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    Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
    Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
    Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
    Audiobook16 hours

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

    Written by Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring

    Narrated by Kevin Stillwell

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A journalist's twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to shocking new revelations about the FBI's involvement in this riveting reassessment of an infamous case in American history.
     Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order -- their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history's most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia -- or dystopia -- was just an acid trip away.
    Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi -- prosecutor of the Manson Family and author of Helter Skelter -- turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O'Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions:
    • Who were Manson's real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties?
    • Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him?
    • And how did Manson -- an illiterate ex-con -- turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers?

    O'Neill's quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, Chaos mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateJun 25, 2019
    ISBN9781478998990
    Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
    Author

    Tom O'Neill

    Tom O’Neill is one of a very close knit family of eleven brought up on a farm in County Carlow. His working life started in science teacher training in impoverished schools in South Africa and he is currently involved in computer based education as well as running a farm in Kilkenny. Restoring the ancient Killahara castle in Tipperary and helping his father publish a social history reconnected him to stories and beliefs that were still vibrant in his own childhood and prompted him to pull together the Fionn Mac Cumhaill tales he had made up to entertain his own children en route to school.

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    Reviews for Chaos

    4/5

    104 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I found this to be extremely fascinating! I've been obsessed with Charles Manson and the Family for as long as I can remember. One thing I particularly appreciated about O'Neill's book is that he frequently referenced other books about the Tate/LaBianca murders, so I can feed my fascination even more!
      I appreciated the time and dedication O'Neill put into writing this book. I learned so many interesting things, not just about the Manson story, but about other questionable things happening in the sixties and 70s... even into present day. I'm the kind of person who is rather naive, so learning that there have been questionable practices going on around me is disturbing yet intriguing.
      This is a great read! It's a bit on the long side, but when you know how much time Tom O'Neill put into researching it, you can totally see why it HAD to be this long!
    • 4/5
      It's a great read. I wish it was longer. So many questions seem to beg for more information. It certainly kept my undivided attention for the short time it took me to read it.
    • 3/5
      L.A. Confidential … Oh, and Manson, Too

      As the author, Tom O’Neill, acknowledges in his tome on the Manson Family and murders, murder investigations and prosecutions can be messy affairs. The Tate-LiBianca Murders appear to have been messier than most, in contradiction of Vincent Bugliosi’s portrayal of a pretty neat prosecution in Helter Skelter. O’Neill started out writing a 5,000-word article for the now defunct entertainment magazine Premiere. Soon enough, all the tendrils of the murders, Manson, his family, Hollywood personalities, unsavory Runyonesque rogues, and dubious behavior, ensnared him, and lo and behold some twenty years later O’Neill finally tied them up, sort of, in this volume. Curious readers should know a few things before deciding if they want to go on this trip with O’Neill.

      First, and foremost, if you’re expecting some earth shattering secret to be revealed, in particular that Manson didn’t do it, or that Manson did it but with the help of a cabal of Hollywood types, or that Manson possessed some psychic powers that enabled him to manipulate his followers and a network of Hollywood bigwigs, well, you’ll go away disappointed. While Bugliosi may have engaged in some less than honorable machinations, distorted facts, especially regarding his personal brilliance in solving the case, and put forth a prosecution narrative (such as Manson wishing to launch a race war), the essential facts of the case remain as we all know them. That is, Manson preyed on susceptible young minds, turned them into petty criminals, and then used them, probably as an extension of his huge ego, to reap revenge on people he imagined had done him wrong, which given his psychological state and background probably was society in general.

      Second, the investigations and prosecution of Manson and his gang did involve a lot of undercover intrigue not generally, and in some cases invisible, to the public. O’Neill should be commended for surfacing these that did seem to include underhanded maneuvers on Bugliosi’s part, as well as tangential activity on the part of various government agencies, yes, among them the CIA. Unfortunately, O’Neill turns following all of the intrigues into an ordeal because he divides the book into a story about his dogged pursuit of information and a tale of behind the scenes fascinations, most of which ultimately didn’t really effect the case. While some readers may find O’Neill’s talk about his dedication, the roadblocks apparently tossed in his path, his near impoverishment in search of truth, his missteps, and such, for most, all this stuff gets in the way of the book’s purpose and only serves to add more confusion to a case with many arms. A more straightforward reporting of what O’Neill uncovered and why these things might be important would have served the exploration and clarity better.

      Having said this, O’Neill does paint a fascinating picture of the late Sixties, the crazy West Coast world of ego and drugs, and life in the epicenter of psychedelic head trips and Hippie life both in L.A. and San Francisco. His characterizations of personalities is also quite good. Nobody comes off well, not Bugliosi, who had created a sterling image of himself that belied his darker self, nor Polanski (already tarnished in the minds of many as he remains on the lam regarding the Geimer abuse and rape case) and his treatment of Sharon Tate, nor Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day and powerhouse record producer, nor a bevy of government scientists engaged in experiments that clearly violated the rights of unwitting subjects, and certainly not the L.A. prosecutorial system, which seemed to play a bit too fast and loose with fair and above board treatment of the accused. In the end, if anything, O’Neill’s book shows how the counterculture of free love fueled by the drug culture prevalent in the Sixties exploded in spectacular and lurid headlines. Farewell flower children.
    • 4/5
      The author's thesis is that the Manson murders might have been part of a CIA and FBI project to derail the new age communitarian movement /peace and love Vietnam war opposition movement , in the '60s. Before I got the book I saw a Joe Rogan podcast with the author, and he noted that two things seemed to end the "hippie dream", the Manson murders being one, and the murder of a black teenager, Meredith Hunter, at a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont being the other.

      O' Neill gives a precedent for such a FBI operations in the COINTELPRO project, which was aimed at sabotaging the Black Liberation Movement. The FBI would spread false rumours that organisations such the Black Panthers, who ran community projects such as free breakfast programs, were really aiming for a general race war with whites ( not just the overthrow of the white establishment). In the course of this they allowed murders to go ahead. By doing this , the FBI were to hoping to end white support for black liberation.

      As to the Manson murders, O'Neil discovered a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Louis Jolyon ("Jolly") West had been involved in the CIA's MKULTRA experiments into mind control through the use of hypnosis and drugs. West had had murky dealings in the case of Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy's assassin. Manchurian Candidate stuff. But similar drugs and hypnosis methods were used by Manson to control his followers . O'Neill doesn't find the smoking gun to link West definitively to Manson, but he does discover West ran a fake hippie "crash pad" in Manson's early stomping ground (the Haight - Ashbury District of California) , and suggests a precedent for the crash pad being a CIA operation, in a fake brothel the had run previously:

      "This wouldn't have been the agency's first" disguised laboratory " in San Francisco. A few years earlier, the evocatively titled Operation Midnight Climax had seen CIA operatives open at least three Bay Area safe houses disguised as upscale bordellos, kitted out with one-way mirrors and kinky photographs. A spy named George Hunter White and his colleagues hired prostitutes to entice prospective johns to the homes, where the men were served cocktails laced with acid. White scrupulously observed the ensuing activities, whatever they were. The goal was to see if LSD, paired with sex could be used to coax sensitive information from the men - something of a psychedelic honeypot experiment. White so enjoyed the proceedings that he had a portable toilet and a mini-fridge installed on his side of the mirror, so he could watch the action and swill martinis without taking a bathroom break. He later wrote to his CIA handler, "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, deceive, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest? Pretty Good Stuff, Brudder! " (p. 347)

      ONeill does prove that Manson attended a free medical clinic with the women in his commune for frequent STD treatment and drug advise. The clinic was funded by the CIA through a front organisation, and it's proprietor had run experiments with rats based on theories of 'behavioural sink" - how confining rats in close proximity led to aggression, one male rat typically "subjugating other males into a tribe of cowering, enfeebled followers and organising female rats into a" harem" of sex slaves. " (p. 315) So again, it's not proof, but it's does seem very similar to goings on at Manson's commune.

      Whether or not the CIA & FBI were catalysts in the Manson murders or not, the author, being an honest researcher, doesn't claim to know for sure. But he's seems correct that the "official" narrative in the book written by Manson's prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, in his book Helter Skelter, doesnt add up.

      In particular Manson's criminal activities before the murders, running an auto theft ring and worse, underage girls, possession of machine guns, and many violations of his parole, at his commune at the Spahn Ranch seemed immune from law enforcement.
      "According to Guillory [former officer at Los Angeles Sheriff's Office] that was because his station had a policy handed down from on high :" Make no arrests, take no police action toward Manson or his followers. " (p. 154)

      When the ranch was raided, no prosecution followed, supposedly because the wrong date had been entered on the warrant, (which ONeill 's research shows wasn't the case.)
      ONeill interviewed one of the detectives in the case, Charlie Guenther:
      " Guenther was famous among true-crime devotees - he'd become something of a staple in the genre, his skilled investigative work having solved a number of notable murders. His better - known cases included the Cotton Club murders and the 1958 killing of the author James Ellroy's mother. Guenther never solved that crime, but Ellroy still hailed him, in *My Dark Places*, as one of the best homicide detectives ever to work in L. A. " (P. 149)
      Guenther and his partner suspected at the time that two sets of murders carried out my the Manson family were indeed linked.
      ONeill details how Manson's prosecutor, Bugliosi, went to lengths to ensure that the were treated as separate. If it came out that the murders were linked, it would have brought into question why Manson wasn't discovered and stopped earlier. The question is was he being protected because he was some sort of asset at the time of the first murders.
    • 3/5
      Regardless of the author’s obsessive reporting the book more akin to Chandler’s The Long Goodbye than it is any sort revelatory or eye-opening investigation
    • 3/5
      This is a hard one to review. On the one hand, the story was gripping and had a lot of twists and turns and unexplained holes. On the other hand, it doesn't really lead to any coherent explanation to challenge the official narrative. By the author's own admission the best he can say is that it didn't happen the way Manson's trial said it did. There's definitely value in exploring those rabbit holes...but it wasn't a secret history of the sixties by a long shot.
    • 3/5
      Chaos indeed. Sex tapes, C.I.A., music, Hollywood --it's all here, as if every National Enquirer story had relevance. It goes down this constant road of attempting to dismantle Vincent Bugliosi's Helter Skelter narrative of the murders. O'Neill uses this "narrative" ploy a lot, and while there is a lot to digest here, from 20 year old interviews of 1st hand witnesses who have since died (some never recorded on tape) before this book's release, to reevaluating related crimes (Gary Hinman case), it still plays up conspiracy fodder through and through. It ultimately comes down to who's "narrative" you believe.

      Are there holes in Bugliosi's theory? Sure. Is O'Neill's theory any more convincing? It could be if there was actually anything consisting of a solid theory in here. The thing about Manson and the Family is that they were a mess during a messy time and a lot of seediness was going on everywhere. This cult's leader was a charismatic sociopath who had control and connections to a great deal of people in L.A. during the 1960s and that time was a mess of crossing lines, cultures and decadence fueled with ego. Manson muddles with famous musicians, Hollywood types and law enforcement. Of course it would be no surprise that Manson or any of his followers would be at the same party as Tate or even Steve McQueen. Drug and hippy culture was somewhat synonymous with some of the jet set actors of the time. It was a strange time. Manson was charismatic and violent. The philosophy and power of his Helter Skelter as his life began spirally out of control (the feds coming down, being shunned by the jet set) led to the murders, it all came to that tragic and unnecessary point.

      O'Neill's interviews with those LAPD / LASO involved are just as strange as the case itself. A lot of error in procedure seems to have happened. Guess what? Stuff like that still happens today. The book attempts to debunk the Helter Skelter bible, but only sites oddities and coincidences, failed police procedures and his general dislike of Bugliosi's way he went about getting Manson and the other murderers convicted. It was an extraordinary, unique case- nothing ever like it- that had to be tried in a unique extraordinary way.

      The book is intriguing, but never solidly builds a case. It's kind of like Oliver Stone's JFK movie with a Kitty Kelley vibe, and throws a bunch of different conspiracies at you, but never fully rounds out any of them.

      Just another Manson book in the Manson kingdom.