During the rise and development of CIA MK Ultra–related mind-control cults examined here—from the Manson Family in 1969 to Jim Jones’ People’s Temple in 1978—the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MIIC) also explored other areas of the mind. No subject seemed out of bounds in the quest for the answer to mass mind control. It funded and embedded itself in leading psychological movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including those associated with Carl Rogers and B.F. Skinner. It also investigated New Age and parapsychology movements, driven by what amounted to a mind-over-matter Red Scare.
By the mid-1960s, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were alarmed by reports that the Soviet Union was developing psychic powers as a way to bypass conventional defenses. They feared Soviet psychics might infiltrate the MIIC. Intelligence reports suggested the Soviets were using telepathy, psychokinesis, mental influence, and related phenomena for espionage. By 1970, the MIIC began efforts to close the perceived “mind gap” with the Russians.
The CIA had explored psychic phenomena for three decades through MK Ultra mind-control research but had dismissed the field as unscientific and irrelevant to its main aim: controlling individuals and groups. However, as intelligence increasingly indicated that the Soviets had spent decades researching psychic phenomena and were using psychics in intelligence operations, the CIA launched a program in 1970 to catch up.
In July 1972, the DIA published a then-classified, detailed assessment of Soviet mind-research achievements. Twenty pages focused on parapsychology, or psychic research. The report, Controlled Offensive Behavior USSR, stated: “The Soviet Union is well aware of the benefits and applications of parapsychology research. In 1963, a Kremlin edict apparently gave top priority to biological research, which in Russia includes parapsychology…Today it is reported that the USSR has twenty or more centers for the study of parapsychological phenomena…”
The MIIC’s motives for taking up research of its own in this field was both defensive and offensive including the potential creation of “mass hypnosis or mind control through long-distance telepathy” (Pg. 26)
With predictable MIIC cold-war-level paranoia, the report warns:
“The individuals who have studied these effects…have suggested that since these bodies (astral) can travel unlimited distances and are able to pass through solid material (walls), they might well be used to produce instant death in military and civilian officials.” (Pg. 29)
The report is full of comical claims to those studied in the world of confirmed psychic or parapsychological phenomena. For instance, it suggests that hypnotism might be the route to creating predictable out of body abilities; when research would demonstrate quite the opposite: those who were proven to leave the body at will were so alert in the present as to be in the 180-degree opposite state to hypnosis.
Buried in the report was one assessment that turned out to be a more measured, accurate prophecy of what its own research would confirm: “…there is great danger that within the next ten years the Soviets will be able to steal our top secrets by using out-of-body-spies.” (pg. 30)
The report notes, “It is a known fact the Soviet Union takes the appearance of luminous bodies very seriously as evidenced by the Kirlian photography of the human body’s aura.” (Pg. 29) Four pages are devoted to this subject. It is a form of photography invented by Semyon and Valentina Kirlian. It purports to show the energy aura that surrounds the body. That to some new age philosophies represents the astral body – the spiritual entity and its energy that animates, but is not imprisoned by, the body. Others, such as Scientology would posit that the spiritual being (called Thetan) is thoroughly separate from the body and also able to produce the energy that animates and surrounds the body. (Why Scientology’s view is important will become evident as we continue).
The DIA report concludes, “In view of what the human mind has demonstrated it can do with organic matter, and in view of the very real Soviet threat in this sector, the science of parapsychology should be investigated to its fullest potential, perhaps to the benefit of national defense.” (pg. 30)
By the time the comprehensive report was published the investigation had already begun in earnest by the CIA. The report’s emphasis on Kirlian photography may have belied that fact.
The New York Psychic Scene
By 1971, the CIA had embedded agents into the thriving parapsychological psychic world of New York City. For decades the wealthy of New York supported and used psychics to entertain guests in their parlors. In July of that year, America’s most skilled psychic Ingo Swann was invited to the center of the NYC psychic scene, the apartment of mystic Zelda Suplee. It was there that Swann performed a mystical act never before accomplished. Visiting Kirlian photographer Bert McCann asked Swann to project energy in a particular place; inferring he choose an area of the body to so project spiritual energy toward. Instead, Swann said that he would post the energy a few feet above his head. Sure enough, when the film developed it showed a halo-like aura some distance above Swann’s head. Word rapidly spread across the psychic community that a new psychic wizard had arrived.
Cleve Backster was a “former” CIA agent working overtime for acceptance into Psychic/New Age circles in New York in the nineteen-sixties. His lifetime expertise was operation of the polygraph, also known as the lie detector. He gained notoriety for publishing a paper claiming to demonstrate with his device that plants could experience emotion and react to human intentions. See, Life Force vs. Chemicals, for background on Backster having copied (without public attribution) previous research of Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard using his own Electro psychometer.
Coincidentally, only a few short weeks after Swann had taken Kirlian photography to another level, Backster wound up at Zelda Suplee’s for a psychic get together that introduced Backster to the man of the hour, Ingo Swann. Backster invited Swann to his offices to participate in further plant/human interaction experiments. Given the MIIC fascination with Kirlian photography in the contemporaneous DIA report, perhaps the teaming of Swann and Backster was not so coincidental. Swann wound up spending many days over the next several months performing psychic acts for Backster to confirm on his polygraph, mainly by projecting intention toward plants.
During this research Backster told Swann that ‘the CIA had been trying to replicate his plant work and that he had personally taught many of them improved polygraph techniques.’ (The Real Story of Remote Viewing Ingo Swann, available in PDF form at Ingoswann.com/works). When Swann proved to Backster that his intentions and thoughts projected through space to plants registered on Backster’s polygraph, the latter exclaimed, “Boy, are the guys down at the CIA going to be interested in you.” (ibid.)
It was during early 1972 at Backster’s lab that Swann would later claim he first heard of the work of laser physicist Harold “Hal” Puthoff who was doing research on life force at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California. While Puthoff was contemplating somehow measuring and better defining life energy, Backster told Swann that what Puthoff should really be doing is attempting to confirm the abilities of psychics like Swann. He encouraged Swann to reach out to Puthoff. (Swann bio, ibid)
Puthoff and Backset shared intelligence backgrounds. The former worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and in Naval Intelligence. While there apparently is no public record of what Puthoff’s intelligence work entailed (Puthoff did not respond to two written requests to clarify matters) we have discovered exactly what Backster’s Military Intel and OSS/CIA work consisted of.
Backster and CIA Mind Control
Backster skated through his 15-year flirtation with the parapsychology/psychic New Age community by claiming he had only a brief and dull, “polygraph expert” connection with the CIA ending in 1950. A review of his archives housed at the Special Collections library of the University of West Georgia (UWG)* tells a far different story.
In 1947 Backster was given a letter of recommendation from the Brigadier General in charge of the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps. It was a commendation for having devoted ”considerable effort toward development of classified techniques in interrogation.” (see UWG, Dec 17, 1947 letter) That Backster’s work overlapped with CIA Operations Bluebird, Artichoke and MK Ultra (see Deep State and Scientology, CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard) was made clear in a Sept 15, 1947 recommendation by the “Chief of Interrogation Section”:
“I have personally witnessed various research problems conducted by Mr. Backster in sub-conscious isolation…The implanting or erasure of information from the mind: the recall, through the sub-conscious, of forgotten facts or information; and the ability of causing wanted information to be divulged are of inestimable value in espionage penetration or intelligence work…I do not hesitate in recommending Mr. Backster in such fields of endeavor…” (see UWG, Sept 15, 1947 letter)
Backster himself described the techniques he helped develop, called subconscious isolation (SI) in a report dated April 21, 1948:
“In this procedure instead of attempting to extract information from the conscious mind, the interrogator proceeds to break down conscious resistance, and thus gain control of the subconscious mind…One of the common techniques is the application of drugs that will paralyze the conscious will to resist…The state of “SI” can be established and terminated without any knowledge of the person involved…The writer of this report has accumulated his knowledge over a seven year research period. This research has involved the actual infliction of the state of “SI” on hundreds of subjects. Detailed interrogations have been conducted. Classified information has been extracted.” See UWG, April 21, 1948 document)
Backster’s UWG archives include personal holiday greetings from the CIA’s original director of Security Operations, Sheffield Edwards. (see UWG Edwards note 1, note 2) He was deeply involved in Mind Control Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK Ultra. At the time that Backster was making headway into the psychic community, Edwards was busy attempting to covertly assassinate Fidel Castro, including by poisoning and then by contracting hits through the mafia. (see, Edwards at Grokipedia) During Bluebird and Artichoke, Edwards personally commended Backster for his contributions. (see UWG May 13, 1949 commendation).
That covers the common backgrounds of Cleve Backster and Hal Puthoff. It so happened that Puthoff also shared an important experience with Ingo Swann. And it was this relationship that almost killed the MIIC’s quest to win the Psychic Spy race with the USSR.
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*Special recognition is due to University of West Georgia Ingram Library Special Collections. Those folks had the foresight to choose the papers of both Ingo Swann and Cleve Backster for preservation. We will be citing and sharing UWG collections papers multiple times in the next several articles.
On August 26, 1957, an unemployed recovering alcoholic named Charles (Chuck) Dederich showed up to the University of California at Los Angeles Psychiatric department to volunteer himself as a human guinea pig. Dr. Keith Ditman’s experimental LSD program was funded by the federal government and as such was considered a CIA MK Ultra spin-off. Ditman would later answer directly to the dean of the CIA MK Ultra doctors, Lois Jolyon “Jolly” West when the latter took over the UCLA neuropsychiatric department that was eventually named after him.
While under West at UCLA, Ditman testified on behalf of Charle Manson’s co-conspirators in the famous 1969 Tate-LaBianca murder trial (see Manson, Manson II). According to the Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, Ditman testified “that a person using LSD is more susceptible to the influence of a second party, and that Leslie’s (a Manson co-conspirator) use of the drug, plus Manson’s influence over her, could have been significant factors in causing her to participate in a homicide.” (Helter Skelter) This of course was consistent with Ditman’s boss West’s claims that he had personally created the aims of the CIA MK Ultra program, essentially circumventing the will of another person. (see Jolly West Part I, and Jolly West Part II). That included wiping out any memory of the person being programmed to kill or do otherwise in the first place.
It is significant that Ditman supervised the administration of LSD to Chuck Dederich because the only record of the latter’s experience is the later spoken words of Dederich himself. He said, “through a crazy bunch of circumstances, I got a jolt of LSD over at UCLA. I took this under an experimental program…On that date, I became a different person, really and truly.” And that is the totality of Dederich’s explanation for his alleged invention of a drug rehabilitation technique that became extraordinarily famous and controversial. It was called Synanon. Dederich said, “Everything that has happened to me since, Synanon, everything, dates from that point (UCLA LSD trip of August 26, 1957).” (see, Charles Dederich Oral History, UCLA Library)
The fundamental technique that Dederich called Synanon was a group attack/encounter session called “The Game.” Dederich asserted, “The Game began with an idea I had of getting people together in a room to pursue a conversation with a ‘line of no line.’ … Boy I felt great, and everyone else loved it too. The next week they all came back. That was the birth of the Synanon Game, which basically hasn’t changed at all since 1958.” (Synanon papers, UCLA Special Collections).
The Game
The game is a confrontational session where an individual is torn down mentally by his group. The person facing the others would be taken down a notch, or several, psychologically. With no rules or precautions in place, the individual was fair game for hazing of the most personal and degrading nature. It was intended to break down the individual’s ego and reduce his or her sense of self. In the end, a new personality was formed – fundamentally altered by the group that tore down the personality in the first place.
Similar, less extreme techniques are used in any highly disciplined group such as the Marine Corps, competitive sports teams, even businesses where cooperation and teamwork are highly valued. But generally, they stop at the first sign that selfish, entitled behavior is apparently eschewed by the “offending” group member. The Game was different. It was uncontrolled and savage. It resulted in damaged people unquestioningly carrying out the demands of Dederich. It resulted in people severing all worldly contact and withdrawing into a cult. In fact, within a few years, Synanon was no longer in the drug rehab business, but instead became an isolated tribe of its own. Its fundamental methodology, the Game, was almost a perfect replication of what the CIA MK Ultra psychiatrists were a) claiming the Chinese/Korean Communists were utilizing on US POWs to control their minds, and b) attempting to replicate and improve for their own mind control programs.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the CIA’s Time/Life adjunct Henry Luce heavily embraced Dederich with cult-like devotion, honoring him with multi page promotional pieces. This 13-page spread made Synanon runner up only to the celebration of John Glenn’s first human orbit of earth, see LIFE magazine.
Dederich’s celebrity would ultimately wane as “The Game” became positioned with brainwashing. Synanon would spiral from drug rehab marvel to primitive, tribal, and violent cult. Nonetheless, the psychiatric profession continued to promote Synanon’s ways. Offshoots were studied and practiced on prison populations funded by the government. This framework overlapped with Dr. Edgar Schein’s mind control work. Schein was a paid MK Ultra colleague of Jolly West, Robert Lifton, Martin Orne, and Margaret Singer (whom he co-authored a book with) who experimented with mind control under the aegis of “studying Communist methods.” (see Edgar Schein LSD MK Ultra). Schein was credited with redefining “brainwashing” with the more academic term “coercive persuasion.” It was an apt term for CIA MK research. Naomi Klien established in her book The Shock Doctrine that in spite of all the yammering about “interrogation research” the CIA experiments and practice were always in fact geared toward torture techniques to change (control) the minds of subjects.
In 1968, Dr. Martin Groder established a federally funded mind control experimental program utilizing the Game model and Schein’s work at the Federal Correctional Institute at Marion, Illinois. The prison was built in 1963 as a maximum-security replacement for Alcatraz. Groder coined yet another term, Asklepieion (the Greek temple of healing), to carry on the coercive persuasion by ego/personality destruction and replacement.
So effective were the new Game techniques in controlling and changing minds, the prison system transferred scores of ideological ‘troublemakers’ from around the country to have their brains washed of unorthodox ideas. For example, the editor of Black Pride news Ed Johnson (aka Akinsiju Ola), the president of radical group New Africa Imari Obadele, Chicano militant Alberto Mares, prison lawyer Lanier “Red” Ramer, and Black Panther Eddie Sanchez. According to then-Associate Warden Fred Frey “We are a dumping ground. There’s no denying that. We get all the adjustment problems in the federal prison system.” (Southeast Missourian, April 25, 1974). Coercive persuasion was used to secure participation of those minds the MK Ultra doctors were assigned to control and redirect. While some with long sentences were promised routes to earlier release, others were threatened with or subjected to solitary confinement (the acknowledged worst form of human torture) until they acquiesced to play the Game.
The goal was to break down the “convict identity” and antisocial/character-disordered patterns, then rebuild a more “prosocial” self. Sessions used confrontation to “unfreeze” old beliefs and self-concepts, induce change, and “refreeze” new ones. All of this work was a natural offshoot of the 1950’s primary CIA MK Ultra work. A comparison to MK Ultra’s least regulated and more extreme early techniques illustrates. Dr. Ewen Cameron of Canada’s McGill University (a World Psychiatric Association president, see The Deep State and Scientology) executed this “research” with what he termed “psychic driving.” He subjected victims to months of electric shocks and coma inducing drugs. At first, it was accompanied with prerecorded continuous playback loops commanding the victims to forget their past. Then having wiped out the memory, ego/personality, to nothing, Cameron sought to reconstruct the individual mind with months of prerecorded new messages to the comatose patient. Needless to say, the experiments wound up with deeply damaged people, both physically and psychologically. Lawsuits abounded and nearly sunk the MK Ultra program altogether. Undaunted, the MK program marched forward using less controversial methods to bring about the same coercive results. The Game was modelled on the same psychic-driving principle.
The later Schein/Groder Game techniques applied the same principles as Cameron’s psychic driving in an aggressive group confrontation context. A 2024 Cambridge University Press paper explained how the MK Ultra doctors who originally studied Korean/Chinese Communist “brainwashing” turned around and applied the same processes to Americans they wanted to perform thought reform on: “In April 1961, Edgar Schein presented his CIA-funded “brainwashing research” at a conference for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). At the event, titled The Power to Change Behavior, Schein hoped to promote coercive reformation as something genuinely therapeutic. He tried to disabuse his audience from popular fictions surrounding the brainwashing concept. Whether in Maoist China or the United States, he explained, coercive reform programs in both nations applied systematic social pressures, nudging deviants to unlearn antisocial personality traits through a process of mimicking and eventually internalizing prosocial behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. When communists used these methods Americans called it “brainwashing,” but to Schein and other social scientists the electric hype around that label caused a serious problem.” (see, Cambridge Press paper by Mark M. Chatfield) Ironically, this publication overall seems to regret that confrontational Game programs were taken out by an epidemic of civil rights violations complaints. Still, the paper is chock-full of pertinent facts supporting our narrative.
The later prison “treatments” at Marion and other facilities, were described by Black Panther (and former Marion inmate) Eddie Griffin: ““In ‘game sessions’ members of the group accuse a person of playing games, not being truthful with the group, lying, and so forth, or the person is accused of some misdeed or shortcoming. Before he is allowed a chance to explain (which is considered only as more lying), he is relentlessly barraged by dirty name calling until he confesses or ‘owns up’ to his shortcomings. He is then accused of making the group go through a lot of trouble in having to pry the truth out of him. So, for this crime, he is forced to apologize. ‘Marathons’ are all night versions of literally the same, except that they include local community people who come into the prison to be ‘trained’ in the techniques. After so many hours of being verbally attacked and denied sleep, a person ‘owns up’ to anything and accepts everything he is told. After being humiliated, he is encouraged to cry. The group then shows its compassion by hugging him and telling him that they love him. These techniques exploit the basic weaknesses in human (aggregative) nature, especially those weaknesses produced by an alienating society, i.e. the need to be loved, accepted by other people, and the need to be free.”
The programs ultimately were implemented in ten different state prison projects across the country.
Unsurprisingly, the Schein/Groder experiments were heavily criticized as coercive thought control, targeting political “troublemakers” (including Black Muslims and other activists), and was discontinued amid lawsuits and congressional scrutiny around the mid-seventies. The CIA had to look for other venues with which to continue the coercive persuasion experimentation and practice. During the late seventies and through the eighties The Game was applied to juvenile delinquents. It was hailed and officially supported in the states of Florida and Utah for years until lawsuits alleging violations of constitutional rights and mind damaging practices broke the activity. Some have pointed to the timing of Jim Jones’ transfer of People’s Temple to the Guyana jungle was another form of mind control experiment venue change. After all, The Game was the central control practice of Jones’ People’s Temple, under the heading “Catharsis.”
How all this ties to our narrative was touched on in the Cambridge Press study where all of the groups we have covered thus far are listed together as related:
“The brainwashing scare retained its communist associations, but the meaning of the term shifted with concerns about scientific advancements in behavior modification, government interest in mind control technologies, and concerns about “brainwashing” in violent cults. In the Vietnam era, concerns grew around the American military’s use of psychological torture in counterintelligence interrogations, and antipsychiatry activists slandered Skinnerian methods of behaviorism as sinister. Shocking events such as the Manson family murders, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and conversion to the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Jim Jones’s orchestrated mass suicides and murders at the People’s Temple compound in Guyana also heightened popular concerns about “brainwashing.” The nature of the threat increasingly symbolized the consequences of pathological individuals and government groups that abused their power by infringing [on] human or constitutional rights. Since the 1970s, instead of something that communists might do to Americans, brainwashing symbolized something that deranged Americans did to unsuspecting victims or enemies.” Still, the study and public at large seemed to overlook the facts we have presented to date: to wit, the consistent Military Industrial Intelligence Complex connections to each of these groups.
Jolly West’s UCLA continued to support Synanon in myriad ways throughout the sixties and into the seventies. At least two professors repeatedly advocated on Synanon’s behalf before state agencies running into conflicts with the group. It also supported Dederich’s expansion into the US prison system. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of those prisons was the Federal Correctional Institute at Terminal Island (Los Angeles) at the time Charles Manson was doing imprisoned there.
As of the mid-seventies Jolly West himself (then head of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Department) was receiving and organizing literature from colleagues he respected and worked with in the “anti-cult” profession that singled out Synanon and the Game as positive societal forces. Those files include a treatise by West’s (and his partner Margaret Singer of Berkley) mind control and anti-cult colleague, Berkley Sociologist Richard Ofshe. He authored Chapter Six Synanon: The People Business in the 1976 University of California press volume The New Religious Consciousness. Ofshe claimed to have spent an entire year as a “participant-observer at Synanon.” He gave this glowing testimonial:
“The philosophical principles on which Synanon’s value system is based rest on traditional American notions of individual responsibility for action, the idea of finding within oneself the strength to control one’s life, and the faith that one can, in some mystical way, look within oneself and know what is right…
“It seems to me that the core of Synanon’s therapeutic system is precisely the fact that absolute demands are made on the individual. In considering Synanon’s authoritarianism we must not lose sight of the substance of what is demanded. The demands are, in the main, for adherence to the highest principles of honesty, rejection of behavior regarded as undesirable by those undergoing change and by the society in general, and pursuit of perfection…
“Insofar as the system is successful, it results in persons who modify their observable behavior in socially acceptable ways and come to believe that they are in control of their actions and able to govern themselves.” (Ofshe chapter of the New Religious Consciousness, source: Jolly West Special Collections, UCLA libary)
Notwithstanding the unusual support and encouragement from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, UCLA, and the most influential American mainstream media, Dederich and Synanon leadership regressed into alcoholism, created a secretive and physically abusive cult, and by the late seventies had for all intents and purposes folded. It did not go out in spectacular fashion like its CIA cult brethren the Manson Family, the Symbionese Liberation Army and Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple. Instead, it disintegrated like the other intelligence cult that used its coercive persuasion Game methods to control its members, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon. The Manson families practiced the Game under the rubric “Charlie’s Rap.” Same ego/personality destruction-reconstruction method as the Game, different name. The Moon Group’s version was called Public Confession. Same technique, different name. Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple called their version of the Game, “Catharsis.” Identical method, different name. The Symbionese Liberation Army was perhaps most honest, calling their version of the Game “Maoist self-criticism and re-education.”
All of the CIA related cults examined in this series used the group confrontation personality destruction and reconstruction methodology that CIA MK Ultra doctors originally ascribed to Communist Chinese and Korean “brainwashing.” They then repackaged the techniques, rebranded them under some ‘transactional analysis’ label and used them to destroy and create new personalities in victims of its experiments. Ironically, the authors of this coercive persuasion program would spend the rest of their careers attacking what they called cults – largely excluding the groups they had a hand in creating. In a devious twist, those very doctors, led by Jolly West, would subsequently use their experiments to accuse other groups they wanted to eliminate of applying their own “coercive persuasion” techniques. More importantly, the Military Industrial Intelligence complex would use the methodologies and principles learned to implement mass mind control mechanisms that effect our everyday lives today.
I began a series on 28 February 2025 focusing on the last area of personal experience and knowledge I had not shared concerning my time in Scientology. As it unfolded, I found myself asking more questions. That led to more research. Along the way a larger narrative began to emerge, much bigger than the original subject, the Deep State and Scientology. The investigation has led to a broader history of Mind Control in America. It may not be apparent to some readers as dozens of current affairs posts have interrupted the flow. For context, I am listing below in date sequence the articles that so far make up this narrative. I will update it with each new post that relates to the History of Mind Control in America. We are only now getting into the thick of the original endeavor and the larger picture it has led us to.
The Jonestown Guyana massacre of 18 November 1978 set into motion one of the largest media shock treatments ever implanted upon the American psyche. Forevermore Americans would shiver at the mention of “cults” and equate following any irrational, destructive path with “drinking the Kool Aid.” As the official, one-dimensional narrative has schooled us, the head of the People’s Temple cult in Guyana persuaded over 900 Americans to commit suicide in unison by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide solely by the power invested in him by being a “cult” leader. The reactive equation branded in American minds was cult=death.
What few remember today though is the far-reaching chain of irregularities in the investigation and coverup of the event that gave immediate birth to conspiracy theories that have survived – and sometimes thrived – to this day. For the most part those theories revolve around the CIA’s involvement with – and apparent protection of – the leader of the People’s Temple, Jim Jones.
Most of the work on those theories are included in the largest and most definitive archive on the subject of Jonestown which is maintained at San Diego State University (Jonestown & People’s Temple, A Digital Archive). It was created and is curated by Rebecca Moore and her husband Fielding M. McGehee. They began their work shortly after the tragedy and it continues to this day, forty-seven years later. Ms. Moore’s interest was personally driven; she wanted answers as her two sisters were causalities of Jonestown.
While Ms. Moore seems unconvinced of some of the conspiracy theories, in her devotion to seeking the whole truth, she includes in the archives the best developed conspiracy work on the subject as well as the most vehement attempts to debunk that work.
The alternate histories point to and document, among many other anomalies, the following little-known facts:
Longtime CIA connections to People’s Temple (PT) leader Jim Jones.
CIA chemical experimentation background of Jones’ biggest donor – whose wife, daughter and son became top Jones’ insiders and enablers.
The CIA’s involvement in years of then-ongoing covert operations to preserve the power of the tin pot dictator it had installed in Guyana.
The State Dept/CIA consequently conceded/granted full authority/responsibility for American citizens at Jonestown to that regime, which consequently dutifully served Jones and PT.
The massive stores of MK Ultra (CIA Mind Control experiments) drugs found at Jonestown.
Evidence that many people publicized as having committed suicide through voluntarily imbibing cyanide laced Kool-Aid were actually stabbed in the back with syringes filled with cyanide.
The lack of standard medical examiner autopsy procedures applied to the victims postmortem.
The CIA friendly Guyana regime’s torching of all official records maintained on Jonestown.
The military-precision of the assassination of Ryan and many unexplained oddities surrounding the event – most prominent of which was the CIA-friendly Guyanan military apparent witnessing and enabling of the event.
Perhaps the most credible indication that there was in fact a nefarious CIA connection comes from the voice of reason concerning Jonestown, conspiracy skeptic Rebecca Moore. She and her husband battled the CIA over withheld Freedom of Information Act documents concerning Jonestown for several years in Federal District Court and up to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals and back again. Rebecca and Fielding established settled FOIA law along the way and put the CIA’s feet to the fire (see e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/10/us/appeals-court-rebukes-cia-in-jonestown-information-case.html) Yet, in the end the system enabled the CIA to conceal the truth. Rebecca once shared these thoughts on the matter:
The CIA has toppled foreign governments, financed strikes, incited riots, encouraged and executed political assassinations, all for the sake of our national security. And are we more secure?
Certainly the CIA’s information on Jonestown might help answer that question. Did it have foreknowledge of the suicides, or of the assassination plans. Did it encourage the paranoia endemic in the community? Did it set up Ryan for a hit? If it did not know about Jonestown, why didn’t it? Was the number of drugs present in Jonestown sufficient to characterize the project as a mind control experiment? And did the CIA sponsor the experiment?
We are seeking “conclusive evidence” which will either exonerate the agency or condemn it. The inconclusive evidence we’ve seen so far suggests that the CIA expanded its interest in Guyana to include 1000 Americans who set up a community in that country. The inconclusive evidence hints of CIA monitoring, and perhaps infiltration and manipulation, of Jonestown activities. The inconclusive evidence indicates the CIA knew more about the suicides than it has told anyone.
The people of Jonestown were American citizens. If the CIA knew what was going to happen, and let it, then Fred Branfman is right when he says that, “the major enemy … will not be the KGB or the Chinese or anyone else abroad. It will be the CIA.”
When even those demonstrably most well-informed and even-keeled raise such concerns, to accept the official narrative lock, stock and barrel would be the epitome of gullibility.
Rather than relitigate matters that can be disputed, which might take a lifetime, I will rely almost entirely upon the Congressional record to establish how Ms. Moore’s, and many like her, suspicions may have merit. That record begins BEFORE Jonestown and extends beyond it as we will examine here. A month ago, I would not have taken this course because I could not have. That is because Congress chose to seal much of the evidence it took in more than 47 years ago during its probes of the matter. Only very recently, thanks to the dogged work of the Moore/McGehee team, extensive transcripts that have been sealed for all that time have been made available to the public. I will share what has been uncovered by Moore/McGehee and again promote their definitive site SDSU Jonestown, where I am sure these transcripts and more will soon be made available.
As noted in the previous few posts, Jonestown happened to unfold at the very time that U.S. House representative Leo J. Ryan was in the fight of his life with the C.I.A. over whether the country would go forward as a transparent democratic republic or an opaque, secret autocracy of sorts. (see, Light vs. Dark, Republic vs. Empire). I’ve since learned that Ryan’s pursuit of the truth concerning the CIA’s involvement with the formation and operation of the Symbionese Liberation Army was not the only such matter pending when he departed for Guyana on 14 November 1978. Just two weeks earlier another committee in which he was a critical participant had issued a report on the Unification Church (Sun Yung Moon’s Moonies organization – see the Fraser Report). The October 31, 1978 report documented years of Moon’s group acting as an intelligence and lobbying arm for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The committee (and Ryan himself) expressed concerns that the CIA was aware of Moon’s activities given its role in founding the KCIA in the early sixties and its close coordination with it since and the widespread unchecked bribery and corruption that went on in Congress and the White House right under its nose. The Committee recommended that a task force be formed by several federal law enforcement agencies to follow up on its finding with potential criminal charges. Many rationally figured that as Ryan was the most persistent Congressman on policing the CIA (e.g. through enforcement of his Hughes-Ryan Amendment – see Light vs. Dark) it would be Ryan who would give the federal task force the cover and impetus it would need to dig deeper into the thick corruption. Clearly, there was no one more aware of the CIA’s fascination with, and formation and operation of, cults for nefarious intelligence purposes.
With that backdrop let us examine the facts surrounding the assassination of Leo J. Ryan in Guyana and the mass “suicide” that followed in its wake.
Jonestown
Ryan’s purpose in travelling to Jonestown was to reconcile conflicting facts. First, a number his constituents had sworn under oath that Jim Jones’ People’s Temple (PT) settlement at Jonestown was holding people against their will, administering powerful drugs, and conditioning them to prepare to commit suicide en masse. The most telling features of the reports might have been the techniques Jones was utilizing to create deployable, programmed agents to carry out his will. It was eerily similar to the ego stripping and reconstruction processes so long studied by the CIA under MK Ultra and MK Search and utilized by cults connected to the CIA (Manson, SLA, Moon, and more that we will further analyze in a future article). For more than a year, Ryan had urged the State Department to act on these reports. The State Department refused. The State Department/CIA run embassy in Georgetown reported that they had investigated Jonestown first-hand and never saw any evidence that corroborated Ryan’s constituents.
Upon this factual footing, State/CIA went a step further, first advising Ryan not to go, and then actively obstructing his investigation. The State Department/CIA resistance to even discerning the truth was so intense, Ryan – who had no desire to travel deep into the Guyana jungle – felt morally obligated to personally investigate his constituents’ growing concerns. While the CIA/State Department discouraged Ryan’s trip to the very moment he departed the capital of Guyana Georgetown to the Jonestown jungle compound, it was never accompanied by any concern for his safety, but instead by the “rights” of PT members and Jim Jones. That was despite the later disclosed fact that the Embassy was quite aware that PT had smuggled large amounts of firearms into Jonestown through its cozy relationship with the CIA installed government of the agency’s handpicked and installed dictator Forbes Burnham. Despite two subsequent congressional hearings, no elected representative (much less the FBI or CIA) so much as even politely asked the State Department or the CIA to reconcile these damning facts. It was particularly disheartening because Ryan’s own Foreign Affairs Committee – chaired by CIA friendly Clement Zablocki – took the lead in the probes.
On 17 November 1978 Ryan along with his Aide Jackie Speier, several concerned family members of Jonestown residents and several interested media personnel departed Georgetown Guyana on a propellor driven aircraft. They were accompanied by only one Embassy personnel, “former” CIA man and Deputy Chief of Mission Richard “Dick” Dwyer. They journeyed for just over an hour to a landing strip in a small outpost in the northwest Guyana jungle called Port Kaituma. They then travelled another hour by truck over a primitive jungle road to the People’s Temple compound called Jonestown.
Ryan visited privately with a number of PT members whose families had asked to check on their welfare and their ability to leave if they so wished. By the end of the evening several members had expressed the wish to go back with the Ryan delegation. The party slept at Jonestown because the Port Kaituma airport was allegedly too primitive to enable nighttime take offs and landings. The next day Jones was visibly shaken by the news that a handful of his followers had elected to leave, notwithstanding Ryan’s assurance that such a small percentage of his cult leaving could serve as Jones’ best evidence that a) most folks were there on their own determinism, b) conditions were satisfactory and c) no one was being held against their will. One of Jones’ henchmen attacked Ryan with a knife but was wrestled to the ground before he could strike.
The delegation left on the afternoon of November 18. Suspiciously, by the time they arrived at the airstrip the two planes they had ordered were not present. This prompted Dwyer to lead the party into Pt. Kaituma to search out a means of communication to Georgetown. When the two planes appeared in the sky, Dwyer inexplicably stayed behind while the delegation’s truck headed back to the airstrip. Dwyer conveniently missed seeing a large tractor pulling a trailer filled with armed PT security staff heading to the airstrip, driving down the same road he was on.
Dwyer caught up with Ryan’s delegation as they approached to board the aircraft. Dwyer went to chat with the pilot from outside the cockpit. He did and said nothing while the PT tractor and trailer full of security staff pulled right up to the area – just yards from Congressman Ryan and the delegation. Several alleged PT members alighted from the trailer and opened fire on the defenseless group. Five were killed, including Ryan and the most informed member of the media Bob Harris, along with 2 other media members and a Jonestown defector. 5 more were severely wounded including Jackie Speier. Six had minor wounds (including Dwyer) and seven managed to escape injury altogether by fleeing into the jungle. Dwyer testified that the assailants followed the initial barrage with close-up shotgun fire to assure the death of Ryan. With no opposition whatsoever, the survival of 13 of the original 18, and the point blank shot gun finishing of Ryan, indicates the mission was designed to assassinate Ryan as opposed to censor what the delegation had witnessed to the rest of the world.
Minutes later Jones announced to his hundreds of followers that Ryan was dead and that to avoid capture and torture by the U.S. government they all now would do for real what they had drilled for years, drink the cyanide laced Kool-Aid. And so the story goes 904 people complied – killing their dozens of young children first and following Jones’ noble example. However, Jones would later be determined to have died from a gunshot wound to the head – written off as suicide contrary to the forensic evidence available. The body count at Jonestown was initially 400 and it kept escalating day by day. It seems the military and CIA cleanup crew could not keep their stories straight. Many books have recounted the avalanche of debunked reported official facts about what really occurred that night in Jonestown. But, as our story is about the man who stood between CIA compliance with the U.S. Constitution and opaque, deep state military industrial intelligence complex rule we’ll focus on his assassination. It also happens to be the only aspect of the tragedy where indisputable visual proof exists. That would be in the form of this three-minute NBC news camera footage that survived the massacre:
It captures the moments before and the first several seconds of the assassination operation.
At :29 you can see the first view of the smaller of the two planes that arrived for the return of the Ryan delegation.
At :58 you can see the red Jonestown tractor just behind the rear of the aircraft. Dwyer testified that the presence of the trailer and tractor on the runway were “very much to my surprise.” (Page 179, Dwyer Transcript) Despite Dwyer asserting that his leading the escape from Jonestown was a heroic attempt to save the life of a Congressman that had already been attacked by knife, Dwyer did nothing about Jones’ operatives’ presence. And no Congressman, nor any investigating agency, pressed or challenged him on that.
At 1:30 you can see the large, double prop plane.
At 2:09 You can see Congressman Ryan (light blue pants and white shirt helping to carry a trunk) and Dwyer (dark pants and long-sleeved beige shirt, greeting Ryan).
At 2:20 Dwyer peels off to talk to the pilot and Ryan continues toward the plane entry stairs. Despite the Jonestown tractor and trailer’s presence just behind the aircraft, which you will see in the next angle, “very much to [Dwyer’s] surprise”, Dwyer can be seen nonchalantly yucking it up with the pilot.
At 2:30 a man in dark pants and beige shirt walks onto the screen from the right. That is Guyanese army guard #1 carrying what Dwyer later confirmed as an automatic rifle.
At 2:55-3:00 you get brief glimpse of Guyanese army guard #2 and a short flash of the butt of his automatic rifle. Dwyer testified there were three Guyanese army guards there, all carrying automatic weapons to protect the Ryan delegation.
At 3:01 the news camera catches the Jonestown tractor pulling the trailer with the assassination crew on board right beside the aircraft.
At 3:02 One assassin in front of the tractor fires off the first shots as more gunmen jump out of the trailer to join in the massacre. Within seconds the filming ceases.
You are looking at the most incriminating, yet most overlooked, evidence of the conspiracy to assassinate Leo J. Ryan.
Those Guyanese army men equipped with automatic weapons were capable of clearing out the Jonestown cult corps in a matter of seconds as the latter were all carrying conventional arms. Instead, the soldiers did not fire a single shot. Remarkably, not a single one of the soldiers was hit by the Jonestown hit squad; whereas, the other 17 people who were not able to flee into the jungle, every one of them, was struck. On March 21,1979 the Congressional Committee asked Dwyer why the army did not protect the delegation. His answer: “The Lieutenant said it took them a few moments to get their weapons ready and he was unsure as to who was shooting whom. It appeared to him simply Americans firing at Americans, and before he could reach any conclusion, the incident was over.” This despite the fact Dwyer testified the assault went on for a number of minutes, the Jonestown crew walking up to shoot Ryan point blank with a shotgun to assure his death. No one, no Congressman in three hearings and one additional investigation, none of the dozens of FBI agents assigned to investigate, ever challenged the bald-faced illogical explanation by the surviving CIA man on the scene. It is there to see with your own eyes.
Shortly after the massacre, Jones announced Ryan’s assassination to his followers and initiated the mass suicide by cyanide ingestion. As noted at the outset, there is a plethora of evidence to challenge the assertion that 904 people willingly participated. But, put that aside for a moment. Stay focused on this fact. The testimony and forensics at the Port Kaituma airstrip massacre indicate it was an assassination aimed specifically at Ryan. What more did Ryan know, or did Jones and the CIA think he knew, that the others did not? Is it possible they suspected that Ryan was hip to the experimental nature of what Jones was engaged in? After all, Ryan had very recently documented his concerns about CIA creation of another cult leader, the Symbionese Liberation Army’s leader Donald “Cinque” Defreeze (SLA Pt II, and Light vs. Dark).
Leo J. Ryan’s best friend and administrative aide Joe Holsinger certainly thought it very likely Ryan was onto something. Though Holsinger did not make the trip to Guyana (Ryan had him run his office while he travelled) he was the most informed on the subjects of Jones, People’s Temple, Jonestown, and their relationship to the State Department and the CIA. As in our last series on the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA Pt I, SLA Pt II) we have the alternative, in this case the African American, press to thank for preserving the results of Holsinger personal investigation. According to the 15 July 1980 edition of the Washington D.C. Afro-American, after expressing disappointment with Congress’s whitewashing of the Jonestown affair Holsinger was of this frame of mind:
“Joe Holsinger, Ryan’s chief administrative assistant, outlined information which he says indicates the existence of a covert Central Intelligence Agency operation in Guyana that had not been reported to the congressional oversight committees. Further, Holsinger said he now believes in the ‘horrifying possibility’ that Jonestown was part of a ‘mass mind control experiment’ by the CIA as part of its MK ULTRA program, which was supposedly terminated in the early 1970s.
“…instead of terminating the MK ULTRA program, Holsinger said, the CIA simply shifted its programs from public institutions to private organizations.
“Holsinger, who has been pressuring for a congressional investigation into CIA involvement with the settlement, believes that Ryan’s visit to the ill-fated colony may have pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding alleged CIA activities there, and would have eventually exposed them.”
The entire article is well worth the read as it contains the CIA’s motive, why the Black community would be the one most interested in uncovering the truth and more particulars on the absurdity of the established narrative of Jonestown. (see DC Afro American) It ends with this, “Holsinger also hinted at the possibility that Ryan, because of his interest in Jonestown, ‘had been led into, or allowed to fall into a trap.’”
Holsinger’s now unsealed testimony (Holsinger transcript) spells out how the State Department/CIA manipulated the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act to accomplish two ends. First, the agencies cited them as their justification for having provided Jones with detailed, up to the minute, reports on every move and intention they learned about Ryan and his interest in Jonestown; as well as justification for keeping Ryan utterly in the dark as to the known actions and movements of Jones and the People’s Temple. The second end accomplished by State/CIA was they would later use these justifications to launch assaults over the years to weaken both Acts which were designed to make government transparent to the people, and the people’s lives private to the government. Note, that equation is pretty much the opposite today. There is virtually no right to individual privacy from the government and virtually no transparency of federal government machinations. Objectively, and not coincidentally, Leo J. Ryan was the last true warrior fighting like his life depended upon it to prevent that democracy-killing inversion from coming about.
The complete transcripts of the testimony of U.S. Ambassador to Guyana John Burke and the D/Chief of Mission Richard Dwyer strongly corroborate Holsinger’s testimony and views (Dwyer transcript, Burke transcript). What is most remarkable is how defensive and combative Burke and especially Dwyer are in justifying their long list of clearly negligent acts to the detriment of Leo J. Ryan. Both, in their attempts to defend themselves are seen defending Jones and his operation as if they are paid advocates for them. Reading the full transcripts of Holsinger, Burke and Dwyer resurrects Holsinger from the grave of “conspiracy theorist” the corporate media and Congress buried him in forty years ago.
In real time, Holsinger’s mission to uncover the truth was a credible and real struggle. Even the lawyer for cult leader Jim Jones, Mark Lane, acknowledged Congress was part of the cover up, “When the Committee on Foreign Affairs Committee report, dated May 15, 1979, was released it became clear that the committee had marshaled a substantial amount of evidence and had determined to suppress almost all of it.”
America’s most renowned muckraker of the 70’s and early 80’s, Jack Anderson, chronicled the growing public perception that the CIA was behind Jonestown. In his 27 September 1980 column (see, Anderson column) he covers the lawsuit brought against the CIA by Leo Ryan’s surviving children. He mentions Holsinger and several of his disclosures concerning the CIA and Jonestown. Another lawsuit followed on its heels brought by Jonestown survivors. The suits were a credible threat to CIA secrets. The attached memo memorializing a conference, chaired by none other than Deputy Director of Central Intelligence Frank Carlucci (see Leo J. Ryan vs. Frank Carlucci), documents the CIA was concerned about the suit: “the possibility that under the rules of discovery we may have to provide their attorneys with sensitive information.” (See CIA memo)
The lawsuits – like so many others over the years attempting to hold the CIA accountable – were predictably dismissed. But they helped bring Holsinger’s quest for the truth into the consciousness of the mainstream. By the Spring of 1980 many Americans were questioning the establishment Jonestown narrative. After two Congressional Committee investigations into the matter brushed off and avoided probing the CIA links to Jonestown, public opinion was not satisfied.
The growing acceptance of the idea that the CIA was involved in Jonestown prompted Ryan’s former colleagues to demand answers. On April 5, 1980 the media reported: “House Foreign Affairs Committee investigators have called for a new examination of the Central Intelligence Agency’s role – if any – in the Guyana Peoples Temple tragedy that ended in the killing of an American congressman and the mass suicide of cultists. The committee’s staff experts urged that allegations made by aides to slain U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan of San Mateo, Calif., be referred to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for its review.” (see San Antonio Light, Washington Bureau report Pt 1 and Pt 2). The report cited six ‘contentions’ that were raised in its own hearing on the matter, referring them to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (the Congressional arm most capable of learning CIA secrets) to investigate:
“ – The contention that the CIA conducted a varied range of ‘activities’ in Guyana;
“- The contention that a CIA agent witnessed Ryan’s assassination at Port Kaituma Airport;
“- The contention that the CIA may have violated the Hughes-Ryan Act by failing to report a covert operation in Guyana; (Hughes-Ryan, largely authored by the slain congressman, requires the CIA report to Congress before spending money on covert operations – as opposed to normal intelligence gathering.)
“- The contention that the CIA made a conscious decision to allow the tragic events of Nov. 18, 1978 to occur in order to avoid disclosure of CIA covert activities;
“- The contention this alleged reporting failure was conscious and calculated because Rep. Ryan was a co-author of the Hughes-Ryan act; and
“- The contention the CIA was used to promote and protect American commercial interests in Guyana.”
By the end of 1980 those who shared Leo Ryan’s passion for transparency in government were hopeful of the outcome of the probe. Unfortunately, at the same time the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex was orchestrating a sort of ‘revolution’ of its own.
The showdown between Congressman Leo J. Ryan and D/Director of Central Intelligence Frank Carlucci (see conclusion of CIA and CIA and SLA Cult, Part II) represented something much bigger than just the forceful personalities involved. It represented the better angels and worse demons of the American psyche battling for the future. It was the personified microcosm of a larger conflict that was coming to a head at the end of the nineteen seventies. The confrontation would resolve the burning question pending at the end of two decades of chaos and turmoil in America: would we be an open, transparent democratic republic or a dark, opaque, autocratic empire?
With highly publicized Congressional Committees throughout the seventies confirming the disclosures of investigative journalists, by late in the decade the CIA and the secretive, militarist deep state it served was reeling. Committees chaired by Senator Frank Church and Representative Otis Pike, along with the presidential Rockefeller Commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, created plenty of embarrassing headlines about a security-intelligence state gone wild. The CIA’s reputation and influence were in the gutter. As a mid-seventies hit song by the band War put it, “I know you’re working for the C-I-A — they wouldn’t have you in the Maf-i-a.”
In 1976 Jimmy Carter was elected as a result of congressional and public uproars about government corruption in the wake of Watergate and the FBI and CIA abuses that had been exposed. Determined to restore trust, he appointed an old Naval Academy classmate of his, the reputed straight-shooter Admiral Stansfield Turner to head the CIA and intelligence community as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). As Turner wrote in his autobiographical Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence, “President Carter had a mandate not only to clean house and raise public trust in national leadership but also to get the country’s intelligence apparatus under control.” The appointment of Turner signaled that Carter would attempt the reform that Congress had promised yet failed to deliver on. Turner noted that while the Congressional disclosures had highlighted the need for change, “In the end, the Rockefeller Commission’s report was too watered down to amount to much. The Church [committee] report recommended new charters for the Defense Department’s agency for coordinating intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); the CIA; and the NSA; but these were not written. The Pike report wanted the DIA abolished, criticized the NSC (National Security Council) oversight mechanism, and called for increased congressional oversight, but had a rather small impact.”
Turner Targeted
While Stansfield Turner’s appointment satisfied the demands of the Democratic Party base, he was soon the target of a coordinated campaign to paint him as too weak and dovish to turn the battered agency around. The trigger for the backlash occurred when Turner fired 820 clandestine CIA agents, the heart of the old school CIA gangster clan. The backlash was no reflection of public sentiment. It was literally created by the CIA itself. Turner wrote in Burn: “The DO [Directorate of Operations CIA] people seized on the reduction of 820 positions as an opportunity to attempt to get me fired. They launched a disinformation campaign (one of their basic skills).” The CIA-infiltrated corporate media took its cue and attacked Turner for executing the very reforms he was appointed to institute. For example, the November 28, 1977 edition of Time magazine reported: “The agency is in turmoil because at least 800 of its employees are to be ‘terminated.’ All are members of the CIA’s 4,500-man Directorate of Operations, the clandestine branch, whose activities… have damaged the reputation of the CIA.” Time went on to quote the ghoulish former head of CIA clandestine operations James Angleton — the single agent most implicated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — to pile on Stansfield with criticism for allegedly weakening America’s defenses. (see, Spooked Spooks at the CIA). Newsweek joined the effort to shackle Turner’s reforms, “Carter’s man at the CIA is under fire for purging the ‘dirty tricks department’ and reforming the whole spy system.” Ditto the Washington Star, “Turner tackles the CIA with vigorous inhumanity.”
In reality, the CIA ran a clandestine operation on its own director in violation of its own charter, in the wake of four years of brutal exposure of just such abuses, apparently demonstrating to President Carter who really drove the affairs of American government, the Military Industrial Intelligence Complex (MIIC). Carter, as was his want, quickly caved in. His “solution” was to bring in the prototypical Mr. Fixit of espionage. He appointed CIA black ops veteran Frank Carlucci as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) – the CIA’s second in command. A popular D.C. beltway radio station summed up the matter in a Feb 10 1978 report: “[K]ey members of the Carter Administration were trying to oust CIA Director Stansfield Turner…[whose] controversial management decisions drove morale at the CIA to a new low…Then word came from the White House that Frank Carlucci was to be named Deputy Director of the CIA…[whose] nomination marked a change of direction for the Agency.” Clearly indicating a major regime change and return to the old CIA business as usual, the report continued, “Turner would surrender control of the day-to-day management of the Agency to Carlucci…”
That “surrender” by Turner was no exaggeration. Carlucci had negotiated control of the agency before accepting the appointment. Stansfield had protested and was overruled by Carter. This was evident in CIA’s FOIA reading room data base. I discovered an entire file in there that closely monitored this transition, consisting of dozens of articles and documents from 1978 covering nothing but a) the CIA’s reputational and operational crisis, b) the alleged new lease on life afforded it by the arrival of Carlucci, and c) Carlucci’s intensive public relations campaign which pressed to scale back reforms, most particularly the Freedom of Information Act and Congressional oversight as it applied to the CIA and intelligence community. The content of that file corroborates this entire article (see, Carlucci and Confidence Crisis)
Carlucci: master of dark CIA ops
Why Carlucci? For starters he was old school CIA, the one that used the State Department as its cover to run black ops across the world (just as the brother tandem Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles had established in the 1950s – see, The Devil’s Chessboard). Carlucci was fresh off a scandal of his own that proved the point. The most popular political party in Portugal was screaming “foul” for Carlucci’s alleged CIA black ops meddling in a Portuguese national election under cover as the U.S. Ambassador to the country. Carlucci survived the controversy by shameless, blanket denial. (see The Strange Career of Frank Carlucci, Counterpunch)
Carlucci was well-schooled in that art. 18 years earlier as a “State Department official” in the Congo, Carlucci was involved in perhaps the CIA’s most damning and embarrassing chapter. That was the assassination of the country’s duly elected President Patrice Lumumba. It did more to discredit the CIA and America with the rest of the world than any other single dark operation. That is because Lumumba was also the moral leader of the entire continent of Africa at a most critical time: the abolition of European colonization and institution of self-Democratic rule. Although it later surfaced that President Eisenhower green-lit the assassination and Carlucci was intimately involved with Lumumba in his final days, he survived the fall out by bald faced denials. (Counterpunch)
While Carlucci was – being charitable – at minimum aiding and abetting the killers of Africa’s first (and perhaps last) great hope for institution of true democratic republics, Leo J. Ryan was beginning a 180-degree divergent career path.
Mr. Ryan goes to Washington
In the thick of Carlucci’s State/CIA Congo work WWII naval veteran Ryan was a High School English and Math teacher in South San Fransico, also serving as a city council member. In 1961 he chaperoned his school’s marching band to Washington D.C. for John F. Kennedy’s inaugural parade. He said that the experience inspired him to run for higher office. In the sixties he served as a California state assemblyman and in the seventies as U.S. Representative for the 11th US Congressional district covering the San Francisco Peninsula. Ryan became a sort of ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ figure. A regular Joe with little tolerance for corruption. He was a hands-on investigator. He once posed as a prisoner and lived for weeks under cover in general population in the California prison system in order to see the conditions for himself. He also doggedly pursued investigations and reforms of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, which by the time he arrived in Congress was giving the United States a huge international black eye.
Ultimately, Ryan became the greatest threat to the unlawful and immoral, yet routine, CIA clandestine operations. From his position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (and its CIA subcommittee) he co-authored a bill amendment with Senator Harold Hughes that did more to reign in the rogue CIA than any other act of Congress. The purpose was to a) prevent the CIA from continuing unlawful domestic operations in violation of its charter and b) prevent the CIA from running its own rogue foreign policy hit squad as it had done for forty years, seriously damaging the United States’ image and global moral authority. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment was passed in 1974. It required the CIA to clear covert operations with the President of the United States beforehand and inform Congress of the fact of such approvals in a timely manner. Thereafter, Ryan continued to police the enforcement of the Act through close scrutiny of the CIA.
CIA hunts the Policeman
Throughout the seventies the CIA was closely monitoring Ryan’s efforts to increase control over the unruly agency. For example, its 27 June 1975 briefing to the DCI (Director of Central Intelligence) notes the tracking of “H.R. 8203 (Edgar and about 10 others, including Leo Ryan) Designates Majority and Minority Leaders of each house of Congress as members of the National Security Council.” Another measure to tighten oversight of the CIA by ten members of Congress, and the CIA only saw fit to mention one name, that of Ryan. (see, CIA Monitors Ryan)
While President Carter was quickly brought to bay by the CIA, Ryan was not so easily contained. By January 1976 his watchdogging had incurred the wrath of both the Director of the CIA William Colby and the President of the United States (and Warren Commission member) Gerald Ford. According to New York Times investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Ford was upset that reports of the CIA’s meddling in Italian elections were published. Apparently, he was all for election interference in democratic western nations, it was the disclosure of the skullduggery that had him alarmed. Ryan was quoted “The passage of my amendment (Hughes-Ryan) was supposed to open things up. Somehow the assumption was that if the CIA has to tell more people, things will change. Well, they didn’t. What we don’t have is some form of approval and disapproval”, said Ryan. Hersch wrote, “[Ryan] said that he was disturbed by the fact that he and his colleagues learned of the CIA programs only after they had been formally approved by the President and put into effect.” (New York Times, CIA AID REPORTS EVOKE FORD ANGER, January 7, 1976).
The Washington Star reported, “Complaining bitterly about secrets that were exposed as a result of congressional briefings, CIA Director William E. Colby today urged Congress to sharply reduce the number of lawmakers entitled to know what intelligence agencies are doing…BUT COLBY reserved most of his criticism for the House Intelligence Committee and for Rep. Leo Ryan, D-Calif., a member of the CIA subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee.” Of interest to our CIA MK Ultra series, the Star also noted “Colby also…criticize[d] the Senate Intelligence committee for failing to cover up the identity of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (founder and director of MK Ultra) in its report on assassination plots.” (see, Washington Star, January 23, 1976) In the same breath as fingering Leo Ryan for shining light on the CIA, the Director was most alarmed by Congress shining that light on the author and director of the CIA’s most notorious decades-long crime against America, the MK Ultra Mind Control program. (Note, Gottlieb was implicated in the Lumumba assassination along with Carlucci).
Ryan’s concerns were further articulated and reported that same month. “‘I know there are three other CIA operations going on,’ Rep. Leo J. Ryan, D-Calif., told a news conference. ‘I am aware of CIA activities around the world to which I have strong objection,’ said Ryan, a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence. ‘I know about them, but you do not, I will not mention them because they are secret.’ But Ryan attacked Ford’s ‘national security’ reasons for keeping the two reports secret. ‘I think they endanger our national reputation rather than security,’ he said.” We all know how that ‘national security justifies government secrecy’ debate went. Sadly, Leo J. Ryan was the last elected official in America who literally risked his life in favor of maintaining an open, democratic society – which is why we have the opposite today instead. (See, Ryan – United Press International).
By early 1977, the CIA was actively working to combat reforms authored and policed by Ryan. In its April 27, 1977 “Action Plan on congressional oversight”, the CIA legislative affairs office notes, “the Hughes-Ryan Amendment would have to be repealed or amended.” (see, CIA Action Plan)
The Clash of the Titans
By late 1978 when Carlucci was handed the keys to reinstate the military-industrial-intelligence complex (MIIC) total autocratic control, only one person stood in his way. At that moment, Leo J. Ryan (House Rep, CA-11, San Francisco) was the greatest threat to unlawful and immoral, yet routine, CIA clandestine operating basis. He would represent the last hope for significant and lasting reforms to the rogue agency.
In late August 1978 Ryan visited Patricia Hearst at the Pleasanton, California Federal prison. He reported to the press that he believed the prison population was growing hostile toward Hearst. (see, SF Gate Ryan visits Hearst) It might have been there that Ryan learned first-hand about the strange origins of Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, the apparent MK Ultra Manchurian candidate (see CIA and SLA Cult Part II). So moved was Ryan by whatever he learned from and about Ms. Hearst and her erstwhile SLA cult leader, that he – along with California Senator S.I. Hayakawa – personally delivered a petition to the White House to have Hearst’s sentence commuted.
Exactly two days later brings us back to Ryan’s September 27, 1978 letter to the CIA Director demanding answers as to the CIA’s possible creation of an MK Ultra Manchurian candidate in Donald Defreeze. Note that Ryan is so confident there is fire behind the smoke he gives the Director an out from the specter of more embarrassing CIA scandal headlines: “In the event your investigation produces an affirmative response, I would appreciate a personal conversation with you about the matter before anything is done with the information.” This has led to speculation that Ryan intended to allow the explosive facts concerning CIA MK Ultra training and experimenting at Vacaville to remain a secret, provided DCI Turner could arrange for its ultimate victim – Patty Hearst – to be freed. The tone of the letter makes it sound as if the former naval officer Ryan had a friendly relationship with Admiral Turner.
Unfortunately, by then Turner had been stripped of control over “day to day operations” of the CIA. We can now divine the significance of the reform-minded DCI Turner being elbowed out of the picture by dark ops master D/DCI Frank Carlucci. On October 18, 1978 Carlucci issued a lawyerly non-denial denial to Ryan: “Thank you for your letter of 27 September to Admiral Turner requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville. It is true that CIA-sponsored testing, using volunteer inmates, was conducted at that facility. The project was completed in 1968. Your letter referred to Donald DeFreese, known as CINQUE, and Clifford Jefferson, both of whom were inmates at Vacaville. 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.” (San Diego State University Jonestown Archives, emphasis supplied) As noted in CIA and SLA Cult Part II, “as far as our records reflect” was meaningless in the light of the CIA’s proven record of mass destruction of incriminating records. The last thing Ryan could be expected to do in light of Carlucci’s slippery response, would be to put the matter to rest. Unfortunately, there is no record of how Ryan responded to Carlucci’s obstruction. The entire matter was about to be forgotten because of the scandal that would eclipse both the Manson and Hearst affairs and every other media shock of the seventies.
Jim Jones and the People’s Temple
Ryan’s district also happened to contain the largest number of loud defectors from the infamous Bay Area People’s Temple (PT) cult of Jim Jones. Years earlier the controversy surrounding the PT had become so deafening that Jones and his several hundred followers had set up a compound called Jonestown in the remote jungle of Northwest Guyana.
Throughout 1978 Ryan’s constituents had been demanding that the U.S. government do something about reports that Jones was running strange mind control operations against his several hundred, mainly African-American, followers. Detailed sworn accounts told of large caches of weapons maintained to keep members imprisoned, dispensation of large amounts of psychiatric drugs, and regular instructions from Jones that he and his followers needed to prepare to commit suicide when the government ultimate swept down upon them.
The State Department and its embassy were unnaturally nonchalant about the matter. Two screaming oddities about the embassy were thoroughly overlooked by the federal government, congress, and the media when Jonestown ultimately imploded and became the biggest cult scare in world history. First, the US Embassy in Guyana was primarily a CIA controlled operation. That is because in the sixties when Guyana was swinging to the left politically, the CIA swooped in with its patented regime change ops and helped install a tin pot dictator, Forbes Burham. The CIA’s continuing presence throughout the seventies was required as Burnham’s popularity was so dismal it took election meddling and propaganda operations to keep him in power. Why Guyana was so important was made crystal clear earlier this year when a US ‘special military operation’ kidnapped the elected President of its neighbor Venezuela. Why? Venezuela is the most mineral rich country in the world. Guyana was also the world’s greatest exporter of aluminum bauxite – the raw ore used to produce aluminum.
The second strange fact about the CIA-controlled US Embassy in Guyana was that it was suspiciously friendly with Jim Jones. Reports of Jones’ abuses were becoming more alarming and frequent throughout 1978 by first-hand witnesses who had managed to escape Jonestown. Yet, every ‘inspection’ of Jonestown by embassy personnel to verify the claims were always preceded by ample warning to Jones directly from the embassy. Predictably, the embassy never found anything to act upon. The U.S. government reports were effectively gaslighting Jonestown victims.
Leo J. Ryan decided that for whatever reasons the State Department and CIA were going to protect Jim Jones and Jonestown over the rights and concerns of his constituents. On November 14,1978 while Ryan was contemplating his next step to get around the obstruction of D/DCI Frank Carlucci concerning Patty Hearst and Donald DeFreeze, he boarded a flight out of Washington D.C. to Guyana. It was an attempt to do what the CIA and State Department refused to do, to save underprivileged, minority People’s Temple members from the clutches of a suicide-bound mind control experiment.
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.
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.
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 
