Charles Manson was the evil behind the brutal murders of Sharon Tate and at least eight others — but a new documentary speculates that Manson and his “family” of followers may have been influenced by government agents before committing their 1969 killing spree.
Journalist Tom O’Neill conducted two decades of research for his 2019 book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties, which is the basis for the new Netflix film Chaos: The Manson Murders, now streaming.
The film and O’Neill’s book each delve deeply into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and their initiatives to spy on American citizens during the Cold War, as well as their secret experiments with drugs, mind control and infiltrating counterculture movements. One such operation was Project MKUltra, which sought to develop a “truth serum” for interrogations.
While it remains unknown whether Manson and his followers were involved with intelligence operations in an official capacity, O’Neill points out parallels and commonalities between the slayings and the government’s goals during the 1960s.
So what were these top-secret controversial CIA initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s? Here’s what to know about Project MKUltra and other operations and their potential link to the Manson family murders.
What was Project MKUltra?
MK Ultra.
David Goldman/AP
MKUltra was the name given to then-secret CIA experiments in mind control. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s top chemist, spearheaded the program, which began in 1953 and ran through the early 1960s, per NPR. The goal was to develop a “truth serum” for interrogations, as well as substances to make people forget things they’d done and to control behavior, according to journalist Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner In Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control.
At Gottlieb’s behest, the CIA conducted experiments on and administered mind-altering substances, including barbiturates and LSD, to often unsuspecting individuals without their consent or knowledge. Their test subjects included other CIA agents, college students, psychiatric patients, cancer patients and prisoners, among others.
According to Kinzer, Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as well as poet Allen Ginsburg and Grateful Dead songwriter Robert Hunter, were among volunteers for MKUltra experiments with LSD, while gangster Whitey Bulger, who was incarcerated at the time, was told he would be given an experimental treatment for schizophrenia when he was administered LSD over the course of a year.
Ted Kaczynski, then a 17-year-old Harvard student who would later become known as the Unabomber, was subjected to psychological experiments, according to The Washington Post, that may have exacerbated his schizophrenia. (Though, per The Washington Post, there is no evidence suggesting LSD or similar substances were used on Kaczynski.)
When did Project MKUltra end?
The program ended in the early 1960s after a member of the CIA Inspector General’s staff learned of MKUltra’s experiments and ordered them to cease all experimentation on non-consenting subjects.
Some of MKUltra’s activities came to light in December 1974 when The New York Times published an expose on the CIA’s activities during President Richard Nixon‘s administration. President Gerald Ford established the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities to investigate further.
The United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, also called the Church Committee, took hold in 1975 to investigate MKUltra and COINTELPRO, among other operations that were deemed intelligence abuses. The following year, President Ford issued an executive order that prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”
In 1977, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) led congressional hearings investigating MKUltra, especially in regard to its use of LSD and its link to the death of scientist Dr. Frank Olson. However, because the CIA destroyed documents regarding the program in 1973 and agents testified that they couldn’t recall incidents, few questions about MKUltra have definitive answers.
What was COINTELPRO?
J. Edgar Hoover.
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COINTELPRO was a domestic counterintelligence program led by J. Edgar Hoover and endorsed by presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon, according to The Daily Beast. Its existence first went public in March 1971, when a group of anonymous activists broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania and released files to the media.
COINTELPRO was initially launched to keep tabs on suspected communists but expanded its reach to surveil activist groups, antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders, as well as public figures who expressed sympathies for any group or cause that Hoover and the FBI deemed a threat.
What was Operation CHAOS?
Operation CHAOS was a CIA initiative to infiltrate leftist groups in an effort to prove they were influenced by foreign interests. Like the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the CIA developed files on college students, as well as civil rights groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Black Panther Party and antiwar organizations.
Was Charles Manson involved with MKUltra?
Charles Manson.
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There is no actual evidence that Manson was involved with MKUltra, Operation CHAOs or COINTELPRO, but O’Neill believes there are potential speculative links between the cult leader and the CIA and FBI’s activities.
“What he did aligned with the objectives of both those groups, which basically wanted to turn society against the young hippie movement,” O’Neill told Jacobin in 2023. “They wanted people to think of them not as harmless young kids with long hair, smoking pot and experimenting, but rather as dangerous bogeymen, out to kill your daughters or abduct your kids.”
O’Neill alleged that Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, a psychiatrist rumored to be involved with MKUltra (but who long denied ever being involved with the CIA), had an office in the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. Another psychiatrist, James Allen, reportedly told O’Neill that Manson and his followers frequented the clinic often for STD screenings and pregnancy tests and that Manson was required to go to the clinic as a condition of his parole at the time. O’Neill claimed that the clinic staff conducted experiments on clinic patients using amphetamines and LSD.
O’Neill posited that Manson may have picked up on mind control techniques from MKUltra and that his and his followers’ experiences at the clinic may have ultimately led them to commit the murders.
“I think there is a good likelihood that Manson is a product of MKUltra, whether he was knowledgeable about it or not,” O’Neill said. “But I haven’t been able to definitively prove it. I chased this story for 20 years, hoping to get conclusive information one way or the other, but I could neither disprove it nor prove it to my satisfaction.”
