Charles Manson and the CIA (Part 1)

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One afternoon, around the year 2000, a journalist stepped into a bustling cafe a few blocks from the courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

He was there to find out about a man rumored to have played a key role in one of the most infamous crimes of the 20th century.

The crime had unfolded 35 years earlier when cult leader Charles Manson sent his followers to the Beverly Hills mansion of a pregnant actress and her movie director husband.

By the end of the night, five people in the home were brutally stabbed to death, seemingly for no reason.

The following night, Manson's cult struck again, butchering a married couple in a nearby neighborhood.

Though Manson and his followers were all sentenced to life in prison, the journalist suspected that Manson was a pawn in a much larger game, possibly involving the U.S.

government.

But he needed proof.

That was where the man in a dark suit sitting at one of the cafe tables came in.

He was a lawyer who had agreed to talk about a man named Reeve Witson.

The journalist had repeatedly heard rumors about Witson in connection with the murders, and the lawyer was one of Witson's few close friends.

After some small talk and a few sips of coffee, the lawyer leaned closer to the journalist.

Then he dropped a bombshell.

Witson was a CIA operative.

The journalist's eyes widened as the lawyer kept talking.

In the late 1960s, Witson was working on a secret CIA project where he befriended powerful people and celebrities in Hollywood.

This included at least one of the murder victims from that first night.

The lawyer said that Witson called people to let them know about the murders the next morning as early as 7 a.m., which was strange because the police didn't know about the deaths until the maid found the bodies around 8:30 a.m.

The journalist asked how Witson found out before the police.

The lawyer looked around the cafe before he answered.

Then he said that Witson was at the murder scene.

The journalist's mind reeled.

A CIA operative wandered into a bloody crime scene at a celebrity's home that included five dead bodies and then didn't report it to the police?

The chatter of the cafe faded to a murmur as the journalist thought about what he had been told.

If what the lawyer said was true, it meant that the CIA was somehow involved in one of history's most gruesome crimes.

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From Ballin Studios and Wondery, I'm Luke Lamana, and this is Redacted Declassified Mysteries, where each week we shine a light on the shadowy corners of espionage, covert operations, and misinformation to reveal the dark secrets our governments try to hide.

This week's episode is called Charles Manson and the CIA, CIA, Part 1.

Charles Manson both fascinated and repelled Americans in the early 1970s.

On one level, he was just a scraggly ex-con who had been in trouble with the law ever since he tried to burn down his school at the tender age of nine.

Yet, with his crazed, piercing eyes and his affinity for doomsday predictions, Manson had an undeniable charisma, charisma that helped him build a cult following that he called the Manson family.

In 1969, he ordered his followers to commit a series of murders that he hoped would trigger a race war.

It started at the home of movie director Roman Polanski and his eight and a half months pregnant wife, Sharon Tate.

Polanski was out of town, but Tate and four other people were taken prisoner and then killed.

Tate was stabbed 16 times as she begged for her child's life.

To make the crime seem politically motivated, one Manson family member then wrote Pig on Tate's front door in blood.

The next night, they drove to another neighborhood and murdered a husband and wife, leaving a carving fork stuck in one of the bodies.

The killers raided the refrigerator and then scrawled more weird messages on the walls in the blood of their victims, including Death to Pigs and Helter Skelter, which is the name of a Beatles song.

By the time Manson went to prison in 1971, he was convicted of seven murders, but bragged about having killed 35 people.

Yet, the full truth of Charles Manson remains shrouded in mystery.

Was the often incoherent Manson really the leader, or did darker powers conspire to use him as an evil force?

One journalist became so intrigued with this question that it took over his life as he began peeling back the layers of the official story.

In this two-part series, where every question is answered with an even bigger question, we're going to find out the shocking revelations this journalist uncovered and ask whether it could all be true.

On the morning of March 21st, 1999, the phone rang in the Venice Beach apartment of journalist Tom O'Neill.

He was still in bed, hungover from his 40th birthday party the night before.

He rubbed his eyes and reached over to answer the call.

It was an editor O'Neill knew from Premier magazine, one of the better film publications.

She had a job offer.

How would he like to write a feature for their August issue on the upcoming 30th anniversary of the Manson murders?

All he needed to do was interview some entertainment industry people who'd been affected by the case and and reflect on the crime's legacy in Hollywood.

O'Neill sighed.

What could there be left to say about Charles Manson in 1999?

The case had been the subject of countless books and bad movies for three decades.

The prosecutor on the case, Vincent Bugliosi, wrote the definitive account of the crimes in 1975.

It was called Helter Skelter and instantly became the best-selling true crime book of all time.

According to Bugliosi, Helter Skelter was Manson's term for his racist and drug-fueled fantasies.

Manson wanted the crime scene to look like the work of a militant black civil rights group called the Black Panthers.

Police would confront the Panthers, who would then retaliate.

Manson hoped this would spark a violent race war, and once society was in ruins, Manson and his followers would seize control.

To O'Neill, it was a tired story.

On the other hand, he needed money.

He had written about famous directors and actors for renowned magazines, but it had been months since his last decent paycheck.

Plus, turning 40 had him feeling down about his future, so he agreed to do the piece.

O'Neill hung up and reached for his Rolodex of A-list contacts.

He started by calling people who ran in the same social circles as Sharon Tate or were professionally involved with her husband, Polanski, actors like Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, and Dennis Hopper.

But none of them agreed to discuss Manson.

Then he moved on to actors more indirectly connected, like Mia Farrow, Angelica Houston, Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman.

All of them refused to talk too.

It didn't take long for O'Neill to conclude that something was off.

Sure, they were big stars who valued their privacy.

But these were also crimes that happened over a generation ago.

All the defendants were locked up serving life sentences.

Why was this still such a sensitive sensitive topic?

As a seasoned journalist, O'Neill knew that silence often spoke volumes.

The refusal to talk suggested there was something being concealed.

He was going to dig around.

O'Neill decided to reach out to other players in the story.

He was surprised when Vincent Bugliosi, the former prosecutor who had secured the Manson family's conviction, agreed to speak to him on the record.

Bugliosi, however, was vague.

He just kept quoting his own book like he was reciting from a script.

It was a disappointing encounter, yielding no new insights.

After the call, O'Neill realized that if he was going to find anything of substance for this story, he would need to go rogue and talk to people beyond the official accounts.

A short time later, O'Neill was having lunch at a sushi bar with a reporter who covered the Manson trial.

They talked about whether the motives behind the murders could have been something entirely different than Manson's helter-skelter visions.

The reporter warned warned O'Neill to be careful and that a story like this could take over his life if he let it.

O'Neill knew it was already too late for that.

As O'Neill kept digging through police reports about the early days of the Manson case, he focused on one man, Preston Gillory.

He was an ex-detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, whose jurisdiction included a rundown Wild West movie set called Spawn Ranch.

This is where Manson and his followers called home.

Giller had made some wild claims in the past, but he swore all of it was the truth.

A few weeks later, on a smoggy afternoon in 1999, O'Neill pulled into a forgettable base strip mall 50 miles southeast of downtown L.A.

Wedged between a taco spot and a check caching business was a small private detective agency.

O'Neill crossed the parking lot and went inside.

A stocky older man with white hair and a bushy mustache introduced himself as Preston Giller.

He gestured to a chair in front of his desk and O'Neill took a seat.

He started by telling Gillory that he had read a transcript of a controversial radio interview Giller gave back in 1971, two years after the murders.

In the interview, Gillory detailed Manson's activities in the months leading up to the Tate murders and alleged that the police were allowing him to evade justice for a range of crimes.

He had access to alcohol, narcotics, and illicit sex.

When I say illicit sex, I'm talking about minor girls.

And all this was going down

with full knowledge of his parole officer, as well as the officers at Malibu Patrol Station.

And machine guns.

Machine guns, right?

When I was there, when I was at Malibu, we knew that there were machine guns being fired on the Spawn Ranch.

We had citizen complaints about this.

We were forbidden to make arrests.

The station had a policy prior to the Spawn Ranch raid.

Our policy was make no arrests, take no police action towards Manson or his followers.

And needlessly, any thinking officer...

The revelations from Giller on the radio interview painted a confusing picture.

O'Neill asked Gillory why an ex-con who violated his parole wasn't sent back to prison.

Guillary didn't know, but he thought that events a week after the Tate murders, when investigators were still looking for suspects, provided a clue.

On that day, August 16th, 1969, the LA County Sheriff's Department staged the largest raid in its history at Spahn Ranch.

They sent in more than 100 officers armed with AR-15 rifles and backed up by helicopters overhead.

Almost 30 people were arrested.

But the strange part was that the raid had nothing to do with the murders.

Guillary's bosses claimed they were targeting the ranch because they thought Manson was running a stolen car ring.

Gillory told O'Neill that he thought it was ridiculous.

Law enforcement had its hands full with seven unsolved murders that were on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

Yet they launched the biggest crackdown ever on some hippies with stolen cars?

And he said the aftermath was even more suspicious.

The Sheriff's Department confiscated submachine guns and drugs, plus stacks of stolen wallets and credit cards at the ranch.

But the entire Manson family was released from jail three days later, with no charges filed.

O'Neill agreed, this was baffling.

If no one was arrested, what was the real motive behind the raid?

And why did Manson seem untouchable?

Who benefited by dismissing his crimes?

Gillory scowled.

O'Neill could see that their discussion was stirring up old resentments in the former detective.

But Gillory said his biggest beef came later.

In December of 1969, three months after Sharon Tate and the others were killed, the LAPD held a press conference announcing that they had finally cracked the case.

Manson and his crazed band of evil hippies were the killers.

The hunt was over, and Manson made the perfect villain.

But to Gillory, the whole thing seemed dishonest.

Law enforcement had long known that Manson was trouble.

He wondered, why didn't they stop him before the killing even began?

That's when Gillory went to a local news station and told them everything he'd witnessed, blaming senior officials for failing to stop Manson.

As soon as his bosses heard about the interview, Gillory was fired.

Now, O'Neill understood why Gillory was still angry 30 years later.

Something didn't add up.

Later, as O'Neill's car crawled through rush hour traffic on his way home, he realized that the Manson case was bigger and messier than he understood.

The Sheriff's Department had let Manson get away with too much before finally arresting him.

The question was why?

Maybe the tipping point came after Manson orchestrated the brutal murders, and then someone at the top finally said enough was enough.

After his meeting with Giller, O'Neill decided to consult a retired deputy district attorney.

He wanted to understand how Manson was able to keep violating his parole without facing consequences.

The former prosecutor was blunt.

This was no accident.

This revelation left O'Neill perplexed.

The local sheriff couldn't have enough power to shield a criminal like Manson.

There had to be a more powerful force at play.

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The deadline for filing O'Neill's 30th anniversary article about the murders passed in August 1999, but his story was far from ready.

O'Neill had to explain to the editor-in-chief that the piece had evolved into something bigger and juicier.

He wasn't happy about the missed deadline, but encouraged O'Neill to keep going.

A short time later, on a freezing December afternoon, O'Neill drove along an icy country road in Michigan.

His research was showing that law enforcement had deliberately protected Manson from arrest in the months leading up to the murders.

A part of O'Neill was worried that he had stumbled into something more complex than he could handle, but another part of him was electrified.

This felt like real journalism with real stakes.

That's what inspired O'Neill to fly to Ann Arbor.

to have a sit-down with another mysterious figure from Charles Manson's past, his former parole officer.

In 1967, Manson had just been released from prison after serving seven years for violating probation on a federal check forgery charge.

He took up residence in Berkeley, California, where parole officer Roger Smith met with him weekly for almost a year.

This meant Roger Smith saw firsthand Manson's evolution from small-town conman into hippie guru.

The San Francisco Bay Area in 1967 was the epicenter of the Summer of Love, and Manson took full advantage.

Week by week, his harem of hippie runaways known as the Manson family kept growing.

O'Neill was curious what Roger Smith had noticed in Manson back then.

Based on his research, it looked like Roger was much more than Manson's parole officer.

When Roger stopped overseeing Manson, he started working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, where hippies flocked to get treatment.

At the clinic, Roger led a research project that was supposed to explore the connection between highly addictive methamphetamines and violent behavior in the community.

Roger sometimes had parole meetings with Manson at the clinic.

Apparently, he even persuaded Manson to move to the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco in order to be closer to the clinic.

It made O'Neill wonder if Manson was somehow involved in the clinic's drugs and violence research.

When O'Neill called Roger to ask ask for an interview, he was surprised how quickly he agreed.

Roger told O'Neill that he had avoided talking about Manson because he thought it would hurt his career, but he was retiring soon, so that worry had passed.

Turning off the dirt road, O'Neill cruised down a long driveway and parked in front of a scenic old farmhouse.

At the door, Roger welcomed O'Neill into a large, rustic living room.

Smith's wife Carmen sat on a couch in front of a crackling fireplace.

Homemade pizza steamed on the kitchen counter alongside several bottles of wine.

O'Neill felt bad.

Roger and his wife had clearly prepared for a welcoming evening together, and here he was with a head full of uncomfortable questions.

Once they were settled in by the fire, O'Neill presented Roger with copies of old parole reports bearing his signature.

Each document was a memo to Roger's boss confirming that Charles Manson was living within the law and not involved in any suspicious activity.

Roger squinted at each sheet before setting it down.

Then he took a big sip of wine.

He told O'Neill that he didn't remember many specifics about that time.

None of these documents rang a bell.

O'Neill asked why his memories were so foggy, and Roger shrugged.

He said he was just a naive kid in his 20s at the time.

Being a parole officer was just a way to pay for grad school.

O'Neill dug out another parole report Roger had filed in late 1967, saying that Manson was making excellent progress.

O'Neill was curious what kind of progress Roger was referring to.

Roger barely glanced at the document.

He said Hait Ashbury back then was swarming with drugged out hippies.

He thought Manson seemed fairly sane compared to most of them.

O'Neill pushed further.

What about Manson's drug use?

Many of his followers had testified in court that Manson dropped acid daily during the family's time in San Francisco, and he persuaded everyone else to do the same.

But O'Neill noted that Roger had never mentioned this in any of his reports.

Roger just shrugged and uncorked another bottle of wine.

To him, taking LSD in the Bay Area in 1967 was like drinking a beer.

No one thought of it as illegal.

O'Neill waited while Roger topped off his glass.

Then he switched gears.

He wanted to know more about Smith's work at the Haight-Ashbury Clinic.

O'Neill mentioned that studying people who take amphetamines in the same place that parole meetings were held seemed like a dangerous combination.

Unless Manson was part of one of Roger's drug studies.

O'Neill asked him point blank if that was true.

Finally, Roger's composure broke.

He raised his voice and said O'Neill was looking for connections that weren't there.

Manson wasn't part of any study.

Roger was suddenly done talking.

O'Neill knew when to take a hint and left.

That night, driving through the snow to his hotel, O'Neill wondered if Roger was more involved with Manson than he was admitting.

But how, the journalist still wasn't sure.

He had to keep digging.

O'Neill had been trying to get in touch with the person behind this whole mystery for months, Charles Manson himself.

Finally, in early 2000, there was progress.

O'Neill got in touch with one of Manson's associates, who helped arrange a telephone interview with the cult leader from the California State Prison.

O'Neill would be allowed five minutes to talk before the call was automatically disconnected.

O'Neill's nerves were jangled as the morning of the Manson interview arrived.

It was February 14th, Valentine's Day.

He was about to speak with a mass murderer, one whose strange charisma persuaded others to follow him without question.

When the phone crackled to life, the notorious criminal's voice cut through.

As Manson mumbled and rambled, O'Neill introduced himself, and that was the last moment of any logical conversation.

The cult leader spoke in riddles, never making any sense.

The five-minute time limit ticked away as the journalist sat dumbfounded.

O'Neill realized then that he would would never get the answers he sought directly from Manson.

Several months later, in the summer of 2000, O'Neill drove across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco on a gloriously sunny afternoon.

He was close to being dead broke, but he still felt re-energized.

As the weeks turned into months of research, O'Neill's conviction only grew stronger.

The official narrative surrounding the Manson Manson murders simply wasn't adding up.

One glaring discrepancy involved Vincent Bugliosi, the lead prosecutor whose best-selling book had captivated the public.

O'Neill had found major discrepancies between Bugliosi's account and the official police reports, suggesting Bugliosi's book contained errors.

He even found a document in Bugliosi's own handwriting.

saying that a key prosecution witness had lied on the stand, yet no one had bothered to question the prosecutor's story.

O'Neill knew he wasn't ready to challenge Bugliosi just yet.

He needed to build his own case, and his instincts kept drawing him back to Manson's home away from home in San Francisco, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

In O'Neill's mind, the evidence was pointing to a disturbing possibility.

Somebody powerful was using Manson as part of an experiment, and the clinic was at the center of it.

O'Neill wasn't sure what it all meant, but he decided to visit the clinic in person and find out.

After walking through San Francisco's hilly streets, O'Neill turned a corner and found what he was looking for, the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

The clinic was founded and run by David Smith, simply known as Dr.

Dave.

Dr.

Dave and Manson's parole officer, Roger Smith, weren't related.

but they shared the same last name and the same interest in drugs, youth culture, and psychology.

When the clinic opened in 1967, the building was painted with swirling day glow murals.

The place quickly became a mecca for hippies in need of free medical treatment.

But now, when O'Neill went inside, the walls were bare, except for some framed old articles about the clinic's history.

After looking around for a minute, O'Neill left.

Whatever secrets he was looking for had been painted over a long time ago.

Back at his hotel, O'Neill pulled out a book he had brought, a 1971 memoir about the clinic called Love Needs Care, written by Dr.

Dave.

The book was mainly self-promotional, but there were some intriguing bits, particularly Dr.

Dave's discussion of the clinic's financial backing.

One of the clinic's biggest donors was the National Institute of Mental Health.

Something about the name triggered O'Neill's memory.

He opened his computer and searched his files and found it.

In 1976, the National Institute of Mental Health was forced to admit that it had been frequently used as a front by the CIA.

The CIA was the same agency that employed Manson associate, Reeves Witson, the guy who somehow knew about the Tate murders, before the police.

O'Neill's mind began racing.

Did the CIA bankroll the clinic when Manson was a patient there?

Dr.

Dave's book revealed that the clinic's federally funded research primarily focused on the effects of drugs such as hallucinogens like LSD and stimulants like amphetamines.

The book also made clear that Manson's former parole officer, Roger Smith, was in the thick of the action, heading up something called the Amphetamine Research Project.

Unfortunately, O'Neill knew that he could never check the original reports from the research project to see if Manson was involved.

That's because in 1969, someone broke into the Haight-Ashbury Clinic and stole every file documenting the amphetamine research project.

Interestingly, nothing else in the clinic was stolen.

O'Neill couldn't help but think that this burglary was no coincidence.

It had happened immediately after Manson's arrest, and Manson family members had confessed to police that they'd taken amphetamines just before committing the cold-blooded murders.

O'Neill was more convinced than ever that Manson and his followers had been guinea pigs in some larger project.

But for what exactly, O'Neill didn't know yet.

Three weeks later, on an overcast weekday morning, O'Neill sat at his desk in his home office.

He sipped some coffee and scanned a file filled with the research he had gathered so far on David Smith, aka Dr.

Dave, the mysterious founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Health Clinic.

One of O'Neill's sources told him that Dr.

Dave absolutely used hippie patients, including Charles Manson, as test subjects for drug research.

Not only that, but Dr.

Dave considered Manson so crucial to his work that he sent an assistant to continue documenting Manson after he moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

But that was just part of the puzzle.

O'Neill had been reading Dr.

Dave's research articles that described a phenomenon the doctor had witnessed when groups of people used LSD together over a period of time.

Those shared drug experiences could gradually shape a distorted, alternate reality for the participants.

Smith called it the psychedelic syndrome.

Susan Atkins, one of Manson's cult members who participated in the Tate murders, freely acknowledged the mind-warping long-term effects of LSD in a 1976 prison interview.

She had taken LSD more than 300 times.

You'd have to understand what acid does to the mind in order to understand how a prison game can get confused behind drugs.

And that's, I would take a thesis writing a book on what LSD can do to the mind.

Dr.

Dave had written plenty on the subject, and O'Neill had finally convinced him to talk.

O'Neill had been deliberately vague in his voicemail about the purpose of the interview.

He didn't want Dr.

Dave to come to the interview with prepared answers.

And the doctor had a lot to answer for, given what O'Neill had learned.

O'Neill's heart beat faster as he dialed Dr.

Dave's number.

Either he was about to learn the truth, or he would run into another frustrating wall.

On the fifth ring, Dr.

Dave answered.

O'Neill started by complimenting the clinic and describing his recent visit there.

He mentioned that he'd even read the doctor's book about its history and found it fascinating.

Dr.

Dave said he was proud of the clinic's legacy, but didn't elaborate further.

O'Neill cleared his throat and broached the subject of the psychedelic syndrome.

He said that to him, it sounded similar to brainwashing.

Then O'Neill took a deep breath and asked him whether Manson had learned a technique like this during one of his many visits to the clinic.

Dr.

Dave didn't skip a beat.

He flatly denied that Manson was involved in any of his studies.

Smith was simply continuing the work he'd begun before opening the clinic.

O'Neill then mentioned that he had heard that the doctor ran studies in which rats were injected with LSD and amphetamines and confined in a small space.

He asked if it was true that most of the rats ended up killing each other in fits of rage.

Dr.

Dave grunted, then admitted that yes, oftentimes the animals would turn hostile.

O'Neill wondered if Dr.

Dave found it an odd coincidence that he was studying how LSD can alter behavior while Manson himself had been using those same drugs to manipulate his followers in the same city.

Dr.

Dave didn't take the bait.

He claimed that Manson had little connection to the clinic, coming by only occasionally for parole meetings or to get medications for his followers.

O'Neill felt Dr.

Dave was lying, but he remained quiet for a minute.

He had been told by another source that the doctor became so fascinated by the Manson family that a few months before the murders, he wrote an academic paper about them.

But when the Manson family was linked to the killing of Sharon Tate and the others, Dr.

Dave pulled the article just before it was set to be published.

But when O'Neill brought this up, the doctor dismissed the whole incident.

He claimed the article had been the idea of one of his assistants, not his.

He was only a supervisor.

O'Neill kept pressing, what about that theft of the amphetamine research project files?

The files went missing right after the Manson family were named as suspects in the murders.

Did it have anything to do with protecting one of the clinic's major sponsors, the one that was a front for the CIA?

There was a long pause.

O'Neill imagined Dr.

Dave's mind racing with excuses.

But again, the doctor didn't budge.

He denied there was ever a burglary at the clinic, but also claimed he had no idea where the files were.

Then Dr.

Dave abruptly stopped the interview.

He told O'Neill to leave him out of whatever story he was writing.

There was a click, and the dial tone hummed.

Yet O'Neill was encouraged.

Dr.

Dave's heated reaction told him he had touched a nerve.

The doctor was definitely downplaying his connections to Manson.

O'Neill walked outside to clear his head.

He now suspected that Dr.

Dave was potentially doing drug research for the CIA and working with Manson and his followers.

Were they looking at how to use drugs to control the human mind?

That could certainly help the spy agency prepare agents and assassins to do their bidding.

Manson might have leveraged those same drugs to program his murderous cult.

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On a breezy June morning in 2001, O'Neill paced in his home office.

One entire wall was filled with thumbtack photos, scribbled dates, and hand-drawn lines connecting cops, criminals, celebrities, and events.

Manson had fully taken over O'Neill's life.

Almost two years had gone by since O'Neill first started digging into Charles Manson and the CIA.

After blowing through so many deadlines, O'Neill no longer owed Premier Magazine an article.

He felt a sense of relief because O'Neill knew this had outgrown just a magazine piece.

It had become a sprawling investigation, even the makings of a full-blown book.

O'Neill knew it would make him some enemies.

Manson's former parole officer Roger Smith and and Dr.

Dave for starters.

And definitely former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter.

Bugliosi's entire book and the murder case he won centered on Manson's fantasy to control society after a race war.

It was the bedrock of Bugliosi's career, and O'Neill was working to rip it in half.

None of that mattered to him, though.

O'Neill believed this would be a story the world needed to hear.

Today, on this breezy June morning, he was following one of the most promising leads he had found yet.

O'Neill felt positive that the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic was the smoking gun to Manson's transformation from small-time hood to mass murderer.

As O'Neill zeroed in on how Manson was able to control his followers, he came across another name, Dr.

Louis Jollion.

aka Jolly West.

West had worked at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic alongside Roger and David Smith during the years Manson was a regular, starting in 1967.

Information on West seemed scarce till O'Neill came across his obituary.

It stated that West died in 1999 and that he had willed 265 boxes of archives to UCLA, where he was chair of the psychiatry department until 1989.

O'Neill headed straight to the UCLA library.

A clerk behind the counter directed O'Neill down to the basement where the archives were stored.

O'Neill passed dusty racks until he reached the counter.

Moments later, a library assistant heaved a huge cardboard box onto the counter.

This was the first, 264 more to go.

As O'Neill scanned through folder after folder of yellowed papers at a desk, His brain struggled to absorb the sheer volume of information, much of it technical.

There were dozens of press clippings clippings on the Manson murders, even research papers by Roger Smith and David Smith.

For the rest of the summer, O'Neill returned to the archive, sifting through one box after another.

Then, he hit on something interesting.

He found letters between West and a man who is a prominent figure in CIA history, Sidney Gottlieb.

the biochemist who oversaw one of the CIA's most infamous programs, a mind control research program called MKUltra.

The project, which operated in the 1950s and 60s, involved experimenting with drugs, hypnosis, and other techniques to develop methods for controlling human minds, often without subjects' knowledge or consent.

West wrote to Gottlieb detailing how they could conduct mind control experiments in secret.

And in one particularly chilling letter, West claimed he had figured out how to remove real memories from a subject and replace them with permanent, false memories.

O'Neill was riveted.

Towards the bottom of yet another box, he flipped open a standard manila folder to find a thick sheaf of papers.

The top page was stamped in red, classified.

As O'Neill skimmed its contents, he realized it was never meant to be saved.

much less seen by a civilian.

It was a letter to Dr.

West from Sidney Gottlieb.

The letter discussed West's involvement with another notorious figure, Jack Ruby.

He was a small-time nightclub owner with a history of minor run-ins with the law until he suddenly shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV in 1963, just days after Oswald had assassinated President John F.

Kennedy.

O'Neill felt a chill run down his spine.

What if, through the CIA's MKUltra program, West played a role in shaping the actions of both Jack Ruby and Charles Manson?

The shocking acts of violence committed by these two men could have been the result of the same twisted experiments in psychological manipulation orchestrated by West and the CIA.

O'Neill ran upstairs to the library's computer lab.

He couldn't believe what he had read.

His hands were shaking as he logged in and started typing an email to to his agent about what he'd discovered.

After clicking send, O'Neill sat there in silence.

He knew his agent would probably think he had slipped over the edge into conspiracy nutchop nonsense, and maybe his agent was right, but another part of him trusted his gut, even though there were still so many unanswered questions.

O'Neill couldn't see the end of the tunnel, but he could tell it was leading somewhere.

That somewhere is where we're headed next week in part two of Manson and the CIA.

Follow Redacted Declassified Mysteries, hosted by me, Luke Lamana, on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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From Bollin Studios and Wondery, this is Redacted, Declassified Mysteries, hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

A quick note about our stories.

We do a lot of research, but some details and scenes are dramatized.

We used many different sources for our show, but we especially recommend Chaos, Charles Manson, The CIA, and The Secret History of the 60s by Tom O'Neill, and the LA Times in-depth reporting into the Manson family murders.

This episode was written by Britt Brown.

Sound design by Andre Plus.

Our producer is Christopher B.

Dunn.

Our associate producers and researchers are Sarah Vitak, Teja Palakonda, Adam Mellian, and Ruffa Faria.

Fact-checking by Sheila Patterson.

For Balin Studios, our head of production is Zach Levitt.

Script editing by Scott Allen.

Our coordinating producer is Samantha Collins.

Production support by Avery Siegel.

Produced by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive producers are Mr.

Balin and Nick Witters.

For Wondery, our head of sound is Marcelino Villipando.

Senior producers are Laura Donna Palavoda, Dave Schilling, and Rachel Engelman.

Senior managing producer is Nick Ryan.

Managing producers are Olivia Fonte and Sophia Martins.

Our executive producers are Aaron O'Flaherty and Marsha Louie.

For Wondery.