Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

  This is kind of a two for one; it’s an investigation into the Manson Family case as well as a memoir of the 20 years of work, the ups and downs, of the writer Tom O’Neill (co-author Dan Piepenbring is never mentioned) put into this project.

  It does have a happy ending. It started as a featured article for Premiere magazine. After delays and extensions, since O’Neill needed more time, the magazine ended up folding and the project was orphaned for a while with the investigator living on savings and family loans. About a year later it was picked up by a book publisher, eventually dropped and then adopted by another producing the published book.That’s the happy ending of the personal memoir part of the book, not that he solved the case.

  The investigation and what it revealed is of course more complicated and still muddy, smeared with intentional official cover-up by various parties for each their own reasons that range from cops just covering their own tracks to the secrecy of CIA MK-ULTRA mind control experimentation connected to it all.   
It’s the CIA MK-ULTRA stuff that I find most interesting. I’m kind of a buff for mind control info as well as The Red Scare, strange and troubling mid-20th Century USA big world happenings and reactions that I think we are still feeling the ripples from. This was their search for truth serums, mind control assassins, and a lot of just dosing people with LSD and other brain altering chemicals just to see what happened or how suggestable the subject would then become. I assume I am saying “kind of a buff” to distinguish from a full-on “conspiracy theorist”. I’m not entirely sure that there is some ultimate truth that can be acquired with a lot of this murky stuff and it might not lead to a very productive life. There are probably countless Tom O’Neill’s out there without official paper publication, guys, and probably mostly guys, who have thrown a lot of their energy and time into finding out the truth of this or that in a long or meandering trail that eventually takes us to Qannon and “Stop the Steal!”. One can picture “The Truth” as a shining city in the distance, but the long dirt road leading there is littered with bones and corpses of varying decay, some still being picked over by the buzzards. With certain ones I just decide what I want to believe. Like; I want to believe that the CIA murdered JFK because the story is very dramatic and makes sense, fits, with some things that have gone on since.

  All this is part of the Manson story because he spent some time while on parole in LA, in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury, maybe acquiring the mind control abilities and forming the family. The MK-ULTRA connection here might be David Smith who ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. In the book it comes off as an interesting place. First, it did provide a real service, a needed one free health care in a non-judgemental hip atmosphere. But it was free like FaceBook is free. We give them data for the service. We get the benefit and then sometimes wonder if we are giving up too much of ourselves in the bargain. The man who created and ran the free clinic was funded by MK-ULTRA to study group dynamics with drugs involved, speed. According to the book, The Family was more into speed than LSD at the time of the murders. Speed, we can assume, is a much better substance to do ones murdering with.
The implication is that Manson was kind of sent there, being on parole in LA it was odd that his parole officer also named Smith (Roger Smith) would let him move like that. Could Manson have been a mind control subject that went berserk or even one that did exactly as planned to make the communal hippies look like potentially a homicidal gang instead of their day-glow flower power free love image?

There is also murky stuff going on with Terry Melcher and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosii. Did Melcher lie on the witness stand and did he visit Manson and the family three times AFTER the Tate murders out at Spahn and Baker ranches?

There is this crazy story about Vincent Bugliosi harassing the family of a milkman because he thought the guy was the father of Bugliosii’s own child. This was even before the famous trial.

    Chaos is multi-layered, well written, with the data not as confusing as it could be, a true crime, memoir, and conspiracy book.
It is rather satisfying if one is looking for that sort of thing. Not that I’m anything other than an occasional reader of the genre.
I liked it. 
Do I have conclusions on the Manson case? Not really, other than not believing the official story and feeling that something was definitely going on there beyond what we were told. Glad that they were not murdering acidheads, but speed users instead, because I like to think that psychedelics are more helpful than harmful because I think they have been for me. 

The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich

This is a CIA spy genre novel which steals its plot from the Frank Olson “fell or jumped” story. 

The reader coming to this because of interest in the Olson story might be better off just reading some other account of it. But if they want a heavy dosage of a hero's journey spy story along with pieces of Olson, then maybe read this. The Coldest Warrior doesn’t really work for me because I’m no longer interested in spy novels and that is the book’s main function. The conclusion was quite dramatic in a cinema spy story sort of way. Maybe some filmmaker has already grabbed this one. It has a nice heroic male lead. Righteous story.

This is a story people like to exploit or at least hope to profit from. 

It’s the same story as the Netflix Errol Morris documentary series Wormwood. 

Wormwood was frustrating because it took 6 hours to tell a story. The story ends up getting lost in the details and the reenactments. Six episodes!?! Errol Morris probably wanted to get the word out, but probably didn’t mind the hefty paycheck for a production on that level. 

Fell or jumped?

Tossed.

It’s not a spoiler of this novel. 

Murdered and tossed out the window. Then covered up for decades. 

But the story is about one spy guy trying to find out what other spies were involved with this. 

That’s the story, the mystery plot not to be revealed here. It doesn’t really matter that the Olson character was murdered because he was upset with the USA using biological and chemical weapons in Korea. Perhaps having this as a minor detail that is overshadowed by the main plot of the novel trivializes it as just part of the set for this play story. It might have even helped if it had spelled out exactly why using these things in Korea was so bad.

LSD is a missed opportunity. It is not explored at all. At least it is not to blame for anything. Maybe it makes one more empathetic for a time. Maybe that is part of what happened with Olson. He tripped and saw the error of the path he was following. Some people have that reaction to LSD, don’t they? Well, this is not the novel to discuss all that.

At any rate the book was not my cup of cheap entertainment brewed from something once living into a rather standard manly adventure saga.

The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot

I had a certain amount of trepidation as I started reading this book. I knew I was entering the heart of the ugliness of the USA, for 620 pages. I’m a notoriously slow reader, so I knew I would be there for awhile.

I shouldn’t have been so concerned. This is a well written history of the CIA. It is loaded with information that was new to me as well as stories I have been hearing for decades like the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the murder of JFK..

This is really the big story of the 20th Century when global technological resources developed to the extent that the have nots were in a position to move on the haves.
Dulles helped developed  the CIA into a secret army working to buttress the holdings of the haves. The book is a working bio of Dulles as a spy. He began as a Harvard educated Wall Street corporate lawyer. He ended as a government official who really functioned as a Wall Street corporate lawyer. The interest of big business was always at the center of his actions and the actions he manipulated the USA into.

He goes through the story of the CIA engineering the coup in Iran in 1953 which put the Shah back in power until 1979. During this time the CIA assisted him in setting up Secret police units that eliminated all opposition other than that embedded in religion, which lead to the religious sectors of society to eventually gaining control rather than a more secular setup that could have been possible with Mossadegh. But this is the history of much of the CIA meddling on behave of corporate business, keeping countries business friendly even if large sections of the population suffered as a result. The USA spreads a good deal of suffering over the world.

The end of the book spends a good deal of space to evidence linking the CIA to the JFK and RFK assassinations. He certainly presents a powerful case of motivation and procedural ability. Of course I’m familiar with and tend to go along with this view of events.

I had not heard of the 1961 coup attempt in France, to ouste Charles de Gaulle and install a right wing government. That was rather shocking to read about and of course there was the good old CIA helping to establish and supporting the perpetrators.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to generate much anger about this stuff anymore, I mean anger that the country I live in spends a great deal of its resources making the lives of people in other countries miserable without much person autonomy under some thuggish government that is friendly the international business interests. And it’s not like these international corporations are even Americans, they aren’t particularly loyal to the USA as their business interests are pushed on other  countries by CIA action as in the 1973 CIA supported coup in Chile, the other 9/11.

No, I’m not angry, just frustrated and sad that this has been the trajectory of the USA my entire life span.
I hope you can do something about it in the future, and that the blowback is not as horrible as it might justifiably be.

Anyway, this mysterious institution, that does more or less what it pleases secretly with an enormous amount of tax money, just goes on its merry way. Maybe we hear about what they do later, but probably not since the government at behest of big business is growing more and more fascistic secretive and controlling.

American Ultra. (2015)

American Ultra. (2015)

Directed by Nima Nourizadeh

Written by Max Landis

This movie reunites Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg for what I think is the first time since the delightful Adventureland. These two play very well together. They are like Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor with a high level of screen chemistry that they are hard to resist. (I was watching them a couple weeks ago on TCM)

Adventureland was more or less a teen coming of age rom-com, a good one. To reunite they make a very good choice with American Ultra. It retains some of the rom-com elements but puts it all into a CIA conspiracy sci-fi  action movie. I thought it worked and that if they wanted they could continue with this in sequel.

There is a lot of violent action and blood. It is mostly a sort of lucid chamber music violence, not the big confusing orchestrated violence commonly found in mega budget product.

And the stars get some very well done two character scenes together. We also get an amusing performance by the great John Leguizamo ( yes I'm the person who thinks The Pest is a good movie), as Mike’s pot dealer buddy.

A really fine entertainment product.

The Reporter Who Knew Too Much by Mark Shaw

I have long been a skeptic of the single assassin myth in the JFK assassination. That goes for RFK and Martin Luther King as well. So I needed no convincing in that regard. I also think that there have been a number of suspicious deaths of witnesses connected to the JFK assassination and therefore accept the plausibility that the death of Kilgallen could very well be one of those.

I'm not really an assassination conspiracy buff, one who needs to keep up on all the latest in this enormous tangled web of information and disinformation, I just read this new book as a curiosity.

Shaw paints a portrait of a dynamic woman reporter. I, of course, was aware of her from What's My Line, but didn't know anything about the extent of her impressive career in journalism or the somewhat interesting gossip like material of her affair with Johnnie Ray  

The final third or so of the book is exhaustive and somewhat exhausting in his presentation of his case that she was murdered by the mob. Yet while pointing out earlier that she made some enemies within the CIA Shaw seems to let them off the hook.

I can buy his mob theory but if so why can't it be the mob set up and in conjunction with the CIA since they had equal dislike for JFK and both benefited from his elimination? He doesn't even present that as a possibility although he does implicate J. Edgar Hoover in her murder.