Speaker 2
you could go on forever. I mean, it's insane how widespread of a program it was. Like, it was like hundreds, if not thousands of psychiatrists you had yeah outposts in canada this guy you and cameron doing torturous techniques on people right you had andre puhorich and he had his roundtable institute in maine he had an outpost in upstate new york where they had these space kids where they were trying to like communicate with you know these these otherworldly beings and actually star trek gene roddenberry like that was channeled via this woman named phyllis schlafly it's this is a really crazy kind of counter history and then you have all the you know kind of manchurian candidate political stuff a little bit notorious criminals like whitey
Speaker 1
bulger who we found out or he found out late into his life um in prison that he had volunteered for medical experiments in prison in the 50s. And he later found out that they were MKUltra brainwashing experiments. Ted Kaczynski. Ted Kaczynski.
Speaker 2
The Unabomber voluntarily went into an MKUltra experiment at Harvard, right? Okay. So we have this crazy CIA mind control history that, you know, was not super well known. Do you want to just set the table and give some basics on what happened to the Manson murders? Obviously, they're extremely famous, but, you know. Yeah, and you wouldn't think these two
Speaker 1
subjects would approach, merge, blend together. The history of my investigation of all this was, like Jesse said, I got a magazine assignment in 99 that was going to commemorate what was then going to be the 30th anniversary of the Tate-LaBianca murders. So on August 8th, 1969, Sharon Tate, the eight-month pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, and two of her house guests, Wojciech Farkowski, a Polish cameraman who was friends with Roman, Abigail Folger, well-known coffee heirs from the Folger family, Jay Sebring, these celebrity hairstylists in Hollywood were all in the house and there was a home invasion. Nobody knew who did it, but they slaughtered all of them plus a visitor to the caretaker's house in the back, a 19-year kid named Steve Parent. Three months later, they captured a group of hippies who lived communally first at the Spahn Ranch, which is outside Los Angeles in a place called Chatsworth, broken down horse ranch, and then they had migrated out to death valley the early reports were that it was a cult and their leader was a man named charles manson 32 year old ex-con short like five five or five four and he had 10 or 15 wives kids they didn't know whose were the parents of which kids everyone was raised communally. And what became then the first sensational trial in Los Angeles, really, until OJ, there had never been that kind of attention. They tried them and convicted them. And what the mystery was, why were these people killed in this house? What was the connection of these hippies? What were they looking for? It wasn't a robbery. What the prosecutor Vince Bugliosi learned through his investigation was, and this is the official narrative of the story, was that Manson believed that there was an impending race war, which he called Helter Skelter after the Beatles song, and it was taking too long and he wanted to trigger it. So he ordered his followers to go to this house where he had a relationship with a music producer who had lived there previously, but no longer lived there, named Terry Melcher. And the murders were committed to shock the world. And they left signs that they hoped were going to implicate the Black Panthers and turn the world against the blacks. And then Manson had prophesied and the prophecies came from Beatles lyrics, Beatles songs that he thought were written to communicate these orders to him. And then the Old Testament, the Book of Revelations, it's just this whole mishmash. Anyway, the murders happened. All of a sudden, these hippies were brought back to Los Angeles from Death Valley. The ones who weren't arrested and charged, held vigil outside the courthouse every day for a year. And whatever Manson did in court, the women who were tried beside him, three women and then another man separately, Tex Watson, would mimic. So he'd carve X in his forehead, show up at court. The next day, the women defendants would have X's, and everybody outside, the family who were sitting in circles and singing and praying, all had X's in their foreheads. I got assigned this story and I didn't know what the angle was. This had been written to death. It had, you know, the book that the prosecutor wrote, Helter Skelter, to this day is the bestselling true crime book of all time. I didn't want to do it. I needed a job though. It was supposed to be three months. I began it and I was trying to find an angle, which can be fun, but it can also be scary because you don't want to write a boring story. And the angle that I kind of settled on was how did Manson get these young women in under a year to go out and kill complete strangers for no other reason than he told them to and to have no remorse and to actually laugh about it. And that was something that kind of, I think that's why people became so obsessed with the case and people still make movies about it and write books about it. Not because it was a horrific murder. There's those kinds of murders all the time. And not even because it was a famous actress married to a famous director who was out of the country when it happened, I should say, but because nobody had ever seen anything like this before, where young kids just killed for the joy of killing and then laughed about it afterward. So I began to try to find out what Manson had done, how he had learned, where he had gained this knowledge to get these kids to do this. In under two years, for the majority of them, under a year for about a half dozen of them. And that's what led me to this program, MKUltra, which I didn't know would be connected to them. But I ended up finding out that there was a psychiatrist named Louis J. West, Jolly West, who was working out of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in 1967, where Manson had begun this group, the cult. And he was doing his research there with LSD on hippies. And when the MKUltra program got exposed, he was alleged to have been part of it. And he told the New York Times he had nothing to do with it. They'd approached him. He wouldn't use LSD on humans. And he said he didn't want to do it. He had died right after I got the assignment. I got access to his papers at UCLA. And after months and months and months of really tedious digging, I was looking for a needle in a haystack and I found it. He was writing using an alias for Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the program at the CIA. He was called the Poisoner in Chief, about all the experiments he was going to do and all of this stuff paralleled his arrival in San Francisco, Manson's arrival in San Francisco. The two of theirs traveled down to Los Angeles. And it was during that period that Manson turned into exactly what the CIA had been trying to create for 15 years at that point. So I present in the book a case that I haven't proven it, absolutely. But I make a case that these two men intersected and Manson was experimented with the girls were. You say
Speaker 2
there's no smoking
Speaker 2
no smoking gun, rather. But you have this kind of, you know, Manson pre 1967 Hade Ashbery, who is this petty criminal. He's like five foot five or something. He's not particularly charismatic. And he keeps getting, you know, caught for these petty crimes. And he goes into this parole officer, Roger Smith. Roger Smith. And Roger Smith specializes in amphetamines and LSD and their effect. He's a parole
Speaker 1
officer who's also a criminology student at Berkeley and a drug researcher. And his special field of research was adolescent kids who join gangs and become violent while using drugs.
Speaker 2
So he's going into this guy constantly who specializes in this stuff. And then David Smith as well, right? Ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. And we know now from the church commission that they had this thing called Operation Midnight Climax, where they would bring in people like Manson and they would sort of dose them up. You have this weird confluence of people around Manson. And then you have this kind of line in the sand of Manson as this like not super charismatic petty criminal into this sex god cult leader guru guy and it's all in the span of basically a year yeah and so you know I think that that's fairly that's fairly compelling and then Jolly West himself just to you guys have a sense of how pervasive MK Ultra was was the head of the UCLA psychiatry plenty of reputable psychiatrists, psychologists studied under him. And so it's pretty fascinating. Yeah, if you go to
Speaker 1
UCLA, there's an auditorium named after him. He was also the head of the neuroscience center there. He started the first neuroscience center at University of Oklahoma in the 50s after he left the Lackland Air Force Base, which is where he began his first experiments on prisoners at the base and then went through Oklahoma, Los Angeles, San Francisco and had connections. He was kind of like a zealot. When Jack Ruby was arrested and charged for shooting Oswald, he became Ruby's psychiatrist, not right away. He tried to get on the case right away, but the judge wouldn't let him. He actually requested to be on. The defense attorney wasn't sure what was going on. So Ruby got convicted at trial within a year of the Oswald shooting, never testified, only told the media he had a story to tell. He wanted to tell it. Well, he was getting a second trial. At the same time, they were finally going to take his testimony, the Warren Commission. All of a sudden, Wes got assigned to the case, goes in and spends about an hour alone with Ruby at the county jail and comes out and holds a press conference and says within the preceding 48 hours, Jack Ruby has had a psychotic break from which he'll never recover. His auditory and visual hallucinations, he thinks there's people in the room. He hears what he says are the cries of Jewish children being boiled alive outside his jail cell at night. From that day forward, Ruby only lived three more years. He could never string three coherent sentences together. Now, West's specialty among his specialties was inducing insanity in a person without their knowledge. And the Warren Commission was never told that, that this guy was actually hit a conflict of interest. He was working for the CIA at the time. And, you know, are these coincidences or is there something more to it that doesn't sound like a coincidence to me so you have
Speaker 2
just to rehash it for everybody you have uh lee harvey oswald who supposedly was this lone gunman who you know took out jfk that was like kind of conventional narrative you have jack ruby killing him and by the way when jack ruby shot him he goes what are you doing i'm jack ruby to the cops who were arresting him almost as if he didn't recall having killed lee harvey oswald
Speaker 1
he didn't you know his original defense was he wasn't sure why he was there he had his his lawyer said he had an epileptic fit and
Speaker 2
he had no memory of this and then and then he's seen by jolly west in a jail cell with no cameras present and goes nuts right right. So I think that's a pretty interesting fact pattern. But going back to to Manson, other possible pieces of evidence that he was an MKUltra patient, his whole life was kind of modeled off of this sci fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, this 1968 bestseller. And he called his son was like Don Valentine, right? Michael Valentine. Michael Valentine. His firstborn child. And then Roger Smith, his parole officer, was Jubal, this protector character. So if you're not familiar
Speaker 1
with the novel, in the 1960s, everyone read that book, especially hippies.
Speaker 2
But Mansson was supposedly illiterate so it brings up this like really interesting question was he like dosed up with lsd read this thing that then became like the narrative for his life because in it you know it involves this race war or whatever like a lot of this stuff he's talking about in his
Speaker 1
life and it's about a leader who is born on mars dispatched to the earth to start a new society of offspring. And he has communal wives and he has someone who protects him in the legal system who is called Jubal. And Roger's nickname from Manson and the girls was Jubal. There's a lot of spooky figures that kind of were on the periphery of Manson's life for the two years he was free between 67 and his arrest in 69. There's like a half dozen of them. And it's kind of a real cornucopia of characters that I present in the book that were really hard to find to get information on. A lot of them have no records. I did CIA FOIA requests for the two or three that I was sure were affiliated with the CIA, and you got what's called the GLOMA response. We can neither confirm nor deny any relationship with the CIA, which means, yeah, they win the CIA. And these people kind of traveled and followed Manson. And when Bugliosi came in and did his prosecution, he erased them from the story. He removed any trace
Speaker 2
of them having anything to do with the group. It's a really crazy, wild story. Crazy. So you have, and yeah, you have a lot of compelling evidence that you write about that Manson was almost being tracked by authorities before he killed Tate. Spawn Ranch was actually raided and bugged. So it was they could hear like Manson sort of plotting out the murder and Reeve Whitson this mysterious guy who would tell everybody oh you know his friends and family that he was CIA knew no he wouldn't actually say that okay he would say he worked for the government
Speaker 1
but he couldn't say who he worked for okay and it wasn't until a year or two before he died he told about three or four or five people who are very close to him, his daughter, his lawyer, who told me reluctantly that he had said to them that he was working in an undercover operation where he had infiltrated the Manson family for this government agency. And his dying regret was he could have prevented the murders from happening. And he said, I was there at the crime scene the night of the murders. He said, I wasn't there when they occurred. I came after and saw the aftermath and left before the police came. And there's actually sound evidence and other physical evidence that shows there was somebody at the property. Manson did go back and he's never said who he went back with. So, yeah, you're dealing with a lot of kind of shady, crazy shit.
Speaker 2
To say the least. Yeah, but it all kind of falls into place. We have a lot of evidence that maybe government had, you know, knew more about this stuff. And maybe maybe Manson was some sort of construct. The question is like motive, like why? Why would you kill a beautiful pregnant movie star in the form of Sharon Tate, who, you
Speaker 1
know, America loved? He's knocking on the chaos door and the COINTELPRO door. Exactly. So the CIA had another operation called Operation Chaos, which began in 1967 in San Francisco. And it was set up to do what the FBI also had a program doing called COINTELPRO. And it was all investigated. The agencies admitted they did it. COINTELPRO and Chaos were designed to neutralize the left-wing movement and the black militant movement in the United States in 67. So by 67, the Panthers were becoming really powerful, the Black Panthers. The war was escalating. People didn't trust President Johnson. And Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, believed that the biggest threat to the United States at that time was internal, that the youth was going to overthrow the country and take over. to do something to stop it. So chaos was started and COINTELPRO was started and they would get agents to infiltrate the groups and then do, among other things, get them to provoke the groups to commit crimes that they could actually get shot and killed by agents waiting in the course of the crimes, like a bank robbery or gun theft, stealing guns. Also, they were trying to provoke them to kill one another, particularly the Black Panthers who were splintering a lot. There was a lot of rivalries among different Panther groups in different cities, and there were other Black militant groups. In Los Angeles, there was something called the U.S. Slaves. There were two black U.S. slaves killed at UCLA campus in 68, which the FBI admitted when another whistleblower came out in the 70s, that those two murders had been pretty much orchestrated by FBI agents on the orders of the people in Washington. About six, seven months before the Sharon Tate murders, which if you don't know, it was a horrible, horrible murder. I mean, it's bad enough that she was eight and a half months pregnant. But the four victims that were stabbed were stabbed more than 200 times. There was blood writing on the wall. It was a real horrific crime scene. And the Tate House kind of represented liberal Hollywood it was a party house the white celebrities in LA were starting to support the pants or Panthers financially they were doing fundraisers they actually had a group I forget what the name was now not called the White Panthers but it was friends of the Panthers and famously you know Jane Fonda, Gene Seberg, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland, they were having meetings. Hoover wrote a memo to the head of the LA field office in November of 68, saying what we have to get these white supporters of the Panthers to fear is that when the revolution finally happens, they're going to be lined up against the wall and slaughtered with the rest of the white population. And then that August, you know, five white people were slaughtered in a house that really was part of the embodiment of the left-wing
Speaker 2
Hollywood establishment.