Joe Rogan Experience #1459 - Tom O'Neill

Tom O'Neill 0:00 I'm ready.

Joe Rogan 0:00 Okay. Tom, how are you?

Tom O'Neill 0:02 Good, Joe.

Joe Rogan 0:03 Great to meet you.

Tom O'Neill 0:03 You, too.

Joe Rogan 0:04 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?

Tom O'Neill 0:36 Yeah, not obsessed by choice. It kinda happened.

Joe Rogan 0:39 (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 0:39 But, uh, in the end, exactly 20 years. We turned in the final manuscript, uh, I think a day to the 20th year assignment.

Joe Rogan 0:48 And this wasn't a personal obsession with yours.

Tom O'Neill 0:50 Never.

Joe Rogan 0:50 You were writing an article. L- l- let's fill people in.

Tom O'Neill 0:53 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?

Joe Rogan 1:24 Right.

Tom O'Neill 1:25 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.

Joe Rogan 1:57 That is so crazy that it took that long. (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 1:59 I know. I know. The magazine shut down five years later.

Joe Rogan 2:03 So you never got the, you never got anything printed in the magazine?

Tom O'Neill 2:06 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.

Joe Rogan 3:31 Because of you?

Tom O'Neill 3:32 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.

Joe Rogan 4:00 So Premier essentially paid for you to start your book?

Tom O'Neill 4:04 Yeah, a lot of money.

Joe Rogan 4:05 Oh, my goodness.

Tom O'Neill 4:06 Yeah. And that's ... I'm actually ... Because it was resolved not in the courts, but we all had to sign non-disclosures.

Joe Rogan 4:13 Mm.

Tom O'Neill 4:13 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

Tom O'Neill 4:43 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-

Joe Rogan 4:51 How would you do that? Like, pretend I'm a guy and you're trying to pitch me this book.

Tom O'Neill 4:55 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?

Joe Rogan 5:44 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?

Tom O'Neill 5:51 You are subject to an actual capital. You, you could be elect- you, you could be sent to the chair.

Joe Rogan 5:57 Wow.

Tom O'Neill 5:58 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.

Joe Rogan 6:26 Now, I told you that I- I just got to the 11th chapter of your book.

Tom O'Neill 6:31 Right.

Joe Rogan 6:31 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.

Tom O'Neill 6:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:55 They knew that he was committing all these crimes. And instead of incarcerating him-

Tom O'Neill 6:59 Well, we have to be careful when we say "they."

Joe Rogan 7:01 Who's they?

Tom O'Neill 7:02 Yeah, we have to-

Joe Rogan 7:02 Okay.

Tom O'Neill 7:03 ... kind of break it all down.

Joe Rogan 7:04 Let's, let's break it all down.

Tom O'Neill 7:05 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-

Joe Rogan 7:19 This was Smith?

Tom O'Neill 7:20 Rodger Smith, yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:21 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 7:21 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.

Joe Rogan 7:42 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 7:42 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-

Joe Rogan 8:22 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?

Tom O'Neill 8:31 Well, that's the problem. I didn't get the whole file, and the file I got had redactions.

Joe Rogan 8:36 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 8:36 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.

Joe Rogan 9:47 Who was hiring hi- Charles Manson to survey soil?

Tom O'Neill 9:51 Uh, it was a company in Nevada which disappeared a couple years later. Um-

Joe Rogan 9:57 So it was a bullshit company thing?

Tom O'Neill 9:58 I believe so, yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:59 What do you think they were doing down there?

Tom O'Neill 10:01 Uh, see, that's it. I don't like to speculate-

Joe Rogan 10:03 Right.

Tom O'Neill 10:03 ... '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.

Joe Rogan 10:18 He was arrested in Mexico, right?

Tom O'Neill 10:20 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-

Joe Rogan 10:40 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.

Tom O'Neill 10:50 Yes.

Joe Rogan 10:51 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?

Tom O'Neill 11:07 Again, this is where I gotta reel it in a little bit.

Joe Rogan 11:08 Yeah, I understand. Okay.

Tom O'Neill 11:09 Um, I have to be real careful about not saying anything that I haven't been able to prove.

Joe Rogan 11:14 I understand.

Tom O'Neill 11:14 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.

Jamie Vernon 12:47 It's crazy how quickly this all happened.

Tom O'Neill 12:49 It's insane how quickly it- it happened.

Jamie Vernon 12:51 So w- for people who don't understand, we're talking about two years.

Tom O'Neill 12:53 Mm-hmm.

Jamie Vernon 12:53 We're talking about '67, Manson is in Haight-Ashbury. '69, the Tate-LaBianca murders, and then the trial and then, then everything else.

Tom O'Neill 13:01 Yeah.

Jamie Vernon 13:01 Two years.

Tom O'Neill 13:01 Yeah. And so you brought up MKUltra.

Jamie Vernon 13:05 Yes.

Tom O'Neill 13:05 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

Tom O'Neill 15:37 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.

Joe Rogan 18:53 They did a lot of crazy shit back then. Are you aware of Operation Midli- Midnight Climax?

Tom O'Neill 18:58 That, tho- those were the safe houses in San Francisco. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:00 Yeah. Well, that was the brothel version of it.

Tom O'Neill 19:02 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:02 Where they, they lured these johns into these brothels and then dosed them up with LSD and studied them.

Tom O'Neill 19:09 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.

Joe Rogan 19:24 Aerosols?

Tom O'Neill 19:25 Yeah, aerosol sprays.

Joe Rogan 19:26 Really?

Tom O'Neill 19:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:27 But that would get the prostitutes too then, no?

Tom O'Neill 19:29 No. The prostitutes would get 'em in there, and then they'd go to the bathroom or something-

Joe Rogan 19:32 Oh, and then they'd spray 'em?

Tom O'Neill 19:32 ... or to be in the bathroom. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:34 Oh, Jesus.

Tom O'Neill 19:34 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.

Joe Rogan 21:16 (Exhales)

Tom O'Neill 21:16 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.

Joe Rogan 22:40 (exhales)

Tom O'Neill 22:40 (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."

Joe Rogan 23:10 (exhales)

Tom O'Neill 23:10 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.

Joe Rogan 23:23 Good Lord.

Tom O'Neill 23:24 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-

Joe Rogan 23:43 Imagine doing that to graduate students, telling them to bring people in and drug them up. Imagine telling them-

Tom O'Neill 23:48 Well, some of them liked it.

Joe Rogan 23:49 ... to make an apartment... I'm sure they liked it.

Tom O'Neill 23:50 Because they were also, you know, encouraged to use LSD.

Joe Rogan 23:54 Yeah. I'm sure.

Tom O'Neill 23:55 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:55 But I mean, imagine being a graduate student and this is your project on people.

Tom O'Neill 24:00 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 24:00 I mean, that sets up... even if you leave that program and go on to do legitimate work, y- the ethical foundations of your career are set up in such a strange way. You're manipulating people against their knowledge.

Tom O'Neill 24:14 Mm-hmm. Well, they didn't know who they were doing it for, and that's why they were always questioning it.

Joe Rogan 24:18 Oh.

Tom O'Neill 24:18 So, um, you know, I don't know how... I found one or two of them after, and they were very careful talking to me.

Joe Rogan 24:26 I'm sure.

Tom O'Neill 24:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:26 They probably felt like they were gonna go to jail. (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 24:28 Well, that's the thing. Yeah. Um, if any of these experiments or whatever was going on resulted in a death, there's no statute of limitations on murder.

Joe Rogan 24:36 Right. Right.

Tom O'Neill 24:37 Um, uh, I mean, that's one of the biggest disappointments of my book is that...... people like West aren't alive, you know-

Joe Rogan 24:44 Right.

Tom O'Neill 24:44 ... to answer for the... to answer to this. And it was really frustrating for me because, again, his name was on the front page of the New York Times in 1977 when they had the major hearings about MKUltra, and it identified him as the head of the psychiatry, uh, department at UCLA, a very prominent doctor, researcher, and he said he had nothing to do with that. He'd never used LSD on humans, and he wouldn't. Uh, he said they had asked him and he said no. Um, I have all these letters between him and the guy who was running the program describing how they're gonna do it, hide it from his colleagues. When he started it, he started at Lackland Air Force Base. He was, uh, running the psychiatry department at the hospital there in 1952. When he was there running that hospital, that's when he started his experiments on prisoners, human subjects, and one letter to Gottlieb he says, "Eventually we have to take these experiments out into the field."

Joe Rogan 25:41 Oh, Jesus.

Tom O'Neill 25:41 Exactly, yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:42 What does that mean?

Tom O'Neill 25:44 Well, I... if you haven't gotten through, uh, chapter 11 yet, you haven't gotten into the Jimmy Shaver case.

Joe Rogan 25:49 No, I haven't.

Tom O'Neill 25:50 A year after... Oh, maybe Jaime did.

Joe Rogan 25:52 No idea.

Tom O'Neill 25:52 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...

Joe Rogan 27:58 Does it describe what kind of experimental treatment he received?

Tom O'Neill 28:02 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.

Joe Rogan 30:28 Mm.

Tom O'Neill 30:28 You know? Um, so there's a lot of that stuff, uh, in the book.

Joe Rogan 30:32 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-

Tom O'Neill 30:47 Well, th- this is speculation.

Joe Rogan 30:48 Yes.

Tom O'Neill 30:48 And I'll, I'll go there-

Joe Rogan 30:49 Okay.

Tom O'Neill 30:50 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 31:45 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?

Tom O'Neill 31:53 Yeah. A- and again, this is speculation.

Joe Rogan 31:55 Yes.

Tom O'Neill 31:55 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.

Joe Rogan 32:03 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 32:03 But to do things against their will, against their moral code, even.

Joe Rogan 32:06 Right. But how would they know that this child would be there? How would they know?

Tom O'Neill 32:09 Oh, no, no, no. She wasn't targeted. It-

Joe Rogan 32:11 So, was it just that they'd put it into his head to go-

Tom O'Neill 32:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:15 ... do that-

Tom O'Neill 32:15 And something-

Joe Rogan 32:15 ... to anyone?

Tom O'Neill 32:16 Yeah. Something clicked and went wrong.

Joe Rogan 32:18 So, it wasn't a precise thing.

Tom O'Neill 32:20 No.

Joe Rogan 32:20 It wasn't-

Tom O'Neill 32:20 No, no. Um, nobody really knew what L.S.... This was the very early days of experimenting with LSD in the... in the early 1950s. West was one of the premier researchers in LSD, but he was still new to it. Um, he had actually come out of... He had first gained national attention for being one of four or five doctors who treated Korean prisoners of war, who were returned to the United States after they had made confessions of spraying the Korean countryside with illegal biological weapons. Um, the United States said that, "We don't use that. That's against the Geneva Codes." Um, and these guys were brainwashed by the, the North Korean, Chinese, Soviets. Uh, so when they were brought back after the war, West and four other psychiatrists were assigned to deprogram them. What a lot of researchers believe, um, is that they actually brainwashed them into thinking they'd been brainwashed by the Koreans, when they actually were telling the truth. Because there's a lot of evidence that's come out as recently as five, six years ago, that we did use these weapons in Korea.

Joe Rogan 33:30 Oh, boy. The old double-cross.

Tom O'Neill 33:32 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:33 So, wh-... is the speculation that Charlie Manson was basically just sort of a two-bit criminal who had spent most of his life inside the system, and, uh, had been incarcerated for, what, half of his life? Something like that?

Tom O'Neill 33:47 Half of his life when he was released about age 32 in '67. All federal institutions, too, which was interesting. Even Bugliosi pointed that out in his book. Um, first of all, h- his mother was a prostitute. She kind of... She would get sentenced to jail for petty theft or prostitution, and she'd hand him off to her parents or other people. And by the time he was 10, 11, 12 years old, he was stealing cars, committing petty theft and stuff. So then, he was sent to, um, you know, juvenile detention centers and schools, uh, reform schools, all run by the federal government. And then, when he committed his first crimes as an adult, uh, which was, again, car theft... The first, um, crimes were car theft, but when he stole the cars, he'd cross state lines, so then it became a federal offense. And he got, uh, imprisoned with much more serious sentences if it's a federal offense than if it's a state. And he'd do these long sentences back to back to back. And then, every time he was released, he either violated parole or probation. And they were actually strict with him in the '50s and early... well, till '60, when he finally went to prison for seven years. It wasn't until '67 when he came out that, all of a sudden, it was hands-off.

Joe Rogan 35:01 Now, what do you think happened?

Tom O'Neill 35:05 In prison?

Joe Rogan 35:06 D- did they f- find him in prison? Did they-

Tom O'Neill 35:08 Well, a- again, I'll, I'll go there with you.

Joe Rogan 35:11 Okay.

Tom O'Neill 35:11 (laughs) And I, I kind of lay out-

Joe Rogan 35:13 Speculation.

Tom O'Neill 35:13 Yeah. What I do in the book is... and, and I get criticism for this, um, which we knew was a good possibility, is I lay out circumstantial evidence for a case with proof of each circumstance, but when you put them all together, that's the h- the hardest part, is linking them, finding the bridges.

Joe Rogan 35:33 Okay.

Tom O'Neill 35:34 Um, what I do is show what the objectives were of... in either the federal government's case, through MKUltra and then other programs, COINTELPRO and CHAOS, and the law enforcements in Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. So, um, MKUltra began, in the, in the federal prisons, experiments on prisoners. Famously or, or notoriously, Whitey Bulger... I don't know if you've heard about this, but, um, a few years ago, it was revealed that Whitey Bulger had been a part of MKUltra experimentation in the '50s when he was incarcerated. And after he was convicted, he was claiming that he believed that all of his violence was a product of what had happened to him in prison when he was experimented o- upon with LSD through these scientists. So, theoretically, Manson was in the prime place where the experiments were occurring in prisons before he was released in '67. In federal institutions. They couldn't do it in the state and local ones.

Joe Rogan 36:39 Did Manson ever talk about any experiments that took place during prison?

Tom O'Neill 36:42 No.

Joe Rogan 36:43 Never?

Tom O'Neill 36:43 No, no. He, he... You know, I actually have, uh, uh, his... not only his federal parole file-... which was the hardest thing to get because it had never been released from '67 to '69. But I also have the one prior to that, from the '50s through the '60s, and all the correspondence. And he would talk about these doctors coming in to examine him, and he didn't trust them, and he didn't know what they were doing. And this was late '50s. Um, and unfortunately, he never had the first names for the doctors. There were two. One of them was Dr. Hartman. I can't remember the other one's name. There was a Mortimer Hartman in Los Angeles who was one of the early psychiatrists using LSD in, in the '50s. Cary hi- Cary Grant was one of his patients.

Joe Rogan 37:25 Oh.

Tom O'Neill 37:26 Um, so theoretically, he could have come out of the program or the experimentation that began there. Um, but I, you know, I hate to even... I, I rather, uh... And again, it's hard to kind of synopsize all this without showing all the documentation and stuff-

Joe Rogan 37:46 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 37:46 ... of what was going on and where he was and how everything matches up. But you'll see that when you get through chapter 11.

Joe Rogan 37:52 Okay, so I wish... I wish I got to it, but it's-

Tom O'Neill 37:55 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 37:56 You know, it's a rush to get to-

Tom O'Neill 37:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:57 ... that far. So, 1967, he gets out of jail, and he... How long before he hooks up with this clinic?

Tom O'Neill 38:08 Uh, so he got out in March of '67. The clinic opened in June of '67.

Joe Rogan 38:14 So just a few months.

Tom O'Neill 38:15 Yeah, well, Roger Smith, he was actually living in Berkeley, Manson was, and he got his first follower, Mary Brunner, and then two or three or four more. And then Roger was the one who suggested that he go to the Haight to absorb the vibes. He thought Manson might benefit from the love and peace vibes that were happening-

Joe Rogan 38:34 And-

Tom O'Neill 38:34 ... in the Summer of Love.

Joe Rogan 38:35 ... Roger Smith was his parole officer in '67, but also was his parole officer before that. Was that proven?

Tom O'Neill 38:43 N- Well, no, Roger Smith's... Yeah, well, his assistant... You, you... That's good, you remember that. Gale Sedalia told me, she was his assistant at the clinic, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, when he was running his amphetamine study, uh, um, in, in '68. She said that Roger had told her he met Manson when he was doing probation work in Illinois in the early '60s. Uh, I eventually interviewed Roger several times, and Roger denied that. And when I went back to Gale, she was shocked. She's like, "I can't believe he's denying that." That was a connection. He... Man, that's why Manson was able to leave Los Angeles. He was sent to Roger Smith, so Roger could be his parole officer. I was never able to document that Manson had been in Illinois except for three days fro- in '61... or excuse me, in '60, when he was brought from Mexico to Texas, and then they brought him to Los Angeles to be violated in front of the judge there. Uh, and he did spend three days at Joliet Prison where Roger Smith worked, but he was there a year or two later.

Joe Rogan 39:53 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 39:53 So that was one of the fr- one of the many frustrating moments where everything made sense except for one, but one very important, um, hole, which was, well, they weren't there at the same time, at least as far as the official record shows.

Joe Rogan 40:08 So if Smith was a part of these experiments, and if Smith was also his parole officer and did know him before he did the seven years, before he got out, which is when it's speculated that Manson was possibly experimented on, and Smith might have been aware of the entire process of it and was supervising him upon his release.

Tom O'Neill 40:30 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:31 And so that's why every time Manson got arrested, which should have just locked him up, they would just let him go.

Tom O'Neill 40:37 Yeah, yeah. And, and Smith... I mean, to give you a little background on Smith... Uh, he, as he told me, he called himself, he goes, "I was a rock, rock-rib Republican from the Midwest, and I came out..." He went to Berkeley, uh, to the School of Criminology to, to become a criminologist, I think in '65 or '66. He was getting his master's and his PhD, and his special area (coughs) of study was, in the be- beginning, gangs, collective behavior and violence, and then how drugs would make some of these gangs that he had people he was working with infiltrate, students infiltrate, um-

Joe Rogan 41:16 Jesus Christ.

Tom O'Neill 41:16 ... to get information. Yeah, this is a- in Oakland, in the ghettos, in, in like '65, '66 when the Panthers were forming. Then in '60, late '66, he decided to become a federal parole officer while he was still writing his dissertation. And (laughs) he, um, got assigned to something called the San Francisco Project, which was an experimental program run by the federal government to see how different, um, numbers of parole clients, caseloads for p- per parole officer were, you know, you know, supervi- It was about recidivism. So if you had... The lowest load was 20 clients, the largest was like 50 or 60, were you able to superv- I mean, you would think that 50 or 60 is gonna be a lot more difficult, but it always wasn't. So Smith joined that program where he's supposed to be paying much more attention and care to his clients, uh, because it's part of a special program called the San Francisco Project. And, in fact, he was. I mean, he was. He was seeing Manson more than he was, uh, even officially supposed to. Things... Uh, you know, it gets even crazier. Uh, after '68, he stopped being his parole officer. He was actually removed, and he said it was voluntarily so he could focus more on his drugs and violence research at the clinic. Uh, Manson's three or four women followers got arrested in Mendocino. They had lured a couple young boys into a house, given them LSD. They... Manson had sent them out, up to Mendocino to recruit people for the family. The three women were... four women were arrested, and one of them, Mary Brunner, had the first baby with Manson in the group. And Roger Smith and his wife Carol...... went up to Mendocino and petitioned the court to take foster custody of the child until Mary was, um... until her case was resolved.

Joe Rogan 43:14 (snorts)

Tom O'Neill 43:14 So they were the foster parents of Manson's son. I mean, everything was irregular about this.

Joe Rogan 43:20 (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 43:20 That... Actually, that case is pretty interesting. So Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins, two women who actually killed for Manson in 1969, were, um, given... They were convicted of contributing to the delinquency of minors, illegal, uh, drug possession, and, uh... Without a trial, they pled out, uh, and then there was, uh, what they call the sentencing phase, where a probation officer is assigned to decide whether or not they should be sent to prison or given probation, supervised probation. So, um, I got access to their files, Brunner's and Atkins, and in the file were recommendations to the court by Roger Smith and his wife saying, "These are good women, they shouldn't go to prison."

Joe Rogan 44:04 (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 44:05 Um, Susan Atkins who, you know, stabbed Sharon Tate and...

Joe Rogan 44:09 Is that proven? 'Cause she said it and then she also-

Tom O'Neill 44:11 She went back and forth and back and forth.

Joe Rogan 44:13 ... said that she didn't-

Tom O'Neill 44:13 Yeah. Yeah. It's-

Joe Rogan 44:14 Yeah. Is, is it proven? 'Cause Tex Watson clearly was a murderer, right?

Tom O'Neill 44:17 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um-

Joe Rogan 44:19 And so she had said that Tex did it, she couldn't do it, but this was later on, right?

Tom O'Neill 44:23 Yeah. Her first, her first accounts were that she did it. And then-

Joe Rogan 44:27 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 44:27 ... when she testified to the grand jury, she said that she didn't do it. She held Sharon while Tex stabbed her.

Joe Rogan 44:34 Right.

Tom O'Neill 44:34 Later in prison, she said that she did do it, then she changed again. She'd go back and forth.

Joe Rogan 44:39 Okay.

Tom O'Neill 44:39 But she was pretty brutal and, uh, Mary Brunner and Susan Atkins were given probation instead of being sentenced, partially based on Roger Smith's recommendation. Roger Smith identified himself as a former parole officer, you know, with his expertise, and he said he had known both of them for two years and... Which was also a lie. He had only known Susan... He couldn't have known Susan for two years. He knew her for about a year. He did know Mary pretty well, um, and he never disclosed that he was Manson's parole officer. And Manson's identified in these same files as the person who lured these women into crime, that they were his communal wives, that they would steal for him, prostitutes themselves for him, and the other people that they interviewed. The probation officer argued against it saying, "They're gonna go right back to this guy who's down in Los Angeles and continue their life of crime." But the judge released them.

Joe Rogan 45:39 Now, this was b-... They were doing Charlie's bidding according to the, the record. What they were trying to do was recruit people into the family.

Tom O'Neill 45:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:48 And so they would offer them drugs and, and, and, uh-

Tom O'Neill 45:53 Sex.

Joe Rogan 45:53 ... sex and a lot of women and bring them to these parties. And where they screwed up is, they got an underage boy who was the-

Tom O'Neill 46:00 Freaked out.

Joe Rogan 46:01 Right. And he was the son of a local-

Tom O'Neill 46:03 A sheriff.

Joe Rogan 46:03 ... sheriff. Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 46:04 Yeah, yeah, and he ran home to his-

Joe Rogan 46:04 And he said his legs turned into snakes and... Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 46:07 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:07 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 46:07 Um, that's when they (laughs) screwed up in that situation, yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:10 And that's how they got arrested that time.

Tom O'Neill 46:11 Yeah. That was 68.

Joe Rogan 46:12 And still they got released.

Tom O'Neill 46:14 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:15 Which is really crazy.

Tom O'Neill 46:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:16 It's like there's so many of these instances where Charlie or members of the family were arrested and then it seemed like the police officers who were holding them were being told, "Hey, you gotta let these guys go."

Tom O'Neill 46:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:30 "There's... This is a higher... The situation is above your pay grade."

Tom O'Neill 46:33 Yeah. Well, real turning point in my reporting was after I got access to Manson's parole file and saw that... I mean, and Helter Skelter, Bugliosi, I think describes two arrests that Manson got released on, uh, technicalities, you know, shotty police work or something, when he should have been violated. But what he didn't do was talk about three or four more and if you've gotten up to chapter 10 you've seen all that stuff laid out.

Joe Rogan 46:59 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 46:59 So when I got this record, a, a pretty substantial record, I took it to someone named Louis Wachnek, who was a retired judge and a retired district attorney from the valley out around here, Van Nuys, um, 'cause I needed somebody with the expertise and the knowledge of how things worked. 'Cause you have to look at everything in context. Things work at... differently today than they did in 2009 or 2000 when I interviewed him, but he was there in '69 in the DA's office. I brought the documents to him and we laid them all out on his kitchen table and he's looking at them, and the poor guy was, um, very sick with cancer and he, he talked like this, but I had the recorder going, and he's looking at all the documents and he's seeing this pattern of catch, release, catch, release and he's going, "Chicken shit. Chicken shit. This is all chicken shit." He goes, "He shouldn't... He should have gone back the first time." He goes, "They wanted him out." He said, "He, that he was more important to somebody out than in." He goes, "You've gotta find out who it was." And I go, uh, "How do I do that?" And he goes, "You're not gonna be able to. That's... He's an informant." I go, "But who should I... What should I look at?" And he goes, "Well, he was working either for local law enforcement, uh, the federal government, the FBI, but somebody wanted him out there doing whatever he was doing." So that was important. Another, uh, turning point was a bunch of years later, was when I brought similar materials to Stephen K, who was Bugliosi's co-prosecutor in the case.

Joe Rogan 48:31 Can I stop you for a second? So the speculation, his speculation was that Charlie was an informant.

Tom O'Neill 48:37 Well, and again, an informant has many definitions.

Joe Rogan 48:39 Right.

Tom O'Neill 48:39 It's not just informing on crime, it also can be doing the police's bidding. That's really-

Joe Rogan 48:45 Or the CIA's bidding.

Tom O'Neill 48:46 Or the CIA or the FBI.

Joe Rogan 48:48 Right, being a part of a program.

Tom O'Neill 48:49 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 48:49 Where they're allowing this... And also there's speculation that the, the goal was (object falls) to try to diminish the antiwar movement and that this guy was a part of the hippie movement and then so now people would associate hippies with violence and drugs and murder and all this-

Tom O'Neill 49:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:07 ... horrific stuff.

Tom O'Neill 49:08 Yeah. Well, I mean-Again, this is going into the weeds-

Jamie Vernon 49:11 Yes. We're in the weeds.

Tom O'Neill 49:11 ... but it's important. I'll try to do it.

Jamie Vernon 49:13 Okay.

Tom O'Neill 49:13 And I know that your podcasts are longer than most. (laughs)

Jamie Vernon 49:15 Well, we can keep going forever.

Tom O'Neill 49:16 (laughs) Don't say that.

Jamie Vernon 49:18 We have all the time in the world.

Tom O'Neill 49:18 You're gonna regret-

Jamie Vernon 49:19 No.

Tom O'Neill 49:19 ... you're gonna regret that.

Jamie Vernon 49:20 I'm not gonna regret it. You're gonna regret it. (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 49:23 (laughs) Uh, so... (laughs)

Jamie Vernon 49:25 (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 49:26 It's been a while since I've done this. The book came out a year ago, and everybody... I mean, I haven't been getting the calls I got when the book came out, so I'm a little rusty, believe it or not.

Jamie Vernon 49:34 No, you're great. This is a- amazing stuff. Um-

Tom O'Neill 49:36 It's, it's just hard to kinda cover all these, this ground without sounding nuts, without giving context, you know?

Jamie Vernon 49:42 Yes, I understand.

Tom O'Neill 49:43 In, in 1967, the federal government started... the FBI started a program called COINTELPRO.

Jamie Vernon 49:50 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 49:51 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-

Jamie Vernon 52:52 Hmm.

Tom O'Neill 52:52 ... 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.

Jamie Vernon 54:02 Phew.

Tom O'Neill 54:02 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-

Joe Rogan 55:11 (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 55:11 ... the Blacks. Um-

Joe Rogan 55:13 This was Vince Bugliosi's-

Tom O'Neill 55:15 Well, he, he-

Joe Rogan 55:15 ... narrative or...

Tom O'Neill 55:16 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.

Joe Rogan 55:32 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?

Tom O'Neill 55:40 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.

Joe Rogan 57:49 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 57:50 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...

Joe Rogan 58:03 So do you think Bugliosi was operating with the knowledge that Manson was a part of these programs?

Tom O'Neill 58:11 Oh, that's the big question. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:13 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 58:14 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-

Joe Rogan 1:00:08 What did he say?

Tom O'Neill 1:00:10 Uh, well, uh, first let me explain. It, it's... it was off the record.

Joe Rogan 1:00:15 Right.

Tom O'Neill 1:00:15 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.

Joe Rogan 1:00:47 Not off the record, you mean?

Tom O'Neill 1:00:48 Yeah. They said, now it's on the record.

Joe Rogan 1:00:50 Right, right, right. Right.

Tom O'Neill 1:00:50 I mean, he has... he violated his agreement with you.

Joe Rogan 1:00:53 Yes.

Tom O'Neill 1:00:53 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:08 Yeah, he seemed like a terrible person.

Tom O'Neill 1:02:09 He was pretty bad, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:10 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."

Tom O'Neill 1:02:15 It makes sense.

Joe Rogan 1:02:16 It makes sense.

Tom O'Neill 1:02:17 Yeah, it's not that surprising.

Joe Rogan 1:02:18 He's a monster.

Tom O'Neill 1:02:20 Yeah, yeah. I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:02:20 A monster that's really good at making movies.

Tom O'Neill 1:02:23 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:23 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 1:02:24 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:30 Mm.

Tom O'Neill 1:02:31 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.

Joe Rogan 1:03:28 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 1:03:28 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."

Joe Rogan 1:05:55 The motivation was revenge on Terry Melcher 'cause Tery- Terry Melcher didn't turn him into a star.

Tom O'Neill 1:06:01 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:01 So this is what Bugliosi was using, but it didn't make any sense-

Tom O'Neill 1:06:04 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:04 ... because Melcher saw him after the murders several times.

Tom O'Neill 1:06:07 Yeah, a- and not only ... Even if it made se- it did make sense. You're cor- you're right, and that's why I think ... Well, I think you could get away with anything then because the antics of the family at the trial and everybody was so horrified by what was going on, nobody was looking at this critically and questioning stuff 'cause every day, you know, Manson and the girls were getting thrown out of the courtroom for screaming, for singing, for dancing, for mocking the proceedings. Um, so all this stayed under the radar, but once I could prove that Melcher lied and then two or three more, then I knew that I had to question the entire narrative. So Bugliosi started monitoring my interviewing. This is all laid out in the beginning of the book.

Joe Rogan 1:06:48 Mm.

Tom O'Neill 1:06:49 So by the fall of the first year of '99, I got a call from one of my sources, Rudy Altobelli, who was another important witness. He was the man who owned the house where the murders happened. He was traveling. He was traveling, actually, in Europe.... with Sharon, who had come back about... Sharon tape about three weeks before, uh, to have her baby. Um, and Rudy had told me from the very beginning, he was very close to Terry, Dennis Wilson, and the third guy, Greg Jacobson. Greg Jacobson was another important witness who lied (laughs) throughout the whole, all of his testimony in the trial, to fit a narrative that Vince needed. Um, Rudy had told me that Vince called him, uh... or excuse me, Terry called him and said, "What are you telling Ms. O'Neill? No one was supposed to know about that. Vince promised me it would never come out." So at that point, I knew that I was onto something even, even bigger. And then, um, I got a call from Vince, and he left a message on my machine saying he wanted to talk to me, it was important. So I called him back and he said, "You know, I'm hearing..." I, I, I, "I can't remember who told me." And that was another little game of his. He would never be... it's like Trump saying, um, "This guy said to me," or, "One of my friends," or, "They say." Uh, Vince said, "Someone told me, I heard that you're questioning my tactics and my choices at the trial. Is, is, is that true? You know, Tom, what's- what's going on here?" I go, "Well, you know, I'm looking at stuff, Vince," and, "You know, you knew where this was going." I mean, "I know we haven't talked..." At that point, we hadn't talked for about six weeks, I think. He goes, "Well, I want you to assure me that I'll be given the opportunity to answer any of these questions." He goes, "'Cause what might appear irregular to you as a layperson can be easily explained by me." And I said, "Well, of course, Vince, I'll definitely swing back around to you before." He goes, "And I thought this was gonna be out in August," and we were in, like, October, I think. I go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got an extension." He goes, "Well, they're also saying you're doing... it's a book, and that you lied, that it's not a magazine story." I go, "Oh, no, no, I'm still getting paid by Premiere," because I was at that point, and I had no idea it was gonna be a book, because we were still in the first six, seven months. So at that point, I... we stopped talking, Vince and I, and it wasn't until 2005 when I got my book deal that I went back to him with these questions. And I thought, hoped naively, that I would get him to break down and say, "Yes, this was all a CIA operation. I was operated-"

Jamie Vernon 1:09:11 Oh, God. (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 1:09:11 But no, that was stupid of me. But, you know, I thought, "What else can he say when I put all this in front of him?" But, you know, um, as...

Jamie Vernon 1:09:20 He must have been really freaked out by how deep you got into this.

Tom O'Neill 1:09:24 Yeah, yeah. Well, again, you've read the prologue to the book-

Jamie Vernon 1:09:27 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 1:09:27 ... where we open-

Jamie Vernon 1:09:28 Right.

Tom O'Neill 1:09:28 ... in that scene in his kitchen, where he's screaming and cursing at me and saying he's gonna hurt me like I've never been hurt before, and he's gonna sue me for hundred- hou- uh, hundreds of millions of dollars, it's crazy. But when you get to the end of the book, you'll see the outcome of that day and what happened when he's begging me, he's saying he'll give me a, a quote on the cover of my book if I don't publish-

Jamie Vernon 1:09:49 Yeah.

Tom O'Neill 1:09:49 ... this stuff. And, and then when I wouldn't agree to anything, then the lawsuit threats started happening. So I naively... I didn't think he was gonna break down and say, "I was working for someone else. I had no choice."

Jamie Vernon 1:10:02 Mm-hmm. Right.

Tom O'Neill 1:10:03 But instead, he was evasive, threatening, screaming, denying. He had two recorders, I had two recorders. He's, he's... he went off the record every two minutes. So we'd have to turn off all the recorders, and Vince was not turning his... I'm like, "Vince, you didn't turn yours back... oh, no, you didn't turn it off. Wait, and... no, that's my recorder. No, this is yours." So one minute, he's screaming and cursing at me, going, "Do you have any idea how I will fuck you if you fucking put this in your book?" And then the recorders go back on, but sometimes, uh, they were already on because we couldn't keep up with all the off-the-records.

Jamie Vernon 1:10:36 Jesus.

Tom O'Neill 1:10:36 Then when I got home that night... so I walk out of the house, six hours exactly, almost six hours, just like the first time six years earlier. He's grabbing me by the arm, he goes, "This isn't quid pro quo, this isn't quid pro quo, but if you don't put this ridiculous nonsense in..." He goes, you know, "A blurb from Vince Bul-..." He always referred to himself in the third person.

Jamie Vernon 1:10:55 Oh, boy.

Tom O'Neill 1:10:56 "A blurb from Vince Bugliosi on the cover of this book, you have no idea what that does, and I rarely do it, I'm very selective. I get asked 10, 20 times a day." I mean, the man's ego is... you'll see that in the book. Then I get home that night, there's messages. "Call me, call me." And he called me, I think it's a week, week and a half, almost every day, the next morning, a few days later, trying to... he would bully me, and then he'd say, "No, no, g-... you know, look at what this is gonna do to my family, my kids," and all that.

Jamie Vernon 1:11:23 (sighs)

Tom O'Neill 1:11:23 Went on and on and on, so-

Jamie Vernon 1:11:25 So you had to be very excited by that, knowing that, like, this is...

Tom O'Neill 1:11:29 Oh, yeah.

Jamie Vernon 1:11:29 There's no, there's no reason for that guy to react like that-

Tom O'Neill 1:11:32 Oh, no, yeah.

Jamie Vernon 1:11:32 ... unless you had him.

Tom O'Neill 1:11:34 I know, I know (laughs) . And then-

Jamie Vernon 1:11:35 He knew.

Tom O'Neill 1:11:36 Yeah. So a, a year la-... he kept... not a year later. He said... when we finally... he goes... at the very, the very last phone call, which was a week and a half later, he goes, "So you're really gonna go ahead and do with this? Go, go ahead with this?" I go, "Vince, I'm gonna report what I have." I go, "If you want." Uh, uh, oh, at this point, I had lo-... the, the magazine deal had ended. I had sold the book, so I- I... he knew I had a publisher, I told him who it was, and he asked for my editor's name there. He said, "Because I will be sending them a letter." He goes, "I will work on this letter for hours. It's gonna be a complete rebuttal of everything you argued... uh, all of your arguments, all of your points, it's gonna ruin you. They're gonna cancel your deal, 'cause they're not stupid." So he wrote the letter, they got it in... I think it was June or July, uh, after February of that, that year, 2005. And I got a call from my editor, he said, "You gotta talk to our attorneys." Uh, he goes, "We have a letter from Vince." I go, "Well, I told you it was coming." He goes, "It's insane. It's 34 pages, single-spaced, with 50 pages of attachments." And, uh, uh, he go- he goes, "I've never seen anything like this." So he said, "Talk, talk to the attorney." So they sent me over to the attorney, and he said, "My first question..." I'd never met the guy before. He goes, "My first question for you, O'Neill, is, is he suffering from dementia?" He goes, "I was a law student during the trial." And he goes, "I followed that trial every day in the paper, I've read Helter Skelter. He was brilliant." He goes, "I can't believe the person that wrote this letter wrote that book, so maybe you were dealing with somebody who was impaired." I said, "He's..."... mentally ill. And, and I have a lot of proof of that in the book. He, he, he ... It's not dementia. I go, "He's finishing his Magnum Opus, a 20-year effort to write a book, uh, rebutting, uh, the critics of the, of the Warren Commission, uh, about the Kennedy assassination." I go, "He's got a book coming out, a tour." And sure enough, you know, he wrote, I think, two or three more books after that. I go, "He's just ... I caught him?" He, he, he goes ... All of his arguments don't make sense. He's contradicting himself. The letter goes off in a directions that i- it sounds like it's written by a madman. And I go, "Is it gonna inhibit us?" He goes, "Oh, no, we're cel- we're opening the champagne here." You, y-

Joe Rogan 1:13:57 (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 1:13:57 I mean, he wouldn't write a letter like this unless you got him.

Joe Rogan 1:14:00 Yeah. Well, that-

Tom O'Neill 1:14:01 Anyway-

Joe Rogan 1:14:01 ... makes sense. 50 pages of attachments?

Tom O'Neill 1:14:04 That was the first letter. Then about six months later, another letter. I think there were four total. I quote some of them in the book. Um, it was nuts. And unfortunately, he passed away in 2015 or '16. And I get a lot (laughs) of criticism by p- I mean, you get it from all over.

Joe Rogan 1:14:21 How old was he when he died?

Tom O'Neill 1:14:23 Uh, I think 74 or 5. It was cancer. I knew he was sick off and on for a couple years. Um, but I've been accused by my critics of not publishing the book until he died because of these threats of law-

Joe Rogan 1:14:38 Mm.

Tom O'Neill 1:14:38 No. Mm-mm. I wanted him to be alive. I wanted him to be accountable and have to answer to all this. The reason I didn't publish it when I was gonna publish it was Penguin, my publisher, canceled my (laughs) deal in 2011 and then sued me for a return of the advance, which cripple- I couldn't-

Joe Rogan 1:14:55 Why did they do that?

Tom O'Neill 1:14:57 Um, well, the book was due originally in 2008. And then th- I'm not good with the deadlines.

Joe Rogan 1:15:04 (laughs)

Tom O'Neill 1:15:05 Figure that out.

Joe Rogan 1:15:06 Well, it, it's a great book, even if it took you 20 years to write it. It's-

Tom O'Neill 1:15:10 Yeah. No, I mean, they, uh, they extended it, and then in 2011, they lost their patience. And it, it, it was a surprise 'cause I, I knew that the editor and the publisher of Penguin Press, the imprint, who are very serious, you know, publishers, very (laughs) well-known, I, I knew or, or I thought that they believed in me and understood why it was still taking long. So, when I got the call, it was devastating. And then even worse is, a year later, uh, my agent got served with papers, and they took me to court. Well, it never got to court, it was resolved, but they sued me for my advance, which was substantial. And I'm not allowed to say anything, uh, except that it was resolved 'cause there's non-disclosures.

Joe Rogan 1:15:55 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 1:15:55 But let's just say you, you've h- I mean, you putting me on here and, and the advance stuff you g- has helped the sales. I'm still not making money 'cause I owe a lot of people money.

Joe Rogan 1:16:07 Mm.

Tom O'Neill 1:16:08 Um, so that was crushing, and it held up the book 'cause we couldn't take it out and try to resell it until it was resolved. It took about a year and a half to two years to resolve the lawsuit. I, luckily, I got a pro bono lawyer. I was busted broke. Uh, and then once we resolved the lawsuit, was about 2016, '17, then we could take it out, but we weren't sure we were, we were gonna be able to sell it because it had this bad history trailing me.

Joe Rogan 1:16:35 So, from 2011 to 2016, it's in limbo.

Tom O'Neill 1:16:40 Well, it is, except I ne- I worked just as hard every single day.

Joe Rogan 1:16:44 Wow.

Tom O'Neill 1:16:44 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?

Joe Rogan 1:16:52 No.

Tom O'Neill 1:16:53 Um, he did, uh, Thin Blue Line.

Joe Rogan 1:16:55 Oh, okay.

Tom O'Neill 1:16:56 Yeah. He's won an Academy Award for a documentary he made about Robert McNamara.

Joe Rogan 1:17:01 So they wanna make a book about the

Tom O'Neill 1:17:02 ... No, no. ... eternally- So Errol, Errol Morris, I think you had a son on Hamilton, Morris?

Joe Rogan 1:17:07 Yes. Oh, that's his son?

Tom O'Neill 1:17:08 It's ... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:09 I love Hamilton.

Tom O'Neill 1:17:09 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.

Joe Rogan 1:18:18 Mm-hmm.

Tom O'Neill 1:18:18 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.

Jamie Vernon 1:20:22 (imitates gun firing)

Tom O'Neill 1:20:22 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