Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is matt
Speaker 2: Our Powell Nol is still on an adventure, but will
Speaker 2: be returning shortly.
Speaker 3: They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
Speaker 3: guest super producer. You know him, you love them. It's
Speaker 3: Max the freight Train Williams. Most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 3: You are here, and that makes this the stuff they
Speaker 3: don't want you to know. We're diving back into something
Speaker 3: that has fascinated both of us and hopefully you. Fellow
Speaker 3: conspiracy realist played along at Home nearly seven years after
Speaker 3: his death. Charles Mills Manson remains one of America because
Speaker 3: most well known Madmen cult leader would be music star,
Speaker 3: best known not for his association with the Beach Boys.
Speaker 2: Correct his music, by the way, I was kind of
Speaker 2: rocking some of it while we were doing research this week,
Speaker 2: and I don't hate it, man. Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 2: don't love it, but I don't hate it. I kind
Speaker 2: of feel what he was doing. It's tough.
Speaker 3: To make it in the world of entertainment. And that's
Speaker 3: you know, that applies to Charles Manson as well as
Speaker 3: everybody else, all the independent musicians in the crowd this evening.
Speaker 3: Manson is best known for running a cult loosely called
Speaker 3: the Family than the Manson Family in the late nineteen
Speaker 3: sixties for relatively short period of time. They are known
Speaker 3: to have committed at least nine murders in California, and
Speaker 3: decades later, people still wonder whether there's more to the story.
Speaker 3: So our question is this, and hear us out. Could
Speaker 3: Charles Manson have been connected to the CIA?
Speaker 2: Definitely, We'll be right back.
Speaker 3: Here are the facts. In previous episodes, we explored Manson's
Speaker 3: life in depth. He had a really tragic, troubled childhood.
Speaker 3: We looked at his early life, which was a lot
Speaker 3: of juvie and prison time, up to his rise as
Speaker 3: a cult leader when he was in his early thirties
Speaker 3: and his messiotic ambition to rule the world literally all
Speaker 3: the way to his conviction his imprisonment. I think it's
Speaker 3: a story most Americans know on at least some level, right,
Speaker 3: Like everybody has heard the name.
Speaker 2: Oh, for sure. There are all kinds of iconic interviews
Speaker 2: that went out there, especially if you were a kid,
Speaker 2: I don't know coming of age in the nineties. There
Speaker 2: was a nineteen ninety three interview with Diane Sawyer that
Speaker 2: really like, let you kind of feel the character of
Speaker 2: Charles Manson.
Speaker 3: I roll the Nichols The game is Mine.
Speaker 2: Oh dude, I broke no law. I didn't step out
Speaker 2: aligne with God. I didn't step out alive with the law.
Speaker 3: I bounced a few checks.
Speaker 2: I told those people the same thing that the United
Speaker 2: States President would tell them. The only way that you
Speaker 2: can dispense Saint life and death is you have to
Speaker 2: be willing to give yourself to that cause. You have
Speaker 2: to fight a revolution. You can't do anything unless you can.
Speaker 2: And he just kind of goes on and on and on.
Speaker 3: My favorite's probably the non verbal thing he does when
Speaker 3: they say who are you? And he does the quick
Speaker 3: cavalcade of character acting and emoting.
Speaker 2: Well and then lyrics to songs. He's often throwing in lyrics,
Speaker 2: and I think it's really important to when you're thinking
Speaker 2: about this person as we're going through their life. That
Speaker 2: thing you mentioned Ben that he spent a lot of
Speaker 2: his time in juvenile detention and then in prison, and
Speaker 2: he sounds to me a lot like interactions that that
Speaker 2: our team had with Wayne Williams, where it's somebody who
Speaker 2: is very good at saying something to kind of throw
Speaker 2: you off of whatever the question is or the line
Speaker 2: that you want to be talking about, and saying something
Speaker 2: to kind of interrupt that and then take you on
Speaker 2: a completely different direction and take you down that line
Speaker 2: far enough to where you almost if you're not really
Speaker 2: paying attention or taking notes, you might have even forgot
Speaker 2: what you were talking about in the first place. It
Speaker 2: brings to me, I don't know if sociopathy is correct,
Speaker 2: but maybe just manipulation tactics are really heavy with this person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, with both of them, and that team MAT's referring to, folks,
Speaker 3: is the production with Tenderfoot.
Speaker 2: Yeah mostly Yeah, Alex and Paine and Donald and myself
Speaker 2: and a bunch of other people. But just I've interacted
Speaker 2: with somebody like that, I guess is what I mean
Speaker 2: to say, And you really pick up on it when
Speaker 2: you watch these iconic interviews with him. So let's jump
Speaker 2: in and let's learn about who this person was early
Speaker 2: on again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so quick and dirty recap, folks, you probably if
Speaker 3: you live in the US, you probably have heard of
Speaker 3: Charles Manson, even if you were born far after those
Speaker 3: horrific events in the late sixties early seventies. For a
Speaker 3: quick and dirty recap, I'd like us look at the timeline.
Speaker 3: Charles Manson is born November twelfth, nineteen thirty four, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Speaker 3: His mother is sixteen at the time. He never knew
Speaker 3: his father, and as far as we know, I'd never
Speaker 3: had any contact with him throughout his life. When he
Speaker 3: was still very young, his mother is convicted and imprisoned
Speaker 3: for armed robbery, so he gets sent to live in
Speaker 3: West Virginia with some relatives nouns and an uncle. And
Speaker 3: from an early age he's on the wrong side of
Speaker 3: the law, Like mentioned earlier, beginning at just nine years old,
Speaker 3: he starts being in and out a juvie and then
Speaker 3: later prison for a lot of what we might call
Speaker 3: miscre inactivity or small time crime. There is just to
Speaker 3: be very clear, it is almost certain that he was
Speaker 3: sexually assaulted in the system. He would later, as we know,
Speaker 3: assault other people. If we fast forward, it's nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 3: he is thirty two years old. He's released from California's
Speaker 3: Terminal Island Prison and from there he goes to San Francisco.
Speaker 3: He has been incarcerated roughly half his life at this time,
Speaker 3: and the hippie movement is in full swing. There are
Speaker 3: tons of disillusioned, often younger people, kind of drifting, searching
Speaker 3: for meaning or a cause. This is fertile soil for
Speaker 3: a man with the ambitions of Charles Manson.
Speaker 2: It is fertile soil. And it's there's a reason for
Speaker 2: all of that disillusionment, right. I mean, we've talked about
Speaker 2: the history of that time, and you know, Vietnam War
Speaker 2: and what was going on, and the disillusionment in general
Speaker 2: of that Americans were having with the system, right that
Speaker 2: just everybody was kind of like, oh wow, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: we can kind of see the man behind the curtain here,
Speaker 2: and it doesn't feel good to know that that's what
Speaker 2: we're doing and kind of why we're doing it. And
Speaker 2: I don't want to lose that fact that he said.
Speaker 2: Ben at nine years old, he started going into the system,
Speaker 2: like thinking about what that does to an individual's mind,
Speaker 2: what the world is, how it functions, what structures are like,
Speaker 2: what time even is like if you're in the system
Speaker 2: that often, and especially from that age, it's and then
Speaker 2: and then to come out and then I guess, find
Speaker 2: a group of people somehow that I don't know, I
Speaker 2: don't know how to put it. Ben, to find a
Speaker 2: group of people that is somewhat like minded, right as
Speaker 2: you said, within this movement, the hippie movement, and then
Speaker 2: to be I don't know, he has this charisma about him.
Speaker 2: I keep trying to figure out how he really developed
Speaker 2: that charisma other than just somewhat manipulating people as he's
Speaker 2: going through the system.
Speaker 3: Would say it's a mater of survival, probably given his
Speaker 3: formative years spent in such a hostile environment. One learns
Speaker 3: to be intensely observant, and one learns how to push
Speaker 3: the right psychological levers in a way that makes your
Speaker 3: environment hopefully a little less hostile. However, you would understand
Speaker 3: that right and.
Speaker 2: Sot it, so that's like people and well mostly manipulating
Speaker 2: people so that the entirety of your surroundings are better
Speaker 2: for you, I guess.
Speaker 3: I guess. Another thing to add in here is that
Speaker 3: he did not have very much at all in the
Speaker 3: way of formal education. But education and intelligence are two
Speaker 3: different things you can never see the inside of a
Speaker 3: classroom for the entirety of your life and still be
Speaker 3: quite a wise person. And so his intellectual acumen, we
Speaker 3: could speculate, was as a matter of survival, a necessity
Speaker 3: solely centered on escaping a hostile environment, dodging maybe consequences
Speaker 3: of actions. And because of this this keen almost supernatural
Speaker 3: observational ability and manipulative capacity. The official narrative is that
Speaker 3: he used this to attract a group of young, kind
Speaker 3: of drifting people that we would call hippies, and you know,
Speaker 3: like the the burnouts and the washed, washed aways of
Speaker 3: American society. This was very common in this time because
Speaker 3: there were so many protest movements, there were so many
Speaker 3: anti war movements, movements for racial equality or civil rights
Speaker 3: or even racial supremacy, and this in this milieu, we
Speaker 3: see that he gets a group of people. They're a
Speaker 3: small group at first, but they're very devoted. They start
Speaker 3: to get its street name, they're becoming a religious commune.
Speaker 3: They're starting to be called, loosely, the family. And if
Speaker 3: they had in the beginning a mission statement, it was
Speaker 3: a cult of personality centered around Manson, the idea being
Speaker 3: that we will study and apply this guy's spiritual or
Speaker 3: even religious teachings. And the best way to describe those
Speaker 3: is kind of like it's similar to scientology in that
Speaker 3: it's a mix of ideas called from science fiction, from
Speaker 3: readings of the occult, from fringe psychological theories.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and if you listen to his interviews, you can
Speaker 2: hear him peppering in stuff. Right, he's mentioning Hinduism and karma,
Speaker 2: then he's talking about Japanese culture and philosophy. Then he
Speaker 2: jumps over to the Bible and starts talking about God
Speaker 2: and teachings of Jesus. It's really interesting the way he's
Speaker 2: as you said, you said, a hodgepodge like a It
Speaker 2: is that, right, And I feel like there's so many
Speaker 2: cults that kind of do that. It reminds me a
Speaker 2: lot of the Unitarian Universalist Church and my grandfather went to,
Speaker 2: where it's not it's more about the philosophies behind the
Speaker 2: meaning of certain things and then putting those meanings together
Speaker 2: into one, you know, all encompassing kind of theory of
Speaker 2: existence and life and death and all of that. Except
Speaker 2: his it feels like he's cherry picking little things in
Speaker 2: the moment to apply to like what to apply to
Speaker 2: what he's talking about in the moment.
Speaker 3: I don't know. It's very strange, and he has He's
Speaker 3: doing something that the protagonist of cults of personalities typically do,
Speaker 3: from televangelist to MLM types, even business tycoons. The idea
Speaker 3: is that you get someone in person and you are
Speaker 3: instantly reacting to what they're saying, and you're offering propositions
Speaker 3: or leads, whether verbally or simply with intonation and physically,
Speaker 3: and then as those people are responding, you start to
Speaker 3: isolate and adjust for the reactions that you want. And
Speaker 3: some people do this much better than others. Some people
Speaker 3: are trained to do this, some people have that intuitive
Speaker 3: nec or maybe in Manson's case, again, you could argue
Speaker 3: had to develop such a skill or set of skills
Speaker 3: as a matter of survival.
Speaker 2: Yeah, or weaponized it as a job, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: think about what spies have to do. It's very similar.
Speaker 3: And this initially this met with great success where he
Speaker 3: was part of this CMB seeing crowd, you know, and
Speaker 3: met celebrities like Brian Wilson and try to pursue a
Speaker 3: career in music, and over time is unfortunately a not
Speaker 3: uncommon thing with cults of personality. Over time, his group
Speaker 3: grew more insular, more hostile, more combative, more militant, as
Speaker 3: they were aiming increasingly towards some apocalyptic end point. And
Speaker 3: that's where you get the most widely accepted narrative, popularized
Speaker 3: by the book Helter Skelter, written by Vincent Boligosi, says, Look,
Speaker 3: here's why these murders occurred. Manson was convinced the US
Speaker 3: would be ground zero for a civilization ending race war,
Speaker 3: and Manson and his followers would hide away underground, and
Speaker 3: then after all the s hit the f he and
Speaker 3: his followers would emerge from the social wreckage and they
Speaker 3: would rain over the smoking ruins whatever was left.
Speaker 2: Jeez, sounds like a pretty common thing nowadays. Again, if
Speaker 2: we're going in the science fiction realm, which is where
Speaker 2: mads And pulled a lot of his ideas from, it
Speaker 2: feels like feels like fallout, feels like a lot of
Speaker 2: these things we've been talking about recently. It feels like Zuckerberg's,
Speaker 2: you know, the rumors of his twenty five million dollar
Speaker 2: hideaway thing that he was building his bunker. Somebody that
Speaker 2: wants to emerge from the wreckage and control stuff.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's pretty grandiose for a guy in
Speaker 2: a group of lovable miscreants hanging out on a farm.
Speaker 3: People largely ranch rather yeah, people largely orphaned by mainstream
Speaker 3: American society. You know what I mean. You want an answer,
Speaker 3: You want to cause, you want something. Unless you're a Manson,
Speaker 3: you want something bigger than yourself. And so they ran
Speaker 3: into a problem that happens with a lot of apocalyptic cults.
Speaker 3: The disaster they foresee is taking just too long to
Speaker 3: get here. You know, Manson was at least smart enough
Speaker 3: to not predict a specific date, or maybe he was
Speaker 3: just cooking live doing some jazz. But eventual he decided
Speaker 3: the race war took too long to ignite, this again
Speaker 3: according to the popular narrative, and so he decided the
Speaker 3: family would take action to kickstart the conflict. He denies this.
Speaker 3: He denies that he or he's dead. He denied that
Speaker 3: he ordered his followers to go commit murders and try
Speaker 3: to frame the black population of California. Instead, he says
Speaker 3: he talked in hypotheticals like you know what I would
Speaker 3: do if it were me doing this?
Speaker 2: Yep, I would leave and.
Speaker 3: I think one of that we were talking about this
Speaker 3: off air. One of the most oft repeated quotes is
Speaker 3: he says, I would leave something witchy behind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you know, if you were going to do
Speaker 2: something like that, let the world know you were there
Speaker 2: if you're going to do it. The way he describes
Speaker 2: it to Diane Sawyer after she kind of breaks through
Speaker 2: to him for a moment, is that I needed money
Speaker 2: to get my brother out of jail. I didn't have money,
Speaker 2: but I had these people around me. But I'm not
Speaker 2: a violent person, so I would never do anything. I
Speaker 2: never do anything like that. What I said was, we
Speaker 2: need that money. We got to get that money. So
Speaker 2: basically talked around doing something violent, right, That's exactly what
Speaker 2: we're describing. Talked around getting money by doing something violent.
Speaker 2: And his followers went and did that thing.
Speaker 3: And at this point in the deterioration of the organization,
Speaker 3: I think it's mission critical to note that the followers
Speaker 3: had already had their egos heavily damaged and their personalities eroded,
Speaker 3: so to them. Similar to the way the Puritans of
Speaker 3: old did not practice metaphor, they thought things in the
Speaker 3: Bible were literal, these folks were not were possibly no
Speaker 3: longer capable of clocking metaphor or hypothesis or simile, so
Speaker 3: they may have just thought he said, yeah, go do it,
Speaker 3: follow in my footsteps, and and.
Speaker 2: They were coming down off an LSD trip, right, That
Speaker 2: was one of the big points of contention. They weren't
Speaker 2: currently on LSD or something like that when the murders
Speaker 2: took place, at least according to Manson. According to some
Speaker 2: of the people who were put on the stand during
Speaker 2: the trial, but they were on other drugs at the time.
Speaker 2: But who knows what he was saying to them while
Speaker 2: they were under the effects of LSD or some other
Speaker 2: psychotropic substance.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's why I wanted to point out, like, the
Speaker 3: thing that we're missing when we just look at that
Speaker 3: something witchy quote is that that is a one episode
Speaker 3: in a series of escalating conversations, a culmination perhaps. So
Speaker 3: he may not have said, you know, the way to
Speaker 3: get right with the world is to follow in my
Speaker 3: footsteps and do exactly what you think I would do
Speaker 3: in that discrete conversation, but earlier, for months, he had
Speaker 3: probably been saying something very much like that, because that
Speaker 3: is how colts work any case, and we can play
Speaker 3: a clip from Manson later, one of my favorite.
Speaker 2: But the whole point there have been was that just
Speaker 2: to bring an LSD into that or this concept of
Speaker 2: using LSD as part of whatever that thing is, that
Speaker 2: manipulation technique that gets people to think a certain way
Speaker 2: at certain times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's some good foreshadowing. We know whatever specifics of
Speaker 3: conversation and brainwashing maybe lost to history, we do know
Speaker 3: that in nineteen sixty nine, the Manson family carried out
Speaker 3: multiple murders odd Manson's orders. That's the legal opinion of
Speaker 3: the United States. That's what they concluded, of course, because
Speaker 3: this country worshiped celebrities. The most well known murder is
Speaker 3: Sharon Tate, who is the wife of director and still
Speaker 3: criminal on the run, Roman Polanski, currently located in France.
Speaker 3: Tate was killed in our Los Angeles home. Three other
Speaker 3: people were killed. This was a mass murder. There were
Speaker 3: other murders as well, and after being apprehended, the members
Speaker 3: of the Manson family and Manson himself gone trial in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy captures the imagination. This is up there with
Speaker 3: Truman capodies in cold blood in terms of the level
Speaker 3: of public interest in what we call true crime. Today,
Speaker 3: he's found guilty. In seventy one, he sentenced to death,
Speaker 3: but fortune favors him, you could say, because the very
Speaker 3: next year, California abolishes the death penalty. So Manson goes
Speaker 3: from an appointment with execution to the much slower death
Speaker 3: penalty of life in prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he just turns into crazy. Uncle Charles says whatever's
Speaker 2: on his mind to everybody that's around him in prison.
Speaker 2: Correspondent in perpetuity, at least until his death.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yeah, he when he dies in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: He has been technically eligible for paroles since nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 3: and he keeps coming up to the parole board and
Speaker 3: he keeps beat me here, he keeps saying crazy, and
Speaker 3: so they obviously are not going to let this guy out.
Speaker 3: He expresses no remorse, He denies anything he did. He
Speaker 3: dies of cardiac arrest due to complications from colon cancer.
Speaker 3: The world begins to move on, you know, the world
Speaker 3: is ending for someone every day, and people across the
Speaker 3: US and later the world are still struggling with disturbing questions.
Speaker 3: How did his cults get so far when others just
Speaker 3: you know, collapse or make an ill fated Vegan co op.
Speaker 3: Why did it seem like there was more to this story?
Speaker 3: Did he have additional associations, influence, maybe assistants that could
Speaker 3: explain how things got this far? What if the story
Speaker 3: of a race war? What if it was merely a narrative?
Speaker 3: What if it's not the whole truth? And if he
Speaker 3: did have help, who could it have been?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 3: Like, who could be powerful enough to keep their association
Speaker 3: with Manson hidden?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah? And why would they do that? Why would
Speaker 2: they want to make the hippie movement look evil and
Speaker 2: violent and cruel?
Speaker 3: What if he had some friends in the CIA? Will
Speaker 3: pause for a word from our sponsor. Here's where it
Speaker 3: gets crazy, all right, CIA, don't come for us. I'm
Speaker 3: just going to put that out there. We're taught. There's
Speaker 3: a little bit of a stuff there once. You know,
Speaker 3: book Club. There's a book that came out in twenty
Speaker 3: nineteen that Matt I think captured our attention.
Speaker 2: Oh yes. It is titled Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA
Speaker 2: and the Secret History of the Sixties. It's written by
Speaker 2: this guy named Tom O'Neill. And then it says and
Speaker 2: Dan Pipe and bring which is I don't know just
Speaker 2: an co author, I suppose. But this thing is fascinating.
Speaker 2: We both remembered when it came out in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: it was reviewed by everybody from Rolling Stone to the CIA,
Speaker 2: itself a pretty good read. Ben, got to be honest
Speaker 2: with you, I haven't gotten through the entirety of it
Speaker 2: because I don't have I never got a physical copy
Speaker 2: of the book. But I've read so many reviews of
Speaker 2: it and spoken with people about it. I feel pretty
Speaker 2: good talking about it. But Ben, did you read the
Speaker 2: whole thing? Yeah?
Speaker 3: It's great. I actually I reread several parts of it
Speaker 3: for this episode, because it's very dense and part of
Speaker 3: the in terms of information. The reason we have to understand.
Speaker 3: The reason it's so dense goes back to the origin story,
Speaker 3: because even this book Chaos has its own strange provenance.
Speaker 3: Flash of memory back there. It's nineteen ninety nine. There's
Speaker 3: a guy named Tom O'Neil.
Speaker 2: That's a great year. The Matrix came out this.
Speaker 3: Year and people were partying per Prince's instruction, Different cult,
Speaker 3: different episode. Tom O'Neill at this time is an entertainment
Speaker 3: reporter and he gets a job with a film magazine
Speaker 3: named Premiere. They give him an assignment. So they say,
Speaker 3: we're going to give you three months ninety days. We
Speaker 3: want you to write about the Tate LaBianca murders of
Speaker 3: the Manson family and the larger context of their effect
Speaker 3: on what we call Hollywood. So he misses the deadline.
Speaker 3: Oh no, because he gets very involved. He's quite conscientious
Speaker 3: and a diligent journalist, and he continues to investigate the
Speaker 3: murders after that three month assignment. After that deadline passes,
Speaker 3: his three month tour turns into twenty years in the making,
Speaker 3: hundreds of interviews, previously unknown stuff law enforcement arguably missed.
Speaker 3: He has falling out with several publishers about getting the
Speaker 3: book because he's not quite done yet. He has decades
Speaker 3: and decades of research because he is increasingly convinced something
Speaker 3: doesn't add up. In the end result of all this
Speaker 3: is the book Chaos amazing. I guess we should we
Speaker 3: should at least mention what chaos is. Right, He's not
Speaker 3: just talking about the general kerfuffle that is Hollywood.
Speaker 2: Oh sure, chaos or what is this, MH. Chaos. It's
Speaker 2: a CIA program that was going to target American citizens
Speaker 2: from nineteen sixty seven to seventy four meant to ferret
Speaker 2: out possible foreign influence on public activism and protest movements.
Speaker 2: So infiltration of activist groups interesting. We know, that's something
Speaker 2: that has been of interest to both the CIA and
Speaker 2: the FBI for a long time. These outside agitators or
Speaker 2: they have a bunch of different words for them, but
Speaker 2: foreign influence, particularly on groups like the Black Panther Party
Speaker 2: for self defense, This has been in their purview and
Speaker 2: interest for a long, long, long long time.
Speaker 3: Also, go and tall prone never ended.
Speaker 2: Oh exactly, it's still going on right now. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: it's strong, just really quickly. I have met people like
Speaker 2: Tom O'Neil before who have started, do you like, dip
Speaker 2: their toes into one of these topics or individuals that
Speaker 2: is in themselves a rabbit hole that is so deep
Speaker 2: you cannot see the bottom of it, particularly when looking
Speaker 2: into the Zodiac Killer. The people that I met through
Speaker 2: that research who are convinced, like Ted Kaczynski is the
Speaker 2: actual Zodiac Killer and then spent ten twenty years going
Speaker 2: down that rabbit hole to try and prove this thing
Speaker 2: that they believe in their heart so fully. I wonder
Speaker 2: how much of that it feels like Tom experienced something
Speaker 2: like that when he really delved into Charles Manson in
Speaker 2: some of these connections.
Speaker 3: All right, the concept of confirmation bias.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's so strong. We'll keep you going and
Speaker 2: pushing and pushing and pushing because there might be that
Speaker 2: one thing that proves all.
Speaker 3: Of this right. There might be a smoking gun, definitely,
Speaker 3: especially when you smell the powder and the gun oil
Speaker 3: just around the corner. So he has you know, I
Speaker 3: will say in defensive Tom O'Neil, and we haven't spoken
Speaker 3: with him, but you can hear him at length and
Speaker 3: some other podcasts and interviews. He had a piece with
Speaker 3: Joe Rogan not too many years ago, I think when
Speaker 3: the book first came out. But one thing I will say,
Speaker 3: I can't speak highly enough about Tom O'Neill is, despite
Speaker 3: the fact that some people call his exploration controversial or inconclusive,
Speaker 3: he is very honest. He's a guy, he's a man
Speaker 3: of integrity. He's very honest when he says, well, this
Speaker 3: was a dead end, but I had to look into that,
Speaker 3: and I respect, I respect when that happens. You know,
Speaker 3: maybe it's not super sexy for everyone, but it's the
Speaker 3: kind of work that you have to do, and he
Speaker 3: asked a reasonable question. Right, Yeah, he does get rabbit
Speaker 3: holed by his own admission.
Speaker 2: Well, and I don't mean anything like bad by that.
Speaker 2: I just mean it's a it's an easy thing to
Speaker 2: get sucked into when it's this fascinating, that's all. I mean.
Speaker 2: No shade to talk.
Speaker 3: Oh, I don't think we're throwing the shade. I was
Speaker 3: just going to say that he gets to a question
Speaker 3: I think is pretty reasonable, and even the CIA themselves
Speaker 3: admits this a reasonable question. His question kind of starts,
Speaker 3: why on earth would a government institution be involved with
Speaker 3: something as unclean as manson? Make it make sense, as
Speaker 3: the Internet says. To answer that, we've got to look
Speaker 3: at the historical context. The CIA, the FBI, they were
Speaker 3: definitely up the hijinks on domestic soil at this time.
Speaker 3: They were often in partnership with medical institutions, with academia,
Speaker 3: and with organized crime. Those three genres of partnership, you
Speaker 3: could argue, continue today in one form or another, and
Speaker 3: the American public had no clue, They had no idea
Speaker 3: what was happening. They probably the United States almost never
Speaker 3: learned about things like MK ultra. The only reason we
Speaker 3: know about mk Ultra is because someone dropped the ball
Speaker 3: and forgot to destroy all of the records. They probably
Speaker 3: destroyed most of the records, they just didn't get to
Speaker 3: all of them, so we don't know the full extent
Speaker 3: of what went down.
Speaker 2: Well, it was mk Ultra one of the things we
Speaker 2: learned about when I can't remember the activist group, but
Speaker 2: they broke in and stole a bunch of files or
Speaker 2: they like took a bunch of files.
Speaker 3: I think that was co Intel Pro.
Speaker 2: That was Cointelpro, okay, but mk Ultra wasn't a part
Speaker 2: of that either. That was something that came out through
Speaker 2: some FIA.
Speaker 3: Yeah, here's what happened. So mk Ultra gets discovered in
Speaker 3: the late seventies, so far after Manson's conviction or his arrest,
Speaker 3: his conviction sentencing. Because of the panic caused by Watergate,
Speaker 3: the Watergate scandal in seventy three, the CIA director who
Speaker 3: knew about m k Ultra said, destroy all of this,
Speaker 3: and they destroyed most of the CIA docs about MKULTRA.
Speaker 3: But because some of these documents, I think like twenty
Speaker 3: thousand were incorrectly stored. They were literally they were put
Speaker 3: in the wrong building and that's how people found them.
Speaker 3: They were in the Financial Records Office. And you might
Speaker 3: be saying, yet, twenty thousand documents, that sounds like a lot,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean, that's a huge amount of information.
Speaker 3: We'll think about what that tells us about the immensity
Speaker 3: and the scope of the full MK ultra entire We only.
Speaker 2: Know a little. And just going back to what you're
Speaker 2: saying about cointelpro that was the Citizens Commission to Investigate
Speaker 2: the FBI that we've talked about on the show before.
Speaker 2: It literally went to an FBI field office. Bricon took
Speaker 2: a bunch of stuff and they're like, wait, what is this.
Speaker 2: They're spying on American citizens, on activists, including Martin Luther
Speaker 2: King Junior.
Speaker 3: And they didn't know. By the way, they didn't know
Speaker 3: that's what they were looking for. It was a kind
Speaker 3: of an accidental breakthrough, like a great scientific experiment. Shout out,
Speaker 3: double slit. But this leads us to our first provable
Speaker 3: point in this idea, in this conspiracy theory that Manso
Speaker 3: was working with the CIA. The first provable point is this,
Speaker 3: we know the CIA was definitely doing crazy stuff looking
Speaker 3: for so called mentory and candidate truth serums, creating false memories,
Speaker 3: manipulating people's minds to various ends through the use of
Speaker 3: hallucinogenic substances, including LSD, and these conspiratorial experiments were often
Speaker 3: conducted without anything approaching informed consent. They even set up
Speaker 3: a fake brothel, they set up a fake hippie squad.
Speaker 3: They were in all of it. It's a true conspiracy.
Speaker 3: But how does that apply to Manson? This is where O'Neill,
Speaker 3: in particular, I would argue, does some brilliant connecting of
Speaker 3: the dots. And even if you feel you are a
Speaker 3: very skeptical person, fellow conspiracy realist, this is troubling. This
Speaker 3: is I wouldn't say smoking gun, but it's enough to
Speaker 3: beggar claims of coincidence. So again, let's connect. If we
Speaker 3: connected to Manson, we have to realize, yes, CIA, FBI,
Speaker 3: they're up to heinous stuff. Manson's thirty two years old.
Speaker 3: He's just out of prison. And as some of us
Speaker 3: in the crowd unfortunately know, when you get out of prison,
Speaker 3: unless you're exonerated, you have a parole officer who is
Speaker 3: in charge of your life. They have the power to
Speaker 3: put you back in jail.
Speaker 2: Our parole officers generally nice or are they just like
Speaker 2: mean cops? Right, you better not be doing anything wrong.
Speaker 3: Parole officers are people, you know in the spectrum.
Speaker 2: I know, I'm just joking. Like most like most folks.
Speaker 3: In the public sphere, they're probably underpaid and overworked. They're
Speaker 3: probably too many cases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like just check in, are you good? Everything's cool?
Speaker 2: All right? Fine? Bye. Well, Manson did have one of
Speaker 2: these parole officers, but it's a little coincidental. Let's say
Speaker 2: maybe that his parole officer was a Berkeley doctoral student
Speaker 2: named Roger Smith, who, guess what, was involved in a
Speaker 2: federally funded program that researched LSD and drug use among
Speaker 2: the population of San Franciscans. And uh, it's a little bit,
Speaker 2: you know, it's a big coincidence, man, just because he's
Speaker 2: involved with LSD that was a popular thing at the time,
Speaker 2: research into it to figure out what's going on with
Speaker 2: it and how it's affecting people. That's just a big coincidence. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it has nothing to do with his connections to Manson. Sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a gig economy then is now you.
Speaker 2: Just got to get jobs, try to be a doctor.
Speaker 3: There are a ton of people who are grad students
Speaker 3: who have to have another job to get themselves through schools.
Speaker 3: So the weird thing is, though, with the power that
Speaker 3: you may have as a parole officer, and any parole
Speaker 3: officers in the audience tonight, let us know your first
Speaker 3: hand experience. As a parole officer, Smith has a degree
Speaker 3: of what we call juice pull suction. He can provide
Speaker 3: limited immunity to people under his supervision because if they
Speaker 3: run a foul of the law, he's one of the
Speaker 3: first people they call. So he has the power should
Speaker 3: he wish to exercise a kind of get out a
Speaker 3: jail free card, and at Manson's case and the case
Speaker 3: of Manson's followers, he does. He does. I can say
Speaker 3: that's not true because he definitely did it several times.
Speaker 3: He got them out of jail.
Speaker 2: Really interesting and it makes you wonder if he, I
Speaker 2: don't know, had access to a little LSD that was,
Speaker 2: you know, being used for all the experiments in research,
Speaker 2: which would be an interesting relationship outside of the parole
Speaker 2: officer parole thing that would be going on there normally.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the phrase we would use is beyond the scope,
Speaker 3: depending on what the scope is right and what the
Speaker 3: true nature of the relationship is so Smith could have
Speaker 3: at multiple points, pretty much any point after the first violation,
Speaker 3: he could have sent Manson back to prison right for
Speaker 3: quite some time. He never did. And he also never
Speaker 3: bothered to report you know, evidence to drug use or
Speaker 3: petty crime kind of stuff, never reported it up the chain.
Speaker 3: And this happened pretty frequently. At least O'Neill has made
Speaker 3: a really s the case that it does. So Manson
Speaker 3: remained free as a drug addled bird, and he was
Speaker 3: doing he was doing tons of substances, you know.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, he says he only did the weed.
Speaker 2: He only smoked weed and LSD and stuff that made
Speaker 2: his mind expand he never did the uppers and the
Speaker 2: downers and all that stuff, at least that's what he says.
Speaker 3: He never. He also had a very interesting habit of
Speaker 3: forcing his followers to do drugs that he himself did
Speaker 3: not do, which is another indication of cult activity or
Speaker 3: MK ultra or MK ultra. Yeah, because oh god, I
Speaker 3: wish we could see the rest of the scope of mktra.
Speaker 2: Oh, somebody out there, you know, contact us please, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And Roger, so these are Roger Smith is working at
Speaker 3: the Hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic. Okay, he is collaborating
Speaker 3: with a guy who's not related to him named David's.
Speaker 3: David Smith is the founder of the clinic. He is
Speaker 3: a medical doctor who's made a name for himself with
Speaker 3: his expertise in pharmacology. So they get money from Uncle Sam.
Speaker 3: The CIA. The CIA funds the hate Ashbury Free Medical
Speaker 3: Clinics saw operations for research into recreational drug use amidst
Speaker 3: their patients. They're saying, you already have patients who may
Speaker 3: or may not be kind of on the fringes of society.
Speaker 3: We're going to pay you to understand more about them.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, dude, sinister. It's not sinister. But if
Speaker 2: you think of the motivation behind it, why does the
Speaker 2: CIA want to know about that? Why does the CIA
Speaker 2: want to know about that citizens within the United States
Speaker 2: that are taking recreational drugs? I don't it doesn't sit
Speaker 2: right CIA. Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm doing weird voice today.
Speaker 3: I guess it's gathering intelligence technically, but.
Speaker 2: On American citizens inside the United States.
Speaker 3: Right now, you're perview boys, But the what they begin
Speaker 3: to notice everybody involved in this CIA funded stuff, and
Speaker 3: then in just ancillary research happening at the same place.
Speaker 3: They say, Wow, A lot of the folks who keep
Speaker 3: showing up, you know, for treatment for like venereal disease
Speaker 3: or something to help with addiction, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3: A lot of them belonged to this Manson family or
Speaker 3: this family led by Charles Manson.
Speaker 2: They at least know Charles real well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or at least they know Charlie old chuckles. And
Speaker 3: then it it's even deeper. I didn't know this until
Speaker 3: read O'Neill's book, but there was an assistant researcher at
Speaker 3: the place named Alan Rose. And Alan Rose visited the
Speaker 3: Manson families compound when they when Manson relocated to la
Speaker 3: And while he was there, Alan Rose participated in, you know,
Speaker 3: the social rituals of the family. He used drugs, he
Speaker 3: got into some weird sexual rituals.
Speaker 2: As you do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, And so a lot of journalists call this
Speaker 3: diplomatically or euphemistically, four months of immersive research. He's out
Speaker 3: there just going hand for four months. He goes back
Speaker 3: to San Francisco and then.
Speaker 2: He wait, wait, or could that be like deep undercover
Speaker 2: recon like really finding out what's going on there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and how could we use this group potentially?
Speaker 3: And then how why does it take four months to
Speaker 3: figure that out?
Speaker 2: Because it was it was fun.
Speaker 3: That's it's not like that hard as nails boss of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're the four officer four.
Speaker 3: Months in seventy. In nineteen seventy, after his his time,
Speaker 3: I'm in the field, this guy, Alan Rose and David
Speaker 3: Smith write the first scholarly paper about the Manson family,
Speaker 3: the Group Marriage Commune, a case study.
Speaker 2: Wait, the group marriage? Were they all married to Charlie?
Speaker 3: They were fluid in their sexual partnerships?
Speaker 2: Okay?
Speaker 3: And then Manson also had a tremendously vile habit, according
Speaker 3: to reports, where he would you know, like going back
Speaker 3: to spawn ranch and everything, like he would buy people's
Speaker 3: approval or favors dudes by getting female members of his
Speaker 3: family to sleep with them.
Speaker 2: I remember hearing about that, but I'd never I guess
Speaker 2: saw it written out. I don't read books, sorry. But
Speaker 2: he also made people sit around and just listen to
Speaker 2: him play an acoustic guitar for way too long.
Speaker 3: I know, I'm just paying. I will leave the house party.
Speaker 3: I mean, unless it's like vampire rules, unless invited, don't
Speaker 3: do that, you know what I mean, Because that's not
Speaker 3: for the people listening, that's for you.
Speaker 2: Well, I've got a little surprised for you. At the
Speaker 2: conclusion of this episode, bend, is that true? Yes?
Speaker 3: I got it. This was and we also know this
Speaker 3: was not the only thing of its sort in town
Speaker 3: right like this. Yes, there were a lot of communesic cults,
Speaker 3: but also there were other people doing you know, not
Speaker 3: super above board research. There's a guy named Lewis West.
Speaker 3: His middle name was like Jollin or something, so people
Speaker 3: called him Jolly and and he was one of the
Speaker 3: point people, one of the prime connectors for this idea
Speaker 3: of studying LSD in drug use amidst what they called hippies.
Speaker 3: He was also a CIA psychologist with experience in deprogramming
Speaker 3: brainwashing victims, and in later conversations our author here, the
Speaker 3: journalist O'Neill, will say that West had a noted expertise
Speaker 3: in encouraging insanity in people through the use of substances
Speaker 3: without their knowledge.
Speaker 2: Really well to what end? Because he was wasn't he
Speaker 2: also good at de deprogramming people from things? I guess Wait,
Speaker 2: was he programming people and then deprogramming them? I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's like if you already have a person around. It
Speaker 3: depends on what you need for the experiment. Most I mean,
Speaker 3: the Department of Defense is weirdly enough graded offense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true, you just need test subjects.
Speaker 3: Whoa. They did that by creating a fake hippie crash
Speaker 3: path stop. Yeah, clinic, it's true.
Speaker 2: No, it's true, the one we just talked about, Like,
Speaker 2: so wait, this is all connected.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what the fake pad is like this dilapidated Victorian building.
Speaker 3: It's pretty close to the hate Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.
Speaker 3: And the idea is we're just going to study these
Speaker 3: hippies in the wild. We'll see what leads to addiction
Speaker 3: or homelessness, et cetera. West also works for Sidney Gottlieb,
Speaker 3: head of the MK Ultra programs. At some point, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Gee, I wonder why Tom was so into the story.
Speaker 2: It feels like everything is already connecting, at least in
Speaker 2: my mind.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can tell. And if he's a kick ass journalist,
Speaker 3: so he has to and he has to turn every
Speaker 3: stone right if it could lead to something, And you know,
Speaker 3: we know this wasn't a unique situation. Sadly, because I
Speaker 3: think it was nineteen seventy six. New York Times has
Speaker 3: their own investigation and they find the CIA has collaborated
Speaker 3: with all sorts of places, National Institute for Mental Health, Foundations,
Speaker 3: Fund for Research and Psychiatry, incorporated, all sorts of basically
Speaker 3: things they were using as fronts or shell companies, such
Speaker 3: that in several cases, many of the researchers who were
Speaker 3: receiving this funding might not know that it was coming
Speaker 3: from the CIA. So now everybody involved in MK ultra
Speaker 3: was knowingly malevolent.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, and there was real research to be done.
Speaker 2: This is a This is an incredible substance that seems
Speaker 2: to have tremendous effects on the human I don't know,
Speaker 2: state of mind. So you can understand why there was
Speaker 2: such interest here. You can also see why the CIA
Speaker 2: had interest. We've been joking a lot about it, but
Speaker 2: we're in the midst of the Cold War here, the CIA,
Speaker 2: the FBI, all of the American government is both terrified
Speaker 2: and super pissed at the concept of communism up terrified
Speaker 2: of and angry at it. But you know, it's there's
Speaker 2: a reason for all of it to be happening, but
Speaker 2: for it to culminate with freaking Charles Manson somehow super
Speaker 2: closely tied to it is just weird.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we still haven't we're not we're not out
Speaker 3: there yet. But I really appreciate the point you're raising
Speaker 3: about that context and about the the validity the legitimacy
Speaker 3: of those concerns, because the USSR was actively attempting to
Speaker 3: infiltrate and influence movements and the US government entire and
Speaker 3: they had they had a degree of success in doing so,
Speaker 3: So you have to cut it off at the button.
Speaker 3: You might say, hey, I am you know, I'm a
Speaker 3: five y five John Q Blue Jeans employee. I would
Speaker 3: never do hippie drugs like LSD. But if the Russians
Speaker 3: figure out a use for it and we are running
Speaker 3: behind in the game, this could change the course of
Speaker 3: the globe. So they I wouldn't even say it was
Speaker 3: a rationalization at first. It was a very profound realization.
Speaker 3: They had to try it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, they're probably even worried that the Americans might
Speaker 2: be taking the bait and just using it too much recreationally,
Speaker 2: right as and it's being supplied somehow by someone who's
Speaker 2: also working for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then we got to get into Olsley, the
Speaker 3: famous mad scientist of LSD, like mm hmm what his
Speaker 3: connections were. I don't know if you remember, but we
Speaker 3: got some fascinating correspondence a few years back about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my gosh.
Speaker 3: And this all leads us to the second point we
Speaker 3: can definitely prove, which that Manson was around the same
Speaker 3: time these programs were active. He was in the same place.
Speaker 3: He was associated with people who are being studied in
Speaker 3: the research right his followers. He was associated with people who,
Speaker 3: at the very least were associated with people who are
Speaker 3: active in these programs as administrators, as researchers. But being
Speaker 3: in the same area of an event does not prove
Speaker 3: you were involved in that event. That's like if we're
Speaker 3: walking through New York City on the night the Yankees
Speaker 3: win the World Series. It doesn't mean we're on the team.
Speaker 3: We were just also there.
Speaker 2: Ah. I guess you're right.
Speaker 3: But it still needs more scrutiny, and maybe that's our
Speaker 3: ad break.
Speaker 2: I think, so more scrutiny, more ads will be right back.
Speaker 3: We returned. Hope everybody had a good time scrutinizing those ads.
Speaker 3: Our pal O'Neill uncovers evidence that LA law enforcement investigators
Speaker 3: seem to have mishandled multiple aspects of the case. And
Speaker 3: this is something, you know, This is something that Vincent
Speaker 3: b points out in Helter Skelter. O'Neil says, though he
Speaker 3: takes a little step further, and he says the LAPD
Speaker 3: Los Angeles Police Department destroyed records from murder investigations involving Manson.
Speaker 3: Now being a parole officer and saying, hey, my guy
Speaker 3: messed up. You know, he's out past curfew one time.
Speaker 3: Don't put him in jail again, or don't put him
Speaker 3: in prison again, that's one thing. But saying hey, my
Speaker 3: guy might have murdered someone. Let's just keep it quiet
Speaker 3: till the experiment is done, that's a whole other back Badgers.
Speaker 2: I would say, so, yeah, And I think there are
Speaker 2: specific passages in Chaos where O'Neil talks about some of
Speaker 2: this stuff, right, yeah.
Speaker 3: In one passage he is speaking with a forensic psychologist. Again,
Speaker 3: O'Neill interviews so many people for this. Sometimes the interviews
Speaker 3: are contentious, and then there's still people who have just
Speaker 3: refused to talk to him at all. But in one
Speaker 3: in one conversation, he's talking to a guy named Alan Shefflin,
Speaker 3: a forensic psychologist, and they're talking about the possible fallout
Speaker 3: of mk ultra, this mind control program, and he asked Shefflin,
Speaker 3: He says, well, is it maybe possible that the Manson
Speaker 3: murders were part of an mk ultra experiment gone wrong?
Speaker 2: And Shefflin says, no, an mk ultra experiment gone right?
Speaker 2: What dude, it makes so much sense. They want the
Speaker 2: hippies to be evil because the hippies are Commies and
Speaker 2: the Commies are bad.
Speaker 3: M all right, just like the allegations of the FBI
Speaker 3: bankrolling problematic gangster rap. Right, we didn't have a shirt
Speaker 3: on that, dude.
Speaker 2: You can't got to destroy the connective tissue between groups
Speaker 2: telling you it's a thing. It's still happening.
Speaker 3: There is no smoking gun yet. However, we do know
Speaker 3: like this West guy, our buddy Jolly, was being paid
Speaker 3: to quote study hippies in their native habitat they called it.
Speaker 3: Manson was there at the same time, and like the
Speaker 3: CIA would later be proven to do, Manson was dosing
Speaker 3: people with LSD. I mean, it seems again like you know,
Speaker 3: everybody check out our old video on how to start
Speaker 3: a cult, But it seems again like this is sort
Speaker 3: of an mo of a cult leader. You want to
Speaker 3: remove personalities. You want to remove individuality. You want to remove,
Speaker 3: most importantly, the ability to say no to you if
Speaker 3: you're the leader.
Speaker 2: So think about it, right, right.
Speaker 3: Don't think about it. Listen to my acoustic guitar. And
Speaker 3: this makes them easier to control, more malleable, more menable,
Speaker 3: and weirdly enough, later down the line, when this stuff
Speaker 3: goes to court, defense attorneys will try to use this
Speaker 3: as a mitigating factor. It doesn't work, but it does
Speaker 3: all lead O'Neil and a lot of other people who
Speaker 3: have the same bent to ask, Okay, hang on, if
Speaker 3: this Charles Mancy guy is largely uneducated, how could he
Speaker 3: land upon such sophisticated methods of personality control? Do you
Speaker 3: just have a real knack for it? He was just vibing'
Speaker 3: and then he figured out like the right dosage patterns
Speaker 3: and frequency of dosage and so on.
Speaker 2: We'll see. There was this guy at the clinic and
Speaker 2: he was really good at cults programming and deprogramming. Sorry,
Speaker 2: and here's the question. The connection feels right again, that's
Speaker 2: the problem with this. And again, the zodiac theories and
Speaker 2: some of this other stuff. It feels so right on
Speaker 2: the surface when you're looking at it. I don't know, man, Well.
Speaker 3: It's like one of those things where you know those
Speaker 3: puzzles kids played, where you might see a bunch of dots.
Speaker 3: When you connect the dots it makes a picture. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just like that when we see part of the
Speaker 3: picture drawn. But you know, we it gives you a
Speaker 3: bad vibe. I think we could say it gives you
Speaker 3: a bad vibe because the implication here is could go
Speaker 3: a couple of ways. In one way, you could say Manson,
Speaker 3: who is by all accounts a very observant, very clever person,
Speaker 3: may have clocked there was experimentation taking place and may
Speaker 3: have paid enough attention to replicate some aspect of that
Speaker 3: experiment or those processes on his followers, or the more
Speaker 3: conspiratorial end of it. Someone could have actively taught him
Speaker 3: these things like, hey, Charlie, thanks for coming by the office.
Speaker 3: You want to see something cool.
Speaker 2: Check this out, Charlie. Well, or there's a piece of
Speaker 2: it that could be that's why he's staying out of prison,
Speaker 2: because he's complicit in these experiments and he's doing it.
Speaker 2: And you could even take it further and say, the
Speaker 2: real experiment is on Charlie and to see whether or
Speaker 2: not you could influence Charlie to do these things and
Speaker 2: to influence other people further.
Speaker 3: Right, if you could create a cult leader, right, something
Speaker 3: that some kind of thing that you could just transport
Speaker 3: to an unfriendly country or a country that clearly needs
Speaker 3: some democracy, and then you have that be the leader
Speaker 3: of you know, your homegrown student group. Charismatic leaders are
Speaker 3: real things. Shout out to school the Americas. You know,
Speaker 3: that worked until it didn't.
Speaker 2: Yikes. Man again, look, we can't prove any of this stuff.
Speaker 2: We're talking possibilities, right, That's all this is. But man,
Speaker 2: it it gets the wheels turning.
Speaker 3: I mean the third provable point, which I guess is
Speaker 3: kind of out of order. We know that Roger Smith,
Speaker 3: the parole officer and doctoral student, continually gave Manson and
Speaker 3: his followers a get out of jail free card, like
Speaker 3: in less than forty eight hours getting Popps, no matter
Speaker 3: what the circumstances. They were back out.
Speaker 2: They were assets. They were assets, dude.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you don't have to know you're an asset
Speaker 3: to be an asset.
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly. And I think it's the same with his
Speaker 2: followers and with Charlie. Maybe he is completely unaware. Oh
Speaker 2: this is a possibility, But maybe he's completely unaware that
Speaker 2: he's the actual target of the thing.
Speaker 3: And disturbingly, it also fits some of the structural modus
Speaker 3: operandi we know about the CIA programs during this time.
Speaker 3: You want someone else, you want to escapegoat or some
Speaker 3: an asset he can burn if you have to. Yeah, Patsy, right,
Speaker 3: you want you know, you want a Oswald, you want
Speaker 3: a Ruby something like that.
Speaker 2: That's what Oswald called himself. I'm a Patsy.
Speaker 3: That's what he did. And maybe, look, maybe this is
Speaker 3: all a matter of bending small rules and service to
Speaker 3: a greater good. Maybe Roger Smith was taken in by
Speaker 3: Manson and thought he's a good egg. At the end
Speaker 3: of the day, he just had a crap life, and
Speaker 3: you know he deserves a second fifteenth or twenty seventh chance, whatever.
Speaker 2: But we can also, I agree, we should also put
Speaker 2: this out there, completely made up. Off the top of
Speaker 2: my head, there's a possibility that his parole officer was
Speaker 2: subject to some of the same favors that Charlie was
Speaker 2: giving to the other males in his groups.
Speaker 3: Right, right, Yeah, he could have been compromised.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and maybe that's the reason. And then he has
Speaker 2: to protect Charlie and his followers.
Speaker 3: But if he's protecting them for small time crimes and
Speaker 3: drug use, even if the mk ultra connection is real
Speaker 3: and he's rationalizing it, right, then at what point does
Speaker 3: something no longer? Can you no longer define something as
Speaker 3: a small time crime? Murder is a big deal, and O'Neill,
Speaker 3: Tom O'Neil, our author here, believes the family was responsible
Speaker 3: for more murder than the Tate la Bianca homicides, and
Speaker 3: the evidence, which may I have time to get into today,
Speaker 3: is pretty concerning. There's one. There are several unsolved murders
Speaker 3: at this point. One of them, just for a quick example,
Speaker 3: is a guy named Felipo Tenerelli. He was found dead
Speaker 3: under some really strange circumstances, particularly his pubic hair had
Speaker 3: been shaved two hours before his death, and a member
Speaker 3: of the Manson family around the same time named Bill Vance,
Speaker 3: had what he called a magic vest they like to wear,
Speaker 3: and it was decorated with pubic hair. Tenerelli's family refuses
Speaker 3: to believe the official conclusion of suicide and to this day,
Speaker 3: they are campaigning for authorities to release more evidence about
Speaker 3: the murder or the death, which they have none.
Speaker 2: That's that's one of the major problems with our system. Man.
Speaker 2: Once something is ruled an accident or suicide and all
Speaker 2: the evidence, maybe he just goes away, just go we
Speaker 2: don't need that. It's just a it was a suicide.
Speaker 3: Stuff to get it reassessed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's yeah, yay, that's horrifying. A magic vest of
Speaker 2: pubic hair.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's the kind of magic I'm into.
Speaker 2: No. I like fox magic, I like.
Speaker 3: All sorts of esoteric pursuits, but I think I'll avoid
Speaker 3: the pubic vest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, moon magic, stick to moon magic.
Speaker 3: I mean, do you you know what I mean? Just
Speaker 3: don't hurt other people, right, So get your pubic hair consensually, folks.
Speaker 3: There's the other thing. There's so much missing evidence. It
Speaker 3: appears to be right. Like before the publication of Helter Skelter,
Speaker 3: Tex Watson that we've talked about in the show previously.
Speaker 2: He had this is somebody's a part of the group.
Speaker 3: Right, Tex Watson's a member of the family, of the
Speaker 3: Manson family. He had several hours of taped confessions that
Speaker 3: the DA and Tex Watson agreed should not be made
Speaker 3: available to lawyers or journalists.
Speaker 2: Why, uh, there's gnarly stuff in there. Well, and maybe
Speaker 2: he's lying a ton, yeah, which is a real possibility.
Speaker 2: But what if there is stuff in there? Do those exist?
Speaker 2: Do we think, like somewhere physically on tape they did for.
Speaker 3: A while, Yeah, we just haven't. We the public haven't
Speaker 3: heard them. So one possibility is that whatever he says there,
Speaker 3: if it's not total hogwash, it may have in some
Speaker 3: way implicated the authorities on some side of this. Maybe
Speaker 3: he talked a little bit at length about those get
Speaker 3: out of jail free cards, you know, maybe he talked
Speaker 3: about other murders as well. We simply do not know,
Speaker 3: and we should note that again. Vincent Luligosi is he
Speaker 3: was the DA for Los Angeles during nineteen sixty four
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy two. He prosecuted Charles Manson, and that's why
Speaker 3: his book Helter Skelter is by many widely considered like
Speaker 3: the definitive source on what went down and the motivations.
Speaker 3: But O'Neill and Vincent Buligosi disagree on multiple key facts
Speaker 3: the book that O'Neil has does not prove Manson worked
Speaker 3: with the CIA, but it raises some dangerous, disturbing questions,
Speaker 3: important questions about the you know, the prevailing narrative. But
Speaker 3: even that is like raising questions. Is still not the
Speaker 3: same thing as saying the CIA weaponized hippies in a
Speaker 3: mad race to control America.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, yeah, but it does make you wonder about
Speaker 2: this whole season of the which thing as the Summer
Speaker 2: of Love was coming to an end, as the Zodiac
Speaker 2: Killer in sixty eight and sixty nine, as stuff like
Speaker 2: the Manson family stuff, you know, the murders, assassinations of
Speaker 2: very popular, let's say, uniting figures. It makes you wonder
Speaker 2: about that large change in the American psyche and like,
Speaker 2: what really did motivate that stuff? And could any of
Speaker 2: that have actually been projects too, you know, to alter
Speaker 2: the way America was already changing. At least that's what
Speaker 2: it does to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, agreed, agreed, Because we want to find a causative agent, right,
Speaker 3: we want to find the variables that led to these
Speaker 3: apparent and improvable changes. What soured America? You know, what
Speaker 3: cut the heels of the flower power movement?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, some will say it was just an awakening
Speaker 2: to institutions that were not set up for what their
Speaker 2: intended purposes maybe were, or maybe those intended purposes were
Speaker 2: never the thing that we were told exactly.
Speaker 3: And this leaves us I think I was well said, Matt.
Speaker 3: This leaves us with more questions. We know the CIA
Speaker 3: officially claims to have terminated in k Ultra in nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy three. They also issued a statement slash review of
Speaker 3: the book Chaos by Tom O'Neill, and I think we
Speaker 3: can agree there. The whole thing is a good read.
Speaker 3: The review and the conclusion is somewhat surprising, and they
Speaker 3: give O'Neill some compliments. I think that the last, like
Speaker 3: the last part of it, just says O'Neill's narrative is
Speaker 3: never uninteresting, and he raises legitimate questions. And then they say,
Speaker 3: no matter what, though he's not written a secret history
Speaker 3: of the nineteen sixties. And then this line, Matt.
Speaker 2: This one is weird and I had trouble reading it aloud.
Speaker 2: So you go for it.
Speaker 3: Unless he has not written a secret history of the
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties. Unless the secrets are those certain individuals wish
Speaker 3: to keep for their own reasons. The author cannot definitively
Speaker 3: tie Manson, Tim Kay, Ultra or Chaos. He can only
Speaker 3: imply it on circumstantial evidence. At least in the end
Speaker 3: he has the grace to acknowledge it, which like, they're
Speaker 3: not saying he's wrong about stuff, and he doesn't. He
Speaker 3: doesn't claim to have definitive proof. He's like, look, I
Speaker 3: am compelled to follow this stuff up, and I will
Speaker 3: be honest about what I've found. Yes, so why is
Speaker 3: the CIA?
Speaker 2: Man does CIA? Is like a good try, pal, you
Speaker 2: almost got there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So with that, what we can say is this, there
Speaker 3: is no conclusive proof that Manson was knowingly working for
Speaker 3: the CIA, but there is proof there is in the
Speaker 3: same area at the same time, they were doing some
Speaker 3: pretty high heinous mind altering experiments, and he did know
Speaker 3: people associated with those programs, both as the conductors of
Speaker 3: the experiment and as the participants that I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know what to think on this one.
Speaker 2: I know what to think the CIA did that stuff? No,
Speaker 2: I'm just joking. That is how I feel, though. I
Speaker 2: think coming away from this episode, it feels like there
Speaker 2: is a yet to be proven thing that might live
Speaker 2: in those texts recordings that we mentioned, and if you
Speaker 2: can find those whoever you are, or you've seen them
Speaker 2: somewhere in a darkened file cabinet, get them out and
Speaker 2: show the world in us two.
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