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. 

Dreamwatcher By Theodore Roszak

This novel is about dreams. The setting is a psychiatric clinic built around a doctor’s research into dream states. He has stumbled upon people who can tap into the dreams of others. He can help guide them into doing this. He can train people with these innate abilities. He can develop them into tools, “instruments”, to explore and indeed, effect, the dreamscapes of others. But early on in his career, some years ago, the potentially good doctor has fallen for the sick bargain of generous funding, a clinic in his name, but the cost is secrecy and control of a government intelligence agency.
The doctor’s instruments, his dreamwatchers are used by the mind control MK-ULTRA wing of intelligence to enter the dreams of people on their hit list and neutralize, discredit them by psychiatric manipulation. 
Roszak humainizes his big story with Deirdre, a dreamwatcher, who we come to know and gain sympathy for. She and the doctor, Devane, are the main players in the story. The doctor is a good guy but is trapped in a devil’s bargain. He wants the world to know and benefit from his work, but it must be kept secret as it has been bought and weaponized by ruthless power. The critical point comes when the doctor is ordered to destroy the serenity, and public stature of a radical Catholic nun from Central America. The CIA just doesn’t want her to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
The character of the nun brings in with her a childhood connection to indiginous  spirituality. She was taken off as a child and initiated by an aunt who was connected to that stream of ancient female shamanic energy, and training; this magic.

The novel tells an exciting suspenseful story around all this.
Is this just a fun fantasy read? Is it just a spy mind control adventure?
Dreams are so important. Are our dreams manipulated by power above us. In the novel to mess with people the dreamwatchers take them to a place of dark emptiness. At this writing Senator Bernie Sanders has just withdrawn from competition for a presidential nomination. In the address that contained his announcement he said something realated to the power of a dream:

"The greatest obstacle to real social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision,” he said.

Are we watching over our power to dream? Are we keeping it clear from less than wholesome influence? What dreams, or nightmares, would come from power if it actually could influence our thoughts and mental well being?  Where are the borders between awake and dreaming? Are our stories related to dreams? Do they influence dreams? When we hear a story well told around a campfire, how does part of us enter that story, feel with it? What type of stories attract us? Do the most frightening ones draw us in because we are fragile and must be aware of environmental hazards?  Do we instinctively know we have to look out for danger? Is this being exploited for nothing more than commercial interest? 

This writer is aware of mass media influencing his own dreams. 

This happened just the other night after watching a good movie on a 13” computer screen for picture and stereo headphones for audio. 

The movie was Seberg about actor/activist Jean Seberg. The movie was not so much about her but, not so distant to the theme of Dreamwatcher, about government intelligence operatives messing with her business. They spy on her and ultimately try to destroy her by spreading lies about her. 

It is brought up here, not to review the movie itself but as an example of this powerful medium to enter into dreams. 

That night this viewer had a vivid dream of being with the character of Seberg in the movie in an apartment. This was not his first experience of this sort. In this case the movie was very good and the dream benign. This dream was about fitting into the environment of the lavish new all white NYC tower apartment setting, maybe class anxiety but not with longing, greed, or lust triggered by the movie. 

Yet the movie had the power to enter the dream in this way. An expensive mass media entertainment had the power to do that little trick. It wasn’t the first time and this dreamer is a fully developed elder adult far from the relatively open vessels of children who are increasingly exposed to screen dreams direct from powerful corporations who’s only goal is to manipulate them to increase their profit and power. 

Beyond that militant intelligence is also involved with the CIA using a massive portion of their budget to direct mass media in lines with their interests. 

This is not so from the melodrama of the plot line of Roszak’s very fine and thought provoking novel from the relatively innocent times of the 1980s.