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Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill

Tom O’Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared in national publications such as Us, Premiere, New York, The Village Voice and Details. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (https://amzn.to/2RGhdQM) was published by Little, Brown in the summer of 2019.

Tom O'NeillguestJoe RoganhostJamie Vernonhost
Apr 16, 20202h 55mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 1:59

    Why the Manson story became a 20-year investigation

    1. TO

      I'm ready.

    2. JR

      Okay. Tom, how are you?

    3. TO

      Good, Joe.

    4. JR

      Great to meet you.

    5. TO

      You, too.

    6. JR

      I've been deep into your book for the last two weeks and, uh, we'll tell everybody what it's called right off the bat. It's called Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the '60s. And I think it's safe to say that everything that most people believe that happened during the Manson murders is a, a, a tiny fraction of what was going on behind the scenes, and this is what you have ... I mean, you've essentially been obsessed with this for ... How, how many years did it take you to do this?

    7. TO

      Yeah, not obsessed by choice. It kinda happened.

    8. JR

      (laughs)

    9. TO

      But, uh, in the end, exactly 20 years. We turned in the final manuscript, uh, I think a day to the 20th year assignment.

    10. JR

      And this wasn't a personal obsession with yours.

    11. TO

      Never.

    12. JR

      You were writing an article. L- l- let's fill people in.

    13. TO

      The, yeah, the beginning was, uh, I was in between magazines, uh, and not working, and I got a call from an editor I'd worked with for years, um, and she was at Premier Magazine at that point, which was a monthly movie magazine. And she wanted me to do a story on the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Manson murders, which was 1999, happened in '69. And I was like, "Eh, no, no thanks." You know, never been interested, hasn't the story been written, you know, to death?

    14. JR

      Right.

    15. TO

      Uh, and, uh, she said, "Look, once we talk about it, you're gonna see Manson comes up much more often in popular culture than you're aware of. Uh, just trust me on that and I think that if you look into it, you'll find an interesting story." I go, "But, you know, what, what about the 30th anniversary? I, there, there's no angle." And she goes, "You've done it before. You'll find an angle." We had worked together a lot, and that began a spiral into kind of madness that finally ended last, last year in March when we turned the manuscript in.

    16. JR

      That is so crazy that it took that long. (laughs)

  2. 1:59 – 4:43

    Premier Magazine’s role, blown deadlines, and the book that wouldn’t end

    1. TO

      I know. I know. The magazine shut down five years later.

    2. JR

      So you never got the, you never got anything printed in the magazine?

    3. TO

      Well, no. I mean, that's also a little bit of a complicated story, too. I got an assignment to do a normal feature, which is about three months, three and a half months, uh, so I got it on the day after my 40th birthday, which is a time in any m- person's life where you're kind of reevaluating things anyway, so I thought I needed the money (clears throat) and, uh, I needed a job and I knew that I could get into Premier Magazine as a contributor on the masthead, which meant a, a yearly contract because all the people from my prior magazine had moved over. And, uh, once I had a good story there, this would have been the first, then I'd be set. So I agreed to do it and long story, very long story short, uh, after a month or two when the story kind of started breaking open and I started finding holes in the official narrative and pursuing them, uh, I met with the editor-in-chief, Jim Miggs, and he agreed, once he saw all of the documentation I had and the evidence which was just, you know, a small portion of what I ended up having in the end, he agreed to blow the deadline for what would have been the anniversary issue of August '99 (clears throat) and he started contracting me by the month. And that continued for a year and a half. All I did was report the story on Premier's dime. He lost his job.

    4. JR

      Because of you?

    5. TO

      Well, that was kind of what was whispered around the offices. I never heard that, uh, you know, that was ever substantiated. I'm a little worried that it had something to do with it. He went on to a, a career that was fine anyway, but, uh, when the new guy came in, he demanded the story right away. I mean, I, I understood that. And at that point, I got a book agent, uh, through a friend, and my book agent got me out of, uh, my obligation to Premier.

    6. JR

      So Premier essentially paid for you to start your book?

    7. TO

      Yeah, a lot of money.

    8. JR

      Oh, my goodness.

    9. TO

      Yeah. And that's ... I'm actually ... Because it was resolved not in the courts, but we all had to sign non-disclosures.

    10. JR

      Mm.

    11. TO

      So, uh, I didn't get entirely away with it for, for nothing, but, um, at that point though, that was I think 2001 or late 2000, then I was on my own. I had to write a proposal and sell the proposal as a book. So that happened next and, and finally in 2005. And when we took the proposal out, it was book length. It was 220 pages and, um, my, uh, agent who's big shot at ICM

  3. 4:43 – 7:05

    Cracks in the prosecution’s case: perjury, planted defense sabotage, and legal stakes

    1. TO

      who was also kind of ... What I would do, I, I, I would seduce people into this story and get them as obsessed as I was-

    2. JR

      How would you do that? Like, pretend I'm a guy and you're trying to pitch me this book.

    3. TO

      In the beginning, in the first years? Uh, just that the trial that had occurred that had been prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi had a lot of, um, malfeasance in it, uh, by the prosecution. I was able to document that they planted a former prosecutor on the defense team to sabotage the defense. I found out that two or three of the principal witnesses, including Terry Melcher who played a big part in this and will probably talk about that at some point, lied on the stand. You know, suborn themselves in a, in a murder trial and if you commit perjury in a murder trial, you could be convicted of murder. I mean, you could be sentenced to a murder. You could get a, a murder sentence too because of that. Uh, so there was about a dozen of those and none of them happened all at once, you know?

    4. JR

      So if you committed perjury during a murder trial, you could be sentenced for murder for the same amount of time that someone would get sentenced if they murdered somebody?

    5. TO

      You are subject to an actual capital. You, you could be elect- you, you could be sent to the chair.

    6. JR

      Wow.

    7. TO

      And the five people who were convicted of murder in the first trial once-Had I been around and able to prove this in the early '70s, um, Vincent Bugliosi and the three people who lied on the stand, in a material way, you know, in a very important way, they all could have been tried for that perjury and sentenced to the same... uh, uh, or given the same sentence that the people who had gotten the death sentence.

    8. JR

      Now, I told you that I- I just got to the 11th chapter of your book.

    9. TO

      Right.

    10. JR

      And, um, eh, eh, essentially what I'm getting so far, I haven't finished the book, but what I'm getting so far is there was some sort of a CIA program where they were... Explain how they did it. They, they infiltrated these hippie communities, and they allowed Charles Manson over and over and over again to get out of jail.

    11. TO

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      They knew that he was committing all these crimes. And instead of incarcerating him-

    13. TO

      Well, we have to be careful when we say "they."

    14. JR

      Who's they?

    15. TO

      Yeah, we have to-

    16. JR

      Okay.

    17. TO

      ... kind of break it all down.

    18. JR

      Let's, let's break it all down.

  4. 7:05 – 11:14

    Manson’s ‘hands-off’ parole: Rodger Smith, redacted files, and immunity patterns

    1. TO

      One of the other things I found out that was very significant was that Manson had a parole officer, his first parole officer, who kind of had given him a get out of jail free card for the first year after Manson was released from prison in 19-

    2. JR

      This was Smith?

    3. TO

      Rodger Smith, yeah.

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. TO

      And he was a criminologist in, uh, the Bay Area. Manson violated his parole the day that he was released in Los Angeles. And this is one of the... you think it's a little lie, but it's an important lie that Vince Bugliosi presented, not just in his- at trial, but also in his book. At trial, it's much more serious. He, uh, changed the narrative.

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. TO

      He said Manson had been given permission to travel to San Francisco from LA when Manson was paroled. Manson hadn't been given that permission. He just showed up there. They originally were gonna violate him, send him right back to prison, and someone stepped in and took care of that and let Manson stay in San Francisco, and he was assigned to Rodger Smith. Uh, it took about a year and a half, but through a Freedom of Information Act process, I got his federal parole file, and those were the kind of seeds of how I found out that Manson had this immunity from prosecution for the two years he was out of prison from '67 until the murders occurred in the summer of '69. And-

    8. JR

      Who, who... I'm sorry to interrupt, but who was Smith doing this for? Who was giving him the instructions to continue to let Manson out and to con- and to continue to monitor him?

    9. TO

      Well, that's the problem. I didn't get the whole file, and the file I got had redactions.

    10. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    11. TO

      He would report to the head office, and they would give him instructions, uh, and then he would violate those instructions, and there'd be no repercussions for him or for Manson. Uh, for instance, Manson was arrested in July of 1967, three or four months after he got out of prison when he was under Rodger Smith's supervision, for, um, interfering with an officer, uh, who was trying to arrest one of his first young followers, Ruth Ann Moorehouse, who was 15. And he was put in jail, uh, pled out, so he got a three-day sentence, a new probation sentence as well, and all that was hidden. Like, it's not in Bugliosi's book. Uh, the, the parole officer, Rodger Smith, a week later, wrote to the head office that Manson was doing fine, and he actually recommended that Manson be allowed to go to Mexico and work in Mexico. And the head parole office in, in the United States, since it's federal, wrote back, and they said, "That's insane." He was suppos- he, he... The job that he was gonna do in Mexico was surveying, um, soil for insect- insecticides. I mean, it had nothing to do with... And I have all these documents showing this.

    12. JR

      Who was hiring hi- Charles Manson to survey soil?

    13. TO

      Uh, it was a company in Nevada which disappeared a couple years later. Um-

    14. JR

      So it was a bullshit company thing?

    15. TO

      I believe so, yeah.

    16. JR

      What do you think they were doing down there?

    17. TO

      Uh, see, that's it. I don't like to speculate-

    18. JR

      Right.

    19. TO

      ... 'cause I can't prove it. All I know is just the fact that his parole officer asked to send him not only to Mexico, but to the country that M- Manson had been deported from in 1959, the last time he was a free man. He had violated his parole then.

    20. JR

      He was arrested in Mexico, right?

    21. TO

      He was arrested in Mexico and brought over by the Federales and- and given over to federal custody, uh, for, uh, it was a drug violation and, and some other stuff. So why would his parole officer send him back to this place three months after he'd been released, and how do you supervise somebody who's in another country? Uh-

    22. JR

      Can, can I make a summary just for people who are like, "What the fuck is going on right now?" Es- essentially, what you're saying is that Charles Manson was a part of some sort of a program.

    23. TO

      Yes.

    24. JR

      And that through this program, they were using him and using... with LSD and all the members of the Family, they were turning them violent. And why, why do you think they were doing this?

    25. TO

      Again, this is where I gotta reel it in a little bit.

    26. JR

      Yeah, I understand. Okay.

    27. TO

      Um, I have to be real careful about not saying anything that I haven't been able to prove.

    28. JR

      I understand.

  5. 11:14 – 13:01

    Haight-Ashbury clinic as the crossroads: Manson’s transformation and research access

    1. TO

      What I've proven is that he was getting leniency from the federal government and the, uh, law enforcement, first in San Francisco that year. The person who represented the federal government there was his parole officer, Rodger Smith, a federal parole officer, who was giving him leniency. Rodger was also doing drug research at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which opened in June of '67. Manson, during that period, turned into the Manson that we're familiar with today, you know, the monster, the embodiment of evil, as Vince Bugliosi called him, the guru who could control the minds of these followers. So he would come into the clinic to see Rodger S- well, he went for two reasons. Th- it was a free clinic. It was at the height of the Summer of Love, the summer of '67. And, um, he would come in with the women, the girls. He had about five or six followers then, and they would walk behind him. They wouldn't speak unless he spoke to them. Any command he, he issued towards them, they would follow. And they became very well known around the clinic, and they were there principally for...... uh, Manson to see Roger for his weekly parole appointments, and then the girls were going in for STDs, and there were some pregnancies and stuff, and they were getting free treatment. That was y- the summer that the Manson family formed, and then they left in late '67, early '68 and migrated down to Los Angeles and became this killer cult.

    2. JV

      It's crazy how quickly this all happened.

    3. TO

      It's insane how quickly it- it happened.

    4. JV

      So w- for people who don't understand, we're talking about two years.

    5. TO

      Mm-hmm.

    6. JV

      We're talking about '67, Manson is in Haight-Ashbury. '69, the Tate-LaBianca murders, and then the trial and then, then everything else.

    7. TO

      Yeah.

    8. JV

      Two years.

  6. 13:01 – 15:37

    MKUltra explained: brainwashing goals, destroyed records, and ‘safe house’ operations

    1. TO

      Yeah. And so you brought up MKUltra.

    2. JV

      Yes.

    3. TO

      MKUltra was a government program run by the Central Intelligence Aidy, uh, Agency, originally started as something called Bluebird in 1948, '49, morphed into Artichoke, and then in 1952, became MKUltra was a mind control program, a brainwashing program. The CIA was trying to learn how to control people's behavior without their knowledge. Now, this is, all came out in Senate and Congressional hearings. In the '70s it was exposed, but nobody knew about it until 1974 when Seymour Hersh, the New York Times reporter, uh, reported it on the front page of the paper. So, um, their main objective was to commit or to create what they called hypno-programmed assassins, people who would kill on command, uh, popularly known as M- Manchurian candidates after a book that was written in 1962 and later became a movie and then a movie again. Uh, the people would be, through drugs and hypnotism, the objective was to get people to go and commit an act of murder against their moral code and have no memory of their programming, uh, and be amnesic even of the act after the fact often. Uh, that was just one of... That was their main goal, but they were also trying to create couriers, people, you know, military people that they could implant messages, send them, you know, across dangerous areas where there were... You know, at that time, it was the Vietnam War, uh, and deliver messages and then have th- them wiped from their, their memory in case they were captured. Uh, they had all kinds of objectives. So Roger Smith was, um, supervising Manson when he became exactly what, or he was able to do exactly what the MKUltra program had been trying to create and do for, at that point, about 15, 17 years. When it was all exposed in the '70s and there were these hearings, first, um, the Rockefeller Commission hearings and the Church hearings, and then finally, s- uh, Senators Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye held hearings. Um, the CIA admitted that they had done this, but they... No one would say exactly what they did. All the records had been destroyed when the two people who ran it, Richard Helms, who would become the director of the CIA in the '60s, and Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who was kind of the mad scientist who, um, had supervised all the, all the... They had safe

  7. 15:37 – 25:44

    Jolly West’s files: proof of covert experimentation and a ‘lab disguised as a crash pad’

    1. TO

      houses in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, where they would experiment on people that were lured in- into these, um, apartments and houses that were either look, looked like brothels or hippie communes or whatever. And, um, the people who were working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic that was run by another Smith, which makes it a little confusing, but Dr. David Smith, who founded it, um, he had given an office to a scientist named Jolly West, Louis J. West, who, um, was when, when the hearings occurred in the '70s, identified as a top MKUltra researcher. He was an academic, uh, come out of the military, had been at the Okla- University, or Oklahoma University, University of Oklahoma, sorry, and then UCLA running the psychiatric divisions. He denied ever being involved in MKUltra, and this was one of the moments, I think it was 2001, when, you know, things really kind of shook the course of my reporting, was I learned that West had been at the same place that Manson was in the Haight in the summer that Manson became exactly what the CIA was trying to create. And I knew, actually... I'd interviewed West about seven years before for a story I did about celebrity stalkers and people who were obsessed with stars and then only to kill them or try to kill them, and he was an expert in violence, hypnotism, brainwashing, and he was the chair of the psychiatry department at UCLA at that point. Uh, he was dead when his name came up in the Manson story, and there wasn't a lot of... I mean, I guess there was a lot of Google then or a little bit, but when I did a little research, I found out that there had been these allegations that he'd been involved in MKUltra. He always denied it. He was never prosecuted, never even investigated. He went to his grave threatening to sue anybody that said he would have anything to do with this kind of a program. Uh, again, through another long story, but I got access to his files, which had been left at UCLA, uh, and never... They had never been processed when I called, and when, when I made the request, it took them two or three months to process the papers. I went through them f- through the whole summer looking for a needle in a haystack, and it was intuition, gut. I just thought there might be something there, and sure enough, I eventually found it. It was correspondence between Jolly West and Sidney Gottlieb, the doctor that ran MKUltra beginning in 1953, about conduct- conducting experiments on people without their knowledge to get them to, uh, have amnesics, uh, uh, a- amnesia of the acts, uh, after they were programmed and, uh, everything that he had been accused of and denied, he did. Not only did he do it, he created the blueprint for the whole program with Gottlieb. Uh, the fact that all these kind of, um...... interesting research programs merged at the Haight, at the clinic, and then Manson came out of it with the power to do exactly what the MKUltra had been trying to create for up to that point, I thought was worth investigating further, and that's why I kept going and going and going.

    2. JR

      They did a lot of crazy shit back then. Are you aware of Operation Midli- Midnight Climax?

    3. TO

      That, tho- those were the safe houses in San Francisco. Yeah.

    4. JR

      Yeah. Well, that was the brothel version of it.

    5. TO

      Yeah. Yeah.

    6. JR

      Where they, they lured these johns into these brothels and then dosed them up with LSD and studied them.

    7. TO

      Yeah. George Hunter White was the head CIA g- guy, and he would sit behind a two-way or a one-way mirror and watch them. The, the johns would be dosed with LSD. They tried aerosols or just drinks, different things, and then they would study their behaviors.

    8. JR

      Aerosols?

    9. TO

      Yeah, aerosol sprays.

    10. JR

      Really?

    11. TO

      Yeah.

    12. JR

      But that would get the prostitutes too then, no?

    13. TO

      No. The prostitutes would get 'em in there, and then they'd go to the bathroom or something-

    14. JR

      Oh, and then they'd spray 'em?

    15. TO

      ... or to be in the bathroom. Yeah.

    16. JR

      Oh, Jesus.

    17. TO

      And again, the, the problem is the records are so scant because Helms ordered Gottlieb to destroy all the records in 1973 when the two men left the agency. And the only reason anybody ever discovered that it existed was a whistleblower, somebody who used to work for the State Department, who remembered that there were records in a warehouse. And they were just financial records from the beginning of the program in '52 until the end in... the possible end in '73. And, uh, i- it was just financial records of where research took place, how much was spent, what kind of equipment was bought, but nothing about the content. The guy that found that ended up testifying to Congress and working with Seymour Hersh to expose it, was named John Marks. He wrote the first book about MKUltra that came out in the mid to late '70s called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. And after he wrote his book, he never s- y- you know, he spoke, uh, did a little bit of a tour, and then retreated into obscurity and never would do an interview again until I approached him in the early 2000s. And when I told him what I had, what I had found fr- uh, in West's files, these documents, he agreed to meet with me at his townhouse in Washington, DC. And he told me, he said, "The reason I stopped talking or writing about this was people were camping out on my front lawn, you know, telling me that they'd been victims of MKUltra." He goes, "I couldn't go anywhere. My whole life became crazy because everybody thought that they were subject to this," 'cause nobody knew. They did these drug tests on prisoners, hospital patients, johns, hippies, people that had no idea that this was going on for 25 years.

    18. JR

      (Exhales)

    19. TO

      So, Marks became th- the authority. So he had never given an interview till he met with me, and when he looked at my documents, at that point I think I had about 10 or 12 or 15 pages that grew eventually, 'cause I kept going back to the files and getting more. He said it was the most unredacted, uncensored, uh, account of what the real objectives were and what was really being done. He had never... He said, "If I had had that, my whole book would have been different." Um, so, it... that's one of the problems about saying, "Well, how much did they do?" or "How far did they go?" There's barely any record, and that's another reason it took me 20 years, 'cause I was trying to find out, uh, whether or not West had actually interacted with Manson and/or the girls. I mean, I knew he was in the same facility. I knew that everybody that worked there, 'cause I interviewed everybody that was alive, they... most of them were still alive back in the 9- late '90s and early 2000s when I did this. They all said, "Oh, yeah, Charlie was..." you know, "We knew it was Charlie and the girls. They'd come in every day or every few days to see Roger, and, and West was there recruiting subjects." Now, West, while he was there, that summer, had opened something called... what he called the Haight-Ashbury Project. And in his, uh, correspondence and papers that I found, he called it a, a laboratory disguised as a hippie crash pad.

    20. JR

      (exhales)

    21. TO

      (laughs) Yeah. And just like the Operation Midnight, uh, safe hou- they call 'em safe houses, which were disguised as brothe- uh, you know, bordellos and that type of thing, or brothels. These... this was an apartment that was decked out, or as he called it, tricked out to look like a communal hippie place. He had six graduate students, and I have his letters to them before they came to work in this. He goes, "Grow your hair long, wear jeans, dress like hippies, and lure people in there."

    22. JR

      (exhales)

    23. TO

      So they ran that for the summer of '67. And West was getting people from that Haight-Ashbury free medical clinic on Clayton Street and sending them around the corner to Frederick Street, uh, to participate in that.

    24. JR

      Good Lord.

    25. TO

      And, um, I got the diaries of some of the graduate students who were there, and they all, in these diaries, said, "We have no idea what we're really supposed to be doing here. We feel like this whole thing is a cover for something else. What does Jolly want? Why is he making us bring these people in?" So, uh-

    26. JR

      Imagine doing that to graduate students, telling them to bring people in and drug them up. Imagine telling them-

    27. TO

      Well, some of them liked it.

    28. JR

      ... to make an apartment... I'm sure they liked it.

    29. TO

      Because they were also, you know, encouraged to use LSD.

    30. JR

      Yeah. I'm sure.

  8. 25:44 – 49:43

    When experiments ‘go into the field’: the Jimmy Shaver case and memory manipulation claims

    1. TO

      Well, I... if you haven't gotten through, uh, chapter 11 yet, you haven't gotten into the Jimmy Shaver case.

    2. JR

      No, I haven't.

    3. TO

      A year after... Oh, maybe Jaime did.

    4. JR

      No idea.

    5. TO

      A year after, uh, West contracted with, um, the CIA to do these experiments, July 4th, 1954, a three-year-old girl went missing from the parking lot of a bar, uh, at about 11 or 12 at night. Now, her parents... It was a heatwave. They couldn't sleep. They went to the bar. They brought their two kids. They let them play in the parking lot at midnight. Uh, the little girl disappeared. They organized a search party about three or four hours later. They, uh, went to a gravel pit and, uh, two air... oh, two airmen had called... or two itinerant guys had called the poli- the local sheriff and said, "There's a guy here that wandered out of the brush with scratches and blood, no shirt, and he doesn't know how he got here or who he is." Uh, the police came. His name was Jimmy Shaver. He was an airman. They did a search, and they found the little girl's body not too far away, and she had been raped and murdered, uh, by this guy who had no memory of doing it. The guy had no history of, uh, violence. Um, he had a couple kids, and he was a flight instructor at the school. He'd been in the military for a number of years. I think he was in his early 30s. Well, guess who became his, uh, psychiatrist in preparation for the trial? Jolly West, who inserted himself into the case and then extracted his memory from him using sodium pentothal where he admitted to the, the murder. Now, in the context of what we found out West was doing and what his objectives were at that same time, it raises huge questions about this was an experiment gone wrong, you know, that he was part of one of these experiments at Lackland Air Force Base where he was signed up. Uh, during the trial, it came out that he had had treatment for severe migraines, experimental treatment at Lackland. Um, that's another, you know, a smaller subchapter in the book, but...

    6. JR

      Does it describe what kind of experimental treatment he received?

    7. TO

      No. No, because nobody... I mean, I have all the testimony. There was actually a re- a trial, a retrial, and sentencing, and every time it came up, it was really frustrating because he never testified, so they... it was either his wife or his mother who would talk about it. It was mostly his mother saying, "Well, all I knew was they wanted him to be involved in this two-year study, uh, to try to relieve his, his migraines." He would have such horrible migraines he would put his head in, uh, uh, buckets of ice water. Um, the people who described encountering him that night when he was arrested and immediately taken out of the sheriff's custody by the military police and brought to Lackland and then back to the sheriff's. Um, he was in a trance. Uh, the, the doctors tested him for alcohol 'cause they thought, "Well, maybe he's drunk." He had no alco- or just a little bit of alcohol in, in his system, but he wasn't drunk. And, um, after the fact, they found out that he had w- I mean, I don't want to get into this 'cause it's really getting into the weeds, but he had hallucinated, uh, that this little girl was a cousin who sexually abused him as a child and he was trying to kill her. Her name was Beth Rainboat. All this stuff came out at the trial. Um, Jolly West in 1955 sent, uh, a report to Sidney Gottlieb which nobody had seen, and it was another document I found in his files announcing that he had learned how to... or developed the technology to remove true memories and replace them with false memories in a human subject without their knowledge, which was one of the main goals, the biggest goals, of the MKUltra program. And again, when the CIA... when they had the hearings in the '70s, the CIA said nothing was successful. Everything we tried was a failure. It was a waste of money. We shouldn't have done it. Uh, and not, not just me, but most experts think that that was a cover, that they didn't want to admit they... that they had developed these technologies that were effective. They also claim that they had released everything they had. I found the same report where West said that he had learned how to replace true memories with false ones without a person's awareness, uh, but they had removed that from the report and then released it to Congress, so that's a crime right there.

    8. JR

      Mm.

    9. TO

      You know? Um, so there's a lot of that stuff, uh, in the book.

    10. JR

      So the speculation is that this guy, through these experimental treatments, that they had dosed him up with LSD and experimented using these MKUltra techniques and did that to him and induced some sort of-

    11. TO

      Well, th- this is speculation.

    12. JR

      Yes.

    13. TO

      And I'll, I'll go there-

    14. JR

      Okay.

    15. TO

      ... for this. Uh, the guy had no history of violence, uh, never been arrested, uh, was a stellar, upstanding citizen. His only problem was he had these horrible headaches. All of a sudden, he shows up by a small girl's body, who'd been brutally murdered with no memory of doing it. A year earlier, Dr. West, who became a psychiatrist within a week or two, possibly had, uh, uh, experiences with him before, but I... there was no record. Oh, when I tried to get the record from the medical center at, um, Lackland, his file, uh, that... his name was Shaver, I think it was, S-A to S-I was missing. So, where Shaver would have been in the, the medical records, it was gone. So, I couldn't find out whether he had actually participated in any ki- kind of experimental program there.

    16. JR

      So, is the speculation, and again, this is speculation, that he did commit the crime, that he was somehow or another induced into committing this crime?

    17. TO

      Yeah. A- and again, this is speculation.

    18. JR

      Yes.

    19. TO

      It's completely circumstantial. The objective was to get people who would go out and do things. Not even necessarily kill. That's... that was the ultimate goal.

    20. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    21. TO

      But to do things against their will, against their moral code, even.

    22. JR

      Right. But how would they know that this child would be there? How would they know?

    23. TO

      Oh, no, no, no. She wasn't targeted. It-

    24. JR

      So, was it just that they'd put it into his head to go-

    25. TO

      Yeah.

    26. JR

      ... do that-

    27. TO

      And something-

    28. JR

      ... to anyone?

    29. TO

      Yeah. Something clicked and went wrong.

    30. JR

      So, it wasn't a precise thing.

  9. 49:43 – 58:14

    COINTELPRO and CHAOS: domestic infiltration, engineered conflict, and Helter Skelter doubts

    1. TO

      In, in 1967, the federal government started... the FBI started a program called COINTELPRO.

    2. JV

      Mm-hmm.

    3. TO

      Uh, in San Francisco, they opened their first office the same time Manson arrived there. The CIA started a program like MKUltra, illegal. I mean, MKUltra was illegal because they were violating people's human rights by giving them drugs without their knowledge or consent, but they were also operating on American soil, domestic soil, which is against the law in the United States. You're not allowed to... the CIA is not allowed to operate here. Um, they opened something. They started a new program called CHAOS. Same thing. This began in San Francisco in the summer of '67, authorized by Richard Helms, who was by then the director of the CIA. He had come up since '52 working under Allen Dulles and then John McCone, and he was the one who supervised Gottlieb and MKUltra. So CHAOS and COINTELPRO each had the same objectives, which were to neutralize what they believe was a revolution- revolutionaries that were gonna create a civil war in America, the left wing, the antiwar movement, the Black Panthers, uh, and the hippie movement, who kind of embraced it all. And this all began in the early '60s with Ronald Reagan had become the governor of California and, uh, J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the free speech movement, which began in the early '60s in Berkeley, had been infiltrated by communists from Russia and China, and they were trying to create divisiveness within the United States to, um, start a revolution. So, Hoover started COINTELPRO, and Reagan was involved with that as, as the governor, and then Helms started CHAOS, and both of them had informants who were trained. They had something called the Hoover Academy, where they had, uh, training programs to turn agents into hippies, just like Jolly West (laughs) with his graduate students. They grew their hair long, they learned the lingo, and then they went and tried to, uh, insinuate themselves with, with left-wing groups. Um, African Americans with the Panthers. COINTELPRO would pit rival groups against each other, and the ultimate goal was to get them to kill each other. And COINTELPRO was exposed in 1972, '1 or '2, after a bunch of, uh, kind of radical people raided a warehouse in Pennsylvania, where they kn- Media, Pennsylvania, not far from where I was raised, where they knew that the FBI stored records, and then they released it to the public, and it was the record of this operation. Uh, and the documents were astonishing because they weren't redacted, because they were stolen and then released. Uh, there are documents, uh, celebrating the murder of one... The Panthers became really paranoid by '67, '68. There were all kinds of inner power struggles and they thought, they thought that they were... they correctly thought that they had been infiltrated and they susp-

    4. JV

      Hmm.

    5. TO

      ... and they were... Some of them killed other Panthers because they thought they were informants. Uh, but they also had a rivalry with different groups, like in, in Los Angeles, the US Slaves, which was a militant group. And the COINTELPRO operatives, um, would let the US Slaves think they were about to be attacked by the Panthers and vice versa, and then there'd be a shootout. And when COINTEL was- PRO was exposed in the '70s and resulted in more hearings, investigations, they admitted to being responsible for, uh, instigating, I think, 20 or 30 killings, uh, by their operatives. CHAOS, on the other hand, there's minimal records of CHAOS. All we knew was it existed from '67 probably till Helms left the CIA in '73, and that their objective was... We, we knew that they were doing surveillance, and we knew that they were doing wiretapping and infiltrating groups, but as far as beyond that, you can't... They, they can't even name a CHAOS agent. Nobody's ever been exposed 'cause everything was destroyed when Helms left, uh, the record.

    6. JV

      Phew.

    7. TO

      So these groups were trying to, um, incite violence. Now, we get to the motive of, of, of th- of the official narrative of, of the Manson murder, or the Tate LaBianca murders, which is what the prosecutor Vince Bugliosi presented at trial, which was the famous Helter Skelter motive. Um, in a nutshell, uh, Manson believed, uh, that, uh, there was going to be a race war, and he wanted to incite this race war because he had convinced his followers that through messages he received from The Beatles' White Album, from their lyrics, from biblical, uh, Old Testament prophecies, that, um, he had been told that he was gonna be the savior of the world.And once the race war started, he would hide his family in a bottomless pit in the desert. And when the race war ended with the Blacks winning, the Blacks would be framed for, for murders. Um, they would... uh, the Manson family would emerge and repopulate the planet with their perfect op- offspring and dominate-

    8. JR

      (laughs)

    9. TO

      ... the Blacks. Um-

    10. JR

      This was Vince Bugliosi's-

    11. TO

      Well, he, he-

    12. JR

      ... narrative or...

    13. TO

      Th- there was talk of that. There was a philosophy of Helter Skelter at the Spahn Ranch where, where they lived in '68 and '69 that Manson would discuss. But whether or not it was the motive for the murders is, is... I raise serious questions about that in the book.

    14. JR

      And Manson would discuss it in that way, that there was going to be a race war and that they would emerge and then their offspring?

    15. TO

      Yeah, yeah. Except for the fact that, um, what's question... So the way Bugliosi was able to convict Manson, Manson wasn't at the Tate house when the murders happened. He had, in the official story, dispatched Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Kasabian, and Tex Watson to the house, the former house of Terry Melcher. They didn't know who lived there, but just to kill everybody, and as Manson allegedly said, "Leave something witchy." He wanted it to look like Blacks had killed these, uh, all he knew was they were wealthy, beautiful whites. And he wanted to ignite the race war because if the Panthers got blamed for these murders, then the police would crack down on them. They'd revolt. The revolution would happen. It would be ap- it, it would spread across the whole world. And then when it was over and the Blacks had prevailed, they were too dumb, Manson believed, to be able to run the world. That's when he would come out with his followers of their hole in the desert and take over the planet. Now, Bugliosi said in interviews that I didn't have until after he and I stopped speaking, which is when he started threatening me with lawsuits and other things in the, in the about 2006, '07. I discovered two or three interviews he gave in the early '70s, where he was asked if he believed that Manson really believed this craziness. And Bugliosi said, "I don't think Charlie believed in it. He got his followers to, but he never believed in that. He was too smart. He was a con man." What the interviewers didn't ask him in the follow-up was, well, if he didn't believe it, why did he send his followers to kill these people the first night at the Tate house, the second night in Los Vilas, this, you know, upper-middle-class couple, the LaBiancas. Then, you know, what was the motive? And that's one of my biggest regrets is that I slipped, and they were kind of obscure. One was a Penthouse interview. The other was a, a regional newspaper. Uh, but that I didn't have them. I thought I had done all the research. I thought I read every interview he'd ever given.

    16. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    17. TO

      But I didn't have it at hand to say, "All right, Vince, I get that, 'cause I don't think Manson believed it either. Then what was the motive for the murders? Why were they sent there to kill?" And that's what the book explores. Um...

    18. JR

      So do you think Bugliosi was operating with the knowledge that Manson was a part of these programs?

    19. TO

      Oh, that's the big question. Yeah.

    20. JR

      Yeah.

  10. 58:14 – 1:16:44

    Bugliosi vs. O’Neill: off-the-record revelations, intimidation, publisher threats, and legal fallout

    1. TO

      Again, I, I, I lay it out in the book. So I interviewed Bugliosi... He was the first... not the first, but one of the first interviews I did when it was a magazine assignment. He invited me to his house in Pasadena. Uh, so it was April of, of '99. We spent literally six hours together. He was so kind and generous with his time. I thought I scored. I had the prosecutor. He hadn't given interviews. He always gave interviews about this, but he hadn't for a number of years. He agreed to do it for whatever reason, and during the course of that interview, uh, you know, we... I arrived at his house, went to... in- into his kitchen. His wife gave me Italian cookies, with coffee and lemonade. Then he and I went out to lunch in the valley somewhere. He showed me some of the sites connected to the murders. Then we went back to the house and talked till sunset. And towards the end of the six hours, I did realize that even though he was talking non-stop and I'm recording everything, he hadn't given me anything new or different. I mean, I had just finished Helter Skelter. I read it for the first time 'cause I'd never been interested in the case till I got the assignment. So I did what we call the Hail Mary pass in journalism, which is you ask someone, uh, if there's anything they could tell you off the record, not for attribution, that will help them to get something fresh 'cause I was still searching for an angle. This is the first month of reporting. And Vince kind of thought a minute and then he goes, "Turn it off. Turn it off." So I turned off the recorder, and he did... I could tell he was debating, but then he told me something, which I'm not sure if... I don't think I reveal it till the last chapter. It was off the record. It was salacious. Pretty shocking. In the larger pic- picture, it doesn't change anything really, but it showed me that he had s- a very different account of something very important in the narrative. Um, and I took that away, and I thought, wow, I'm gonna ex-

    2. JR

      What did he say?

    3. TO

      Uh, well, uh, first let me explain. It, it's... it was off the record.

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. TO

      In 2005, when I interviewed him for the second time and all things went to hell, and he started threatening (laughs) me and, uh, with lawsuits and writing letters to my publisher, trying to get them to stop the book, he wrote about what he told me, and he claimed that, uh, I had dragged it out of him and embellished it and all this. But once he put that in the letter, the lawyers at the publisher said, "Well, it's not on the record anymore, because these documents will all be in a civil trial when he sues you," which he said he was about to do.

    6. JR

      Not off the record, you mean?

    7. TO

      Yeah. They said, now it's on the record.

    8. JR

      Right, right, right. Right.

    9. TO

      I mean, he has... he violated his agreement with you.

    10. JR

      Yes.

    11. TO

      So what he told me was that, uh, famously, an audio t- or videotape was taken from the Tate house by the police-... excuse me, the first day after the murders. They found it hidden up in a loft. Uh, videotape- videotaping, home videotaping was relatively new at that point. Not a lot of people had cameras, but Roman Polanski did. And in Helter Skelter, Vince says, in the book, um, that the police took the tape, viewed it, and it was just Sharon and Roman making love, and returned it to the loft. Uh, Roman was in London at the time of the murders. He came back immediately, and then about a week later, he went up to the house, and one of the first things he did was he went up to the loft, and he never even knew that they took it, allegedly. That, that's the story. Found it and took it. Vince told me, originally off the record, that the tape wasn't of Roman and Sharon making love. It was, uh, Sharon being forced to have sex with two men against her wishes, and he said Roman was the one who was making it 'cause you could hear him in, in the background. Um, y- y- you know, if you read the b- well, you've read those chapters, Roman did a lot of bad stuff to Sharon.

    12. JR

      Yeah, he seemed like a terrible person.

    13. TO

      He was pretty bad, yeah.

    14. JR

      But when you, when you hear what he did, what the reason why he can never come back to the country, you go, "Well, okay."

    15. TO

      It makes sense.

    16. JR

      It makes sense.

    17. TO

      Yeah, it's not that surprising.

    18. JR

      He's a monster.

    19. TO

      Yeah, yeah. I mean-

    20. JR

      A monster that's really good at making movies.

    21. TO

      Yeah, yeah.

    22. JR

      Yeah.

    23. TO

      Which we're not gonna see anymore 'cause the last one he made, which is supposed to be one of his best, they're not gonna release it in the United States.

    24. JR

      Mm.

    25. TO

      But, um, once I had that, that's kind of the first rabbit hole I went down 'cause I'm like, "Well, if this was different in the official narrative, what else might they have changed?" So Vince and I were talking on the phone about every week for two months. He was so accessible. So I'd be interviewing people, and one of the first things after that that I found was, uh, the perjuries, uh, by Terry Melcher on the stand. I found ... I got access to two separate files and found that Melcher, Doris Day's son, record producer, young boy wonder who lived in the house with his girlfriend, Candy Bergenonciello, up until January 1st of '69, then moved to Malibu, um, and Roman and Sharon moved into the house in February. Melcher was the part of the motive for why the house was picked. And again, this is getting into the weeds, but it's hard to talk about any of this without this exposition.

    26. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    27. TO

      Um, Manson sent his followers up there to instill fear in Melcher by killing all the occupants of his former house who were strangers to them. I don't believe that. That's the official narrative. But, um, Melcher testified at the grand jury and then at the trial that he had three fleeting encounters with Manson, one at Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson's, uh, two there, I think, and then ... Oh, no, one there and then two when he went to the Spahn Ranch in, uh, April and May of '69 to listen to them play music with the possible- possibility of recording them. Uh, and he didn't think they were talented enough and told, uh, Charlie that in so many words, and then, again, this is the official narrative, uh, that's when Manson kind of spiraled and went crazy because he'd been rejected by Terry Melcher, so he decided it was time for Helter Skelter, the race war. And again, a lot of these things don't add up when you step back. Well, why didn't he kill Terry Melcher at the house in Malibu 'cause he knew where he had moved to? Why did he just go to this other place and kill strangers? Maybe Terry wouldn't connect it, all that. The bottom line was, Terry, on the stand, and in all the official accounts of th- this case, of which there are many, not just Helter Skelter, but lots of books, his relationship with Manson ended in May of, of '69. He said he never saw him again. When the murders happened at his former house, it never occurred to him it had anything to do with him or that Manson did it. I stopped believing that a month or two in, and then I found these documents showing that Melcher actually had gone to see Manson twice at the Spahn Ranch after the murders, and then once all the way out at Death Valley where they had the Barker Ranch, where they were hiding when they were finally captured in, in the fall of '69. Um, once I could document that, that changed the whole, uh ... I mean, it didn't change, but impacted the motive. I mean, Melcher was a principal witness. Again, 'cause Charlie wasn't at the Tate house, Manson had, or Bugliosi had to convict him of conspiracy. In other words, ordering people to go up there and kill, and he had to have a reason for that house. So Terry provided it by saying, "Yes, I did go out there and try to record them." And then eventually in the questioning, it came out, "But I never had anything to do with them again. I had no idea. I never saw them or heard from them again."

    28. JR

      The motivation was revenge on Terry Melcher 'cause Tery- Terry Melcher didn't turn him into a star.

    29. TO

      Right.

    30. JR

      So this is what Bugliosi was using, but it didn't make any sense-

  11. 1:16:44 – 1:30:21

    From limbo to launch: Errol Morris project, collaborator partnership, and adaptation battles

    1. TO

      And then I was involved with, uh, a director, and I kinda hint in the book who it is, but I mean, it's n- I don't think it's a secret. Errol Morris, do you know who he is?

    2. JR

      No.

    3. TO

      Um, he did, uh, Thin Blue Line.

    4. JR

      Oh, okay.

    5. TO

      Yeah. He's won an Academy Award for a documentary he made about Robert McNamara.

    6. JR

      So they wanna make a book about the

    7. TO

      ... No, no. ... eternally- So Errol, Errol Morris, I think you had a son on Hamilton, Morris?

    8. JR

      Yes. Oh, that's his son?

    9. TO

      It's ... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    10. JR

      I love Hamilton.

    11. TO

      Yeah, yeah. Well, Hamilton was... He wasn't officially part of this project, but he came to the shoots. Um, Errol approached me. He actually is a writer for Penguin Press, uh, an author there. He writes books too. Uh, not too often, but occasionally. And he knew about my book 'cause they had asked him at one point if he wanted to collaborate on it with me when it w- when I was struggling with it. And he said, "No, no, I wanna make a movie about it." And they said, "Well, it's not a movie, it's a book. Maybe after." So when my deal got canceled and I was in limbo, I thought, "Well, I can go to Errol now." I'd never met him or spoken to him, but I sent him an email, got his email address, and he called me, like, the next day, and he goes, "Are you kidding me?" He goes, "I've always ..." He goes, "I was fa-" 'Cause I, uh, he had got my proposal. He said, "I was so fascinated by this story, and I've always wanted to do something on both Manson and MKUltra." So, it took about six months of legal stuff 'cause, um, since my book was still owned by Penguin, but the suit was happening, and he helped this process. He got them to allow him to work with me on what became a n- was gonna be a Netflix series. He sold it. He, he shot a, what do you call it, a teaser.

    12. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. TO

      So he spent two days, and this was 2014, with me. One day at my bungalow where he wired it with, like, 15 cameras on remote cables in the ceilings and then interviewed me all day, uh, at the house, at my house, and going through all my files and everything. And then the next day, his crew took, like, half of my apartment to a sound stage in the valley somewhere and recreated my apartment. But then he w- used all his magical tricks, like he had a camera 200 feet in the air, it would zoom down and spin. It was beautiful what he ended up cutting and putting together. Um, and then in 2015, he changed what he wanted to do with the documentary. It was gonna be a six-hour series. He had sold it, and I had never signed the final contracts 'cause I said, "Errol, you gotta give me a clearer picture of what this is." Well, at one point, he decided he wanted to do the story of Frank Olson with my story. And Frank Olson's son's, Eric's pursuit of his father's, uh, possible murder by the CIA in 1954 because of what he had found out about the Korean POW, uh-... uh, biological stuff. That became Wormwood, which I don't know if you saw, it was a Netflix series about two years ago. It's the last thing... Oh, no, Errol... It's the second-to-last thing Errol did. It was his first six-part series. That happened because I backed out when, you know... I di- I didn't like the direction it was going, so Errol and I fell out, um, over that. We're still friends and he gave me some pictures for the middle of the book from, from the shoot. Uh, and he did just, just Frank Olson and Eric's pursuit of it. So that took up, like, a year and a half of, um, working with him and his people to develop it. And, and then it all stopped. And I actually walked away from money that would've really helped me, but I s- you know... I was willing to give him control, but I didn't like where it was going, and I'd already invested 16 years of my life at that point.

    14. JV

      (imitates gun firing)

    15. TO

      And I just thought, "I can't, I can't do this." You know, "I still need this to be my vision and not somebody else's." And he was pretty upset and pissed off, um, but he, he made another good series that, you know, evolved out of my project. And, uh, and at that point, uh, it was about 2015, '16, I just kept reporting and working to get the lawsuit resolved. And then as soon as it did, um, my agent took, took it out and he said, "Before I take out this new proposal, I got a collaborator." Dan Piepenbring, young, uh, had started working with Prince on Prince's memoir, and then Prince died in the middle of it. And because once Prince was dead, all this stuff had to be settled with his estate, Dan had, like, a year of not doing anything. So our agents were at the same agency. They put us together. And at first, I was apprehensive 'cause he was, like, 29 and he wasn't even alive when this happened, and I thought, "What is this kid gonna know about this case and all of this stuff that COINTELPRO, chaos, MKUltra? I'm gonna have to teach him so much. That's gonna take a year." But the... when I met him, uh, and I saw the writing he had done before, I'm like, "This guy is perfect." And he was, so we turned it out in a year. Well, we took it out and, and Sloane, my agent, said, "We've got to send it to Penguin first, because we still have that resolution that hasn't been resolved. I mean, it's, it's all agreed to, but we have to finish what, what we have to do, so they need to know about it." They saw the new proposal (laughs) and made us an offer for the book that matched-

Episode duration: 2:55:04

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