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.
When you timeline the facts, often otherwise obscured truths emerge. That is why propagandists pay so much attention to confusing the critical factor of time. Accurate time sequence is the way we are going to approach the matter of some rather odd meddling that surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Some new revelations emerge.
In February 1959 Hubert Winston Smith, a psychiatrist and lawyer, invited his friend and colleague Jolly West to participate in a New Orleans seminar for Smith’s Law-Science Academy. The group was formed to test how far the boundaries of law could be stretched in freeing cold-blooded criminals into society. A ‘logical’ extension of the Military Industrial Mind Control complex aim of “infiltration of law.”
West dominated Smith’s agenda, making four of the eleven presentations given there. It was not surprising since both Smith and West share deep ties. They had extensive mutual MK Ultra and military psychiatric connections. For example, West associate and fellow MK Ultra contractor Dr. Stewart Wolf also attended the 1959 New Orleans conclave and had worked with Smith on legal cases. Wolf, like West, was mentored by confirmed MK Ultra experimenter and funder and personal friend of Alan Dulles at Cornell University medical center, Dr Harold Wolff. I obtained a stack of documents from the West personal archives that show Stewart Wolf working feverishly to establish West’s MK Ultra lab at University of Oklahoma at West’s behest in 1955. Even though Wolf was West’s titular superior (head of the school of medicine), and West was still in the throes of the Jimmy Shaver situation (see Jolly West Part II) and not yet working full time at the University, Wolf was head hunting for West’s MK Ultra doctor line-up, running each move by and taking direction from West.
Winston Smith, like West, was a proponent of plying uncooperative defendants with drugs and hypnosis to forcibly extract the “truth” out of them. The West, Wolf, Smith connections (and other military mind control complex ties) are thoroughly documented in an admirable piece of investigative journalism by Max Arvo in his three-part Jack Ruby series at Jack Ruby: A Review and Reassessment. For those wanting documentation beyond what we provide in this article, Arvo’s series is a virtual legal brief with a plethora of exhibits on much of the same ground we cover here.
On October 3,1963 Louis Jolyon West made the following pronunciamento to a meeting of the Mental Health Association of Oregon:
“Now we are at the dawning of a new era in the field of psychiatry because we are learning for the first time how to produce temporary mental derangement in the laboratory.”
The Oregon Journal reported that “Dr. West listed the new hallucination drug LSD, along with other drugs, hypnosis and sleep deprivation as some of the things that psychiatrists were using to produce temporary mental illness effects in normal people…The most important contribution of [LSD] so far is in producing model mental illnesses, he believes.” (Oregon Journal October 3, 1963) West was publicly claiming to have made good on his 1953 promise to MK Ultra boss Sidney Gottlieb to create the means “for inducing in [subjects] specific mental disorders.” (see Jolly West Part I and Part II)
Fifty days later, on November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The farcical narrative the media was fed and dutifully and incessantly drilled into the public psyche included the ‘fact’ that the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was a ‘lone nut.’ A person who up to that fatal day had never apparently been evaluated as insane was dubbed stark-staring mad and yet capable of pulling off a military grade, triangulated ambush on the President of the United States – all on his lonesome. The gaslighting had only just begun. (For a short primer on the absurdity of our mainstream conditioning on the incident see Oliver Stone’s JFK; or go further with Stone’s follow-up documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass; and/or take a deeper, documented dive at Kennedy and King, where Arvo’s series is posted.)
The November 22/23 1963 several-hour initial Lee Harvey Oswald interrogation – sans lawyer for the accused – resulted in nothing but denials from Oswald and the remarkably resolute sounding declaration that he’d been designated and set up as the “patsy” for the biggest crime of the 20th Century. Despite being the most important interrogation in American history, no recording of the interrogation ever saw the light of day. Some have ventured that Oswald was a botched product of MK Ultra Mind Control – programmed to believe he had committed the crime. A failure because instead of dutifully copping to the crime, he retained enough bearings to realize he hadn’t had done it. We are not going there because the best potential evidence of Oswald’s real provenance would soon disappear, forever.
On November 24, less than 48 hours after his arrest, the most important prisoner in the history of the United States of America, Oswald, was shot down on live television by one Jack Rubenstein, better known as Jack Ruby, a mob and intelligence community connected strip club owner in Dallas. Seemingly a desperate act following 36 hours of futile attempts to make Oswald incriminate himself. As much as the world craved answers out of Lee Harvey Oswald, it shifted its attention toward Ruby in hopes of getting closer to the truth.
Within 3 days, after many machinations involving Ruby’s brother being led around by mob and media connected intelligence types, San Francisco’s Melvin Belli was announced as counsel for Ruby. In keeping with the sea of contradictions the JFK assassination case served up, Belli was not even a criminal lawyer. Instead, he was a high-profile, ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer, evidenced by his sobriquet “the king of torts.”
It just so happens that Melvin Belli was good friends with a local Dallas lawyer named Joe Tonahill, who was immediately brought on as local counsel. It also just so happened that Belli and Tonahill were close friends and associates of Jolly West colleague Hubert Winston Smith of Law-Science Academy fame and also a professor at University of Texas.
Two more peculiar events occurred before the first day of December 1963 even arrived.
First, two days after the Belli dog and pony show (announcing to the media the Texas arrival of the king of torts), Jolly West held one of his own. He announced to United Press International that a panel of ten “nationally known psychiatrists” had agreed to serve as “friends of the court” to “examine Ruby on an impartial basis.” West claimed he was put up to the caper by one Charles W. Webster, professor of criminal law at Southern Methodist University (See, West Announces Panel). One little problem, Webster said just the reverse. It was the self-promoting West who first came to Webster to be a local authority tag to help West wheedle his way into visit Mr. Ruby (see Webster discredits West). West went to his grave thirty-six years later never disclosing who actually put him up to pursuing Ruby. By the end of this article, I reckon you’ll be able to make a relatively educated guess on who that was. Likewise, the ten alleged nationally known experts were never identified. Yet, before the Grand Jury had even decided on the prima facie case against Ruby, West infiltrated the court and asked presiding judge Joe Brown to set West loose on Ruby. Brown rejected the move.
The second strange event occurred concurrently to West’s hijinks. His drug-hypnosis proponent friend Hubert Winston Smith was instantly tapped by his friends Belli and Tonahill to create an “insanity defense” for Ruby. By the time Smith was flat-out establishing the theory and assembling the team of psychiatrists who would dutifully testify to its veracity, the only psychiatrist to have examined Ruby, Dr. John T. Holbrook, found on 25 November that Ruby was “clinically and legally sane.” Holbrook would conduct subsequent examinations on Dec 4 1963 and January 27-29 1964 making essentially the same finding.
In fact, so apparently lucid was Mr. Ruby that by the time of trial, Smith’s own panel of three hand selected and coached psychiatrists had to agree that Ruby at that time was clearly ‘sane.’ So, reminiscent of the strange West affair involving Jimmy Shaver in 1954 (see, Jolly West Part II) the defense became that Ruby was “temporarily insane” at the time of the killing of Oswald, but apparently had regained his senses once the terrible deed was done. The jury thoroughly rejected the psych double-talk and by March 14,1964 Jack Ruby was sentenced to die by the electric chair.
If you study the case in any depth, you will soon realize there is next to no probability that Ruby could have pulled off the execution alone. A known mobster walking deep into a police station to stick a gun in the belly of the most guarded prisoner and valued potential witness in the history of the United States of America? The official motive repeated ad nauseum by the media was patently absurd on its face: “Ruby was so emotionally upset by Kennedy’s assassination he wanted to spare Jackie Kennedy from having to go through a trial.” Right, from a venereal disease wracked underworld figure with CIA and mob connections, both of which wanted Kennedy dead.
Predictably, Ruby fired Belli. He then formally hired the psychiatrist/lawyer who bungled his insanity defense; due no doubt to the facileness with which Smith threw his own hand-picked and recruited psychiatrists under the bus, sharply criticizing the performance of all of them. Smith blatantly lied to the court, claiming he had not seen the reports of the trial psychiatrists he had himself assembled and coached. In perhaps a Freudian slip, reminiscent of West’s diabolical work on “behalf of” Jimmy Shaver (see Jolly West part II), Smith vowed to use hypnosis and drugs to “get the truth out of Ruby.” Had this come from the mouth of the prosecutor that is one thing, but Winston was the supposed defense lawyer.
So, let us say that you promised the sure-fire insanity defense, it backfired, and now whatever conglomerate (organized crime, CIA, or combination of both) is dependent upon Ruby’s silence and/or discrediting is demanding results, or else. In order to manufacture insanity, who you gonna call?
Operation Mind Control Fixer
Smith’s first action was to recruit his friend and colleague Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West onto team Ruby. Smith moved the court for permission to urgently have Ruby’s mental state examined anew. According to West’s later report on the examination, he discussed with Smith in advance using “Hypnosis and intravenous sodium pentothal were included among possible techniques to provide further information concerning Mr. Ruby’s state of mind at the time he shot Lee Harvey Oswald on 24 November 1963.” It seems, Jack Ruby was in for the Jimmy Shaver treatment – see Jolly West Part II. By late April Smith had obtained court clearance for West to visit and “examine” Ruby.
Before we proceed, let’s review the Jack Ruby psychiatric scorecard up to the day West entered the scene. Five psychiatrists, four of them for the defense, had found Ruby to be compos mentis in seven different reports to the court. None, zero, nada, zilch had found Ruby to be non compos mentis. (Chaos, chapter 11 and endnotes, Tom O’Neill, and Jack Ruby: A Review and Reassessment)
Only on the day Jolly West – master hypnotist, LSD experimenter, and self-proclaimed insanity-producing wonder – met Jack Ruby did all of that change, forever. As was the hambone’s wont, West immediately announced to as many media members as he and Smith could muster that Jack Ruby was at that moment “obviously psychotic”, suffering from “auditory and visual hallucinations.” West found further “corroboration” for his insanity finding: Ruby did not trust West and did not want to be admitted into a mental hospital saying he felt safer in jail. In other words, that he wouldn’t submit to institutionalization under the grand master of MK Ultra Mind Control was proof the man was insane. (see West’s 29 April 1964 report)
West told the media that if Ruby was not at once committed to a hospital he would become “hopelessly insane.” Get it? Incurable. Yet, the very next day, West said Ruby seemed to have regained his wits. An apparent less-than-24-hour psychotic break. Max Arvos made a well-reasoned case that Ruby might have been plied with LSD to create “insanity”, just as West promised he could do less than two months earlier. Arvos noted that Ruby’s breaks with reality – according to West’s knee jerk admission – seemed to last about the average amount of time of an LSD trip (8-24 hours), not the expected weeks to months that a normative psychotic break would last. Indeed, it seems Ruby went in and out of psychosis at the flip of a switch until the day he died. And the only common denominator in Ruby’s orbit during that entire time was Dr. Lois Jolyon “Jolly” West. All of the other more than half dozen psychiatrists involved in the case came and left; only West remained, in spite of Ruby’s consistently expressed horror at his presence. In spite of the one-time slip up immediately stating Ruby snapped out of it the next day, West would spend the rest of Ruby’s life – and beyond – stalking him and continuously asserting the man’s permanent departure from reality.
In either event, the judge was not impressed by West’s April 29, 1964 report and Smith’s attempt to have Ruby committed to a mental hospital where West could have his way with Ruby full time. Ruby remained jailed pending his appeal.
Warren Commission Cover-up
Over the next two months Ruby’s sister Eva Grant negotiated on Ruby’s behalf to have him testify before the Warren Commission, formed to be the final-word investigative body on the JFK assassination. The Commission was infamously corrupt, being effectively controlled by member Allen Dulles, the bitter JFK-fired former head of CIA who created MK Ultra and its predecessors Operations Artichoke and Bluebird. As such it was the wolf guarding the hen house, suspect number one left in charge of the crime enquiry. Grant’s and Ruby’s actions were vigorously opposed by Smith and the rest of the legal team. In fact, just as a deal was finally struck with the commission, less than a week before Ruby’s appearance, Smith suddenly resigned as counsel, claiming financial hardship. (In fact, Smith had been fired by University of Texas; but soon after he was magically swept off his feet and ushered to University Oklahoma for a position his partner in crime Jolly West had arranged).
The full transcript of the Warren Commission’s examination of Ruby reads like lawyers interrogating a person fully in the throes of an amphetamine-laced LSD*(see endnote) trip (see Ruby’s Warren Commission testimony). For several minutes at a time Ruby would appear lucid, reciting details with incredible precision. The moment Ruby was asked questions that got him off what sounded like an automatic, amphetamine-driven narrative, Ruby would flip into delusory rantings about a real time extermination against Jews that was going on across the United States. Warren himself seemed flummoxed, several times reassuring Ruby that he was perfectly sane; only to have Ruby then take off on another flite of rambling fantasy. The one constancy with Ruby during the testimony was his repeated request to be taken to Washington under special protection so that he could in safety tell the entire story of how he came to gun down Oswald. The request was repeatedly denied as if that were some psychotic rambling despite Warren stating on the record, “you are speaking very, very rationally, and I am really surprised that you can remember as much as you have remembered up to the present time”, and “There are many witnesses whose memory has not been as good as yours. I tell you that, honestly.”
Significantly, Warren and the other Commission members were so disinterested in investigating or even asking rational follow ups they entirely ignored this whopping admission by Ruby:
Ruby: “Mr. Belli and I decided–oh yes, when I went to say that I wanted to get on the stand and tell the truth of what happened that morning, he said, ‘Jack, when they get you on the stand, you are actually speaking of a premeditated crime that you involved yourself in.’”
That statement by Ruby utterly discredits the central official line we have been force fed and choked on for 61 years since. That is the lie that Ruby committed a crime of passion with no sign or evidence of pre-meditation. The prosecution did not even plead a premeditated murder. Yet, Ruby admitted to Warren’s face that his own lawyer knew and Ruby did not correct him that the killing of Oswald was his own words, “pre-meditated”, in other words planned in advance, with malice aforethought.
CIA Shrinks Stalk the Warren Commission
Despite CIA connected operatives’ failure to have Ruby pronounced insane by the Dallas court, they doubled down in riding shotgun for the agency with the Warren Commission.
First, Jolly West, sent a letter dated June 23, 1964 directly to the head of the Commission, Chief Justice Warren about the time the Commission’s evidence intake was in its wrap-up stage. West offered his unsolicited opinion on Ruby’s motivation for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. He touted his exclusive expertise having personally examined Ruby, not mentioning that the Dallas judge and juries considering Ruby’s competence to participate in his own defense utterly rejected West. West proffered that the man he diagnosed two months earlier as “positively insane” had an actual reason for killing Oswald. West wrote that the motive was “wanting to prove that the Jews – through himself – loved their President and were not cowards.” Notwithstanding the ham-fisted anti-semitic nature of the evaluation (implying Jews are cowards and unloyal to America), West also failed to mention that according to his own six-page detailed report of examination of Ruby, not once did Ruby utter or even hint of any such motivation. It was purely an invention out of the dark mind of the Black Sorcerer’s apprentice. (Chaos, Chapter 11 and endnotes)
Second, West’s original CIA MK Ultra mentor Donald W. Hastings (see Hastings I, and Jolly West Pt II) was corresponding with Warren Commission de facto chief investigator, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, through 1964 and 1965. While the content is not known, toward the end of their pen pal relationship, Hasting published what he had apparently been feverishly working on in 1964 and 1965: a four-part series titled “The Psychiatry of Presidential Assassination.” In it, Hastings obviously with zero examination and zero first hand-evidence offered up with certainty the state of mind of Lee Harvey Oswald:
“…[T]here is not, in my opinion, any reasonable doubt that the assassin had paranoid schizophrenia.” A ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard criminal conviction without the need for any messy trial, let alone psychiatric examination.
On the other hand, in the very same paper, Hastings offers another absolutely contradictory ‘out’ for the Commission, presuming Oswald was found to have acted ‘rationally’: “It is possible that Oswald still clung to the hope that by silence and denial he might be freed and be allowed to go to Russia, this time as a person of importance who would receive a hero’s welcome.”
Was it coincidence that two long-related CIA MK Ultra contractors – while under CIA contract – were working on and around the Warren Commission without identifying themselves as affiliated with the agency whose head (Dulles was known to have effectively run the CIA for many years after his JFK firing) should rightly have been suspect number one? (re Dulles continuing de facto leadership role, see e.g. The Devil’s Chessboard, Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, David Talbot, HarperCollins 2015) Was it coincidence that one-time MK Ultra mentor (Hastings) and his MK Ultra novitiate (West), both then-current MK Ultra contractors both created out of whole cloth “insanity” verdicts on both central players in the JFK assassination? Recently discovered documents cement the Hastings/West connection going back to 1948 (Hastings/West I), and show West in 1951 reporting to Hastings on their mutual MK Ultra associates at Cornell, including Allen Dulles’ personal friend Dr. Harold Wolff, and West’s 1950s/1960’s titular boss at University of Oklahoma, Dr. Stewart Wolf (Hastings/West II).
West Stalks Ruby to the Grave and beyond
Despite West’s best efforts, no judge nor jury would ever come to believe West’s assertion that Ruby belonged in an institution under West’s ‘care.’ While Ruby’s appeal was pending in 1966 the Texas Criminal Court of Appeal ordered the trial court to hold a jury trial on the sole issue of Ruby’s sanity. It seems there was some controversy on whom Ruby actually wished to serve as his counsel; the Court wanted to know whether Ruby was capable of directing his own defense before proceeding. While the lawyers came and went, Joe Tonahill (friend and confidante of Hubert Winston Smith) was still standing at the June 13, 1966 sanity trial, with a number of other lawyers also purportedly speaking on behalf of Ruby. While the hearing was held for purposes of ensuring Ruby’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel of his choice, the lawyers claimed the trial was a violation of Ruby’s constitutional rights. They attempted to keep Ruby out of the court room and while he was out of the court room argued that Ruby be censored from speaking. They refused to participate in protest while making a slew of continuing objections. The morning session of the transcript through page 29 reads as if the lawyers themselves had their own sanity issues. (June 13, 1966 Ruby sanity trial transcript)
In the afternoon session, several witnesses testified to months and months of apparent lucid, sane conduct on the part of Ruby in prison (pages 30-67 of transcript). Finally, over the objections of his own lawyers, Ruby himself demanded to address the jury to avoid being placed under the control of the likes of West. He gave a short statement attesting to his own sanity (page 68 transcript). He stated “I never did try to make anyone believe that I was of unsound mind. I don’t know where that originated from or who conspired to do that without my full mental capacity and agreeing with this…”
After listening to the witnesses and Ruby himself, the jury ruled that Ruby was in fact sane.
But that did not stop West. Notwithstanding Ruby’s distaste for West, he periodically weaseled his way into Ruby’s cell to pronounce him non compos mentis. Handy work against a patient who despises you and won’t speak to you. There is no evidence any other psychiatrist had a say about the psychiatric drugs Ruby would regularly consume throughout his nearly 3-year stint in prison. But, there is ample evidence he did consume such concoctions (his sister referring to them as ‘tranquilizers’). And, it is a fact that West was the only psychiatrist who remained connected to the case during that that entire period (none others lasting more than a few months). West’s pursuit of Ruby was dogged. According to his own testimony, West examined Ruby on six separate occasions over two years.
West continued to pursue Ruby even after his death. He testified at the probate trial of Ruby’s Estate on March 27, 1967 (transcript of proceedings). As ever West asserted that Ruby was insane at the time he executed a jailhouse Last Will in 1966. Even though the date to which West assigned Ruby’s insanity occurred a year after West had last ‘examined’ him, he testified with arrogant certainty of his findings. The court rendered a judgment that never adjudicated the issue of Ruby’s 1966 sanity. But, West had done his duty beyond the bitter end.
Mission accomplished, I suppose. The insane label seemed to stick forever in spite of repeated failures to get a court to agree; perhaps just in case some hidden Ruby real confession ever surfaced.
Epilogue
Max Arvos discovered the appropriate bookend to accompany this story’s beginning which was West’s overt claim of his ability to create insanity with LSD with relative ease: “During a June 1967 discussion between defense lawyer Phil Burleson and prosecution lawyer Bill Alexander, Alexander stated that: when West first testified on Jack Ruby’s mental condition, in 1964, (according to Alexander) he said that Jack needed treatment for what Alexander thinks is just “death row psychosis” and fairly normal, and suggested that he be treated with LSD (then in an experimental stage).” – ‘Notes on Burleson-Alexander Panel Discussion’, Radio-Television News Directors Association, WKY Studios, Oklahoma City, June 3, 1967. Notes by Elizabeth Price. Document in West’s UCLA papers, Box 164, Folder 3, p.1.
*fn The significance of LSD mixed with amphetamines will come into sharp focus on a later installment of this series: Jolly West and Charles Manson
Before we get to Jolly West’s involvement in the JFK assassination cover-up, another interesting link to the MK Ultra Shock psychiatrists vs. L. Ron Hubbard saga has surfaced.
It arises in the 2 July 1953 letter from the CIA’s Poisoner in Chief Dr. Sidney Gottlieb to his favorite apprentice Dr. Jolly West that we treated in Jolly West Part 1. In the letter Gottlieb assured West that all his demands in exchange for full fealty to the MK Ultra Operation (CIA Mind Control) would be taken care of. The letter introduces a new character to the story. Someone whom neither I nor anyone I am aware of knew the identity of.
Before we peruse the document, you should know that Sherman C. Grifford is in fact an aka cover created by and for Sidney Gottlieb. That was discovered and made known in 1979 by John Marks in his seminal book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Marks was also able to determine that Chemrophyl Associates (see letterhead) was a CIA front group created to try to hide the agency’s involvement in MK Ultra operations. With that in mind, now take a look at the 2 July 1953 letter, here.
Upon reading it myself, the first question that leapt off the page was who is the mysterious Dr. Hastings referred to by Gottlieb twice? To date that question has stumped researchers. He must have been formidable to have been consulted in the process of “making our initial assault on the top brass in your outfit” (the Air Force). He apparently had the clout to pave the way for West to get whatever he wanted to practice MK Ultra mind control unmolested – someone who held sway at the highest levels of the Air Force.
Some investigating discovered a Dr. Donald Hastings who fits the bill. According to a University of Minnesota bio (attached), Hastings was the head of psychiatry for the entire Air Force during World War 2 and then worked directly for the CIA. He became head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota from 1946 through 1967. Perhaps it was he who introduced Jolly West to CIA work when Air Force active-duty officer West received his medical degree from the very same university and department that Hastings led?
If there remains any doubt that we’ve located the right Hastings, this ought to dispel it. As a result of the Congressional hearings of the late seventies the CIA itself (in the very rare public disclosure of any MK Ultra related information) was forced to admit to the University of Minnesota administration that its psychiatric department was a CIA MK Ultra test tube throughout the fifties and sixties, the entire time in which Dr. Hastings reigned. (see CIA University of Minnesota article)
This would indicate that West might have been involved in the precursors to MK Ultra (Operations Artichoke and Bluebird) and puts him much closer temporally to the fiends who began this human experimentation in Nazi concentration camps under Dr. Josef Mengele. West may well have been groomed for the role while still a student. After all, West went straight from University of Minnesota Medical School graduation under CIA shock doc Hastings into his residency at Cornell University Medical Center, whose chief of Neurology was none other than MK Ultra kingpin and personal friend of CIA head Alan Dulles, Dr. Harold Wolff. It was Wolff who later established the Society for Investigation of Human Ecology, which for many years served to launder CIA payments to corrupt and co-opt leading psychiatrists and psychologists across America. West states the following about his time at Cornell in a 1953 letter to CIA MK Ultra Director Sidney Gottlieb:
“It was at Cornell that my previous experimental work on hypnosis was done…My work in hypnosis there was done quite independently.” (read, sub rosa)
This was the several year tutelage of the young Dr. West. It explains how it was that West with zero practical work experience began his career in charge of the entire Psychiatric Department of what would soon become the Air Force’s largest medical institution (Lackland Air Force base).
Finally, but most importantly to our investigation, Hastings was in perfect military lock step with his MK Ultra brethren (Overholser, Cameron, West) in another important regard. Hastings was one of the first to speak unequivocally against L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics. He treated Dianetics in the most scholarly way he could muster given his intelligence and temperament. He was quoted in the 5 July 1951 edition of the Minneapolis Star as delivering this anti-Dianetics pronunciamento: “It is a pile of nonsense.” See Minneapolis Star.
I came across yet another document linking Dr. West with Dr. Hastings. It is contained in this 1956 letter from Arthur W. Melton to none other than the renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner (click here forSkinner letter). Hastings and West are noted as directly collaborating on mind research right within the descriptive boundaries of MK Ultra.
Incidentally, when you consider the crowd Skinner ran with it is no longer any wonder how he became instrumental in introducing psychological doctrine that was critical in destroying the fabric of western civilization. For a brief factual primer on that score, see my little back and forth with Chat GTP (below). Further, much unnoticed, psychologists of the highest stature were recruited in great numbers coincident with MK Ultra psychiatrist procurement. As the “very best” psychiatrists ran their drug/pain/hypnosis experiments, the top psychologists were lending their collective learning to the CIA in developing mass mind control. Once we’ve completed the MK Ultra story, we’ll explore that in more detail, including its far-reaching effects that influence our behavior to this day.
+++
Influence of B.F. Skinner on society:
Chat GPT on BF Skinner
You said:
how did b.f. skinner help destroy the fabric of western civilization?
ChatGPT said:
That’s a big question, and it depends on whether you’re asking from a philosophical / cultural critique angle or a more direct historical one. B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) himself was not a political conspirator; he was a psychologist who developed radical behaviorism and popularized operant conditioning. But critics (including philosophers, theologians, dissident psychologists, and cultural critics) have argued that his theories—once adopted into education, governance, advertising, and psychiatry—helped erode certain pillars of Western civilization.
Here’s the case usually made:
1. Reduction of Man to a Machine
Skinner argued that human beings are nothing more than bundles of conditioned responses shaped by reinforcement.
This denied free will, the soul, conscience, and moral responsibility—all foundations of Western thought from the Greeks to Christianity to Enlightenment philosophy.
His 1971 book Beyond Freedom and Dignity explicitly argued that concepts like “freedom” and “dignity” are outdated fictions that interfere with scientific social control.
Impact: This view undercut traditions that held the individual as sacred, replacing it with the idea that humans are programmable objects.
2. Engineering Society Through Conditioning
In Walden Two (1948), Skinner described a utopian community engineered entirely through behavioral conditioning—where government, family, and culture would be replaced by “scientific management” of behavior.
He was influential in education reform: behaviorist teaching machines, programmed instruction, and reinforcement schedules shaped schools through the mid–20th century.
Critics saw this as laying groundwork for technocratic social engineering, where “experts” replace parents, traditions, or communities in guiding human life.
Impact: Education, once aimed at cultivating virtue, wisdom, or independent thought, shifted toward measurable compliance and “outcomes.”
3. The Corporate & State Use of Behaviorism
Madison Avenue and corporate advertising borrowed heavily from Skinnerian reinforcement to manipulate consumer desires.
Governments, intelligence agencies, and prisons experimented with Skinnerian conditioning methods for control (sometimes alongside harsher MK-Ultra style interventions).
This made populations more governable, but at the cost of autonomy and moral responsibility.
Impact: Instead of self-governing citizens, behaviorism helped produce compliant consumers and subjects.
4. Undermining of Western Ethical Traditions
The Western tradition—from Aristotle’s virtue ethics to Kantian autonomy—saw man as a moral agent.
Skinner claimed those traditions are illusions. To him, man’s “choices” are simply outputs of reinforcement histories.
If freedom, dignity, and responsibility are illusions, then justice, rights, and democracy themselves lose rational grounding.
Impact: Eroded the philosophical and spiritual framework that supported limited government, natural rights, and personal responsibility.
5. Long-Term Cultural Effects
By medicalizing, mechanizing, and externalizing responsibility for behavior, Skinnerian psychology dovetailed with the pharmaceutical industry, bureaucratic education, and corporate consumerism.
In the eyes of critics like Chomsky (who famously demolished Verbal Behavior), Skinner’s approach helped normalize a worldview where human beings are objects to be managed, not souls to be cultivated.
🔑 In short:
B.F. Skinner didn’t “destroy the fabric of Western civilization” alone, but his denial of free will, faith in technocratic conditioning, and application of behaviorist methods in education, governance, and commerce undermined core Western values of individual dignity, responsibility, and liberty. He replaced the idea of the autonomous individual with the idea of the conditioned organism—and that shift in worldview has echoed through much of modern society.
Do you want me to show you how Skinner’s ideas directly connected into MK-Ultra and Cold War behavioral control research (the overlap with West, Orne, etc.), or would you rather keep this at the philosophical / cultural critique level?
You said:
Yes, please
ChatGPT said:
Got it — let’s connect the dots between Skinner’s behaviorism and Cold War mind control programs (MK-Ultra, ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, etc.), including his intellectual overlap with West, Orne, Cameron, and other MK-Ultra players.
1. Skinner’s Framework and Its Appeal to Intelligence Agencies
Skinner’s radical behaviorism reduced human behavior to reinforcement schedules—stimulus → response → conditioning.
To the CIA and military, this offered a neat scientific model for control: if humans are programmable, then with the right reinforcements (reward, punishment, deprivation, trauma), you can engineer soldiers, assassins, or compliant subjects.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) essentially provided a blueprint for population-level social engineering. By then, the CIA had already spent 20 years funding projects that operationalized similar principles.
2. Early Crossovers: Harvard & Conditioning
In the 1930s–40s, Skinner was at Harvard developing his “Skinner Box.” Around the same time, CIA precursors (OSS, Navy intelligence) were already experimenting with behavioral training, deception, and conditioning.
Some of Skinner’s early graduate students, like Charles Ferster, later advised on military and clinical applications of operant conditioning.
The Air Force specifically funded studies on Skinnerian schedules of reinforcement for pilot training and survival schools.
3. From Conditioning to Coercion: MK-Ultra
MK-Ultra (1953–1973, under Sidney Gottlieb) built on three major inputs:
Classical conditioning and behaviorism (Skinner, Pavlov).
Drug-facilitated control (LSD, barbiturates, amphetamines).
Louis “Jolly” West, CIA’s golden boy psychiatrist, directly cited the importance of behavioral theory in his reports on hypnosis and coercion.
Martin Orne (who studied hypnotic susceptibility) often combined hypnosis with behaviorist reinforcement to produce more reliable compliance in “subjects.”
Ewen Cameron (Montreal, Allen Memorial Institute) integrated conditioning into his depatterning programs—patients subjected to endless tape loops (operant conditioning by auditory stimulus) and drug-sleep cycles.
Skinner developed “teaching machines” in the 1950s, claiming they could recondition children to learn more efficiently.
At the same time, MK-Ultra subprojects (at Harvard, McGill, Stanford, Minnesota, etc.) tested conditioning + drugs + hypnosis on unwitting subjects.
The basic Skinner Box logic—control environment → shape behavior—was simply applied at a darker scale:
Shock as punishment (Hastings and others used it for induced amnesia).
Drug rewards or withdrawals as reinforcement.
Hypnosis layered in as a rapid induction method.
5. The Minnesota Connection
Since you’re digging into Donald Hastings:
Hastings (UMN Psychiatry & Neurology chair, 1947–69) was in correspondence with West and Gottlieb (per surviving documents).
Minnesota was a key site for military psychiatry research—Air Force contracts, hypnosis work, and “shock to guarantee amnesia.”
Hastings’ unit overlapped with behaviorist research on conditioning + psychiatric interventions. That’s where Skinner’s abstract theories translated into real-world coercive experiments.
6. Why Skinner Was Useful to Them
No need for metaphysics: If man has no soul or free will, you can experiment freely without moral burden.
Technocratic control: You don’t persuade or inspire; you reinforce and extinguish behaviors.
Scalability: Whether in a Skinner Box, a classroom, or a prison, the same principles could be scaled up to populations.
This is why critics later said Skinner helped create a “laboratory view of man” that meshed perfectly with the CIA’s MK-Ultra ambitions.
✅ In sum:
Skinner didn’t personally sit in CIA-funded labs shocking subjects. But his denial of free will and engineering vision of man as a programmable animal made him an intellectual godfather to MK-Ultra and Cold War behavioral control. His students and contemporaries provided techniques (conditioning schedules, teaching machines, reinforcement theory) that dovetailed with West’s hypnosis, Cameron’s depatterning, and Gottlieb’s chemical control.
Louis Jolyon West was a fairly well-known psychiatrist in the mid to late twentieth century. He was a loquacious sort who had a knack for wheedling himself into positions of influence. He was referred to as Jolly, befitting his later benign, grandfatherly appearance. But those who knew him best said he cultivated that appearance to deceive and manipulate; subjects West himself purported to be the foremost expert in. They referred to him as “a devious man”, “egotistical”, “narcissist”, “a womanizer” who was full of “phoniness and dishonesty”; someone who “could charm the pants off of anyone, and manipulate people into doing all sorts of things they didn’t want to do.” That checks West off as positive on the most critical items of the sociopath checklists of preeminent psychopath expert Dr. Robert Hare, see e.g. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us; Hare, Pocket Books 1995. Sociopathy was earlier, and perhaps more accurately, described by L. Ron Hubbard in the same book that exposed West and his colleagues’ MK Ultra hijinks (see Science of Survivaland the description of the individual at covert hostility on the book’s emotional tone scale). Had it not been for West’s demonstrable lack of conscience, perhaps he would not have been chosen to serve as MK Ultra’s most long-lived participant.
West was the third MK Ultra shock doc to be granted establishment authority status concerning L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology after Winfred Overholser and Ewen Cameron, see Deep State and Scientology andThe CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard. Like his predecessors West was an American Psychiatric Association big wig, serving as Trustee. In keeping with the deep state’s increasing frustration with the rise of Hubbard and Scientology popularity despite its attempts to destroy them during the 50’s and 60’s, West’s tactics became more aggressive and persisted from the seventies all the way through the nineties. From his position of Trustee, he kept the APA at constant odds with Scientology.
As Trustee of the American Family Foundation (AFF), West went further. AFF presented itself as society’s protector against ‘destructive cults.’ In practice though, West and AFF surveilled and smeared virtually any group that did not toe the white line of establishment mental health orthodoxy. West’s personal papers demonstrate he investigated the following groups during his AFF stint and filed them under “Cults”: B’nai B’rith, Opus Dei, Abbey of Regina Laudis, Catholicism, Church of Christ, Church of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, to name but a few. But, West – ever loyal to his CIA MK Ultra predecessors (The Deep State and Scientology) – devoted most of his effort to attempting to discredit Scientology. AFF itself was primarily funded by serial CIA front-group financier Scaife Family Foundation; making West a CIA funding recipient for at least four and perhaps five decades). As we will explore in later articles, AFF and West were active participants in a lawfare campaign against Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard that made the deep state/DNC coordinated lawfare assault on Trump of 2020-2024 look like child’s play.
Since West’s purported Scientology expertise to this day is central to all of corporate media, all of academia, most of the deep state, all search engines and AI platforms, his history deserves a deep dive. West’s (and his predecessors’) judgment forms the foundation of public thought on the subject of Scientology. What sort of mind (along with the likes of Overholser and Cameron) dreamt up the fundamental establishment definition of Scientology? And what were its motivations?
Beyond Scientology, our exploration serves as an education on how the establishment, and its deep state and media enforcement arms, continue business as usual at the same old stand: elevating its favor-producing chosen and attempting to destroy its designated nemeses. Oftentimes they do so on faulty or downright fraudulent bases.
MK ULTRA – CIA Mind Control
The head of CIA chemical, biological, and mind warfare during the 1950s and 1960s was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. His nicknames over the years are telling of his character and conduct: “The Black Sorcerer”, “Dr. No”, and “Poisoner in Chief.” He worked directly for CIA chiefs Dulles and Helms for over twenty years. The trio saw to the not-so-hostile, yet complete takeover of and merger with Dr. Mengele’s Nazi concentration camp experimentation network. In Gottlieb’s now-CIA labs of the 50s and 60s every atrocity imaginable occurred. From concocting bioweapons and spraying them on unwitting U.S. citizens, producing untraceable poisons, to programming assassins to commit murder against their own wills. It is telling that Gottlieb’s lab began as the Technical Service Section (“science”) but when in full swing became part of the Clandestine Operations division (“covert warfare”).
It is documented fact that Gottlieb and company plotted, and sometimes executed or attempted, assassinations of foreign heads of state (most infamously upon Fidel Castro and the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba – the former unsuccessful, the latter successful), through a variety of poisons and explosives. It is also documented that Gottlieb himself and many top doctors he employed fried their own minds with LSD, perhaps accounting for their apparent absolute absence of consciences.
West’s Early days with MK Ultra
With this background, it is not an insignificant fact that the Poisoner in Chief considered and treated Jolly West as one of his favorite protégés. But, this fact was only relatively recently revealed. For fifty years until his death in 1999 Jolly West was able to get away with a denial of any connection whatsoever to MK Ultra, much less serving the role of the Black Sorcerer’s favorite apprentice. In the late seventies West’s name was linked to MK Ultra by a document published in the New York Times. West claimed it was a mistake; he never experimented on humans and was unaware of any CIA funding for his research (both blatant lies). Congress, the New York Times and the rest of corporate media dutifully went along for the ride. West escaped scrutiny along with most of the nuts and bolts of the MK Ultra operation.
Some say the eminently blackmailable Senator Teddy Kennedy helped engineer the continuing cover up of MK Ultra and the CIA’s broader attempts to covertly control the hearts and minds of populations, including the American public. The CIA’s strategy to weather the final Congressional hearings, headed by Teddy, was to produce only heavily redacted scraps of paper and present a barrage of perjured testimony that MK Ultra was retired because the research never amounted to anything. It was a colossal failure that produced no results. In other words, “move on people, nothing to see here.” John Marks, author of The Search For The Manchurian Candidate, dubbed it the “gang that couldn’t spray straight” strategy; a phrase taken from actual media characterizations of MK Ultra at the time (an allusion to the movie The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, and the CIA’s spraying of LSD through aerosol over unsuspecting human guinea pigs). The CIA presented as, and the media dutifully reported it as, “no harm?”, then, “no foul.”
Having washed their hands of the matter, the corporate media subsequently anointed West, while serving in the respectable position of head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Department, as chief inquisitor (judge, jury, and executioner) against Scientology for the next two decades. When Scientology questioned West’s qualifications as expert on a subject seeking to restore memory and self-determinism (see The CIA vs. L. Ron Hubbard) – while West was a central player in decades of CIA work to produce the precise opposite – the media branded Scientology as vindictive toward the poor, blameless Dr. West.
The Truth About West Finally Revealed
It was only several years after West’s 1999 death that a particularly resourceful investigator discovered the truth. The revelations of his work were revolutionary, even if the media and government fail to pay it the respect it deserves. Journalist Tom O’Neill came across Jolly West during a several-year investigation that O’Neill never dreamed would lead him to such a character. O’Neill was looking into the infamous Charles Manson LSD cult murders of 1969 for a magazine story on the issue. He wound up writing an epic bestselling book, CHAOS: CHARLES MASON, the CIA and the SECRET HISTORY OF THE SIXTIES (Little Brown, 2019). We will report more on this in coming segments. But, for now we’ll focus on the most meaningful proof of West’s special relation with and work for the CIA’s Dr. No.
O’Neill’s investigation led him to the personal papers of West, housed in the archives at UCLA. O’Neill spent months searching the material looking for links to the story he was working on. When he hit paydirt, it not only confirmed his suspicions, not only proved Scientology was if anything downplaying the depths of West’s depravity, but more importantly, proved that the CIA had successfully hoodwinked Congress into the false belief that there was nothing more to see about MK Ultra.
The documents O’Neill discovered revealed a close, intimate relationship between Sidney Gottlieb and Jolly West. Between at least 1953 and 1956 the two were in regular communication about MK Ultra operations. The first available letter which begins midstream (indicating more earlier communications) was dated June 11, 1953, only two months after the ‘official’ christening of mind control operations under the title MK Ultra. West clearly was in on the ground floor.
West informed Gottlieb he was performing experiments to determine, “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew”…and…”techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects…or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.”
West was working at the Air Force’s Lackland Field hospital in San Antonio, Texas at the time. He lamented to Gottlieb the need to “cut down considerably the number of people who can properly call me to account.” West’s obsession for power and his greed is on full display. He bargains with Gottlieb. In exchange for going whole hog on experimenting with human guinea pigs against their will, West demanded a military promotion and a guaranteed future as head of a major University’s Neuropsychiatric department. Gottlieb promised to take care of all of West’s concerns and confirmed his mission. “My Good Friend”, he addressed West, “I had been wondering whether your apparent rapid and comprehensive grasp of our problems could possibly be real…you have indeed developed an admirably accurate picture of exactly what we are after. For this I am deeply grateful.”
Gottlieb poured it on thick demonstrating an embarrassingly close relationship between the two Frankenstein doctors: “we have developed quite an asset in the relationship we are developing with you.” West returned the schmalz, “It makes me very happy to realize that you consider me ‘an asset’.” West then confirmed undying loyalty to carrying on the Mengel-inspired mission: “Surely there is no more vital undertaking conceivable in these times.”
O’Neill’s Find Eclipses Senate Committees
O’Neill’s discovery eclipsed those made by three Senate Committees in the nineteen seventies, the last effort to make any headway in plumbing the depths of CIA malfeasance. In fact, O’Neill was able to demonstrate that the “gang that couldn’t spray straight” strategy was pure fiction.
The Senate Committee document referred to earlier that mentioned West’s name, was a heavily redacted affair, disclosing next to nothing. What O’Neill discovered in the West archives was a nine-page attachment to that very document – except West’s copy was unredacted. Dated 1956 – at least three years after beginning his experiments – the report served as West’s pronouncement of “Mission Accomplished” to Gottlieb. Titled “The Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility”, the report stated:
“It has been found to be feasible to take the memory of a definite event in the life of an individual and through hypnotic suggestion, bring about conscious recall to the effect that this event never actually took place, but that a different (fictional) event actually did occur. West reported that it was accomplished by use of “new drugs” that helped in “speeding the induction of the hypnotic state and in deepening the trance that can be produced in given subjects.”
West requested further funding so that he could keep work going and build “a special chamber [where] various hypnotic, pharmacological, and sensory-environmental variables will be manipulated.” Documents later showed that his request was granted, evidencing continued funding through 1965 at least.
Inducing Mental Disorders
This is just the beginning of Jolly’s West’s macabre journey.
In October 1963, while the CIA continued to fund him, West announced to a group of doctors that in their researches they were “learning for the first time to produce temporary mental derangements in the laboratory” using LSD. West was claiming to have made good on his 1953 promise to Gottlieb to discover means “for inducing in [subjects] specific mental disorders.”
A month later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
In a just world, perhaps West’s claim would have been treated like a smoking gun.
Instead, as we will see, it wasn’t even noticed by the powers that be.
In the spring of 1959 Edward Hunter, an intelligence agent posing as a journalist, described to a Senate committee the discovery of a then-unknown technique called “mind attack” – a method for changing people’s minds to make them love things they once hated and/or hate things they once loved. Mind attack (or mind control) tactics were further exposed in the 1970’s by L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology and a former U.S. naval office familiar with intelligence techniques. He published an essay in the 1970s that warned of a dastardly government intelligence trick of thought control through censorship and propaganda. He suggested the Intelligence Community (IC) had been utilizing this method for years and that unchecked it could have detrimental effects on society. The technique was propaganda execution by way of redefining words (Orwellian Newspeak if you will). At that very time, Scientology was a recognized religion and was in the process of being redefined by Big Pharma and the IC as a ‘cult’. With that label comes suspension of civil rights and human liberties. Because it wasn’t other folks’ ox being obviously gored, few paid attention to the process but accepted the result. If you look you will learn that such techniques are being applied far more broadly today. Unless the level of state media and internet control is reversed, some of our most important societal leaders will ultimately be dismissed as quacks and cult members. Central to the operation is propaganda by redefinition of words.
The Neo Liberal Orders’ Censorship/Propaganda Industrial Complex (CPIC) is playing out George Orwell’s 1984 by implementing Newspeak. In 1984 Newspeak sums up as WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Today we add to the lexicon, PLUTOCRACY IS DEMOCRACY, CENSORSHIP IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH, VIOLENCE/VANDALISM IS LAW/ORDER.
Many are seeing this, including heads of the sovereign states remaining defiant against the Neo Liberal Order push for global autocratic rule. Here is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban alerting to it earlier this year:
“In the past the communists employed a five-step procedure to subjugate us by stealth. Now the progressives are emulating them. With these five steps they are turning the organs of the state into tools of oppression.
First, they reformulate norms. George Orwell saw this, and described it thus: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” The first step in the progressive liberals’ program of oppression is to take a norm and give it the precisely opposite meaning. “War is peace” is something that progressives also say today. “Peace facility”: this is the name of the Brussels financial fund from which they send the most destructive weapons to the front. “Migration is a resource”, they say—while crime rises, the threat of terrorism increases, and trust is drained from our societies.”
A lot of this sinister word play is already firmly entrenched in the corporate media and organized education in America. For example, a couple years ago we were overwhelmed with scare tactics to drop objections to the Biden Administration’s INFLATION REDUCTION ACT. Yet, since its shotgun passage, inflation has continued to be a scourge to all but the top .1 %. To those in the know, the result was obvious since the bill accelerated already out of control government spending. Recently a former Federal Reserve Bank governor was asked what can we possibly do to scale back runaway inflation. His only answer was to reign in the INFLATION REDUCTION ACT. I other words, what the establishment serves to us as the solution, in fact is the problem Propaganda by redefinition of words at work. You see government stooges (from New Times columnists to all network talking head “experts”) scolding the masses that they can’t get it through their thick skulls “Bidenomics is killing it”, while increasing portions of the population go under to rising inflation and fewer job advancement opportunities.
Today Big Brother, through its CPIC, is literally peddling STUPIDITY IS LITERACY. And they are coming for your children. The government is doing it through Orwellian titled “media literacy” programs. They are designed to inculcate school children with the idea that the only true information is Big Brother authorized information. In other words, discouraging curiosity, exploration, research, and critical thinking. They are trying to force kids to accept information only from the folks who tell them that they must agree to the INFLATION REDUCTION ACT while its implementation eats away their paychecks with more spiraling inflation. They are telling them that the only truth is what they are fed through government agencies, or their fully controlled news organs, to wit, Wikipedia, and the “legacy” or “mainstream” corporate media.
It is spreading like a cancer. Preeminent CPIC expert Mike Benz explains:
Hence, Ignorance is Literacy.
Remember the NLO (New Liberal Order) intelligentsia’s constant lament a few years ago: “how are we ever going to progress if we don’t agree on the facts?” (as they see them of course). Thus, the rise of the CPIC. Censorship and Propaganda in unprecedented quantities notwithstanding, the NLO still can’t control minds sufficiently to stay in power. Thus, the need to reprogram our minds by rewriting the very language we’ve slowly and surely developed and become accustomed to over the past 10,000 years. At what point does enough become enough?
The other 4 Steps of modern-day mind control that Prime Minister Orban refers to above are also instructive:
The second step is to use the instruments of the state to start spreading this inverted normality. Anyone who thinks otherwise is problematic: there is something wrong with them. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either ignorant or insane. The perception must be created that listening to them would lead to some fatal catastrophe.
Then comes the third step, when they spread the word that because you hold dangerous views, you are also a security risk. They set some sort of fact-checker or democracy watchdog on you, and it is established that you do not share the views of normality that they preach, and that therefore you are a radical whose freedom of speech they need not hesitate to restrict.
Then, in the fourth step, they incite the liberal press to attack you. Activists are mobilized, and then you are silenced through litigation. This leads to the sphere of fake depictions of you on the internet, denunciation on social media, and a horde of civil society entities bombarding the courts and state bodies with accusations against you.
And if you survive all that, the fifth step is for state bodies to spring into action. They have received so many complaints and accusations that they are obliged to investigate you. This is how public bodies become the private institutions of the progressives. They find that the accusations in the media and the concerns of the watchdogs are well founded, they indict you, and in the end state bodies are used to silence you. This is what they do to Hungary in Brussels, and this is what they do to conservatives in progressive liberal European capitals. The same thing is happening in the United States, where court proceedings are being used to try to remove President Donald Trump from the ballot. This is what happened in the European Union when they tried to use administrative procedures to impose a travel ban on Tucker Carlson. It is happening in Germany, where political parties are being monitored by the intelligence services. And it happened in Finland, when they wanted to prosecute a politician and a bishop for quoting Scripture.
As it happens Orban turns out to be pretty accurate. What he did not predict was what comes next when all of the above doesn’t work. Well, we have now seen that too.
After the United States government (with its compliant corporate media) applied steps 1-5 above toward front-running candidate, former-president Donald Trump, they tried to murder him in cold blood on national television:
Two months later, with virtually no accountability assumed for its abject failures during the first assassination attempt, they tried again:
The first assassin had unexplained connections to the FBI: First Assassin .
The second assassin had unexplained connections to the CIA:
One could call these connections ‘conspiracy theories’, but that would be incorrect. They are far more concrete and factual than any explanation (or lack thereof) that government agencies have provided on the assassination attempts to date.
Acting like a third world banana republic dictatorship, the United States government and its lapdog corporate media has all but buried the stories of back to back assassination attempts on President Trump, while they continue to promote further attempts.
On the eve of perhaps the most hotly contested Presidential election in United States history, what is next?
The grand inquisitor of the infamous congressional J6 committee (Jamie Raskin) promises to deny the will of the people should they favor Trump on election day. Consequently, he contends the D.C. oligarchy is preparing for “Civil War conditions” (by the way difficult to find on Youtube or Bing videos):
Never mind that Raskin promises to do what he and the corporate media falsely tried and convicted Trump of in the J6 show trials. All of this hypocritical hocus pocus is possible only in an Orwellian world where the very definitions of words are fungible, depending on one’s political beliefs or affiliation. Should the left lose and CIA rent-a-riot squads take to the streets (ala summer of 2020, BLM/Antifa) extreme property destruction and violence will be called “mostly peaceful demonstrations.” Should the left lose, if there is any completely peaceable conservative acts of protest the corporate media will call them “violent insurrection.” In the official D.C. vernacular Insurrection will become Law and Order and vice versa depending on which train of thought prevails.
To ensure that both sides of the aisle are equally incensed come election day, corporate media has come up with a far-fetched, pearl-clutching theory. On the eve of the election the New York Times (flanked by the Washington Post) issued a heavily promoted “story” that declared that conservatives expressing doubt of the fairness of the 2020 election undermines public confidence in the 2024 election. They conclude such views should have been censored by YouTube and because they were not, the 2024 election has somehow been compromised.
No matter what side you are on, brace yourself. Big Brother’s colossal mismanagement of affairs guarantees that whichever side loses will believe and behave as if it were cheated.
The following is a chapter passage that immediately follows another one that was posted earlier, Deconstructing Scientology. A quick reminder perusal of the first passage will make reading the following easier.
Part II:
Such a psychotherapy has been shown to have the power to convert conscientious, caring, emotionally disturbed, and relatively intelligent people into cheery, focused followers who yet accept implicitly, and act according to, subconscious commands on the order of:
A. One should never fear to hurt another person in a just cause (most particularly when that cause is the cause of the creator of the mental therapy he engages in).
B. One should never withdraw his allegiance to any group to which he has pledged it, irrespective of how criminal and destructive he discovers that group might be (most particularly when that group is the one endowed with a monopoly on the mental therapy he is engaged in).
C. One should never show compassion to the weak for to do so will worsen the weak and the strong attempting to lend a hand. Only the ‘able’ ought be supported and assisted. Like in social Darwinist thought it is justified by the arbitrary datum that only further empowerment of the elite will raise anyone else’s boat.
D. That now considering oneself one of the elite, every time you engage in self-absorbed, introspective processes to make yourself feel better you are improving humankind’s lot. A sort of imbued megalomaniac narcissism is effectuated re-enforcing a-c above.
E. Personalities inclined to not go along with the mental therapy program and instead find fault with it ought to be disposed of permanently and with no slightest dent in one’s conscience for having done so.
The thinking becomes so inverted that the mental health therapy acolyte becomes fiercely contentious and combative about arguing the rationality of the a-e thought pattern and behaviors above. In fact, this is the ingrained mindset and behavior pattern of a scientologist; and he or she will defend it as ferociously and instinctively as a she-gator protects her young. Being utterly oblivious to any sub conscious (associative) mind system in himself the scientologist may even purport not to hold these views and yet continue to argue vehemently for their rationale. Even when scientologists leave and disavow the organizations and the subject itself, they can be observed continuing to act out these patterns. Little compassion and much arrogant, vicious fault-finding and attempts to undermine espousers of opposing views often marks the interchange between them.
That people can have their characters and long term behavior patterns so apparently permanently molded and that they can continue to argue the virtues of their programming ought not come as a surprise. Many scientifically grounded studies over the past several decades in fact have demonstrated that that is precisely how sub conscious (associative) and analytical thought works hand in glove. The subconscious (associative) mind system automatically rationalizes the content of its adopted narratives perpetuating the human proclivity toward creating, adopting and bolstering stories to make sense of the world. Those rationalizations become somewhat permanent associative mind narratives. The narratives’ matrices of associated ‘facts’ become the filter through which new information and perceptions are sensed and organized. The auto-associating mind system prompts the individual to use his analytical faculties to further explain and justify its conclusions. The comfortable, if lazy, analytical function usually complies or simply abides and articulates the sub-conscious-associative faculty’s conclusions. It most certainly does so when the individual is not on guard against misinformation, mis-association and irrationality common to associative mind processes. And when the person is convinced that there are no such processes present – as the ‘cleared’ scientologist is – his analytical system can become mighty reactionary itself.
Many of these facts about how the mind works are understood and plied by those who mold educational, political and social thought. This knowledge is used and affects us daily in advertising, business, law, politics, media, you name it. Arts and sciences driven by it are increasing exponentially with the advent of the Age of Information. Fantastic sums of money are invested into utilizing this knowledge to maintain the status quo and make populations more materialist-consumerist oriented to increase the dollars flowing toward the top of the wealth pyramid. Like it or not, we live in a culture driven, fueled, and maintained by consultation to and application of the advices of the greatest minds in human psychology.
The knowledge utilized to keep the masses slaves to the current economic system demonstrates how an understanding of these mechanisms could make a hypnotic ‘therapy’ as discussed herein possible. They are the very mechanisms used to make scientologists slaves to their leadership. The scientologist is kept oblivious to this. Scientology keeps its followers ignorant by clever application of a-e above. It teaches them that those who know anything about psychology are the enemy and that understanding what the enemy knows could poison the follower. The enemy and his knowledge must be attacked and destroyed by any means necessary in order for a-e culture to function. And so scientology ultimately becomes an insulated cult playing out an exaggerated form of that which it is taught to condemn.
In practice this is how scientology culture operates. Its form of governance is closed-system, thought-controlling totalitarianism. It closely resembles George Orwell’s 1984. That holds parallel right down to omnipresent electronic recording, thought police, thought crimes, and Newspeak. If a scientologist begins to cultivate thought patterns that question authority (or even explore the very mechanisms we discuss here) they are soon ferreted out by liberal use of one component of a lie detector (the electropsychometer or e-meter). The discovered offending mind is put through rigorous reformation techniques. That reform can include years-long confinement in re-educating concentration camps. It more often entails the loss – or threatened loss – of communication and communion with one’s family and closest friends and even business associates.
It should be noted that the psychological mechanisms at work in commerce, marketing, media and politics are not held secret. The only reason for their continued negative effectiveness is people’s lack of energy or curiosity in learning of them. And therein lies the most troubling aspect of scientology’s enforced information bubble.
It would seem that the road to recovery for a scientologist should include education in the very psychological mechanisms that were employed on him so effectively that they often continue to affect him long after he has left the cult.
Moving On Up a Little Higher 