Pod Insights American Alchemy CIA Brainwashing & Charles Manson: Hidden History (ft. Tom O'Neill) About this episode Thank you to Founders Fund, Michael Solana and Hereticon for today's episode! Subscribe to Pirate Wires at https://www.piratewires.com
In today's episode of American Alchemy, Jesse Michels sits down with Tom O'Neill, author of Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. They uncover chilling connections between Manson, CIA mind control experiments like MK-Ultra, and the counterculture of the 1960s. This eye-opening conversation challenges the official narrative and reveals how hidden forces may have shaped a darker side of the 1960's and American counterculture.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:06 Speaker 02 It was a cult and their leader was a man named Charles Manson. And he had 10 or 15 wives. Manson believed that there was an impending race war. And the murders were committed to shock the world. And they left signs that they hoped were going to implicate the Black Panthers. The four victims that were stabbed were stabbed more than 200 times. There was blood writing on the wall. It was a real horrific crime scene. How did Manson get these young women in under a year to go out and kill complete strangers for no other reason than he told them to? And to have no remorse? And to actually laugh about it? Jolly West reported to the CIA in 1955.
1:50 Speaker 02 He had developed the technology to implant false memory in a person and remove true memories using drugs and hypnosis.
1:59 Jesse Michels? We have a lot of evidence that government knew more about this stuff. Manson was almost being tracked by authorities before he killed Tate.
2:06 Speaker 02 There was NKUltra research going on at all those places that he was at.
2:10 Speaker 04 When you're in war, you're in war, mister. You don't make no change without bloodshed.
2:18 Jesse Michels? Charles Manson and the History of Government Mind Control. I have Tom O'Neill here, and Tom is an incredible journalist and really is kind of a tribute to a bygone era of journalism where he was just gonna write a routine article about Charles Manson and it turned into this 20-year saga where he uncovered a whole plotline in the most famous murders in American history, the Manson murders, that involve CIA brainwashing, government mind control, all sorts of craziness. And so, we are very excited to be here today. And I want to start just with some basic, kind of, you know, setting the table, scaffolding. Tom, what is MKUltra?
3:01 Jesse Michels? A lot of people here might not know that the CIA even had a mind control program.
3:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, MKUltra was a brainwashing program that was developed by the CIA, end of the 40s into the early 50s. It was originally created as a defensive program because intelligence in the United States learned that the Soviet Union and the Chinese and North Koreans had developed these techniques to brainwash people, to get them to make false confessions. They were using drugs, sensory deprivation, a bunch of different technologies. So, the United States wanted to learn how to defend against that, particularly for airmen who got shot down overseas and were captured. And what began as a defensive program quickly evolved into an offensive program when they
3:51 Speaker 02 realized how effective it could be. The ultimate goal was to create a programmed assassin, people who could be pretty much hypnotized to go out and kill somebody for no reason in their mind or no recollection of being Program to do it. They had programs for mass conversion where they would try to control groups of people, thousands of people, using media, other kinds of technology. They wanted to be able to implant information in service people's minds that they could courier to across enemy lines, deliver, bring back. And ultimately, what they played with the most was memory. They wanted to be able to control people's memory.
4:36 Speaker 02 They wanted to be able to implant false memories and people without their knowledge take away true memories, using initially sodium pentathol and then LSD and then other drugs that we still don't know about. The program was exposed by a whistleblower in about 1975. It was quite sensational. The CIA had to acknowledge that they did it. It was not just illegal. The CIA by law is not allowed to operate on US soil. But also, it was horrific because they were using, they were doing human experiments on people without their knowledge or consent. And they began in prisons and jails and then they started doing it with service people.
5:20 Speaker 02 They even set up what they called safe houses in San Francisco and New York City where prostitutes would lure Johns into rooms where two-way mirrors would be set up. The prostitutes would administer LSD to them and then they'd observe behaviors and see what they could do with the Johns while they were under control. So this went on until about 73, 74. Watergate was happening. Richard Helms at that point was running the CIA. And it looked like Nixon was going to leave office. A lot of stuff was going to get discovered and they had to hide it as fast as they could and as effectively as they could. So Richard Helms ordered all of the files destroyed. And nobody would have known about this program if it wasn't for a guy named John Marks,
6:05 Speaker 02 who was a State Department official, who found files, financial files in 74, took it to a congressman, and that began congressional investigations. When I began this book about a murder case, Charles Manson murder case, I'd never heard of MKUltra. People here probably know more about it now than I did when I began this. And when I first heard about it, I thought it was a fantasy that it couldn't have been real, but you can see the congressional record. There were three different hearings. The church hearings were the longest, but there was also a congressional combined Ted Kennedy and Daniel Inouye hearings. Testimonies entered into the record. The CIA lied. They said that it hadn't been effective.
6:46 Speaker 02 That they allow themselves to look like fools and they said, none of this stuff worked. We shouldn't have done it. It was inhumane. Ha, ha, ha, stupid us. We're not going to do it again. Sorry. And Congress let them get away with that. In fact, a lot of it was effective, a lot of it had worked. And I found out a little bit about what they'd done that had never been reported before that bled into this famous story about Charles Manson and the murders that occurred there. So that's kind of like the two minute or.
7:16 Jesse Michels? Go on forever. I mean, it's insane how widespread of a program it was like, it was like hundreds, if not thousands of psychiatrists. You had outposts in Canada, this guy, you and Cameron doing torturous techniques on people.
7:29 Speaker 02 Right.
7:29 Jesse Michels? You had Andre Puharich and he had his Round Table Institute in Maine. He had an outpost in upstate New York where they had these space kids where they were trying to like communicate with, you know, these, these other worldly beings. And actually Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, like that was channeled via this woman named Phyllis Lefley. It's this is a really crazy kind of counter history. And then you have all the, you know, kind of Manchurian candidate political stuff.
7:54 Speaker 02 And then notorious criminals like Whitey Bulger, who we found out, or he found out late into his life in prison that he had volunteered for medical experiments in prison in the 50s. And he later found out that they were MKUltra brainwashing experiments.
8:11 Jesse Michels? Ted Kaczynski.
8:11 Speaker 02 Ted Kaczynski.
8:12 Jesse Michels? The Unabomber voluntarily went into an MKUltra experiment at Harvard, right?
8:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
8:17 Jesse Michels? Okay. So we have this crazy CIA mind control history that, you know, was not super well known. Do you want to just set the table and give some basics on what happened to Manson murders? Obviously they're extremely famous, but you know.
8:30 Speaker 02 Yeah. And you wouldn't think these two subjects would approach, merge, blend together. The history of.
8:38 Speaker 02 My investigation of all this was, like Jesse said, I got a magazine assignment in 99 that was gonna commemorate what was then gonna be the 30th anniversary of the Tate-La Bianca murders. So, on August 8th, 1969, Sharon Tate, the eight-month-pregnant wife of director Roman Polanski, and two of her house guests, Wojciech Warkowski, a Polish cameraman who was friends with Roman, Abigail Folger, well-known coffee-er as from the Folger family, Jay Sebring, these celebrity hairstylists in Hollywood were all in the house, and there was a home invasion.
9:18 Speaker 02 Nobody knew who did it, but they slaughtered all of them, plus a visitor to the caretaker's house in the back, a 19-year-old kid named Steve Parent. Three months later, they captured a group of hippies who lived communally first at the Spawn Ranch, which is outside Los Angeles in a place called Chatsworth, broken-down horse ranch, and then they had migrated out to Death Valley. The early reports were that it was a cult, and their leader was a man named Charles Manson, 32-year-old ex-con, short, like 5'5" or 5'4", and he had 10 or 15 wives, kids,
9:59 Speaker 02 they didn't know whose were the parents of which kids, everyone were raised communally. And what became then the first sensational trial in Los Angeles, really, until OJ, there'd never been that kind of attention. They tried them and convicted them, and what the mystery was, why were these people killed in this house? What was the connection of these hippies? What were they looking for? It wasn't a robbery. What the prosecutor Vince Bulyosy learned through his investigation was, and this is the official narrative of the story, was that Manson believed that there was an impending race war, which he called Helter Skelter after the Beatles' song, and it was taking
10:42 Speaker 02 too long, and he wanted to trigger it, so he ordered his followers to go to this house Where he had a relationship with a music producer who had lived there previously, but no longer lived there, named Terry Melcher. And the murders were committed to shock the world. And they left signs that they hoped were going to implicate the Black Panthers and turn the world against the blacks. And then Manson had prophesied, and the prophecies came from Beatles lyrics, Beatles songs, that he thought were written to communicate these orders to him. And then the Old Testament, the Book of Revelations, it's just this whole mishmash. Anyway, the murders happened.
11:24 Speaker 02 All of a sudden, these hippies were brought back to Los Angeles from Death Valley. The ones who weren't arrested and charged held vigil outside the courthouse every day for a year, a year. And whatever Manson did in court, the women who were tried beside him, three women and then another man separately, Tex Watson, would mimic. So he'd carve X in his forehead, show up at court. The next day, the women defendants would have X's. And everybody outside, the family who were sitting in circles and singing and praying, all had X's in their foreheads. I got assigned this story, and I didn't know what the angle was. This had been written to death. It had, you know, the book that the prosecutor wrote, Helter Skelter, to this day is the
12:09 Speaker 02 best-selling true crime book of all time. I didn't want to do it. I needed a job, though. It was supposed to be three months. I began it, and I was trying to find an angle, which can be fun, but it can also be scary because you don't want to write a boring story. And the angle that I kind of settled on was, how did Manson get these young women in under a year to go out and kill complete strangers for no other reason than he told them to? And to have no remorse, and to actually laugh about it? And that was something that kind of, I think that's why people became so obsessed with the case.
12:51 Speaker 02 And people still make movies about it and write books about it, not because it was a horrific murder. There's those kinds of murders all the time and not even because it was a famous actress married to a famous director who was out of the country when it happened, I should say. But because nobody had ever seen anything like this before, where young kids just killed for the joy of killing and then laughed about it afterward. So I began to try to find out what Manson had done, how he had learned, where he had gained this knowledge to get these kids to do this in under two years for the majority of them, under a year for about a half dozen of them.
13:33 Speaker 02 And that's what led me to this program, MKUltra, which I didn't know would be connected to them. But I ended up finding out that there was a psychiatrist named Louis J. West, Charlie West, who was working out of the Hayth Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in 1967 where Manson had begun this group, the cult. And he was doing his research there with LSD on hippies. And when the MKUltra program got exposed, he was alleged to have been part of it. And he told the New York Times he had nothing to do with it. They'd approached him. He wouldn't use LSD on humans and he said he didn't want to do it. He had died right after I got the assignment.
14:17 Speaker 02 I got access to his papers at UCLA. And after months and months and months of really tedious digging, I was looking for a needle in a haystack and I found it. He was writing, using an alias for Sidney Gottlieb, the head of the program at the CIA. He was called the poisoner in chief about all the experiments he was going to do. And all of this stuff paralleled his arrival in San Francisco, Manson's arrival in San Francisco, the two of theirs traveled down to Los Angeles. And it was during that period that Manson turned into exactly what the CIA had been trying to create for 15 years at that point.
15:01 Speaker 02 So I present in the book a case that...
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16:00 Speaker 02 I haven't proven it, absolutely, but I make a case that these two men intersected and Manson was experimented with the girls were.
16:10 Jesse Michels? You say there's no smoking evidence, no smoking gun, rather. But you have this kind of, you know, Manson pre-1967 hate Ashbury, who is this petty criminal. He's like five foot five or something. He's not particularly charismatic. And he keeps getting, you know, caught for these petty crimes. And he goes into this parole officer, Roger Smith.
16:33 Speaker 02 Roger Smith.
16:33 Jesse Michels? And Roger Smith specializes in amphetamines and LSD and their effect.
16:38 Speaker 02 He's a parole officer who's also a criminology student at Berkeley and a drug researcher. And his special field of research was adolescent kids who join gangs and become violent while using drugs.
16:52 Jesse Michels? So, so he's going into this guy constantly who specializes in this stuff. And then David Smith as well, right? Ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. And we know now from the Church Commission that they had this thing called Operation Midnight Climax, where they would bring in people like Manson and they would sort of dose them up. You have this weird confluence of people around Manson. And then you have this kind of. Line in the sand of Manson as this like not super charismatic petty criminal into this sex god cult leader guru guy. And it's all in the span of basically a year.
17:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
17:25 Jesse Michels? And so, you know, I think that that's fairly, that's fairly compelling. And then Jolly West himself, just to, you guys have a sense of how pervasive MKUltra was, was the head of the UCLA psychiatry. Plenty of reputable psychiatrists, psychologists studied under him. And so it's pretty.
17:41 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you go to UCLA, there's an auditorium named after him. He was also the head of the neuroscience center there. He started the first neuroscience center at University of Oklahoma in the 50s after he left the Lackland Air Force Base, which is where he began his first experiments on prisoners at the base. And then went through Oklahoma, Los Angeles, San Francisco and had connections. He was kind of like a Zelig. When Jack Ruby was arrested and charged for shooting Oswald, he became Ruby's psychiatrist. Not right away. He tried to get on the case right away, but the judge wouldn't let him. He actually requested to be on. The defense attorney wasn't sure what was going on.
18:25 Speaker 02 So Ruby got convicted at trial within a year of the Oswald shooting, never testified. Only told the media he had a story to tell. He wanted to tell it. Well, he was getting a second trial at the same time. They were finally going to take his testimony, the Warren Commission. All of a sudden, West got assigned to the case, goes in and spends about an hour alone with Ruby at the county jail. And comes out and holds a press conference and says, within the preceding 48 hours, Jack Ruby has had a psychotic break from which he'll never recover. He has auditory and visual hallucinations. He thinks there's people in the room.
19:07 Speaker 02 He hears the, what he says are the cries of Jewish children being boiled alive outside his jail cell at night. From that day forward, Ruby only lived three more years. He could never string three coherent sentences together. Now, Wes specialty, among his specialties was inducing. Insanity and a person without their knowledge. And the Warren Commission was never told that, that this guy was actually hit a conflict of interest. He was working for the CIA at the time. And, you know, are these coincidences or there's there's something more to it?
19:40 Jesse Michels? That doesn't sound like a coincidence to me. So you have, just to rehash it for everybody, you have Lee Harvey Oswald, who supposedly was this lone gunman, who, you know, took out JFK. That was like kind of conventional narrative. You have Jack Ruby killing him. And by the way, when Jack Ruby shot him, he goes, what are you doing? I'm Jack Ruby, to the cops who were arresting him, almost as if he didn't recall having killed Lee Harvey Oswald.
20:03 Speaker 02 Well, he didn't. You know, his original defense was, he wasn't sure why he was there. He had, his lawyer said he had an epileptic fit and he had no memory of this.
20:14 Jesse Michels? And then, and then he's seen by Jolly West in a jail cell with no cameras present and goes nuts right, right afterwards. So I think that's a, you know, pretty interesting fact pattern. But going back to Manson, other possible pieces of evidence that he was an MKUltra patient. His whole life was kind of modeled off of this sci-fi novel, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, this 1968 bestseller. And he called his, his son was like Don Valentine, right?
20:43 Speaker 02 Michael Valen.
20:44 Jesse Michels? Michael Valentine, sorry.
20:45 Speaker 02 His firstborn child.
20:46 Jesse Michels? And, and then Roger Smith, his parole officer was Jubal, this protector character.
20:51 Speaker 02 Yeah. So if you're not familiar with the novel, in the 1960s, everyone read that book, especially hippies.
20:58 Jesse Michels? And so, but Manson was supposedly illiterate. So it brings up this like really interesting question. Was he like dosed up with LSD, read this thing that then became like the narrative for his life? Because in it, you know, it involves this race war or whatever, like a lot of this stuff that he was talking about in his life.
21:15 Speaker 02 And it's about a leader who is born on Mars, dispatched to the earth to start a new society of offspring. And he has communal wives and he has someone who protects him in the legal system who was called Jubal. And Roger's nickname from Manson and the Girls was. Jubal. There's a lot of spooky figures that kind of were on the periphery of Manson's life for the two years he was free between 67 and his arrest in 69. There's like a half dozen of them and it's kind of a real cornucopia of of characters that I present in the book that were really hard to find to get information on. A lot of them have no records. I did CIA
21:58 Speaker 02 FOIA requests for the two or three that I was sure were affiliated with the CIA and you got what's called the Glomer response. We can neither confirm nor deny any relationship with the CIA, which means, yeah, they were in the CIA. And these people kind of traveled and followed Manson. And when Bully Osi came in and did his prosecution, he erased them from the story. He removed any trace of them having anything to do with the group. It's a really crazy, wild story.
22:26 Jesse Michels? Crazy. So you have, and yeah, you have a lot of compelling evidence that you write about that Manson was almost being tracked by authorities before he killed Tate. Spawn Ranch was actually raided and bugged. So it was like they could hear like Manson sort of plotting out the murder and Reeve Whitson, this mysterious guy who would tell everybody, you know, his friends and family that he was CIA, knew about the murder?
22:48 Speaker 02 Well, no, he wouldn't actually say that.
22:50 Jesse Michels? Okay.
22:50 Speaker 02 He would say he worked for the government, but he couldn't say who he worked for.
22:54 Jesse Michels? Okay.
22:54 Speaker 02 And it wasn't until a year or two before he died, he told about three or four, five people who were very close to him, his daughter, his lawyer, who told me reluctantly that he had said to them that he was working in an undercover operation where he had infiltrated the Manson family for this government agency. And his dying regret was he could have prevented the murders from happening. And he said, I was there at the crime scene the night of the murders. He said, I wasn't there when they occurred. I came after and saw the aftermath
23:33 Speaker 02 and left before the police came. And there's actually sound evidence and other physical evidence that shows there was somebody at the property. Manson did go back and he's Never said who he went back with. So yeah, you're dealing with a lot of kind of shady, crazy shit.
23:53 Jesse Michels? To say the least.
23:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, but it all kind of falls into place.
23:56 Jesse Michels? We have a lot of evidence that maybe government had, you know, knew more about this stuff and maybe, maybe Manson was some sort of construct. The question is like motive, like why, why would you kill a beautiful pregnant movie star in the form of Sharon Tate? Who, you know, America loved.
24:14 Speaker 02 He's knocking on that chaos door and that COINTELPRO door.
24:17 Jesse Michels? Exactly.
24:18 Speaker 02 So the CIA had another operation called Operation Chaos, which began in 1967 in San Francisco. And it was set up to do what the FBI also had a program doing called COINTELPRO. And it was all investigated. The agencies admitted they did it. COINTELPRO and Chaos were designed to neutralize the left wing movement and the black militant movement in the United States in 67. So by 67, the Panthers were becoming really powerful, the Black Panthers. The anti-war movement was real, the war was escalating. People didn't trust the President Johnson.
24:59 Speaker 02 And Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, believed that the biggest threat to the United States at that time was internal. That the youth was going to overthrow the country and take over and they needed to do something to stop it. So Chaos was started and COINTELPRO was started and they would get agents to infiltrate the groups. And then do, among other things, get them to provoke the groups to commit crimes that they could actually get shot and killed by agents waiting in the course of the crimes, like a bank robbery or gun theft, stealing guns.
25:39 Speaker 02 Also, they were trying to provoke them to kill one another, particularly the Black Panthers who were splintering a lot. There was a lot of rivalries among different Panther groups in different cities and there were other black militant groups. In Los Angeles, there was something called the US Slaves. There were two black US slaves killed at UCLA campus in 68, which the FBI admitted when another whistleblower came out in the 70s, that those two murders had been pretty much orchestrated by FBI agents on the orders of the people in Washington about six, seven months before the Sharon Tate murders, which if you don't know, it was a horrible, horrible
26:23 Speaker 02 murder. I mean, it's bad enough that she was eight and a half months pregnant, but the four victims that were stabbed were stabbed more than 200 times. There was blood writing on the wall. It was a real horrific crime scene. And the Tate House kind of represented liberal Hollywood. It was a party house. The white celebrities in LA were starting to support the Panthers financially. They were doing fundraisers. They actually had a group, I forget what the name was now, not called the White Panthers, but it was Friends of the Panthers. And famously, you know, Jane Fonda, Gene Seberg, Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Donald Sutherland, they were having meetings. Hoover wrote a memo to the
27:07 Speaker 02 head of the LA Field Office in November of 68, saying, what we have to get these white supporters of the Panthers to fear is that when the revolution finally happens, they're going to be lined up against the wall and slaughtered with the rest of the white population. And then that August, you know, five white people were slaughtered in the house. It really was partly the embodiment of the left-wing Hollywood establishment.
27:35 Jesse Michels? Manson himself, he was an aspiring musician, right? There's actually on YouTube, there's one of his songs, I think it's like, "Look at your game, girl." Is that right? It's like, got over 2 million views. And it's like, eerily, like, not that bad.
27:49 Speaker 02 Neil Young.
27:51 Jesse Michels? And he was also living with Dennis Wilson, like, one of the Beach Boys.
27:56 Speaker 02 There's a lot of different chapters to the story. You know, Manson infiltrated the rock and roll world in 1968 through the drummer for the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson, who became mesmerized by him, allowed the girls in Manson to live in his house in the Pacific Palisades for about two months until they trashed the house, trashed his roles, gave him VD, stole his money, and he threw them all out.
28:20 Jesse Michels? And so the overall point is if you're trying to co-opt counterculture, what do you do? You have this construct of a guy that like, looks like and acts like a hippie, kind of a counterculture revolutionary type, and you make him do some really bad savage stuff. And you have Donna Tartt, famous author, writing August 8th, 1969, you know, that was the day the 60s ended. Like, the hippie movement was sort of torn apart by this. And there's also speculation that I think MKUltra occurred in Laurel Canyon as well. And so, you have the, like, quotes at the time, Abbie Hoffman, who's this famous hippie, he's like, "We were just upright Berkeley, you know, students doing our normal kind of hippie thing and
29:04 Jesse Michels? protesting very peacefully. And you had these flower children from Laurel Canyon with their guns and their drugs and they're trying to kill each other, whatever." And it kind of marginalized the whole movement.
29:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. It's funny, because a lot of those guys, the yippies, Hoffman and them, were paranoid and did think that they had been infiltrated by people who were trying to set them up. And what happened with the Manson case was, within a week of his arrest, there's, on the cover of every newspaper in the world, a magazine, and it was confusing because the women are 17, 18, 19, they're wearing love beads, they have long hair, they've got babies breastfeeding.
29:46 Speaker 02 And they look like the hippies you saw, you know, in Life Magazine, but these women are accused of being murderers, savage murderers, and they're kind of playing into it to the reporters. And overnight, people became terrified of hippies. They wouldn't pick them up hitchhiking anymore. It really, if the chaos in Coentual Pro's goal was to make society fear the left wing and fear what was happening, they accomplished it with that act, those murders.
30:18 Jesse Michels? What do you think Manson was taught? Because even until, until the end, like, I think he had this interview with Charlie Rose, right? And he was like, there's like a reality warp, like, there's this like weird effect that he has. And he was dating like a beautiful, I think, woman in her mid twenties, like, at the end of his life while he's in prison. So he is able to have some, like, magnetic weird culty pull on the outside world while he's in prison?
30:44 Speaker 02 So Starr was a woman who came from Ohio, just like a million women before her, but when Manson was free, she was drawn to him. She was beautiful, and she became his girlfriend. She lived outside the prison gates. We don't have conjugal visits in the state of California, so she could only go in and hold his hand and sit with him. And she had a relationship with him until he found out that she was also fucking Gray Wolf, who was his guy outside the wall who managed his publicity and everything. So Starr ended up drifting away. Charlie, a friend of mine who was very close to Charlie, said it was the only time he ever heard Charlie, Charlie cry, because he was so brokenhearted that
31:27 Speaker 02 Starr had cheated on him with his best friend. Starr is now either engaged to or married to an actor named Vincent Gallo, who, she lives with in Malibu.
31:39 Jesse Michels? Buffalo 66?
31:40 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:40 Jesse Michels? Wow.
31:41 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:41 Jesse Michels? Crazy.
31:42 Speaker 02 Who was obsessed with Manson, has the largest collection of Manson art, memorabilia, and wanted to play him. There were several movie projects where, that were being developed. And if you know the guy, you can see why he'd be perfect to play Charlie. And I met him at a party just this past fall, and introduced myself, and I asked him if it was true, because I'd heard the rumor. And he said, yeah, yeah, Starr's with me.
32:11 Jesse Michels? What's the tip of the spear on your research now?
32:14 Speaker 02 Jolly West reported to the CIA in 1955 that he had developed the technology to implant false memory in a person and remove true memories using a combination of drugs and hypnosis without that person's knowledge and it would be permanent. And that was in 1955. So that's like five, six, seven years into the program. It went another 10 or 12 years. When they had the congressional hearings, the CIA said they were going to turn over all the documents they had, which weren't a lot because they destroyed most of the things. Well, they summarized West's report and I had West's original report. It's one
32:56 Speaker 02 of the documents I found at UCLA. And in the original report, he makes that pronouncement to them that he had successfully done really the most important thing that they needed to do. When they, the document that ended up at Congress and is in the record, that paragraph is missing. They took that out. They censored it. They didn't redact it. They just acted like it never existed. They redrafted his document. I think that they'd be idiots not to still use it. I have no evidence. I don't report on anything after like the 70s because I'm doing a second book, a follow-up, and I'm still just trying to stick to the
33:37 Speaker 02 1940s through about 75. And I'm looking real hard at Manson's life in prison before he was released. He was in federal institutions from the time he was 12 or 13. And in the institutions he was in, starting out in the East Coast, in Ohio, in Pennsylvania, Washington DC National Boys School, there was MKUltra research going on at all those places that he was at. And they were looking for adolescent boys who were prone to crime, prone to violence, who had no families, no network of support outside that would be concerned about what happened to them. And that was Charlie. That's who he was.
34:20 Jesse Michels? Should we open it up to Q and A?
34:22 Speaker 02 Sure. So if anybody has a question.
34:24 Speaker 05 You mentioned that MKUltra may have had an objective of subverting sort of hippie culture and making it seem like a threat. Does that assume a level of competence of government entities that is realistic?
34:37 Speaker 02 You know, they took the fall for it. They look like fools. Uh, but that was what the sacrifice they had to make to keep it going and to protect what they had.
34:47 Speaker 06 Hi, um, could you speak a little bit about the alleged connection between the Grateful Dead, the CIA and MBK Ultra? Cause that's fascinating to me.
34:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. So the Dead were early distributors of LSD, free LSD and the hate at their concerts in Golden Gate Park. And Ozzy Stanley was the one who was the chemist who was making it. I haven't looked a lot into that since my book came out. You know, I get lots and lots of people contacting me with information. And I've kept the file on the people who have the Ozzy Stanley was a CIA agent. And the Dead knew what he was doing and why he was doing it. But I don't have any real personal, original reporting on that.
36:29 Speaker 02 It's just stuff I'm starting to collect now.
36:32 Speaker 06 Okay. Awesome, guys. Thank you so much.
36:33 Speaker 02 Thanks very much for indulging us.
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