and lied to journalists, police and other investigators while twice being sued successfully for defamation.   

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Bugliosi went to extraordinary lengths to get the conviction of Manson and The Family members through deviously extralegal methods and by convincing the jury that Manson's motivation was political -- to start that race war by pinning the murders on the Black Panthers.  Indeed, one of Manson's bibles was Stranger In a Strange Land, a novel about a savior who grows up on Mars and descends to Earth to supervise the apocalypse, although Bugliosi's narrative was an adroit evasion of the likely truth and, in O'Neill's words, "a sham" and "cover-up." 

Bugliosi may not even have fully understood what the truth was.  O’Neill acknowledges as much and admits "I didn't have a smoking gun" while documenting the many ties between Manson and the CIA and its operatives and surrogates.  

Over O'Neill's intensive 20-year quest for that truth -- and one of the draws of Chaos is, at least to this former investigative editor, the immense obstacle course he had to navigate -- he comes awfully close in determining that the CIA, through its super-secret MKULTRA mind-control program, indirectly used Manson and Family members, among other unwitting hippies, in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in 1967 as laboratory rats to study the effects of LSD. 

One of Manson's incidental contacts in the Haight was Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West (photo, below), an arguably psychotic doctor on the CIA payroll who recommended LSD to the spy agency as a means of mind control that could penetrate the heads of informants or prepare so-called Manchurian candidates for service as spies or assassins. 

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Once was back in Los Angeles, did Manson the hippie messiah employ the same methods to program his murderous surrogates? 

(Erroll Morris's 2017 Wormwood documentary explores the roots of MKULTRA and the likely murder of tripped out Army scientist Frank Olson at the CIA's hands.  It is available on Netflix.)    

O'Neill deduces that both before and after the murders, Manson and several Family members were arrested for a series of crimes but never charged because the CIA was able to make that happen, and speculates that this may have led to a later coverup, which included an extraordinary number of missing police files, suspect and witness transcripts, hospital charts and other records that would have further cemented the CIA-Manson link. 

Meanwhile, the inaction of law enforcement because of the invisible CIA hand may have resulted in additional murders.  Manson himself bragged to a hand at the Spahn Ranch, a disused Western movie set near L.A. where he and The Family lived, that he had killed 35 people.  Bugliosi, who concealed Manson's pivotal hiatus in San Francisco from the jury because it would have weakened if not demolished his race-war narrative, thought the number might have been even higher. 

Manson died in prison in 2017 after repeatedly being denied parole.   

O'Neill is justifiably shocked about "the many ways our government has deceived us," and in the 50 years since the Manson killings that has become more obvious than ever even as Americans become more inured to it than ever.  In that respect, Chaos is a welcome corrective although it always will remain in the shadows of Helter Skelter.