Starting a second thread for the rest of the Manson book. Let's do it.

The first thread, detailing the Hollywood/music crowd and the police surveillance done on Manson and his compound at Spahn ranch, can be found here: https://twitter.com/BTH_Bill/status/1282176304813613056?s=19

Most of the rest of what I have to share deals with the CIA. I know. You're shocked.

Let's talk about Reeve Whitson.

Prior to embarking on his Manson research, the author of the book, Tom O'Neill, was "never interested in conspiracies." That changed with Whitson, who was a mysterious background figure that no one could quite figure out:

Whitson is mentioned 4 times in the trial transcript- by a key witnesses, Shahrokh Hatami. Hatami claims he got a call from Whitson at 7am telling him that their friend, Sharon Tate, had been murdered. This was an hour and a half before the bodies were "first discovered."

How would Whitson, who'd been a friend of both Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, have known such a thing before anyone else did?

Whitson went on to pressure Hatami to testify that he'd seen Manson at the house four months prior to the murders- thus linking Manson to the scene and to the victims. Hatami knew this was untrue, but was threatened with deportation if he didn't comply. So he did:

He sounds like something out of a shitty spy novel, but O'Neill spoke to dozens of his friends/acquaintances and they all had the same stories: he was CIA, involved in the investigation in some mysterious capacity, and was possibly surveilling the house when the murders happened.

O'Neill tracked down his ex-wife and his daughter. Both confirmed his CIA ties:

Turns out Whitson had likely been enlisted to aid in the investigation by Sharon Tate's father, Colonel Paul Tate. He'd been running his own parallel investigation into the death of his daughter.

Whitson had been present when Roman Polanski was first interviewed by the cops.

Two known associates of Whitson: Otto and Ilse Skorzeny, who were, uh, literally Nazis.

In the end, nothing on Whitson could be definitively proven. You can't exactly FOIA the CIA and expect clear answers. But his mere presence is enough to make anyone wonder - just what the hell was going on behind the scenes of the Manson investigation/trial?

Why was a likely CIA operative wrangling witnesses, directing testimony, and moving in and out of the shadows of the investigation?

Continuing on - COINTELPRO and CHAOS, and how they might've been employed before, during, and after the murders...

COINTELPRO, for those who don't know, was the FBI's way of dealing with civil rights / anti-war groups between 1956 and 1971 (officially). It involved every dirty trick in the book. J. Edgar Hoover's directive to his agents said this:

CHAOS was the parallel CIA operation that had the same goals as COINTELPRO.

O'Neill managed to dig into an LAPD officer who fit the bill as being involved in such operations as COINTELPRO and CHAOS. His name was William Herrmann, and he had ties to the Phoenix Program in Vietnam:

Herrmann was enlisted by then-Governor Reagan himself to implement the anti-left/counterinsurgency tactics in California, beginning in 1968 with the "Riots and Disorder" task force. This was happening throughout the Family's LA relocation and the murders.

As if all of this wasn't enough, the Special Investigations Section (SIS) of the LAPD was also active in the investigation. Its commander, Danny Bowser, was assigned as Roman Polanski's bodyguard after the murders.

The SIS was an elite 20-man unit that was unconnected to any specific division and had a, uh, controversial mandate: they declined to intervene as crimes, even violent crimes, took place. They were surveillance/witness-oriented.

Despite these marching orders, the SIS were christened with the nickname "Death Squad" (no, I'm not joking) because they'd killed 34 suspects between '65 and '88.

O'Neill tracked down Bowser, who alleged 1. Other LAPD cops had missed key physical evidence at the scene and 2. They'd spent decades covering it up:

If you're keeping track: a CIA officer, a spook with connections to the Phoenix Program, and a secretive surveillance unit of the LAPD were all involved heavily with the investigation, but never in any "official" capacity.

None of the principals were ever called to testify. Most of them were barely mentioned at trial, if at all. And almost everyone connected to intelligence, including one-time suspects like Tacot, were given pseudonyms in "Helter Skelter."

Mind you, at this point in the book, we've primarily covered what happened *after* the murders. It is in the latter third of the book that O'Neill finally digs into all the intelligence connections to Manson BEFORE the killings.

Let's go back to 1967 and talk about the Summer of Love.

Manson formed the Family in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco during the Summer of Love, 1967. He essentially groomed and developed a devoted following of primarily young women between the ages of 15 and 20.

The girls were Manson's ticket into different worlds- the Beach Boys, parties in Beverly Hills, even gaining leniency with the authorities that were supposed to be keeping him in check.

His parole officer was a Roger Smith, and he had a very, very interesting background with some ulterior motives and affiliations:

"How had an uneducated ex-con... who, months ago, had never taken acid... come to use the drug to such sophisticated ends?" Roger Smith, his P.O., and David Smith, his doctor in San Francisco, hold the keys to this question:

Roger Smith, as his P.O., was meeting with Manson routinely while researching the effects of LSD/amphetamines and violent behavior. David Smith, Manson's doc at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC) was doing the same.

That clinic had funding from a CIA front group.

You're not gonna believe this, but after Manson's arrest, the HAFMC offices were burglarized and his files were all stolen.

Despite the fact that the prosecutor, Bugliosi, argued at trial that Manson had brainwashed the family, he never called any of the group from San Francisco (including his P.O., his doctor, etc) to testify. Why not?

Guess who else kept an office at HAFMC? A CIA-connected doctor, Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West. His personal papers were stored at UCLA, O'Neill got his hands on them, and that's how he came to discover the MKULTRA connection to Manson's circle in Haight-Ashbury:

The CIA funded West's research into hippie culture and LSD in Haight-Ashbury 1967. The Family formed with LSD as its glue in Haight-Ashbury in 1967.

So some of the world's foremost experts on LSD, with a history of using it in experiments to brainwash people, were in Manson's orbit. They were particularly interested in behavior control, memory replacement, and violence.

During that time, Manson learned to utilize LSD better than anyone prior or since, cultivated a rather large, obedient following, and turned them loose in spurts of unimaginable violence, most of which they could barely remember afterward.

WEIRD COINCIDENCE IF YOU ASK ME!!!

By the way, MKULTRA was exposed in congressional hearings, and led to an outcry, but 1. None of the researchers were ever investigated 2. Only 2 (!!!) victims were located/compensated 3. The CIA got away with never sending its files to congressional investigators

O'Neill found indisputable evidence tying Dr. West to MKULTRA. West had a direct correspondence with Sidney Gottlieb, the godfather of the program. "Needless to say... the experiments must be put to test in practical trials in the field."

The official story is that MKULTRA was ultimately a waste, a colossal failure, the classic example of CIA overreach in the midst of Cold War hysteria. But what if the opposite is true? The program ran for 25 years. What if they succeeded?

This is a great summary of the book, really, and is the final excerpt I'll share:
"I could poke a thousand holes in the (official) story, but I couldn't say what really happened."

O'Neill did not find a smoking gun, so he isn't comfortable speculating on what "he thinks really happened." And that's probably a good thing. I think his skepticism about conspiracies in general makes him a terrific researcher.

My two cents: with this many CIA people at the periphery, before the killings and afterward, they had to be involved.

Stop rolling your eyes, I'm serious

A parolee with a long, long rap sheet suddenly finds himself with what amounts to immunity, and his actions during his time of immunity line up with what the CIA was experimenting with.

The fact that police departments, parole officers, and judges across multiple jurisdictions made decisions that 1. kept Manson free to commit crimes then 2. covered it up just reeks of high-level coordination

My personal conclusion is that Manson/the Family was almost certainly an MKULTRA experiment. It didn't go wrong, it went pretty much exactly how they envisioned/hoped it would.

Turning the story into a cautionary tale, and as a way to smear hippies/the anti-war left/counter-culture as potentially dangerous, violent people in the collective imagination was icing on the cake

Even if you disagree with my interpretation- I believe the one thing O'Neill proves with his research, beyond the shadow of a doubt, is that there was/is way, way, WAY more going on with Manson than meets the eye.

And thus concludes the thread, 70ish tweets later. Thanks for sticking it out. I hope you were as intrigued by this stuff as I am. I'd highly recommend buying the book. I left a lot out of the thread! There's more to discover, I promise!