Charles Manson’s MK-Ultra Madness: From Chaos to Apocalypse, Part 1
By Guest Writer Nathaniel Allison
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
“My brain’s strange from taking contaminated acid
While you be selling your soul we assassinate assassins
Am I hallucinating
You’ll see visions of death, possessed
By homicide is what I’m obsessed”
Ill Bill “Acid Reflux”
The new Netflix documentary Chaos: The Manson Murders just aired. It explores the links between Charles Manson, the CIA, and mind control experimentation. Heavy on spectacle, light on many important facts & connections. Another limited hangout with a light-handed, softball approach. Dummy cuisine.
The documentary is based on Tom O’Neill’s book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. It’s a decent read. One of the most important aspects of his demonstration is that Manson’s time in San Francisco’s Summer of Love was deeply connected to the murder of Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas – and that they might be linked to governmental operations like MK-Ultra and psychiatrists like Dr. Louis Jolyon West.
JOLLY’S EXPERIMENTS
“A government could also supply drugs to help control a population. This method, foreseen by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), has the governing element employing drugs selectivity to manipulate the governed in various ways. A country that requires maximum effort from it’s total work force must take stern measures to eliminates all drug abuse, but a more affluent nation can afford to tolerate large numbers of drug users in various circumstances.”
– Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, “A Clinical and Theoretical Overview of Hallucinatory Phenomena.
Dr. West, former chief of psychiatric services at Lackland Air Force Base, and director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, became famous for using enough LSD to kill Tusko the elephant. Jolly worked studying behavioral modification bankrolled by the CIA throughout the 1950s – experimenting with using hypnosis and drug-induced trance states as forms of political control. He warns in 1965 “Dangers of Hypnosis” about criminals using hypnosis to create violent impulses in people – exactly what Manson is accused of. Jolly contributed the chapter to a 1967 psychiatric textbook called “Hallucinogens,” where he cautioned of alienated kids experimenting with new substances and the potential development of cults centered around LSD. Author of several studies, including Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States, and The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility, he went to San Francisco in 1966 to study the effects of LSD on hippies. This research was done at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.
Criminologist Roger Smith was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health – later revealed to be a CIA front for behavioral control experimentation, to study amphetamines and their role in violent behavior. He opened the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic during the “Summer of Love” in 1967 just for this project. Tom O’Neill’s book demonstrates the medical clinic was frequented by Charles Manson and his hippie Family. Charles Manson – The Terminal Man – was released from Terminal Island Prison on March 21, 1967. Roger Smith turned out to be the parole officer of Charles Manson, and most of his probation visits occurred at the medical clinic. In retrospect, it seems odd that Haight-Ashbury clinic was the central nexus for a serial killer and a major social engineer. The clinic was a playground for MK-Ultra experimentation. Tom O’Neill suggests “All of these goals of MK-Ultra and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments.”
BLACK SORCERER’S PLAYGROUND
The head of the agency’s MK-Ultra project was the spymaster Sidney Gottlieb, nicknamed the Black Sorcerer. He directed much of the Agency’s secret research into mind control. The program oriented itself around the use of drugs like LSD. The Poisoner in Chief introduced experiments including electroshock, psychological torture, sensory isolation, and even feeding radioactive material to children. Clandestine research was conducted in universities, research centers, and American prisons. Counter cultural figures like Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, and Grateful Dead’s lyricist Robert Hunter were unknowingly given LSD. Gangster Whitey Bulger was given daily LSD for over a year in prison.
Tom O’Neill found letters between the CIA’s Sidney Gottlieb and Jolyon West, discussing techniques for implanting false information, ways to induce mental disorders, and the creation of an innate desire to withdraw from reality. Louis eventually moved his operation from the Haight-Ashbury clinic to a nearby Victorian house that he described as a “laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad.” The house was paid for by another CIA front, the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, who were studying the combination of sex & LSD and how it could encourage people to divulge sensitive information. This “disguised laboratory” was inspired by Operation Midnight Climax, a project that involved hiring prostitutes to give men drinks laced with acid so their behavior could be studied. There’s a story of the scientist Frank Olson getting unwittingly dosed with LSD at a backwoods CIA party; not responding well, they took him to the Statler Hotel in Manhattan for help only to have Frank supposedly hurl himself out the window. The Errol Morris documentary Wormwood suggests the CIA faked his suicide because they feared he would blow the whistle on MK-Ultra and the military’s use of biological weapons.
After the JFK assassination, Jolly interviewed the shooter Jack Ruby. All prior psychiatric examinations ruled that he was mentally fit, but after Jolly’s visit Jack Ruby had a psychotic breakdown. From that day forward, everyone that examined him found similar diagnoses. Dr. William Beavers reported to the judge of the possibility someone administered Ruby a mind-altering drug that induced toxic psychosis. The Warren Commission was never able to get a coherent account from him. It’s odd that two members involved in the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, had previously employed Dr. Jolyon West.
The 1975 Senate Church Committee hearings showed that human experimentation was conducted on the American public without their knowledge. Seymour Hersh reported it on the front page of the New York Times: “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces.” No criminal charges were ever pursued for the MKUltra experiments. There are many examples of various other programs, like the Tuskegee Study, Operations Artichoke & Bluebird, to MK-Ultra and MK-Search, Stargate, & Naomi. Human experiments with brain-electrodes, radiation. Programs like COINTELPRO and CHAOS.
Frank Wisner called his operations at the CIA, The Mighty Wurlitzer, for his ability to play any propaganda tune. Creating culture and influencing popular trends. For example, the CIA promoted abstract expressionism during the 1960’s Cultural Cold War – funding concerts, art exhibitions, and music festivals. Many in the Los Angeles Laurel Canyon music scene of the 1960s and early 1970s, had many connections to military intelligence; including The Doors, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, etc.
Squeaky Fromme, adorned in her Little Red Riding Hood outfit, emerged from the crowd. Pulling a .45 caliber Colt of Gerald Ford. Shortly after, Sandy Good, who Manson nicknamed Blue, called a press conference, saying: “wave of assassinations across golf courses and bridge clubs throughout the country. And people in the news media, you better stop lying or you’re going to get cut up, too. Your blood is going to be on the walls.”
HELTER SKELTER or HURLEY BURLEY
“The so-called Manson murders were actually orchestrated by military intelligence in order to destroy the counterculture movement. It’s no different from the Special Forces in Vietnam, disguised as Vietcong, killing and slaughtering to make the Vietcong look bad… Charles Manson was a patsy, identical with Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray. The Manson thing was a hidden war against the youth culture. People sharing their housing, their food, their cars, recycling their old clothes. Make your own candles and turn off the electricity. It was an economic revolution, affecting everything from the cosmetic industry to the churches.”
– Mae Brussell
The Summer of Love was a planned behavioral modification program. The researcher John Judge thought that all of Manson’s girls came from high ranking military intelligence families associated with MK-ULTRA type operations. Judge thought The Manson Family was using a military version of LSD – MK-ULTRA; a psilocybin derivative identified as EA1729. According to Judge, this is the same “acid” that David Berkowitz was given while in the Army, when placed in a special program reportedly for profiled candidates. While Manson and Timothy Leary were in Folsom Prison together, Manson asked him why he doesn’t “use acid to control people” – LSD is better for confusion than control. In Will You Die For Me”, Tex Watson says The Manson Family was getting Orange Sunshine LSD that was manufactured by “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love” prior to the murders. Most of this LSD supply came from Ronald Hadley Stark, “CIA informant who turned on the world.” They also hired The Weather Underground to break Timothy Leary from Prison in 1970.
1970’s radio personality Mae Brussell believed the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, was another in a long list of MK-ULTRA victims. She called him “son of Uncle Sam.” Mae thought things like, COINTELPRO, Waco, Tate/LaBianca murders, etc., were operations to create a “strategy of tension” by using mass murders and killer cults to create an atmosphere that would lead to the erosion of civil liberties and constitutional rights – creating a police state. It was things like the famous Altamont concert where The Rolling Stones played Symphony for the Devil while their Hell’s Angels bodyguards killed someone in the front row.
SONS OF UNCLE SAM
“In this overlit realm ruled by images of the space race and the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassination and the suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a unique alchemy of the imagination was taking place… The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade.”
– J.G. Ballard
Television today is saturated with exposés of the evils of the world. The more and more titillated by themes of serial killers, sex, and occultism – the more desensitized we become. The TV Videodrome saturates us with more murder and torture. Under the guise of learning of the evil of the world, we’re brutalized. The researcher Michael A. Hoffman describes this as a process of initiation – an alchemical psychodrama for the transformation of humanity. This brutalization instills the loss of will power and the loss of interest in events vital to one’s own health and survival – stuck in a state of abulia and apathy. We’re ever more mesmerized, transfixed, and desperate for more thrilling revelations. This process produces a demoralized, cynical, double-mind. We’re all Rosemary’s Babies now – indulging in this forbidden fruit. Like Salamanders in a fiery furnace.
From the book Helter Skelter, the film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, to series like Mindhunter and American Horror Story: Cult, The pop culture version of Manson is like your drug addict uncle who always ‘causes chaos at the family reunion. From his influence on The Beach Boys to Guns N’ Roses covering his song “Look at Your Game, Girl”, to The Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral being recorded at residence of Sharon Tate’s murder.
Early in Manson’s life he was deeply into Scientology. He reached the state of mind they refer to as Clear – where you free yourself from repression. Ed Sanders showed in The Family: Story of Charles Manson’s Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, that Manson also had connections with the Scientology offshoot, The Process Church of the Final Judgment. There were organized smear campaigns against him, with nicknames like Ed “Satanic Panic” Sanders. Ed was sued by the Process Church in the UK and won his defense. The Church was ordered to pay legal fees to Sanders and his British publisher. During the U.S. case, Sanders’ publisher settled by removing the disputed chapter.
The worship of The Process Church of Final Judgement centered on the combination Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan, and Christ as one deity – Manson melded this occult mindset and apocalyptic framework into his worldview. They blended Scientology’s psychological techniques with Christian eschatology, paganism, and occultism. They saw the combination of sex and death as a divine expression. They were preparing for a cosmic balance through apocalyptic judgment. In Manson In His Own Words, Charlie claims he met individuals at The Spiral Staircase clubhouse who worshiped “multiple devils” – alluding to the Process Church.
To Be Continued
