Instead of asking for a cash ransom for the release of Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) demanded that her father, media magnate William Randolph Hearst Jr, supply poor Californians with $2 Million of free food. The demand resulted in a sea change in public opinion, especially with the radical left which the SLA had alienated with the assassination of Marcus Foster. The right exacerbated the problem with reactionary responses to the demand. Governor Reagan told the media that he hoped that the poor people who would receive the food would contract botulism.
Cinque and his SLA crew dominated the media for the next two months. It issued “communiques” decrying what it called the fascist corporate state and its institutionalized racism, peppered with criticisms of the elder Hearst’s inept execution of the “feed the needy” demands. Boosting the SLA ride to fame, Patty Hearst announced that she was no longer a kidnap victim, but instead a card-carrying member of the SLA. She participated in the SLA’s armed robbery of the Hibernia Bank in downtown San Francisco. Security camera footage with Patty lording over face-down customers with a semi-automatic weapon would be run multiple times in virtually every major media forum for the next two years. Here is Hearst with Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze during the robbery:
Cinque’s intoxicating rise to fame would be short lived. After the bank robbery, Cinque issued a communique that would seal the fate of himself and all of the SLA in his vicinity. He broadcasted a ‘death warrant’ for the man who put him up to black radicalism and SLA formation in the first place. That was the coordinator of the Berkley/prison Black Cultural Association. It wasn’t the death pronouncement that marked the SLA for massacre, it was the reason articulated by Cinque:
“Colston Westbrook: male, black, age 55, brown eyes, brown hair, 5-8, 210 pounds, Berkley language instructor, resident of Oakland is a government agent, worked for the CIA in Vietnam as interrogator and torturer in Phoenix operation and also served same purpose in other foreign countries, now working for military intelligence while giving cross assistance to the FBI.”
Apparently, Donald DeFreeze (a/k/a Cinque) had been triggered when he learned of Westbrook’s background (which had by then been published in alternative newspapers). Informed observers reckoned DeFreeze must have realized then why Westbrook had prompted him to target the beloved Marcus Foster: to turn the public against Black activists, thus justifying more military policing of them (just as called for in COINTELPRO). The Westbrook communique signified that the gloves were off and the CIA and military intelligence were being teed up for the worst possible exposure and publicity imaginable.
That prompted two credible, informed and disrelated observers to come to the same conclusion as to the ultimate fate of DeFreeze and the SLA. One was private investigator and author Lake Headley whom Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi called “the best private eye on earth.” The other was DeFreeze’s operative handler when he was serving as an informant for the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Ronald Farwell. After Defreeze exposed and targeted CIA man Westbrook, both Headley and Farwell independently predicted there would be no arrest of Cinque and his SLA. Instead, both predicted Cinque and company would all be slaughtered in a shoot-out.
Shortly thereafter, on May 17 1974, the LAPD tracked down Cinque and the SLA to a small ramshackle home in Southeast Los Angeles. They surrounded it with over 400 officers, heavily armed with several armored vehicles. The house was pummeled with over 4,000 rounds of ammunition. It was burnt to the ground by incendiary cannisters shot into it. There were no survivors. Shreiber’s Revolution’s End shares a number of controversies about the incident, including whether a meaningful chance to surrender was given, whether a woman SLA member attempted to surrender but was shot in the back, and whether Cinque’s head was removed and destroyed to cover up evidence of psychosurgery he may have received as part of MK Search ‘treatment’ at Vacaville. Schrieber also outlines the big lessons the government clearly wanted the public to take away. It was the first time, and a warning for the future, that military grade force was and would be used domestically in an overwhelming fashion against ideological resistance. It was also the first time the networks’ ‘mini-cam’ technology was put to use so that the several hour pyrotechnic massacre was broadcast live across the nation. In Shreiber’s view, these facts tend to corroborate the claim that Donald DeFreeze was an unwitting MK Ultra victim put up to incredibly ill-informed, spectacular acts of rebellion which would justify implementation of repressive police measures. Here are the remains of the Symbionese Liberation Army’s Alamo:
It was not until the coroner identified the burnt and bullet ridden bodies that the police discovered Patricia Hearst and two other SLA members, Bill and Emily Harris, were missing. Hearst and the Harris’ avoided the others’ fate by virtue of luck. The day before they had engaged in their own shoot out over a shoplifting rap laid on Bill Harris at an L.A. Sporting Goods outlet and escaped to parts unknown.
After the SLA massacre, the Harrises and Hearst went on the lam, crisscrossing America, hidden by left wing activists. During that nearly year and a half period, Hearst participated in more SLA communiques and another bank heist in which a bystander was murdered by her crew.
Finally, on September 18, 1975, Hearst was arrested in San Francisco.
Jack Ruby Redux
To fully appreciate what follows, it would helpful if you read CIA Cult Creation – The Manson Family, with particular attention to what CIA MK Ultra psychiatrist Dr. Lois Jolyon “Jolly” West did. That is, West’s going to extraordinary lengths to wheedle his way into a federal court proceeding in order to influence it’s outcome by suspicious means. Just as in the case of Jack Ruby, West apparently went ex parte (off the record) to the Federal judge assigned to hear the Hearst case to have himself put in a position to manipulate the outcome of the case from the outset. We caused the public availability of the United States vs. Patricia Hearst record, which had been mothballed in off-site archives for more than 50 years, to be scanned and made available to the public. (Hearst trial transcripts) The record is revealing. On the 23rd of September 1975, just four days after Hearst’s arraignment the judge ordered sua sponte (on his own, not upon any motion brought by either side) that Hearst’s mental fitness for trial be determined after the examination by court-appointed psychiatrists named Roland Levy, Donald Lundy, Seymour Pollack, and Chalmers Johnson.
Two days later, on the 25th inexplicably and with no rationale provided, the judge again issued a sua sponte order, amending his order of the 23rd. The new order eliminated doctors Levy and Johnson and replaced them with “L.J. WEST, and MARGARET THALER.” So apparently unfamiliar with those involved, the judge omitted the latter’s last name, “Singer”, Margaret Thaler Singer, a longtime protégé of West. There is no record whatsoever of how or why the judge suddenly substituted the CIA’s West (along with partner Singer) into the mix. But just like the Ruby case, West took charge of the stable of psychiatrists. He added another MK Ultra colleague, Dr. Martin Orne, and CIA friendly ‘expert’ Robert J. Lifton. Finally, West proceeded to dig into Patricia Hearts with an intensity that made his Jack Ruby programming look like a picnic.
Seven days after the entry of West, his Jack Ruby case defense team member, former FBI agent and high profile CIA-friendly attorney F. Lee Bailey, entered his appearance on behalf of Hearst. The odds of these two CIA birds randomly rendezvousing in the Hearst case as they did in the Ruby case are incalculably tiny. Here is West lecturing Bailey and his team of CIA-affiliated psychiatrists on Hearst trial strategy in their San Francisco hotel:
The Brainwashing of Patty Hearst?
What is known of West’s dozens of hours spent with Patty Hearst reflects a classic case of brainwashing, mind control, or as psychiatry had come to relabel it – coercive persuasion.
Hearst was resistant at first. Even after her arrest she made defiant expressions of solidarity with the American radical left. Upon booking she listed her occupation as “urban guerilla”, and flashed a closed fist leftist salute to media cameras.
By her own account in her autobiography, a strong case can be made that West practiced more effective MK Mind Control than he had on Jack Ruby. Like Jack Ruby, Hearst found West “too soothing to be trusted.” But, apparently unlike Ruby, Hearst capitulated. She wrote that West’s “creepy, hypnotic voice” somehow overwhelmed her: “I simply crumpled under his scrutiny. I cried, murmuring and mumbling out replies that were not answers to his questions.” (Quotations from Every Secret Thing, autobiography of Patricia Hearst)
Once her defenses were stripped, West lectured Hearst at length about his experience with the returning US soldiers who were ‘brainwashed’ in North Korean prison camps in the early 1950s. That included how they were saved from hanging for treason only by making the claim they had been “brainwashed” to testify to their captors about U.S. war crimes. He also committed the first cardinal sin of any legitimate counselling by telling Hearst what she ought to consider is ‘wrong’ with her. West informed Hearst that she had “traumatic neurosis with dissociative features”, “which meant simply that I was frightened out of my wits by the SLA, subjected to powerfully effective coercive manipulation by my captors, and that I would need three to four months of psychiatric treatment before I would be ‘able with full competence to aid and assist counsel in my own defense.’” (Every Secret Thing)
Just as in the Jack Ruby case (see, CIA Mind Control and the Assassination of JFK), West was originally appointed by the court to determine fitness of the defendant for trial but gaslit the court into subsequently accepting his conversion to a defense team psychiatrist. The odds of a psychiatrist successfully executing that sleight of hand in two of the most high-profile cases in U.S. history are impossibly slim.
And so, West arranged for a handpicked psychotherapist, and his mind control colleagues, Dr. Singer, Dr. Lifton, and Dr Orne to spend many dozens of hours programming his evaluation into the head of Patricia Hearst. This is a conservative characterization by comparison to U.S. Attorney James Browning’s, lead prosector in U.S. vs. Patricia Hearst.
Ultimately, he put it very bluntly to the jury:
“Did [Hearst] do all of those things, and can you really believe she did all of those things because of fear from the Harrises (SLA members), or was it because she was reprogrammed by the psychiatrists, by the defense attorneys, with a view in mind to painting the very picture that has been painted of her here to you ladies and gentlemen?” (emphasis added)
Think about that. A United States Attorney from the Department of Justice suggesting that CIA employed and/or affiliated doctors Jolly West, Margaret Singer, Martin Orne and Robert Lifton “programmed” the mind of Patricia Hearst to carry out a stage-managed fiction to present before a U.S. Federal District Court judge and jury. Why? What were they hiding?
This was no whimsical allegation by Browning. It was based on the following evidence presented to the jury.
At page 2186 of the trial transcript the prosecution read from a West/Hearst psychiatric session transcript where West instructs (not asks, counsels or exams) Hearst on what her attorney told him would be the legal strategy and how she was to play along:
“To emphasize the involuntary and violent way in which you were dragged out of a relatively normal life with a forcible and terrifying sort of indoctrination that you got, and the tremendous pressure of threats in the beginning to make you subservient and compliant with the leadership of this group so that they would be able to keep control of you.” Remarkably, West does not ask Hearst if this is accurate or bears any resemblance to reality. Instead, he tries to sell her on the presentation: “I think myself that is the best explanation for what happened. I haven’t heard anything to make me think otherwise. Doesn’t that sound logical to you?”
At page 2189 self-proclaimed expert hypnotist West’s hypnotic-sounding command to Hearst, sealing the trial strategy deal, is read into the record:
“You are relatively suggestible. I would say if sensitized, easily deceived, especially if dependent on someone. You were so successfully coerced.”
Referring to West’s conditioning, U.S. Attorney Browning summed up the jury’s duty during closing argument: “One has only to question whether [West] was asking the defendant, whether he was evaluating the defendant or whether he was telling the defendant.”
(pg. 4450 trial transcript)
Despite several days of several West coordinated psychiatrists and America’s most famous trial lawyer (Bailey) trying to muddy the waters, the jury unanimously agreed that beyond a reasonable doubt Jolly West and his fellow CIA psychiatrists were the ones who performed mind control on Patty Hearst and not Donald DeFreeze and Symbionese Liberation Army.
Hearst was convicted of bank robbery with a firearm and sentenced to 7 years in prison.
Cinque the MK Ultra Practitioner
While the jury agreed with the prosecution that the only Mind Control that was practiced on Patricia Hearst was that of Dr. Jolly West, it very nearly learned a highly protected state secret. So intent on diverting attention to DeFreeze was West that he very nearly outed his CIA brethren James Hamilton (MK Search 3 operator at California Corrections medical facility at Vacaville, during DeFreeze’s stay and participation in his medical experiments). West spit out that DeFreeze had learned effective mind control from his subjugation to Hamilton’s ‘treatment’: “Cinque was looking for a successful political conversion in the well-known revolutionary tradition (Maoist) of ‘thought reform.’ His experience in prison had taught him also that following a period of isolation, solitary confinement or ‘black hole,’ where people are kept in darkness, an inmate would be unusually susceptible to political indoctrination.”
(pg 2160 trial transcript) (Emphasis added)
Dr. Colin Ross, author of The CIA Doctors, connected the dots West left: “Where did a street hood and unsuccessful robber like Donald DeFreeze learn such sophisticated programming techniques?…My conclusion is that Defreeze was a controlled controller, created in part by Phoenix Program veteran Colston Westbrook.”
So, we wind up asking ourselves “who was brainwashing whom?”
Recall in our Manson episode that confusing picture left behind in San Francisco in 1967 by MK Ultra doctors Jolly West and James Hamilton. It was difficult to discern whether Charles Manson and the CIA crossing paths was an accident, or Manson was programmed to kill, or even Manson was taught to program to kill. The same bizarre web was left behind Vacaville prison and the US District Court by West and Hamilton. Was Donald Defreeze programmed to kill, programmed to program to kill, and was Patty Hearst programmed by DeFreeze or by Dr. West, or even by both of them?
In, out, back in, and out
After being convicted in March 1976, Hearst was released on bail pending appeal in November of 1976. After her appeals all the way to the US Supreme Court were exhausted Hearst was re-incarcerated in May 1978. Having lost at every level she disconnected from Bailey and hired a new, aggressive lawyer, George Martinez. In September of 78 he moved to reduce the sentence against Hearst. In early October, he filed material that West-influenced Bailey wouldn’t touch. That is the declaration of Clifford Jefferson a fellow inmate of DeFreeze’s subjected to the CIA MK Search mind control program at Vacaville. He summarized Jefferson’s declaration in his pleading as follows:
“Clifford Jefferson relates that Donald DeFreeze stated to him the CIA was conducting tests to try out certain drugs on inmates and that he had been in it. The tests were on the third floor of the facility in B-3 (at Vacaville). That Jefferson went there and met two CIA men who were giving the tests and who gave him drugs which wiped out his memory; that DeFreeze stated to Jefferson he had gone through the same tests and knew of certain stress tests; that Defreeze told Jefferson that when he got out of prison, they would kidnap a rich person and give him drugs and the person would become a robot and do anything he asked to do.” – ADDITIONAL EXHIBIT IN SUPPORT OF MOTION TO REDUCE SENTENCE, filed October 6, 1978
Famed syndicated Columnist Jack Anderson was tipped off in advance and wrote a column about Jefferson, spreading the news across the country. (see October 5 1978 column).
Worse still for the CIA, its biggest nemesis of the seventies, California Congressman Leo J Ryan, was clearly coordinating with Hearst’s new lawyer. He was already riding the Director of the CIA Admiral Stansfield Turner on the matter (see Ryan letter to Turner). Ryan’s September 27th 1978 letter demanded confirmation or denial regarding “CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville”, specifically referring to “Donald DeFreeze, now deceased, who was the leader known as CINQUE of the Symbionese Liberation Army” and “Clifford Jefferson.”
On October 18th, Deputy CIA Director Frank Carlucci responded. Astonishingly, he admitted “it is true that CIA-sponsored testing, using volunteer inmates, was conducted at that facility.” His denial of DeFreeze and Jefferson involvement was carefully worded: “In so far as our records reflect the names of the participants, there is nothing to indicate that either was in any way involved in the project.” It is an incredible denial given the CIA’s habit of destroying embarrassing documents en masse.
Given that the CIA’s Oct 1978 denial was contradicted by the fact that Jack Anderson had extracted an acknowledgement from Vacaville Superintendent T. Lawrence Clanon that “DeFreeze had volunteered for medical research in July 1970 shortly after he entered Vacaville” (See Anderson column), and Ryan’s history of pursuing CIA secrets like a bull dog, you can take it to the bank that as of shortly after 18 October 1978 (date of D/Director Carlucci letter) Ryan was pursuing new means of uncovering the whole truth. Why the paper trail ends in late October 1978 will be answered in future chapters. Those episodes explore another epic American tragedy which, until now, nobody had any reason to believe had anything to do with U.S. vs. Patricia Hearst.
Postscript on Hearst
Less than two months after the CIA’s Vacaville hijinks were put front and center before a Federal District Court Judge (Motion to reduce sentence) and the American public at large (Jack Anderson column), and smack dab in the middle of the CIA Director’s desk, and Leo J. Ryan’s pursuit of the CIA came to a climactic, violent conclusion (see coming chapters), the Patty Hearst affair was abruptly put to rest by the President of the United States. Despite the fact Hearst’s appeals were rejected all the way up to the United States Supreme Court, and despite her losing repeated motions to reduce or vacate her sentence, President Jimmy Carter would commute Hearst’s sentence, setting her free. After two long years of the most expensive defense ever produced in America striking out, only after the CIA’s fingerprints were presented did the Hearst saga surprisingly end.
In pursuing the whole truth from the CIA, Congressman Leo J. Ryan would not be so fortunate.
What an incredible acid test this message from Joe Kent is. Marvel the divide, the chickenhawks are squealing like stuck pigs on X and across all media channels. The viciousness with which they go after this man is remarkable. Also, behold the pundits lecturing him on international terrorism, zionism, and the like – like professors lecturing birds on how to fly.
After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.
I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this… pic.twitter.com/prtu86DpEr
Donald Trump, like every President since JFK, has become a cloying, groveling slave of Empire. Trump came to be elected by winning the decisive Independent Middle by promising to break that mold. It was embodied most by two promises in particular: reinstitution of Free Speech and ending all war, let alone not starting new ones. See for example,
In one year he has betrayed those promises in a manner more destructive of the moral fabric of this country than any betrayal by any President since Lyndon Baines Johnson. We noted Trump’s departure from “Free Speech and no more wars” on 8 August 25 A New Form of Censorship, his continued fall on 16 Sep 25Trump Is On A Slippery Slope and covered his apparent descent into war madness on 3 January 26, The Cult of War on Overt Display. While the majority of Independent Middle voices witnessed the same and rang out in loud protest, it was to no avail.
The holy war launched on 28 Feb 26, apparently on behalf of Bibi Netanyahu and historically illiterate “Zionist Christians” – against the strong dissent of 80% of Americans, is a forfeiture of American sovereignty unseen in its 250-year history. The bizarre, Middle School mentality propaganda issuing from the White House since the massacre of 168 Iranian school children on day one of the “war” is strengthening and emboldening America’s alleged competitors (Russia and China and its new league of nations, BRICS – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, et al). The juvenile, even infantile, illogical slop issuing from Trump’s “Truth Social” account and the White House press office is degrading American image and power at a dizzying pace.
If you believe there are high-minded, even the least bit defensible, goals and purposes behind the war, you are not paying attention to its two architects and drivers, Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump. The former refers to Iranians and Palestinians whom he vows to eliminate (read genocide) as “animals.” Trump refers to Iranians as ‘genetically’ inferior ‘savages’, whose only chance for survival is to cede the very land and minerals they have lived on for millennia. See for example:
Trump talking eugenics. This is 1870s all over again. Literally, Empire is talking about "obliterating", "genetically" inferior, "savages" because they refuse to cede what lies beneath their feet. https://t.co/Ef6hLH8Nq0
This is Eugenics. That is justifying genocide to purify the race. Clearing the land of “animals” or “genetically” inferior “savages” in order to exploit it is no different to what we did the Native Americans in the nineteenth Century. A cursory review of history will show the precise same justifications issuing from the genocide purveyors then that you are being repeated by Israel and the White House now. And much of the media is playing ball with it.
Wait, the media? Wasn’t it all owned by the Left and used to demonize Trump 24-7 only a year ago? Yes. But, look what has happened since. Trump himself just this morning blasted out the following piece glorifying his “reshaping” of the media.
Trump celebrates himself for using the levers of government power to take out 7 anti-Trump media figures by name, and bring virtually all major US media players under his control and command.
Here is the clearly unbalanced Secretary of “War” lecturing the media on how it is to cover the decimation of Iran. Note that he says of CNN, “The sooner that David Ellison (Zionist nepo baby of Zionist Billionaire Larry Ellison) takes over that network, the better.” This is shortly after Trump negotiated a deal for Larry Ellison to buy the most influential social media platform on the planet, Tiktok, at a bargain basement price. Netanyahu commented the Tiktok sale was the most important advance in Israel’s war of censorship across Western Civilization. The Trump administration also paved the way for Ellison to take over one of the three major U.S. networks, CBS, which in the following several months has turned into a shameless Trump regime and Zionism War cheerleader.
In one year, Netanyahu and Trump have managed to consolidate more Empire controlled and censored media than during the previous forty years.
The fascist One World government order has made more progress in one year than it did in the previous four years of unprecedented consolidation. And it did so under the command of the President elected to stop it in its tracks. And now he is overtly attempting to censor folks like you and me.
The administration is already going after its own erstwhile greatest supporters:
When you discover the CIA has been reading your texts in order to frame you for a crime. pic.twitter.com/XgoluHw8EG
After Charles Manson, the next major sensational crime story impressed upon the collective consciousness of Americans was the saga of Patricia “Patty” Hearst. For several years beginning in early 1974 the corporate media kept the public electrified with the tale as it unfolded. Like with Manson, many informed people came to believe the around the clock coverage was intentional in forwarding the deep state aim of making the American public fearful of violent activist groups and cults and thus willing to give up their civil rights to protect themselves. As far as most are concerned, it began with the 4 February 1974 kidnapping of the heiress of media magnate William Randolph Hearst Jr by a radical political group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). It continued through Hearst’s joining her captors in a high-profile bank robbery (her initiation as a participating member), then going on the lam for nearly two years, and ultimately being captured, tried, convicted and having her sentence commuted. But, unbeknownst to most, like the Charles Manson story it actually began much earlier
Fortunately, in 2016 an author named Brad Shreiber published the result of his extensive compilation of previous probes that had gone deeper than the official narrative the American public had come to accept over the several decades since the events. As Tom O’Neill awakened readers to the fact they had been snowed on the subject of Charles Manson in his groundbreaking Chaos, Shreiber alerted us to a similar psy op played upon our collective consciousness when it came to Patricia Hearst’s captor, Donald DeFreeze. While his book provides no new breakthroughs and very little original research, Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze and the SLA is a good reference book on the subject.
It is remarkable that forty years passed before someone would organize the evidence hiding in plain sight and use it to tell a compelling narrative that is far more credible and documented than the official one repeated ad nauseum by the media. Shreiber published what was written off in the seventies as coming from “Black radical prisoners.” Yet, those incarcerated in the California prison system were the only people situated to witness how Donald DeFreeze the revolutionary was created. As former U.S. Attorney and DEA Director Robert Bonner once said, “in a plot hatched in hell, don’t expect angels for witnesses.” In this case, Shreiber’s witnesses already had the seal of approval from the dean of MK Ultra exposure, former State Department official and whistleblower John Marks (author of In Search For The Manchurian Candidate). Marks wrote this about the same sources used for Revolution’s End: “During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed that every radical on the West Coast was saying the CIA was up to strange things in behavior modification at Vacaville (California prison medical/psychiatric facility where DeFreeze was created). Like many of yesterday’s conspiracy theories, this one turned out to be true.” (pg. 215 In Search of the Manchurian Candidate).
As we did with O’Neil’s Manson opus, we will use Shreiber’s DeFreeze account as the foundation for summarizing the narrative, enhanced and supplemented by our own follow-up investigation and the established larger CIA Mind Control (MK Ultra) backdrop context.
The Manson Parallels
The background of the alleged villain of this piece, Donald DeFreeze, had remarkable resemblance to that of Charles Manson. Like the latter, Donald DeFreeze spent his adolescence in juvenile penal institutions and most of his adult life in jails. While Manson was suspected to be a government operative based on years of unusual parole favors, there was no question about DeFreeze’s informant status. He was documented to be a government operative through the late sixties and early seventies. Like Manson, DeFreeze was an incredibly inept criminal always financially broke and caught more times than he was successful in attempting crimes. He found being an informant would net him regular cash payments from the police while remaining free to attempt bigger takes through robbery and gun trading. He worked under the auspices of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Public Disorder Intelligence Unit and Criminal Conspiracy Units, both of which were unusually close and cooperative with the California Bureau of Investigation (then governor Reagan’s chief intel arm used against Black activists), the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Schreiber shared evidence that DeFreeze was specifically used for purposes of infiltration of black power groups and for framing and convicting their leadership. That the Feds had routinely engaged in such activity was documented in the stolen FBI COINTELPRO papers (COINTELPRO). As long as he cooperated, DeFreeze was given a get out of jail free card, allowing him to make street crime his profession and snitching, stinging and framing his protection.
After a few years of plying his trade on the streets of Los Angeles, being arrested and set free by the police on numerous occasions, by 1969 DeFreeze overstayed his welcome. He was arrested for robbery and shooting his pursuers with a gun that the LAPD had given him to sell to Black activists in order to bust them for arms violations. He had directly put the police department at risk. His protectors, burnt one too many times by DeFreeze, decided to cut him loose. He spent a year in the LA County jail awaiting and then going through trial – overlapping Charles Manson’s stay in the same facility. In December 1970, DeFreeze was sentenced to 5 to 14 years in prison with an initial stop at the California Corrections Department medical facility at Vacaville, California for psychiatric evaluation. And here is where the DeFreeze story runs smack dab into our CIA MK Ultra Mind Control narrative.
MK Ultra and MK Search
You may recall from our Manson chapter that CIA MK Ultra doctor Jolly West was working out of Stanford University when he crossed paths with the Manson family at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco in 1967. We also noted that Stanford’s leading MK Ultra psychiatrist Dr. James Alexander Hamilton was doing MK Ultra experiments in San Francisco at that very same time. Hamilton’s Stanford work had included MK Ultra Sub Project 2, the purpose of which was “To study the possible synergistic action of drugs which may be appropriate for use in abolishing consciousness.” (see, MK ULTRA Subproject 2).
On the heels of his San Francisco MK Ultra work, Hamilton headed to the very same institution Donald DeFreeze was committed to, Vacaville State Prison. He was director of the CIA’s MK SEARCH Subproject 3 (the successor to MK ULTRA) at Vacaville. MKSearch3 spanned into 1973. Marks wrote the following about Hamilton:
“Hamilton was one of the renaissance men of the program (MK ULTRA/SEARCH), working on everything from psychochemicals to kinky sex to carbon dioxide inhalation. By the early sixties, he had arranged to get access to prisoners at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville” (page 251, In Search For the Manchurian Candidate)
In January 1971, at the height of the Vacaville MK Search program, Donald DeFreeze was deposited there for psychiatric evaluation. While the average stay for an inmate was 90 days, DeFreeze would set the all-time record of over two years of Vacaville psychiatric “treatment.” Revolution’s End points to evidence that DeFreeze was subjected to experimental psychiatric drugs, some designed to coerce behavior change by making the inmate/patient violently ill. That DeFreeze participated in ‘experimental’ psychiatric drug programs was later confirmed by Vacaville Superintendent T. Lawrence Clanon. In addition to such debilitating drugs as Prolixin and Anectine, electro-shock treatment and brain crippling psycho-surgery were routine. That government backed psychiatric behavior modification was routinely used at Vacaville and throughout the California prison system (among others) was widely known through the Black community and its alternative (uncensored) history apparatus (see e.g., FIGHTING PSYCHIATRIC ABUSE: The BPP (Black Panther Party) and the Black Disability Politics of Mental and Carceral Institutions).
Operation CHAOS
Hamilton’s MK Search activities at Vacaville were date coincident with the CIA’s clandestine Operation Chaos. The Rockefeller Commission (which much like the Warren Commission was intended to cover up known CIA crimes) acknowledged that the CIA’s Chaos ran from 1967 through October 74. The Commission noted the aim of the first project under Operation Chaos was: ”’An Effort…in Acquiring Assets in the “Peace” and “Black Power” Movements in the United States.’ The project was to involve the recruitment of agents who would penetrate some of the prominent dissident groups in the United States…” (page 137, Rockefeller Commission Report). While the Commission served to cover-up – slavishly accepting the CIA’s blanket denials of wrongdoing – the intent of such Black activist infiltration was clearly spelled out in the FBI’s Operation Cointelpro (the only unedited, unfiltered look at domestic spy operations in America, because the documents were stolen and published before the government could redact or destroy them like the CIA did in response to Congressional inquiries into CHAOS, MKUltra and MKSearch, and most recently Jeffrey Epstein). In the FBI director’s own written words, the aim of infiltration was to “Prevent militant black nationalist groups and leaders from gaining RESPECTABILITY, by discrediting them to three separate segments of the community. The goal of discrediting black nationalists must be handled tactically in three ways. You must discredit those groups and individuals to, first, the responsible Negro community. Second, they must be discredited to the white community, both the responsible community and to ‘liberals’ who have vestiges of sympathy for militant black nationalist [sic] simply because they are Negroes. Third, these groups must be discredited in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement.” – March 4, 1968 memo from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Other Cointelpro documents demonstrate US spy agencies’ informants set up Black activists for assassinations.
Phoenix Program intersects with Chaos and COINTELPRO
At the same time DeFreeze was having his behavior modified and his mind controlled, he was subjected to another program run by a CIA subcontractor named Colston Westbrook. Westbrook had previously worked on a CIA operation setting up interrogation and torture centers for South Vietnamese citizens suspected of harboring sympathies for the North Vietnamese. It was a sub project of the infamous Phoenix Program. It is estimated that more than thirty thousand civilians were massacred as a result of torture-forced confessions under Phoenix. Colston’s work with DeFreeze had all the earmarks of a CIA Operation Chaos and FBI Cointelpro production. Colston’s new cover was as a prisoner enhancement service coordinator run out of University of California at Berkeley. Colston created the Black Cultural Association (BCA) at Vacaville and sister California prison at Soledad. The BCA connected white radical leftist students from Berkeley to Black prisoners for ‘cultural exchange.’ In practice, Colston and his program did nothing but turn Black activists more leftist and radical and do the same for white students who felt empowered with street cred for bonding with persecuted black ‘freedom fighters.’ Regardless of one’s politics, the program had zero socially redeemable purpose, even arguably, for either the students or the prisoners.
In fact, most Black prisoners were wary of the program. Westbook acknowledged that he resorted to offering extraordinary benefits to lure prisoners. That included arranging for meetings of the BCA where “conjugal” spaces were made available so that prisoners could have sex with female students. Still, most Black prisoners smelled a law-enforcement rat in Westbrook’s operation and did not want to be associated, despite the offered benefits, because to do so would be to be suspected of informant status (a virtual death warrant in prison). Later, prisoner-observers would surmise that Donald DeFreeze took Westbrook’s offered leadership role because he was and always had been an informant (the latter being documented fact). Indeed, with mind tenderized by MKSearch Subproject 3 ‘treatments’, all the conjugal visits he could handle, and perhaps the threat of his informant status being confirmed and leaked, Donald DeFreeze jumped to the lead of Westbrook’s program with enthusiasm. He established regular sexual relations with at least two of the Berkeley participants. While Schreiber repeats accusations that Patty Hearst herself came to conjugate with DeFreeze on several occasions under a false name and phony identification, I personally found the evidence flimsy and the likelihood slim. At the same time, there is no denying that at that time the politics of Patricia Hearst – then a student at Berkeley – were lurching further and further to the left.
Cult Formation
DeFreeze was indoctrinated by Westbrook and the students in leftist, radical politics. Even though DeFreeze appeared dull intellectually and slow to express his mainly shallow thoughts, under Westbrook’s guidance the students developed starry-eyed allegiance to DeFreeze. In their eyes he was a persecuted, minority freedom fighter. DeFreeze’s acceptance of them bolstered their radical, revolutionary fantasies. And their acceptance of DeFreeze caused his damaged mind to swell. DeFreeze adopted the mantle “Cinque”, the name of the African slave/prisoner who famously overthrew and killed the guards, overseer and captain of the ship Amistad that was transporting him to the New World in the 19th Century. His group, himself and his student followers, adopted the moniker Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Symbionese was a coined term signifying symbiosis of races in fighting establishment oppression.
Finally, after Cinque was created and DeFreeze was fully playing the part, and had established a veritable cult of the Berkeley clan, he was virtually shoved out the door. DeFreeze was given a prison detail that put him in a position where only a six-foot bare chain-link fence separated him from freedom. To top it off, he was left there alone by prison authorities late at night – a obvious invitation to leave. On March 5, 1973 DeFreeze accepted and within hours joined his white ‘comrades’ in Berkeley. No search party followed up. Nobody – including Colston Westbrook – bothered to check the residences of the Berkeley crew who spent months regularly visiting DeFreeze. And it was in those very residences over the next several months that their radical cult was organized and formalized.
SLA’s First Offensive
Cinque’s first endeavor at revolution was to offer up the SLA as an assassination for hire operation to the Bay Area black activist groups, including the Black Panthers and the United Slaves. All offers were recoiled from, with virtually everyone approached smelling a federal agent provocateur. Undaunted, the group continued to train with arms and explosives, DeFreeze’s specialty as a Los Angeles informant and a lifelong obsession. Rejected by the Black activist community, by autumn 1973 the SLA were planning their first major offensive against their capitalist masters.
Recalling an important target suggested by erstwhile CIA operative and mentor Westbrook, DeFreeze decided to assassinate the School Superintendent of Oakland, one Marcus Foster who allegedly served the aims of the national security state. His followers argued against it, noting Foster was seen as a hero in the black community, the very people SLA was formed to protect and serve. They argued, “why kill a black man when our first purpose is to combat racism?” But, DeFreeze, once the vacillating, bumbling criminal was steadfast on the idea apparently implanted by Westbrook.
The assassination was performed. The SLA took credit for it. The backlash – as predicted by most SLA members – was catastrophic. The leftist and activist communities, especially the black elements, roundly condemned the killing and sought to distance themselves from the SLA. They clearly saw Cinque/SLA’s act as something so anathema to the sensibilities of all communities that only the most avowed enemies (the CIA and FBI) could dream it up for a “black activist” group to execute. To them, it was something straight out of the CIA’s operation Chaos or the FBI’s COINTELPRO.
It was somewhere during this dark post-assassination period – alone and despised by all segments of society – where Schreiber reckons DeFreeze might have realized he had been set up by Westbrook aided by the ‘doctors’ of Vacaville and the prison system encouraging his ‘escape.’ In a world where SLA was universally vilified – right and left, establishment and radical – Cinque became a free agent who was forced to come up with a spectacular encore that would restore his followers confidence, his reason for being and his very survival.
Enter Patricia Hearst and…Scientology?
On the night of February 4, 1974 the SLA burst into Patricia Hearst’s Berkeley apartment, knocked her boyfriend to the ground with a rifle butt, and physically seized the heiress at gunpoint. They threw her into the trunk of a getaway car and fled into the night.
The Berkeley police initially investigated. When they discovered that the victim was the daughter of one of the most influential and wealthiest men in America, the Alameda County Sheriff’s department and FBI swooped in. After a day of getting nowhere, and apparently overwhelmed with the red tape and arrogance of its county and federal overseers, a Berkeley detective decided to try something unconventional. He had heard about a group of psychics working at the Stanford Research Institute, attached to the famous University at the south end of the Bay area. The detective phoned a director of the project, Russell Targ.
Targ had two psychics to choose from. Both were long-term Scientologists, as was the founder and co-director of the entire psychic research project. Targ chose the top performing psychic at that time, a former Burbank, California police commissioner named Pat Price. According to Targ, Price was able to identify two of the kidnappers and the location of Hearst, even accurately describing her immediate circumstance of being blindfolded in a closet. (Third Eye Spies documentary) Establishment corroboration of Targ comes from the most unlikely of places. That is the Central Intelligence Agency. Two years earlier when the CIA saw the level of accuracy in the Scientologists’ abilities to transcend space and time to view things and events thousands of miles away, they became the largest funder of the program. The CIA assigned two full-time agents to oversee their investment. One was Ken Kress. His report corroborating Targ’s account is attached (CIA Report on Pat Price/Hearst).
Targ quipped that had the Feds not so summarily dismissed the Berkeley police’s SRI psychic data, the saga of Patty Hearst would have ended right there and then. But, the police were prevented from acting by the Feds, and so this story is to be continued.
This Deep State and Scientology series began by establishing the Cult of Intelligence’s early and visceral need to eliminate L. Ron Hubbard and his established subjects of Dianetics and Scientology. In his 1951 book Science of Survival, Hubbard had disclosed the CIA and Military Intelligence unlawful mind control experiments on unwitting Americans. Worse, Dianetics procedure uncovered the fact and cured the damage inflicted (see The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard). From the outset Dianetics and Scientology processes were virtually the reverse of establishment Mental Health and its Cult of Intelligence bosses (see Military Industrial Mind Control, documenting the post World War II merger of the military and ‘mental health’).
As Hubbard evolved Dianetics and Scientology, and MK Ultra probed the depths of how to “abolish consciousness” (MK Ultra Subproject 2), the diametric opposition of the deep state vs. L. Ron Hubbard intensified.
By the mid 1950’s the conflicting purposes of Hubbard vs. Intelligence-controlled, established psychiatry came into sharp focus around a simple electronic device.
The artifact is generally known as the Galvanic Skin Response meter (GSR). Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, the CIA MK Ultra doctor later tasked with destroying Hubbard and his Scientology movement, and organized psychiatry referred to it as an integral component of the lie detector. Hubbard called his version of the device the Electro-Psychometer (the E-Meter). He referred to it in opposite terms than the psychiatrist, also calling it a truth detector.
The psychiatrists took the reductionist view that the meter detected chemical processes within the body. This is consistent with reductionist ‘science’ which for several hundred years – and to this day – attempts to reduce all forces and energies to physical universe matter. You know, the theory that says all mis-emotion and psychological disturbance is a chemical imbalance, to be ‘remedied’ by ingestion of drugs. Materialists still maintain this crude explanation, despite its flying in the face of subsequent discoveries in quantum mechanics (See e.g., The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra). Hubbard took the opposite, vitalism view, that the meter was affected by life force – that is the energy created by the spirit, elan vital, inhabiting the body.
Significantly, a study of the meter’s namesake Luigi Galvani reveals the age-old struggle Hubbard found himself up against, life force (elan vital, the spirit) vs. chemicals, or vitalism vs. reductionist materialism. Galvani’s story was the 18th Century chapter of science burying evidence of the spirit or life force. Galvani had discovered that a being created electrical force to aid in body movement and healing processes. Consensus opted to discredit Galvani’s view. Alesandro Volta offered the alternative explanation that the forces Galvani observed were explained by the interaction of different chemicals. As “science” was funded by industry bankers – who accumulated money not by truth but instead by marketability of physical universe goods, naturally Volta won the ‘consensus’ that did and does often constitute accepted “science.” Thus, even today “science” says the GSR measures chemical changes registered through perspiration. For a deeper history on Galvani vs. Volta and the centuries-long suppression of evidence of spirit in science, see CROSS CURRENTS: The Promise of Electromedicine, Dr. Robert O. Becker, Penguin 1990).
Hubbard described how the E-Meter projected an imperceptible electric current through the body – on the order of magnitude of Galvani’s life force – and could detect impedance in the created circuit caused by thoughts interjected by the participant. It could also be explained as disruption in an electric field created and measured by the meter. In either event, a competent E-Meter operator can prove to anyone in less than a minute that without variance the E-Meter reads on thought projected by the participant. I have done so to the silent astonishment (or perhaps chagrin) of Scientology antagonists from the founder of CBS 60 Minutes to the Editor of the New York Times.
For more than thirty years, Hubbard worked with electronics engineers to calibrate his E-Meter to react as closely as possible to thought, distinguishing its signal from the noise of other bio-electric processes. Others carried on the process for another 40 years so that now the Scientology E-Meter bears little resemblance to the GSR component of the crude lie detector of ‘science.’ With the aid of the E-Meter, Dianetics and Scientology sought to clear the mind of pains associated with physical and emotional injuries of the past. The idea was to locate moments of pain, release them of the detectable electrical charge they imposed on the mind and body, and thus clear the mind and free the will of the individual. Hubbard described the process in hundreds of lectures and dozens of books as a reversal of hypnotic effect.
Conversely, West and his CIA MK Ultra brethren used the GSR to measure pain inflicted on the body in the quest to capture the mind and will of the individual. Thus, West requisitioned a GSR, in the form of “polygraph” as part of his “psychophysiogical (sic) laboratory” where he would measure “noxious stimulation” inflicted on drug and hypnosis subjects. See attached 1956 West report and proposal to CIA poisoner in chief Sidney Gottlieb (see page 9 of REPORT ON RESEARCH IN HYPNOSIS).
Clearly the cult of intelligence understood the significance of Hubbard’s work and evolution. They already were acutely aware of the fact that even without the aid of the E-Meter he could and did uncover the harms the CIA was committing against human research subjects. Imagine their alarm when reckoning what else Hubbard might find out with the aid of the E-Meter. Consequently, the CIA spearheaded a multi-agency effort (including Army, Air Force and Navy intelligence), across several international governments, to stop L. Ron Hubbard in his tracks.
But, it wasn’t enough to simply destroy Hubbard. The agency simultaneously attempted to steal the man’s discoveries. This was evidenced by the activities of its one-time employee and longtime informant Cleve Backster. Mr. Backster was an acknowledged expert on the polygraph (lie detector). He hung around the spiritualist community evidenced by his claim that he met L. Ron Hubbard at a function surrounding parapsychologist J.B. Rhine in the late forties. In 1967 Backster became famous when he published a paper that detailed experiments that he performed with plants using the GSR meter (Evidence of a Primary Perception in Plant Life, International Journal of Parapsychology). According to Mr. Backster his work demonstrated that plants have measurable feelings. It became the genesis of a cultural phenomenon recognizing new dimensions about life force. A very popular book followed, The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Thompkins and Christopher Bird. A subsequent documentary by the same title featured a soundtrack created by Stevie Wonder.
Backster’s use of the crude ‘lie detector’ GSR component became the parapsychology/spiritualist standard diagnostic and experimental tool and continues to be until now. Ironically, during the ensuing decades, while improving upon that ill-tuned device, Hubbard’s E-Meter was smeared by the state-controlled corporate media as a “crude lie detector.”
Neither Backster, the CIA, nor any of those involved in creating a movement around Backster’s alleged discovery ever mentioned an embarrassing detail: The experiments Backster presented as groundbreaking had already been done and publicized nearly a decade before by L. Ron Hubbard. Of course, in keeping with the agency’s decades-long campaign to discredit Hubbard, his experiments were written off as some sort of kooky hoax. See for example, CIA-influenced Time/Life publication’s branding the E-meter as one of the “dumbest inventions.” (note, it is dated a year after Backster’s celebrated “discovery”, and ten years after the date of the photo displayed and the experiments conducted by Hubbard).
The deep state went so far as to attempt to ban the E-Meter in America through litigation spanning nearly the entire sixties. It backfired on the lead agency, the Food and Drug Administration, as even Time magazine was forced to acknowledge (Appeals: Victory for the Scientologists | TIME). However, it kept Hubbard distracted while his discoveries were hijacked.
When much of the dust had cleared, even Cleve Backster acknowledged privately that which nobody was apparently willing to admit publicly. Until recently the evidence lay quietly in the archives of the University of West Georgia. There sat a 1976 letter from Backster to a Scientology staff member. In it, he acknowledges Hubbard’s precedence: ‘His interest in plants also appears to have preceded my extensive involvement since February 1966.’ (Cleve Backster letter) This concession, buried in cordial correspondence, highlights the overlap—and the lack of crediting—in their work.
It is quite possible Backster himself had created sufficient distance from the CIA so that he truly wished to give credit where credit was due. However, this would not be the last time the CIA would rob from L. Ron Hubbard while beseeching the media and other government agencies to destroy him. Stay tuned.
So, Trump steals the all-important independent vote in 2024 largely based on vehement and repeated libertarian promises. The foremost of which was no more war, no more neo con empire extension (read, republic destruction). He appoints decidedly anti-forever-war Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence to prove he was serious. First, she reports there is no atomic bomb threat imminent in Iran. Then, upon Cult of War pressure she caves and reverses herself to cheerlead the boss’ unprovoked bombing in Iran. In 2019 Gabbard had this to say about US intervention in Venezuela: Gabbard 2019. Cult of War coercive persuasion applied, and we’ve got Gabbard making Hillary Clinton look like a peacenik.
What is startling about the latest foray is how overtly imperialistic it is. The administration is bragging about the plunder it has won (newsflash, this rodeo hasn’t even begun yet). It is also remarkable for its lack of justification. They have bombed a country (with no casualties reported nearly 24 hours after triumphantly distributing massive airstrike footage over Venezuelan cities), indicted a head of state for, among other things, possessing machine guns, kidnapped him, subjected him to extraordinary rendition and bragged about that too. What is depicted in the following photo is sensory deprivation in violation of 4 major international human rights agreements to which the United States subscribes to. The taking of the photograph and distributing it alone is a violation of the Geneva Conventions. How soon we forget – say, Abu Ghraib for example.
All of this is apropos to what we have been covering on this blog for the past year. It is CIA MK Ultra Mind Control ‘technology’ being applied in the present overtly and pushed into our faces. It is flanked by the mass conversion (media accomplices noted) MK Ultra psy op being run on the American people to accept this demonic behavior.
Did you think the last post, The Cult of Intelligence, was some quaint nostalgia about darker times of the ancient past? Think again. This very day, the Military-Industrial Mind Control apparatus is on full display. While most Americans are distracted with Christmas preparation, weekend football, reality TV dramas, and hating one another on social media, the Director of National Intelligence herself, Tulsi Gabbard, is fighting for our country’s future. She is not battling a foreign power. She is crossing swords with the very agencies that are supposed to answer to her (Military Intelligence/CIA deep state). See, Tulsi Gabbard fights for peace.
Someone powerful enough to defy and covertly undermine the President and the Director of National Intelligence is dropping propaganda on Reuters news service clearly designed to undermine peace and to continue forever war in Eurasia. According to Reuters “six sources familiar with US intelligence” are claiming the absolutely absurd (for anyone paying any measure of attention to world affairs) idea that Russia is dead set on recreating the Soviet Union and presumably its purpose to rule the world with imposed communism. It is conveniently dropped right when prospects for peace in Ukraine were looking promising.
This is our second post in four months about the duly appointed and confirmed Director of National Intelligence combatting undermine and sabotage by the Cult of Intelligence in the year 2025, see Operation Mockingbird: CIA Mind/Behavior Control Program. CIA/DIA/NSA, et al – the Cult, is doing its all to realize the goals so clearly set forth eighty years ago, see Military Industrial Mind Control.
Now that our series has introduced the CIA’s introduction of cult mania, let’s examine what makes the agency so expert on the subject.
Former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul once reckoned that democracy in America had effectively ended when former CIA Director Allen Dulles was appointed to the Warren Commission. The most suspect perpetrator of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was assigned to investigate that very crime. There is something to that idea (see e.g. CIA Mind Control and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy). After more than sixty years of whistleblowers’ and dogged researchers’ revelations, it is now fairly clear that the Warren Commission’s de facto mandate was to create the ‘record’ that would marginalize anyone with an independent thought about who actually killed President Kennedy and thus really controls the country.
One of the first and most important high level government whistleblowers of the early seventies disclosed that the military industrial complex and its intelligence community had usurped the Presidency long before the Kennedy assassination. He was Col. L. Fletcher Prouty who had served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Kennedy administration. Oliver Stone said of Prouty (who served as his model for whistleblower “Mr. X” in his film JFK), “Fletcher Prouty is a man whose name will go down in history.” In 1973 Prouty published an expose that showed the CIA and military intelligence acting as an independent deep state unanswerable to the American public, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, republished by Skyhorse 2011. Because of his unique position, Prouty never signed CIA non-disclosure agreements so the US government was powerless to censor him, legally. The CIA did succeed in limiting distribution of Prouty’s book through unlawful domestic covert operations against its wide distribution.
In the wake of Prouty’s struggle with censorship, former Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA Victor Marchetti and former State Department official John Marks published a book that carried the ball further, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Alfred A. Knopf 1974. Marchetti introduced a number of documents and first-hand accounts from inside the CIA in their expansion upon Prouty’s work. ‘The Cult of Intelligence’ was the first book in American history to cause the US government to sue for prior restraint of publication. The agency was partially successful and large swathes of the original edition were blacked out at the order of courts buying into the CIA’s “National Security” claims. Years later, the book was updated with most of the redacted text restored.
Marchetti’s and Marks’ choice of a title could not have been more appropriate. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines cult as: a group (as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous. The CIA and US intelligence community meets all three criteria: coercive, insular and dangerous. The first chapter of ‘Cult of Intelligence’ explains why the authors refer to the “intelligence community” (and the Military Industrial Complex it services) as a cult. The following excerpts are from that chapter. See whether any of it rings true for you today.
There exists in our nation today a powerful and dangerous secret cult – the cult of intelligence. Its holy men are the clandestine professionals of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its patrons and protectors are the highest officials of the federal government. Its membership, extending far beyond governmental circles, reaches into the power centers of industry, commerce, finance and labor. Its friends are many in the areas of important public influence – the academic world and the communications media. The cult of intelligence is a secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy…
…The cult is intent upon conducting the foreign affairs of the U.S. government without the awareness or participation of the people. It recognizes no role for a questioning legislature or an investigative press. Its adherents believe that only they have the right and the obligation to decide what is necessary to satisfy the national needs. Although it pursues outmoded international policies and unattainable ends, the cult of intelligence demands that it not be held accountable for its actions by the people it professes to serve. It is a privileged, as well as secret, charge. In their minds, those who belong to the cult of intelligence have been ordained, and their service is immune from public scrutiny.
The “clandestine mentality” is a mind-set that thrives on secrecy and deception. It encourages professional amorality – the belief that righteous goals can be achieved through the use of unprincipled and normally unacceptable means. Thus, the cult’s leaders must tenaciously guard their official actions from public view. To do otherwise would restrict their ability to act independently; it would permit the American people to pass judgment on not only the utility of their policies, but the ethics of those policies as well. With the cooperation of an acquiescent, ill-informed Congress, and the encouragement and assistance of a series of Presidents, the cult has built a wall of laws and executive orders around the CIA and itself, a wall that has blocked effective public scrutiny…
…In the field of classical espionage, the CIA’s Clandestine Services have been singularly unsuccessful in their attempts to penetrate or spy on the major targets…
…As the opportunities for covert action abroad dwindle and are thwarted, those with careers based on clandestine methods are increasingly tempted to turn their talents inward against the citizens of the very nation they profess to serve…
And so, as Noam Chomsky has ably demonstrated, elected federal officials from Congress to the White House continually operate in diametric opposition to the will of the American people who elect them.
This series is in the process of illustrating the why for the Cult of Intelligence’s launch of the great cult scare of the 70’s and 80’s. And it will demonstrate why the Cult specifically targeted Scientology for virtual annihilation as part of that campaign.
While we set the table, let’s add some perspective on the matter provided by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team) and Victor Marchetti (The Cult of Intelligence).
Mr. Marchetti:
During the period 1969-1972, while I was Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, it was my responsibility to read and evaluate all incoming intelligence reports from all sources, including the FBI, on a daily basis. In this capacity, I became aware of the intense interest of both the CIA and FBI in the Church of Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The files on Scientology were voluminous, and there were frequent inter-agency discussions and meetings on how to counter what was perceived as a growing ‘problem’ posed by the Church. Proposals included infiltration by agents, psychological operations to discredit Hubbard, and even legislative efforts to classify Scientology as a subversive organization. However, higher-level reviews often vetoed the more aggressive tactics, though some surveillance and monitoring continued. – U.S. District Court, D.C., Civ. No. 77-2076, filed Oct. 5, 1978
L. Fletcher Prouty testified similarly to a court Ontario, Canada:
It is not without significance that the affidavit of Fletcher Prouty, appearing in Volume 8A of the record at tab KK, makes it appear that he formed the conclusion, as a highly placed official of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, that since 1950 there has been a definite campaign of harassment against this organization (Scientology) for nearly thirty years, primarily by means of the dissemination of false and derogatory information around the world to create a climate in which adverse action would be taken against the Church and its members. – decision dated January 23, 1985, by Osler J. in the Ontario High Court of Justice
After his 1971 murder conviction and death sentence, Charles Manson was sent to the “Adjustment Center” at California state prison at San Quentin. The center is aptly named as it is intended to adjust the prisoner into docility and conformance. Federal District Judge Alphonso J. Zirpoli described it as follows: “Despite its euphemistic title, the Adjustment Center is not a treatment or rehabilitation unit. It is a punitive isolation facility designed to ‘adjust’ disruptive prisoners by breaking their will through prolonged solitary confinement.” – Toussaint v. McCarthy preliminary injunction hearing (N.D. Cal. 1973)
The MK Ultra program taught the CIA that the separation from humans and sensory deprivation of total isolation was the most effective way to achieve a broken will, (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klien, 2007 Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Company.)
Manson proved a tough nut to crack at the Adjustment Center. He was kept in solitary confinement for almost a decade. He was injected with heavy psychiatric drugs periodically. (Eye of The Beholder, Carrie Leonetti, Southwest Law review)
Manson also spent time in the California state prison system’s medical facility at Vacaville for psychiatric work (Eye of the Beholder, ibid.) Vacaville was the site of James Hamilton’s MK Search Project 3 (MK Ultra successor), where he set up facilities to experiment with prisoner psychiatric patients in the late sixties through early seventies. That included specifically, “clinical testing of behavior control materials.” (page 215, In Search For The Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences, John Marks, W.W. Norton and Company 1979.) (See Jolly West Part IV for background of Hamilton and his pursuit of “obliteration of consciousness”)
Hamilton’s fellow MK Ultra/Search doctor Jolly West also had his fingers in Vacaville. According to journalist Alexander Cockburn’s The CIA’s House of Horrors:
The CIA funneled large grants to the University of Oklahoma, home to Dr. Louis “Jolly” West. West would later go on to head the Violence Project at UCLA, where he and Dr. James Hamilton, an OSS colleague of George White and a recipient of CIA largesse, performed psychological research involving behavior modifications on inmates at Vacaville state prison in northern California.
When West’s involvement with Vacaville began and when it ended is unclear – as are much of the activities of the career-CIA doctor’s movements. What we know for sure is that in 1973 West ignited a public uproar when it was discovered that he intended to experiment on the brains of Vacaville prisoners, including the use of psychosurgery and inserting electronic controls. see West at Vacaville. While the proposal was ultimately rejected, perhaps Mr. Cockburn – one of the last credible, old-school, non-programmed journalists of the late 20th century – had sources for his assertion that West indeed did get his fingers into the Vacaville mix.
On the heels of West’s brain-remote-control play, Manson checked in for a 7-month stint at the Vacaville prison medical center. Manson’s first stay would span March through October 1974 for more thorough mental adjustment (Daily Republic July 9, 2023). That was roughly three times the length of the typical Vacaville 90-day stopover. From at least that point forward the con man with hypnotic Svengali-like persuasive powers sufficient to create a cadre of MK-Ultra grade assassins, was a rambling incoherent mess. Jack Ruby redux? (See Jolly West Part III).
After years of systematic adjustment, they rolled out Manson for periodic nationally televised freak shows. The first prominent interviewer, NBC’s Tom Snyder, played the straight-guy act persistently trying to get a straight answer out of an incoherent rambling Manson. It, like all of the many repeat performances, played out like Jack Ruby’s show before the Warren Commission (see Jolly West Part III). One of the only meaningful, sincere-sounding quips from Manson, perhaps explaining his condition, apparently went unnoticed: Manson and the Nuthouse Treatment. No follow-up was forthcoming to that one from the incurious mainstream media.
For decades after the corporate media dosed us with periodic Charles Manson freak shows. It became almost a rite of passage for mainstream ‘journalists.’ So, after Snyder came Diane Sawyer, Charlie Rose, Geraldo Rivera, Ronald Reagan Jr., et al. The message was CIA project Chaos handy: beware of hippie, peacenik culture; and be terrified of ‘cults.’
“I have taught a lot of people how to do hypnosis through the years. Some of them were extremely talented at it. A lot of it has to do with communication skills and keeping your eyes open. That is the hypnotist’s should be wide open.” – “Dr. West’s talk”, box 133, folder 6, Louis Jolyon West papers
Jolly West goes West
In late Fall 1966, after he had conducted his sixth installment of handiwork on the mind and brain of Jack Ruby (see, Jolly West Part III), CIA MK Ultra contractor Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West was beginning a new chapter in the mind control saga. According to Tom O’Neill’s Chaos*, at that time West was granted a ‘sabbatical’ from the School of Medicine Neuropsychiatric division at the University of Oklahoma. That school was headed by another CIA MK Ultra operator Dr. Stewart Wolf, who presumably signed off on the mission. West asserted that he was going to pursue a fellowship at another known MK Ultra laboratory, Stanford University in the San Francisco Bay area.
*Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, Little Brown and Co. 2019. While delivering on the promise of its title, Chaos is also the most revealing work on CIA Mind Control (MK Ultra/MK Search) programs published in the past fifty years. This is the third and last article to summarize, then expand upon, discoveries first published in Mr. O’Neill’s book. Subsequent articles will further corroborate both O’Neill’s work and our narrative beginning with The Deep State and Scientology.
Documentation confirms at least seven MK Ultra subprojects were run out of Stanford, making it perhaps the central hub of CIA Mind Control experiments in academia during the fifties and sixties, see CIA Letter to Stanford. One of those programs, titled MK Ultra Subproject 2, stated these lofty objectives: “To study methods for the administration of drugs without the knowledge of the patient”, and, “To study the possible synergistic action of drugs which may be appropriate for use in abolishing consciousness.” see, Stanford MK Ultra subproject 2.
Another undocumented, but widely acknowledged and admitted, Stanford subproject was right up Jolly West’s expertise alley, involving the testing of LSD on human beings. That would be the 1959-1961 (and perhaps beyond) project which noted author Ken Kesey allegedly voluntarily participated in. Based out of the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital, Kesey tapped a long-continuing supply of LSD by partaking in the Stanford-CIA project. (West also listed on a 1990s CV, “Consultant in Psychiatry, Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital 1966-1967″, the very years subject of this article). While almost continuously high on CIA supplied LSD, Kesey turned his home into a psychedelic party site for influential Beat era poets, writers and artists. Dozens of influential hipsters were introduced to LSD there. Kesey ultimately took his LSD cult on the road under the title “The Merry Pranksters”. They would turn on thousands to LSD from coast to coast, and were integral in creating the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as ground zero of the hippie movement.
Kesey became the third CIA linked or sponsored “Johny Appleseed of LSD” to be launched across America to broadly promote and introduce the hallucinogen. The first was former OSS (CIA predecessor) Captain Al Hubbard who bought tens of thousands of LSD hits from then-sole manufacturer Sandoz in 1950 and spent the next decade travelling across the US attempting to dose as many influential people as possible. (Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond, Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain 1985). The second was Timothy Leary who began dosing as a Harvard faculty member in the fifties, then toured the planet urging people to ‘turn on [to LSD], tune in, and drop out “. (ibid.) By July 1967 Time Magazine benighted Leary as “The Grand Shaman of Psychodelia.” Note, Al Hubbard had no relation to creator of Dianetics and founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard. Ironically, however, federal agencies would later use the name similarity as a pretext to unlawfully stalk the latter. But, we’ll get to all that later.
Tom O’Neill reported in Chaos that while West claimed to be working on a Stanford fellowship in 1966 and 1967, the university had no record of it. I have since discovered that West testified under oath in Jack Ruby’s probate trial on 6 June,1967 that his then-current address was “the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California.” (Page 153, Jack Ruby Probate Trial). That places the elusive West at the time, at the location, and working for the folks capable of creating a cult whose 1969 crime still affects the American collective psyche nearly six decades later.
The Human Experimental “Laboratory”
Later published papers by West described his 1966-1969 special operation as a study of hippies and their reactions under LSD and marijuana use.That latter date may seem a stretch to some MK ultra researchers. However, it is based on West’s own words in one of those papers. Published on Sept 6, 1968, in “Flight from Violence: Hippies and the Green Rebellion”, West asserted that “we studied the Green Rebellion (hippies) at first hand through September [1967] and, on a modified basis, we have been doing so ever since.” Keep this in mind when we introduce other participants in his San Francisco hijinks. West chose the epicenter of hippiedom (the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco) because he wanted to “study them in their natural habitat” (ibid), as if he were studying some lower form of life. He constructed what he called a “pad (apartment) as laboratory” from which to covertly observe them. (ibid)
As if creating a false cover, West’s papers emanating from the “pad” are bloviating affairs, full of general newsy cliches and random anecdotes with no sources cited. They do not contain a single, concrete observation from his “laboratory”, nor any finding which could possibly be construed as “scientific.” Which begs the question, what was Jolly West actually doing during those years?
The intrepid Tom O’Neill (Chaos) spotted the oddity and actually tracked down West’s files on the ‘study’, consisting mainly of the diaries of graduate students who were staked out at West’s “pad laboratory.” He also interviewed one of those project participants, forty years after the fact. What he found was stunning. The graduate student for nearly one half a century was continuing to ponder the same question, “where in the hell was Jolly West, and what was he up to?” The lab attendant noted that they simply opened their pad to hippie drifters who wanted to find a place to get high on dope and acid. And the students would observe them. Given no other instructions by West, no environmental stimuli, not even communication, there was virtually nothing to observe for months on end. They seldom saw West and never received a single bit of feedback on their months of notetaking. One student even wondered if the paid observers themselves were the subjects of West’s study, being covertly surveilled. (Chaos)
I have since found another monster clue as to where the elusive doctor West might have been spending a good portion of his time in San Francisco. Perhaps the only doctor who approached West’s epic volume of CIA Mind Control work was his opposite number at his then “fellowship”-sponsoring University, Stanford. That was Dr. James Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was a Stanford-affiliated psychiatrist from 1949 through at least 1975. During West’s stint in San Francisco, Hamilton was executing MK Ultra sub project 140. He was busy poaching human Guinea pigs from St. Mary’s Memorial hospital (University of California, San Francisco Medical Center) and plying them with drugs in a private office nearby. Hamilton happened to have been the project leader of the other Stanford-based MK Ultra projects listed above, including the one trying to develop a means of “abolishing consciousness” altogether.
On top of that Hamilton had been the supervising psychiatrist for the CIA’s Operation Midnight Climax. That entailed setting up bordellos in San Francisco in the fifties and early sixties – also referred to as “pads” – where unsuspecting Johns were dosed with LSD and observed behind one way mirror windows tripping with prostitutes. So deep was the CIA’s trust for Hamilton that Sydney Gottlieb himself (Creator of MK Ultra, Head of CIA Technical Services) made a regular practice while in San Franisco of fornicating with as many of Hamilton’s Midnight Climax call girls as possible. (sources, In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks 1979, Poisoner in Chief, Stephen Kinzer 2019, The CIA Reading Room and a variety of documents from sites across the web). Bookmark Dr. Hamilton, he will be a lynchpin in the article to follow this one.
Enter Charles Manson
In early 1967 Charles Mason was a career criminal who had been mostly in, and only sporadically out of, juvenile detention and federal prisons between ages of 15 and 32. He was released from Los Angeles’ Terminal Island federal correction facility in March of that year.
It was right on the cusp of San Francisco’s “Summer Of Love”, a time and destination (San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District) promoted by the mainstream media, led by Time Magazine (run by CIA friend and LSD recipient Henry Luce and his OSS/CIA-trained deputy C.D. Jackson); and leading CIA MK Ultra Mind Control LSD evangelists Timothy Leary from Harvard and Ken Kesey from Stanford. Time quoted a hip “Bishop” claiming Haight-Ashbury might be the site of the second coming, “The hippies are saying to the Church what the young Church said to the Jews: ‘You have had it.’”
Even MK Ultra stalwart Jolly West himself seemed to promote the LSD inspired hippies – despite having earlier predicted the possibility of the rise of LSD cults that would kill and then forget the crime (ala MK Ultra goals and Manson family reality). West would claim “the hippies seem to take literally the words of such teachers as Moses, Jesus and Gautama…Bishop Pike may have been correct when he likened the hippies to early Christians.” (Flight From Violence) It is remarkable how West promotes the Hippie drug culture when his project participants’ notes hold one thing in common: a plethora of observations of the rapid, and disgusting decline of Haight-Ashbury over a two-year period of Hippie “control.” (West archives box 118, folders 8-10)
Manson who reportedly did not even wish to leave prison, and thoroughly out of character, apparently heeded the calls to drop everything and migrate to Haight-Ashbury. So strong was the appeal that he blatantly violated his parole terms restricting him to Los Angles, and headed to the Bay area, guitar in hand.
When the parole violation was discovered, instead of hauling Manson back to prison (standard operating procedure), the US Parole office assigned Manson to a particularly suspicious parole officer in the Bay area. He was a criminologist named Roger Smith. O’Neill learned that Smith was running an experimental parole program that monitored its parolees. Smith had several dozen parolees on his roster when Manson showed up. However, he would soon have none, but for Manson himself. It was Smith who promoted Manson becoming a full time denizen of ground zero of the hippie movement, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He claimed LSD and Manson’s fledgling harem cult (The Manson family, consisting of a bevy of young female, druggie waifs who pledged allegiance to Charlie) somehow made the violence-prone Manson more mellow. Using that justification, Roger Smith did everything he could to encourage the lifestyle change; including breaking federal law on a serial basis to facilitate Manson. Quite the prescription from a federal parole officer (unlimited LSD, unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card and sex slavery cult creation). (Chaos)
So federally protected, despite numerous parole violations and fresh crimes, Manson would remain free to wreak havoc well into his cult’s fateful journey to Los Angeles in 1968 where a year later he would direct the commission of the mass murders that shocked the American psyche. (Chaos)
Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC)
In early 1967 Dr. David E. Smith (no familial relation to Roger Smith) was a straight-laced toxicologist researching the effects of LSD and amphetamines on rats. He was finding that LSD would subdue the rodents while amphetamines would turn them into violent, ruthless killers, murdering and cannibalizing their own. Smith made those experiments at the same time and place that Dr. James Alexander Hamilton was running CIA MK Ultra subproject 140 operations (UCSF St. Mary’s Medical Center – all a stone’s throw from the center of the Haight-Ashbury district). (The CIA Doctors, Dr. Colin A. Ross, Manitou Communications 2006). In January of that year Smith would make a transformation as stark as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That was thanks to the chemical he was studying in the lab. In January 1967, partially inspired by the mellow, LSD-tripping rats in his laboratory (literally stated in an interview) he dropped LSD for the first time in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park at the hippie Human Be-In rock concert. While listening to the likes of Timothy Leary and watching thousands similarly tripping, he had a revelation of sorts. He “wanted to become bohemian, to free himself of inhibitions.” And so, he decided to open what would soon become the epicenter of the hippie culture, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. (HAFMC)
At least that is what he wrote in his self-promotional book on the matter, Love Needs Care (David E. Smith and John Luce 1971). But years later, perhaps forgetful of the company line, David Smith told a journalist that his inspiration for opening the clinic in fact was precisely the same reason Jolly West came to San Francisco, the promise of experimenting on humans rather than lab animals. Eerily he spoke in the very human-degrading terms of West, “In the beginning my interest in the Haight was as a natural drug laboratory, a giant mouse cage.” (Frank Olsen, The Dark Side of the Summer of Love). That view was corroborated by the head of the Diggers (the volunteers who scraped up life necessities for visiting hippies so they could live free) Emmett Grogran. He wrote of HAFMC in his memoir, “Patients were treated as ‘research subjects’ and the facility itself was used to support whatever medical innovations were new and appropriate to the agency.” (Ringolevio, 1970, emphasis added)
Remarkably, parole officer Roger Smith would come to operate a federally funded Amphetamine Research Project out of the federally funded HAFMC. He, like David Smith, had previously issued a study acknowledging the powerful violence inducing effect of amphetamines.
And so Manson was federally mandated to regularly check in with this federal parole officer (cum amphetamine experimenter) at the clinic whose founder dubbed “a giant mouse cage, natural experimental laboratory.“ Manson and his family would regularly come to HAFMC for venereal disease treatment, or perhaps the occasional bad LSD trip rescue, sometimes to report in to his parole officer and even just to visit with the man he considered his guardian angel, Roger Smith. Smith earned the nickname amongst the HAFMC regulars as “The Friendly Fed.”
Tom O’Neill discovered that Jolly West would frequent the clinic at that very time, to “drum up hippie business” for his nearby federally funded “hippie crash pad laboratory.” While his own project personnel wallowed in mystery as to West’s whereabouts, he was busy tinkering with human minds at the “giant mouse case… natural drug laboratory” in of an office provided by human experimenter David Smith.
David Smith told O’Neill that “[West] studied people at our clinic” and “he recruited subjects from our clinic” but insisted he was kept entirely in the dark as to any details of West’s work. He claimed the only thing he knew about West’s background was that he had slayed an elephant with an overdose of LSD (See, Tusko tanked). Smith sought to distance himself from West in the interview and explained his ignorance by claiming “we were service at that time, not research.” Some service, to render your patients to unknown experiments by a man whose only claim to fame was drugging the mightiest earth-walking mammal to death.
While the Smiths both claimed to be in the dark as to West’s activities, as did West’s own project personnel, West himself left the secret hiding in plain sight. He wrote in a later study that he engaged in “transforming ‘bad trips’ into good ones in the back rooms of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.” (Flight From Violence) In his person diary which I located at the UCLA archives, West acknowledged ‘bad trips’ as the first and foremost mental health problem at the then-fledgling HFAMC: “For the most part, the problems seem to be related to the use, misuse, and abuse of drugs. LSD is a significant offender in this respect, contributing a substantial number of ‘bad trips’ to the total volume of business.” – Jolly West’s Haight-Ashbury project Diary June 24, 1967
TRANSORMING TRIPS and HYPNOTISM
Whatever West was doing in the “back rooms” of HAFM, he never committed it to paper. He even took measures to keep his own “crash pad laboratory” team in the dark. While many on the team noted West’s near continuous absence from the crash pad lab, one of them noted that West’s representative at the pad: “he discouraged anyone on the project from visiting it [HAFMC] or helping it or having anything to do with it.” Virtually, the only thing we know for certain about what Jolly West actually did in San Francisco during the years 1966 and 1968 when he was there is this admission, “transforming bad trips into good ones in the back rooms of the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.” How exactly does one accomplish that? Consult anyone who ever had anything to do with turning potentially bad LSD trips into good trips, from doctors to psychiatrists to LSD gurus to social workers, you will find one, single common denominator: the use of the power of persuasion. You talk the person through it.
What particular power would West turn to? There is only one ‘therapeutic’ tool West ever boasted expertise in, and he did so repeatedly: hypnosis, the ultimate tool of persuasion. He considered himself a master hypnotist. It was that primary skill that he flouted to CIA MK Ultra chief Sidney Gottlieb that resulted in at least a decade of taxpayer dollars flowing to him to conduct mind control experiments, utilizing primarily hypnotism and drugs. (Jolly West I, II, and III). And just as west had used certain drugs with high levels of making patients suggestible on Jimmy Shaver (Jolly West Part II) and Jack Ruby (Jolly West Part III), West mentions favorably the use of chlorpromazine for ‘bad trips.’ (West diary) Chlorpromazine has been listed to this day in studies to numerous to recount as top of the list in terms drugs that create suggestibility.
Both Smiths are on record claiming Manson and his followers’ minds were thoroughly marinated with acid while they and West were routinely in the house (HAFMC). We know from both Smiths that Manson and his several followers were the only recurring and consistent HAFMC denizens (referred to as a fixture of the clinic) worthy of mention in their several hundred-page book (Love Needs Care) and many papers and articles they wrote on the clinic. The odds of West plucking one or more of the family (cult), and particularly Charlie who was attracted to hypnotism like positive charge to a negative terminal (see below), for his LSD trip readjustment expertise are outstanding. It was those overwhelming odds, even without noting the West admission we have here, that lead O’Neill and so many more since to suggest that perhaps West took the well-LSD-seasoned brain of Charles Manson and programmed it to kill, right in line with West’s 1953 promises to the CIA’s Gottlieb to create the Manchurian Candidate (Jolly West Parts I, II, and III).
O’Neill recounts in Chaos how he kept a quotation from Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book “Helter Skelter” taped above his computer. “The most puzzling question of all” about the Manson murders to Bugliosi was ‘how Manson had turned his docile followers into remorseless killers’…”it may be something that he learned from others.” Perhaps we should entertain another possible theory besides Manson being programmed to kill. That is Manson being trained to program to kill. That is, rather than (or perhaps in addition to) being hypnotized and programmed himself, Manson also did his own hypnotizing.
Some of the most convincing material for that theory in my view are contained in the end notes of Chaos. Two such notes are from page 369 where O’Neill conducts a side investigation into claims by LA hypnotist William Deanyer that Manson visited him for tips and fine-tuning of skills he already apparently possessed in the 68/69 period. Deanyer claimed the encounters to a Manson biographer (Ed Sanders, The Family), and Deanyer’s daughter corroborated them directly to O’Neill.
Others have also spoken of Manson’s long history of application of hypnosis. Actor Danny Trejo has said that Manson was a somewhat accomplished hypnotist as far back as 1961 where he encountered him in jail. He described Manson as a “small, scrawny, poor, bum.” Yet, he said Manson was so adept at hypnosis he could convince the prisoners that they were high on drugs; producing the same effect of drugs of choice on their minds. It exlained to Trejo how such a diminutive convict could survive so long in jail without protection. see, Trejo on Manson.
If hypnotism really was Manson’s forte and continuing trick of survival it answers Bugliosi’s haunting question as to how on earth he programmed others to kill. If you think it is far-fetched for West to believe a career criminal like Manson worthy of training or capable of mastering hypnosis, you might reconsider when you read West’s published words about the minds of accomplished, criminally-inclined hypnotists (quotations taken from Dangers of Hypnosis, Louis J. West, MD, and Gordan H. Deckert, MD, JAMA April 5, 1965):
1.
“We do know of sexual seductions that appear to have been achieved by hypnotic suggestion. For example, an ugly, uncouth janitor who had learned hypnosis (at an “Academy of Hypnotism”- fee, including lessons and certificate, $50), seduced several female tenants whom he initially hypnotized in “demonstrations.””
That would explain how the “small, scrawny, poor bum” could create a literal harem ½ his age who would perform orgies on demand and kill for him. Incidentally, Manson’s other alleged hypnotism instructor, William Deanyer, was indicted and tried in the fifties for sex slave trafficking for that very stunt (though saved by directed verdict from a Federal Judge, and perhaps by Deanyer’s continuing hypnotic influence over the victims) (Chaos).
2.
“Because of his ability to induce hypnosis and thereby influence others, the operator may become convinced that he is somehow superior to other people or that he enjoys powers beyond the scope of ordinary men.”
That would explain Manson’s and certainty that he was in fact the second coming of Jesus Christ as well as Satan. If Manson were also being hypnotized, it would be consistent with West’s pontifications about hippies being the new early Christians (a theme Manson incessantly riffed on post-summer of 67)
3.
As to Manson’s followers’ gravitational attraction to Manson:
“Hypnotized repeatedly as a subject in demonstrations, eventually she could not make the most trivial decisions without consulting the hypnotist, and when he moved to a city 1,500 miles away, she followed him leaving her family, friends, and job.”
4.
More on the formation of his Family (cult):
“Since World War II organized hypnosis has seen the insidious growth of cult-like conditions. If those who employ hypnosis succumb to this cult-forming temptation, the label “crackpots” may become appropriate.”
5.
Finally, on how Manson’ already antisocial character could be manipulated into a full blown psychotic personality by hypnosis applied to him:
“Upon hypnotic intervention the prominence of the neurotic (eg, hysterical, phobic, or compulsive) symptoms may yield, only to bring to the fore, in intensified form, the underlying schizophrenic psychopathology.”
According to West’s own words, a skilled hypnotist could create a split personality psychopath. West’s confidence in a practitioner’s ability to do just that later led to his help in forming a foundation dedicated to convincing the media and public that Multi-personality disorder (clearly a form of schizophrenia; though psychs sometimes argue otherwise) was predominantly an iatrogenic (doctor created) condition. Stay tuned for later article on the CIA’s False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Also, see Jolly West parts 1-3 for West’s claims of creating psychosis with relative ease.
If West were to create or exacerbate a condition of paranoia, it could become a permanent condition, according to West himself. He testified in the probate proceeding of Jack Ruby’s Will on the eve of the Summer of Love: “Paranoia is almost by definition incurable.” (testimony of Dr. Louis Jolyon West, March 27, 1967, pp. 181-182, ibid.). Across the spectrum of Manson literature, from absurd propaganda pieces like Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter to Tom O’neill’s meticulously documented history Chaos, one word is shared by nearly all in describing Manson’s state of mind, paranoid.
At the end of the day West considered himself above all else a master hypnotist. He lectured on the subject. In one of those talks he asserted the following:
“I have taught a lot of people how to do hypnosis through the years. Some of them were extremely talented at it. A lot of it has to do with communication skills and keeping your eyes open. That is the hypnotist’s should be wide open.” – Dr. West’s talk, box 133, folder 6, Louis Jolyon West papers
Granted, because of the suspicious lack of detail anyone seems to recall or to have committed to writing about the mysterious Dr. West’s activities a HAFMC, it is easy to speculate and attempt to fill the void. But, even assuming Manson was not a ticking time bomb created directly by West to explode a year or so later, one cannot ignore the two things held in common by the three federally funded experimenters who spent months under the same roof with Charlie Manson in 1967. David Smith, Roger Smith and Jolly West were all exploring and experimenting with the same chemicals (LSD, then amphetamines) that coursed through the veins of Manson and his sex/murder cult slaves. All three confirmed in writing that switching from LSD (for heightened suggestibility – perfect for hypnosis) to amphetamines created people capable of wanton, senseless and grisly violence. All three were with Manson in the critical period wherein the laws of supply and demand were manipulated to change the drugs of choice for Manson, his family and the entire US counterculture. The CIA’s fingerprints were all over that transition.
Summer of Love Becomes Summer of Chaos
It so happened that the Summer of 1967 also marked the season when the CIA was ordered by then President of the United States Lyndon Baines Johnson to flank the FBI’s efforts to roll back and demolish anti-war resistance. The peace movement was then seen as majorly driven by an LSD-soaked generation of counter-culturalists. Since the CIA had created that counterculture (wittingly or not), when the agency christened the new effort as “Operation Chaos”, it very aptly described what it’s previous decade of domestic meddling caused as well as what it would soon create even more of. Popularly dismissed as a discreet surveillance campaign focused on foreign connections to US civil rights and anti-war protest groups, serious students of the history of the CIA consider that pretext. After all, it took the literal break-in and theft of FBI documents several years later to learn that at that very same time J. Edgar Hoover’s boys were actively infiltrating those civilian groups, and intentionally creating conflict and strife within them (chaos); even to the point of encouraging and causing assassinations (See COINTELPRO ). To believe the CIA would be outdone by its comparatively straight-laced fellow agency to some is naïve. After all, it was the FBI’s failure to quash the counterculture through such tactics for several years that prompted the President to sic the CIA on it. In any event, chaos truly did exponentially increase from the moment of the inception of Operation Chaos.
Just as the LSD-inspired counterculture hit its apex of power and prestige in the summer of of 1967, a sea change occurred in the historically CIA-controlled drug influx into Haight-Ashbury (and ultimately the entire country).
As noted at the outset, the CIA had a remarkable run as the primary promoter and distributor of LSD across America for more than a decade. The Grand Shaman of Psychodelia Timothy Leary himself admitted during the peak of his fame, “The LSD movement was started by the CIA…I wouldn’t be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists.” (p 190, Poisoner In Chief: Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, Stephen Kinzer, Henry Holt 2019).
However, by the mid-sixties the CIA was up against a movement by a number of members of Congress who by then were flooded with constituents railing about the increasing numbers of runaways and delinquents LSD was creating. By April 1966, the primary manufacturer of LSD, Sandoz of Switzerland, announced a recall and halt to production in the face of the growing backlash. See e.g., New York Times April 15, 1966: Distributor of LSD Recalls All Supplies.
In the Times story, Sandoz refers to a growing black market, something the incurious newspaper does not elaborate on. That market was as much as cornered in the all-critical LSD-culture of California. One man produced nearly all of the West Coast’s LSD from 1965 into the 1967 Summer of Love. His name was Augustus Owsley Stanely III. In 1965 as LSD supply was becoming extremely thin, Oswald slithered up next to California’s LSD Johnny Appleseed Ken Kesey, supplying top quality LSD for his Merry Prankster ‘acid tests’, huge open parties with massive vats of Kool-aid spiked with LSD to introduce one and all (witting or unwitting) to turn on, tune in and drop out as an unthinking mob. Stanley toured with the Merry Pranksters and then for years with its rock entertainment drawing card, the Grateful Dead. In Time Magazine’s July, 7, 1967 ode to the Summer of Love it referred to Stanley as the “Henry Ford of LSD—the man who turned the psychedelic underground into a mass-production industry.”
Most have overlooked a glaring anomaly in Stanley’s history. We’ll examine it for reasons that will become obvious. Stanley was born into privilege, the grandson of a Kentucky U.S. Senator. By all accounts he was a precocious, if mischievous boy. In 1950, at the age of 15, Stanley purportedly voluntarily checked himself into St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital. St. Elizabeth’s was still under the directorship of OSS/MK Ultra pioneer Dr. Zigmond Lebensohn at that time. (see, The Deep State and Scientology). While Lebansohn’s OSS (CIA predecessor) hypnotism and drug experiments began as early 1943, they are widely reported to have continued at St. Elizabeth’s well into the fifties. In fact, I discovered a document from UCLA archives showing Lebensohn collaborating with Jolly West as late as 1954 on an experiment entitled “Studies in Hypnosis” (see, Lebensohn). Stanley remained in “voluntary” mental hospital commitment for nearly a year and one half. He told his biographer it was really a great experience – he learned “self-control” through “hypnosis.” (Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III, Robert Greenfield, St Martins 2016). After a stint in the Air Force, Owsley took technical positions for military industrial complex collaborators and contractors Jet Propulsion Laboratories and Rocketdyne, all with no college degree, and only one semester of post-High School education.
Almost date-coincident with Time’s honoring his psychedelic achievements, Stanley suddenly ceased LSD production, thus cutting off the most reliable and pure source since Sandoz quit supplying it. Instead, he produced and boldly promoted a new drug, one that David Smith acknowledged marked the seminal turning point in the shifting of Haight-Ashbury as an Eden of free love and peace into the dirty, diseased, and very violent dangerous arm pit of San Francisco. Stanley’s new drug was named STP, after the fuel additive used by racecar driving teams. STP was marketed as a 72-hour LSD trip. 10 times the length of the typical trip because of one important ingredient, methamphetamines (popularly known then as ‘speed’). The drug that both Smiths had previously experimented with and acknowledged caused aggression and violence. Because of the suggestibility, group-think mentality of the drug-fueled culture, STP spread rapidly and wide.
West’s Haight-Ashbury project files indicate he was fully aware of the “experimental” nature of Owsley’s drug work and his/Grateful Dead’s distribution role. Here is the notation in his file of the debrief of an informant (including promise not to disclose):
“He sees Owsley as using the area on experimental grounds, for testing of drugs. He now says Owsley’s place is in L.A. not Los Altos. (with promise I would not reveal, he stated that the Grateful Dead distribute a great deal of acid for Owsley).” (Box 118, folder 9, West UCLA archives)
Even before the month of July 1967 had ended, the San Francisco Chronicle noted of STP in the Haight: “It turned love-ins into speed-ins.” While STP quickly earned a horrendous reputation because of the abhorrent experiences and behaviors associated with it, its introduction marked the beginning of a marked dearth of LSD and overabundance of addictive amphetamines coursing through the Haight, then all of California and the rest of the nation.
David Smith described the rapid decline evident in San Francisco in his book Love Needs Care: “The love philosophy was exploited, and the sense of community vanished during the summer of 1967, while those individuals who gave the district its illusive solidarity drifted or were driven out, to be replaced by others, interested primarily in speed.” The co-author of Smith’s book Love Needs Care, John Luce was more explicit: “The Summer of Love turned into a winter of wreckage, where psychedelic dreams curdled into heroin haze and hollow-eyed hustles, leaving behind not liberation but a ledger of lost souls and societal scars.”
As the Haight-Ashbury model decay spread across the country (including the transition from LSD to amphetamines) the hippie image would transform in American minds from harmless space cadets into cut-throat violent speed freaks. Chao-incarnate.
1968 – ACID HEADS TO SPEED FREAKS
Meanwhile, Manson’s federal protector and HAFMC anchor Roger Smith formally began receiving federal funds for a study he was conducting on amphetamines, Amphetamine Research Project (ARP) in the clinic. He tapped David Smith’s HAFMC administrator Alan J. Rose as his project assistant. Smith continued to facilitate Manson’s probation-violating treks across America and Mexico into 1968. When some of Manson’s girls were left behind, Alan Rose invited them to live in his home. Rose dropped LSD and engaged in orgies with the group. When several of them were arrested during a trip to Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, Rose was rushed there to assist in springing them from jail. Roger Smith personally took custody of and cared for Manson’s infant son for weeks, while he and Rose worked on freeing the child’s mother who was arrested in the affair. Roger used his authority as a federal parole officer to vouch for the women and under false pretenses pulled off what looked to be impossible, the premature release of the Manson cult members.
Rose continued living with the girls, doing drugs and taking sexual liberties with them after their release. When Manson established a base in the L.A. area, Rose physically led the girls in their return south to the Manson cult. He lived, took drugs and had sex with them and participated as a Manson-obeying member for another several months. Two things are crystal clear in Rose’s and Roger “Friendly Fed” Smith’s wake.
First, the ARP, and its two principle federally funded and empowered officers (Rose and Roger Smith) facilitated the freedom and creation of what would become the Manson family cult. Second, that creation would go from relatively peaceful to violent and deadly by transitioning to the very drug the ARP was studying the effects of, methamphetamines.
THE CRIME THAT CREATED CHAOS
The shift to speed began gradually but escalated right up to the Manson family’s infamous ritual murders of pregnant Hollywood star Sharon Tate and her several houseguests in early August 1969. That escalation is recounted by several Manson cult members in their memoirs and trial testimony. Significantly, Manson himself did not partake of speed, stating (unrefuted by family members) in a 1970 Rolling Stone Interview, “I don’t fuck with speed at all and I’ve never had a needle in my arm.” (Reference)
Roger Smith at the very least should have known where the Manson clan was headed. Just a couple months before the Manson carnage, Smith wrote in the following in the Journal of Psychodelic Drugs (Spring 1969):
“The paranoid speed freak is highly prone to violent behavior…Threats of mayhem and murder are common within speed groups, and many begin to collect guns and knives to make the threats more convincing.”
And that same knowledge ought to be attributed to West. More than a year into West’s Haight-Ashbury program one of his project members began a dual role, member of the ARP acting as its representative in West’s larger project. This is documented in this late June 1968 diary entry: “I will be a part of the project [ARP] and attend all meetings and clinical conferences. I will get subjects and follow them through their rel. to the project. Also, I will put in hours at the pad [West’s ‘crash pad laboratory’] as kind of the rep. of the project, when people who are subjects come here just to rap, etc.” – Box 118, Folder 10, page 62 Jolyon West papers, UCLA archives. This puts O’Neill’s Chaos interview with Roger Smith into an entirely new light. Smith went to great lengths to distance himself and his project from Jolly West.
In September 1970 Alan J. Rose finally got around to putting his name to something, a study on the Manson family, The Group Marriage Commune: A Case Study (David E. Smith, M.D., and Alan J. Rose, M.A. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, Vol. 3 (No. 1), pp. 115–119, Sept. 1970). It was most notable for its omissions. First, Love’s boss – Roger Smith – who directed the “study” was absent (even though there are reports Rose was living at Roger Smith’s home at the time of the report). Instead, HAFMC founder David E. Smith co-authored the report. Second, the name “Manson” is missing, though David Smith later confirmed it was about the Manson family. Third, it euphemizes by withholding the details of the cult’s infamous crimes. Finally, and most significantly, not a single mention is made of amphetamines, the fuel Manson lit his cult’s murderous fires with and which the cult began imbibing date coincident with the Amphetamines Research Project (in the person of Love himself) deeply embedding within it. Instead, it speaks only of LSD and marijuana use. Since David Smith has consistently advocated both LSD and marijuana – literally to this day – as passive, peace-enhancing drugs, the replacement of amphetamines with LSD and marijuana is less curious than it is suspicious.
In 2022 David Smith was interviewed by researcher Dan Storper about O’Neill’s Chaos and the suggestion that Roger Smith may have been riding shotgun for some CIA program to create a killer in Manson. David Smith’s response was telling: “I talked with Roger and he denied it. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.”
Roger Smith revealed later that somewhere along the line West’s primary interest went from LSD to amphetamines. He told O’Neill that he I had no idea that Jolly West was recruiting subjects for his LSD experiments in the same HAFMC that Smith operated his Manson contacts out of. But, he did say this about West “I got on this kind of professional circuit with psychiatrists and basic researchers who were looking at high dose amphetamine use and Jolly West was very involved in that.”
Right around the time of the Manson family murders of Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and her friends Jolly West moved to Los Angeles and began his twenty-year run as head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric department. O’Neill’s review of West’s papers indicated that West kept a collection of Manson trial press clippings, but was careful not to keep any notes. He also, very uncharacteristically, rarely commented on the murders, the trial or the cult even though the entire affair played out on his doorstep and grew out of his shared “mouse cage, laboratory” at the HAFMC. However, two psychiatrists under his department were involved in the trial offering their views on how the murderers ought be understood.
In 1970 by the time Manson hysteria became a national thing, David E. Smith offered words that perhaps reflect the fear Operation Chaos set out to create in the first place: “the place [Haight-Ashbury] is full of Charlie Mansons.” (Love Needs Care). In other words: America, be afraid; be very afraid.
The increasingly CIA-controlled mainstream, corporate media would beat that drum for decades to come, until today mere mention of the word “cult” engenders a visceral reaction to most Americans.
In spite of his fingerprints being all over the formation of the killer cult that created that domestic terror, Jolly West – in his inimitable style – soon strutted back into the limelight to capitalize on and exacerbate those fears for the rest of his days.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 