Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, & ... the Sixties

[Cordelia]

Bumping, since 50 years ago today...



(I’d just arrived home from a trip to the beach w/friends when the news broke. I remember thinking the world really is a fucked-up & scary place, discounting the fact that I’d just spent three hours seatbelt-less in the backseat of a car full of newly licensed sixteen year-olds who were drinking while barreling down a busy interstate.)

[Wombaticus Rex]

The book was indeed superb. I wound up pulling out Seth Rosenfeld's "Subversives" because there was so much overlap at points.

From his closer (p. 429-430):

In my nearly twenty years of reporting on this case, people have asked me all the time: What do I think really happened? I hate that question more than anything. The plain answer is, I don't know. I worry that as soon as I speculate, I undermine the work I've done. In a sense, had I been more willing to fill in the blanks, I might've finished this book sooner.

...

It's when someone claims that I've "found the truth" that I get anxious. I haven't found the truth, much as I wish I could say I have. My goal isn't to say what did happen -- it's to prove that the official story didn't. I've learned to accept the ambiguity. I had to, I realized, if I ever wanted to finish this book. For every chapter here, there are a dozen I've left out. There's more, there's always more.

I'd rather like to see his missing chapters on Charlie's Early Years In The Federal Prison System, especially in terms of his tenure at Boy's Town, which doesn't rate a mention in CHAOS.

[minime]

Manson was at Boy's Town for all of three days. It was unlikely a formative event in his youth, aside all the rest of his institutionalized experience. But, then again, youneverknow.

I'm more interested in his time in Mexico.

And of course, his Scientology training in prison raises a sea of red flags.

Whack a mole.

[streeb]

It’s a fantastic book, maybe a game changer. O’Neill has said he has enough material for a couple more.

[thrulookingglass]

Incredible thread. So much here. Anyone think this could tie into the Kathy O'Brien mind programming phenomenon as well? This is so awful a project it makes me question humanities sanity. We have so many threads now for all this government made dirty secret program bullshit, absolute criminal horrors from jfk/rfk/mlk, anyone close to leftist causes, peace activists, John Lennon all of it is fucking real. This is what they do with American taxes. Glad the government can do lsd legally but I can't!

Madness! Psycho-killing & Madness!



Weep I.

Weep I.

[Marionumber1]

Manson was at Boy's Town for all of three days. It was unlikely a formative event in his youth, aside all the rest of his institutionalized experience. But, then again, youneverknow.

I have yet to get a copy, but an Omaha author named Lawson McDowell wrote a book on Manson's stay in Boys Town, and he said in an interview that "[t]he things that happened at Boys Town changed the course of history in a darker direction for Manson". What McDowell actually means is unclear but there could be more significance in his brief stay at Boys Town than it would appear at first glance. I also find it very odd that E. John Brandeis, the uncle of Franklin scandal perp Alan Baer and one of the wealthy elites who basically ran Omaha, owned a ranch in the Chatsworth, California area (the Brandeis Ranch) not far from the Spahn Ranch where the Manson Family lived. John D. Kennedy, a seller of Navajo goods, claimed on p.187-188 of his book A Good Trade that he was selling to Brandeis and saw the Manson Family in the vicinity while he was there. So perhaps Boys Town wasn't hugely impactful in terms of programming, but it was the first place where Manson got noticed as a potential MKUltra subject and he had an overseer from that Omaha pedophilia/intelligence milieu.

[Elvis]

E. John Brandeis, the uncle of Franklin scandal perp Alan Baer and one of the wealthy elites who basically ran Omaha, owned a ranch in the Chatsworth, California area (the Brandeis Ranch) not far from the Spahn Ranch where the Manson Family lived. John D. Kennedy, a seller of Navajo goods, claimed on p.187-188 of his book A Good Trade that he was selling to Brandeis and saw the Manson Family in the vicinity while he was there. So perhaps Boys Town wasn't hugely impactful in terms of programming, but it was the first place where Manson got noticed as a potential MKUltra subject and he had an overseer from that Omaha pedophilia/intelligence milieu.

Now that's interesting.

[Harvey]

I've just bought a copy as a birthday present for my girlfriend on the strength of the recommendations here. Won't be able to read it until she's finished, but definitely looking forward to it. Thanks all.

[Wombaticus Rex]

O'Neill's find on Jolly West is an extremely important data point. I transcribed some of it for the Jerry Drake Varnell post:

Tom O'Neill, "CHAOS," p. 348

Before (Louis Jolyon West) moved to the Haight, he'd supervised a similar study in Oklahoma City, hiring informants to infiltrate teenage gangs and engender "a fundamental change" in "basic moral, religious and political matters." The title of the project was Mass Conversion. As I was soon to see, its funds came from Sidney J. Gottlieb, the head of CIA's MKULTRA program.

p. 360-363
August 25, among a batch of research papers on hypnosis, I found them: letters between West and his CIA handler, "Sherman Grifford. (aka Gottleib)

...

Next West addressed a sensitive matter: who would the guinea pigs be? He listed four groups -- basic airmen, volunteers, patients, and "others, possibly including prisoners in the local stockade." Only the volunteers would be paid. The others would be unwilling, and although it wasn't spelled out, unwitting. It'd be easier to preserve his secrecy if he was "inducing specific mental disorders" in people who already exhibited them. "Certain patients requiring hypnosis in therapy, or suffering from dissociative disorders (trances, fugues, amnesia, etc.) might lend themselves to our experiments."

...

Gottleib's reply came on letterhead from "Chemrophyl Associates," a front company he used to correspond with MKULTRA subcontractors. "My Good Friend," he wrote, "I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real ... you have indeed developed a remarkably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful."

...

...1956. That year, West reported back to the CIA that the experiments he'd begun in 1953 had at last come to fruition. He was ensconced in a civilian institution, and evidently he found it a less oppressive setting than Lackland had been. In a paper titled "The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility," he claimed to have achieved the impossible: he know how to replace "true memories" with "false ones" in human beings without their knowledge. In case the CIA didn't grasp the significance of this, he put it in layman's terms: "It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and, through hypnotic suggestion, bring about the subsequent conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but a different (fictional) event actually did occur."

The document, marked "Classified," was right there in West's files; I had to assume the CIA had destroyed any copies. They've never publicly acknowledged West's groundbreaking deed. He'd done, it claimed, by administering "new drugs" effective in "speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects."

As in his initial experiments, West performed most of these psychiatric feats on mental health patients. "The necessity to obtain most of the subject material from a population of psychiatry patients made standardized observations very difficult," he groused. In the report, which doubled as a request for continued funding -- a successful request; West received government backing through 1965 at the least -- he enthusiastically described a high-tech laboratory he planned to construct at Oklahoma. It would included "a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacologic and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated."

[minime]

Which makes possible links between/among Gottlieb, Jolly, Manson, Oswald, Ruby and Mexico more compelling and worthy of investigation.

Of course, if Gottlieb was a loose cannon, it may all be nothing more than a cultural artifact. A fascinating one.

[The Consul]

Does he mention Neil Young introducing Manson to David Geffen?

[Grizzly]

https://reptiledysfunction.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/onion-bomb-for-jeffrey-epstein/

Onion Bomb, For Jeffrey Epstein

by William Skink

Charlie lit an onion bomb
that blew the noosphere into
300 million pieces of jagged atmosfear

who did Charlie haight so much
in San Francisco?
Shadow Sid and JJ Angel?

onion bombs touch the part of us
outside time

stories splatter like brain matter
and the Nephilim scoop it up greedily
for their blackhole soup bowls

black magic onion bombs
spreading fear-death
in deep lust for the time-spot
and the prize of forever—

that is what they are after
with their Palantir spy eyes
pimping glamour death
to soften fresh souls
for their banquets

surface sparks and clown noses with orange hair
have angry poles sharpening their teeth
for a strategic cannibalizing
of our power—

the power to love beyond self
is a power denied them as they gobble the essence
of life
while missing the whole point

because their feeling is an emptiness of feeling
consuming all

now, in the epoch of lead rain,
the endless hunger of self-styled wolves
uses each ritualized death spectacle
to further an order their chaos will make us demand

while awareness grows
a million dead-ends are conjured
to stupefy the seekers

what once was a rigor of intuition
has been blunted by trauma and trolls under
each hopeful bridge

trolls who bludgeon honest exchanges
into rust-red stains

to state it plainly: we are being driven insane

understand onion bombs
have layers of meaning
and reverberations beyond what our senses
can detect

I once thought true detectives
could discover the origin without core loss
of compass tied to heart

but the dark magnetism of charred remains
is still occulted to a left brain moving forward
with heart roots

the dead body of old Jeff
found in his cell
killed on the day it happened 50 years ago—

they’ll say by his own hand
but those familiar with twilight language know
the true meaning of suicide watch
and can feel the detonation of an onion bomb

when it blows another hole
in our holy web,

the end

[hanshan]

...


https://reptiledysfunction.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/onion-bomb-for-jeffrey-epstein/


bump


...

[streeb]

It's tangential, but still interesting to me: I was told, not really off the record, that Errol Morris's proposed documentary series based on O'Neill's research eventually morphed into Wormwood after the two of them disagreed about the direction Morris wanted to go. There's evidence of their collaboration in the book. Maybe I should watch it again before commenting, but I recall thinking that Wormwood had no guts, especially in the wake of A Terrible Mistake. Some here might remember that stupid/lousy short Morris made about Umbrella Man for the NY Times a few years ago. Really soured me on the guy.

Now it seems that Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain are about to publish their 20 year Manson investigation:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/the-follow-up-to-please-kill-me-is-an-oral-history-about-charlie-manson-869680/

What did the musicians, poets and other cultural figures you interviewed bring to the story?
McNeil:We spent a lot of time with Peter Coyote, who was in the Diggers [an anarchist collective and offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe], and a lot of people around San Francisco and the Haight, Carl Franzoni [performers and fixtures of the LA hippie freak scene], and the Byrds and Love.

For those who've read CHAOS, I've wondered for many years if Peter Coyote might be a Reeve Whitson.

[Grizzly]

POSSIBLY TRIGGERING

First song was recorded on Aug 9, 2019...know what I mean? The poem put to music was written the morning it was reported Jeffrey Epstein died. The layers are numerous and the rot grows more putrid the closer you get to the center of it.