Netflix Film Shines Light on How Manson Family Murders Appear To Have Been Tied to CIA Mind Control Project
By John Potash - April 17, 2025 for Covert Action Magazine
As detailed in his book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, and the new Netflix documentary, CHAOS: The Manson Murders, Premiere magazine writer Tom O’Neill turned a feature-article assignment into a 20-year investigation, revealing a mass of evidence that a CIA doctor—Jolyon West—helped create Charles Manson and his “Family” of murderous young women and men.
Testimony and evidence support that the CIA, through projects such as “CHAOS” and particularly “MK-ULTRA,” created the Manson Family and other CIA assets nationwide.
Book and Documentary Counter Previous Narrative on Manson Murders
Major American publisher Little, Brown and Company released a very important non-fiction book in 2019, titled CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties. In March 2025, Netflix issued a new documentary by Academy Award-winner Errol Morris, Chaos: The Manson Murders, based on O’Neill’s book.
In CHAOS, Tom O’Neill and co-author Dan Piepenbring laid out O’Neill’s 20-year investigation of the infamous 1969 Charles Manson murders of Hollywood actress and activist-organizer Sharon Tate and others around Los Angeles.
O’Neill took the name from the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, first revealed by Seymour M. Hersh in a New York Times front-page story. Alternative magazines revealed various illegal CIA activities in the U.S. and abroad for years. Hersh’s 1974 story was one of The New York Times’s first revelations about the CIA’s illegal work against American anti-war and civil rights activists in the U.S., which its charter prohibited.
Major American publishers rarely produce books that uncover so many CIA covert operations as CHAOS does. One of the few books published by a major publisher that may have surpassed CHAOS in its depth of revelations on CIA projects, such as MK-ULTRA (which overlapped the CIA’s Operation CHAOS), is Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion. Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting co-founder Martin A. Lee wrote this book with Bruce Shlain in 1985.
O’Neill started out by reviewing the most common source of information about the Manson murders, which came from Manson’s Los Angeles prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, who published the best-selling book, Helter Skelter. O’Neill related Bugliosi’s threats and seeming bribes during at least several long personal interviews with him.
O’Neill also came to find that Bugliosi covered up much information throughout both the trial and his overlapping book writing. Despite the censorship of information, Bugliosi did describe how Charles Manson used LSD and some form of hypnosis to turn a large group of young people into murderers.
U.S. Intel Drug Trafficking, “Investigating” and Embedding in the Manson Family
O’Neill reported having conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed troves of police files, court records, and CIA documents. He filed Freedom of Information Act requests for many of the government documents, including CIA documents that are extremely hard to obtain.
The followers Manson called his “Family” included mostly underage girls whom he supplied with lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD or acid, as well as amphetamines.
The young guys in this family, who all dressed like hippies, joined the girls in pointing their rifles at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officers and Fire Department personnel who came onto their property, but superiors consistently gave Manson and his Family leniency from prosecution for two years, until they committed the more infamous murders.[1]
As O’Neill interviewed more people involved with Manson and some of Manson’s victims, he found that some of these undercover U.S. Intelligence agents or collaborators—such as, Charles Tacot, Billy Doyle, and particularly Reeve Whitson—working around the Manson Family were taking part in either drug trafficking or murders.[2]
As documented in more than 20 pages detailing dozens of interviews, many close to Reeve Whitson reported his work for the CIA and as an undercover agent in the Manson Family, including Whitson’s ex-wife Ellen Josefson.
Based on these many years of interviews, O’Neill told interviewer Joe Rogan that Reeve Whitson worked and lived with the Manson Family in and around the Spahn Ranch in the Los Angeles area, while also working for the CIA.[3]
Several of O’Neill’s other findings include Los Angeles Police Detective William Herrmann, working for the CIA’s Operation Phoenix, slaughtering civilian Vietnamese, before coming to L.A. and getting involved in the Manson case—O’Neill detailed how Herrmann worked for both the LAPD and a “dizzying list of American intelligence and military agencies” concurrently.[4]
Los Angeles District Attorney Evelle J. Younger worked for the FBI and then the CIA predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services. Younger’s second in command, Lynn “Buck” Compton, worked with Herrmann on “advanced intelligence gathering” on “subversives and militants,” which was not supposed to be part of their duties.[5]
Such intelligence gathering was usually done on behalf of the CIA’s CHAOS program, which had also teamed up with the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Both programs targeted anti-war activists and Black civil rights activists, particularly the Black Panthers.
MK-ULTRA, Targeting Robeson and Castro, Dr. Jolly West, and Mind Control
As O’Neill related in his book CHAOS, CIA directors illegally shredded most of the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA documents due to a forthcoming U.S. Senate inquiry in 1973, though at least some were found in a financial department. Acid Dreams writer Martin Lee and A Terrible Mistake writer H. P. Albarelli reported that 20,000 documents remained in archives for their research.
The CIA’s MK-ULTRA could be called an umbrella project, as it included 149 sub-projects carried out at 44 colleges and universities, as well as many hospitals and jails. One of its main thrusts was what some documents described as the use of drugs for “unconventional warfare.”
A U.S. Senate report detailed how MK-ULTRA used LSD and other drugs to hurt people’s minds or manipulate people’s behaviors at home and abroad.
As mentioned earlier, the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA used LSD as a weapon against many targets. For example, MK-ULTRA Director Sidney Gottlieb and his agents created a hit list of political targets to dose with psychedelics for neutralization, from activists in San Francisco to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.[6]
Paul Robeson, Jr., believes the CIA dosed his Black activist singer father with a large amount of LSD or the super-psychedelic BZ, a few weeks before Robeson was to meet with Fidel Castro and Che Guevera. This led to London doctors convincing Robeson’s wife that Robeson needed to be hospitalized in a facility collaborating with MK-ULTRA where they gave him 54 electro-convulsive shock treatments and seriously damaged his mind permanently.[7]
Tom O’Neill’s investigative research reached its peak in finding and detailing a UCLA archive of undercover CIA operative Dr. Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West. Dr. West, a psychiatrist, had infamously “examined” Jack Ruby before he testified in front of the Warren Commission about the murder of President John Kennedy’s reported assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
Documents revealed that Dr. West used “hypnosis and sodium pentothal” in that examination, supporting his creating a conclusion of Ruby’s “psychosis” that disallowed Ruby’s testimony about his murder of Oswald.
In the UCLA archive, O’Neill uncovered many more documents, including direct correspondence between Dr. West and CIA Project MK-ULTRA Director Gottlieb.[8] On Muckrock, a photocopy shows part of a letter from West to Gottlieb—“S.G.”—and part of a proposal asking for his work with hypnosis and drugs to run from “1956 to 1967.” In this last year, Dr. West would be working in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, the year it was founded.
After the U.S. Senate hearings on MK-ULTRA, The New York Times’ front-page story on MK-ULTRA described it as “a secret 25-year, $25 million effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to learn how to control the human mind.”
The papers of Dr. West supported his claim that he “achieved the impossible: He knew how to replace ‘true memories’ with ‘false ones’ in human beings without their knowledge,” using drugs to enhance hypnosis.[9]
The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic and Dr. Jolly West
Charles Manson was released on parole in Los Angeles and, for an unknown reason, was soon transferred from a Los Angeles parole office to Parole Officer (PO) Roger Smith in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1967. In an extremely bizarre turn of events, Smith, who had a background in criminology and directed the Amphetamine Research Project at the University of California Medical Center, would then winnow down his caseload “of parolees from forty down to just one: Manson.”[10]
There, Smith led Manson and his group of growing, mostly underage women to regularly attend a clinic that Roger Smith started to help run—the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic (HAFMC). This small clinic appeared to only have three administrators: Dr. David E. Smith who founded it in June 1967, Roger Smith, and Alan Rose.
The Smiths received federal government funds for the clinic and invited CIA MK-ULTRA psychiatrist Dr. Jolly West to have his own office at the LSD-promoting HAFMC. Smith received funding from the Amphetamine Research Project to study the drug at the HAFMC.[11] This coincidence comes with the fact that studies show methamphetamine is a drug that is most associated with committing murder.
Smith wrote a paper outlining his use of drugs with his subjects and the need to protect his subjects from prosecution by police.[12] This fit perfectly with his and Dr. West’s possible use of the Manson Family in this regard. According to ex-CIA agent Mike Baker, when the Manson Family was regularly visiting the HAFMC, they were “part of a study and getting their LSD from there.”
HAFMC administrators David and Roger Smith both wrote about Manson getting LSD from their clinic. Both tried to hide any malevolent goals in talking about it as a positive development, though David ended up writing that Manson “began to develop a number of delusions.”[13]
O’Neill described how Charles Manson attended HAFMC at least weekly and some weeks daily. Manson’s growing group of girls often accompanied him to HAFMC, reportedly to get treated for their increasing amount of sexually transmitted diseases.[14]
O’Neill wrote that the Smiths clearly knew of Charlie Manson pimping his girls out as David claimed, “Charlie frequently offered him the services of his harem,” adding, “Roger declined this offer.” And finally, another HAFMC administrator, Alan Rose, started working with the Manson girls at the clinic but then followed them to Los Angeles, strategized on how to get them out of jail for an early legal case in LA, and lived with them for four months there.[15]
More U.S. Intel Agents and Manson, Targeting Black Panthers, Activist Hollywood
Tom O’Neill met others who understood that U.S. intelligence aided Manson’s control over these girls to accomplish CIA goals. O’Neill reportedly interviewed the daughter of William Deanyer, who said her father learned hypnosis in the U.S. Navy (likely Naval Intelligence). She said she saw Deanyer help train Manson in hypnosis at a Sunset Strip club in Los Angeles.[16]
O’Neill further talked to law professor and forensic psychologist Alan Scheflin. Prof. Scheflin had reviewed MK-ULTRA documents where the CIA claimed to have perfected the creation of hypnotically controlled assassins with the help of drugs, which he wrote about in his 1978 book The Mind Manipulators, co-written with UC Berkeley psychology graduate school Associate Dean Edward Opton, Jr. Scheflin believed that Dr. West worked on the Manson Family to carry out just what the CIA wanted.[17]
What goals did the CIA have in mind with these Manson Family actions? Why did the majority of the murders happen at movie star Sharon Tate’s house? One of the most logical reasons came in O’Neill’s report that the Tate house had “become a high-profile gathering place for liberal Hollywood,” including Jane Fonda, Cass Elliot, Warren Beatty, and Donald Sutherland (and Leonard Bernstein in New York), who supported the Black Panther Party. They “were under surveillance by the FBI.”
Coffee heiress Abigail Folger, who would die at the hands of the Manson Family at the Tate house, also belonged to the White Panther Party. Many in the Polanski-Tate crowd further belonged to the anti-Vietnam War organizing Peace and Freedom Party of California.[18]
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had issued a 1967 COINTELPRO memorandum that expressed extreme concern about white Hollywood liberals giving the Black Panther Party (BPP) respectability. He noted: “The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) has been furnishing the BPP with financial assistance. An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of the PFP in which it is set forth that the BPP has made statements in closed meetings that when the armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.” Manson’s family lined them up for slaughter and left “slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.”[19]
Evidence supported that the FBI, CIA, and local police had already worked together in the murderous targeting of Los Angeles Black Panther leaders Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, who were fatally shot in January 1969—this U.S. intelligence collaborative work further led to the FBI’s attempted murder of LA Panther leader Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt (later Ji Jaga) in December of that year, bracketing the Manson murders.[20]
In the three murder scenes created by the Manson Family members, the Netflix film, CHAOS: The Manson Murders, showed images of the word “Pig” or “Piggies” scrawled on the wall in blood at every location. The Black Panthers referred to corrupt police, federal agents, and oppressive politicians as “Pigs” to relate their institutional racism against Blacks, from police brutality to exclusion from voting in the South. [21]
The CHAOS documentary also played audio and video recordings of several of the Manson Family members saying they took “speed” (murder-aiding methamphetamines) just before going to the houses where they committed the murders—it should be remembered that Roger Smith had run his federally funded Amphetamine Research Project out of HAFMC[22] where CIA MK-ULTRA Dr. Jolly West had an office.
MK-ULTRA Continued: Presidential Assassination Attempts and HAFMC Closure
After the arrest and conviction of Charles Manson and some of his Family members involved in these murders, another Manson Family member tried to strike again in the 1970s. Nelson Rockefeller had been appointed by Dwight Eisenhower as a special assistant to the president where he attended meeting at the National Security Council (NSC) starting in 1954. From that position, he was aware of the increasing sums of money going to the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA, which started in 1953. His family’s foundation was also a cover for covert funding of CIA projects such as MK-ULTRA.[23]
After three failed runs for president in the 1960s, Rockefeller appeared to finally try to take the presidency after President Gerald Ford nominated him for vice president following the Watergate scandal resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. As vice president, Rockefeller almost had a chance to see his financial backing of MK-ULTRA pay off.
In 1975, Manson Family member Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme came within arm’s length of President Ford, and pulled the trigger of a pistol, but it did not go off as she had not correctly loaded a bullet into the chamber. A Secret Service agent grabbed the gun from her hand and took her to the ground, while others dragged President Ford away.
When that did not work, it’s a wonder if Vice President Rockefeller didn’t go with his backup plan. A “former FBI informant” tried to kill President Ford 17 days after Fromme’s attempt. Sara Jane Moore fired shots at Ford from close range, but his Secret Service agents saved him again.
Tragically, these were not the only victims of the CIA’s Project MK-ULTRA mind-control experiments, to turn young people into future CIA assets. In 1995, President Bill Clinton’s administration held hearings on Human Radiation Experiments that included sexual abuse and mind-control techniques. Claudia Mullen and Christine DeNicola testified at this hearing with their therapist Valerie Wolf in 1995.
Mullen and DeNicola said that MK-ULTRA scientists raped, drugged and tortured them throughout their childhoods to force them to work for the CIA. Therapist Wolf said “nearly forty therapists” said they had patients who had similar stories of having mind-control experiments conducted on them.
Mullen and De Nicola reported many details that supported their credibility and their connection with key MK-ULTRA officials such as Army Chemical Corps Director Dr. L. Wilson Green, MK-ULTRA Director Sidney Gottlieb, MK-ULTRA psychologist John Gittinger and Subproject eighty-four grant recipient Dr. Martin Orne.
One consequence of O’Neill’s CHAOS was that Manson case co-prosecutor Stephen Kay said that his boss “might have [had] to throw out” the Manson Family’s verdicts had he known about O’Neill’s findings.
A second possible consequence—perhaps it is just a coincidence—is that the HAFMC closed “about four months after” CHAOS was published. While no one appears to have the power to charge and prosecute the U.S. intelligence agents behind these operations, we can hopefully avoid being fooled by them again.
JRE Clips, “Was Charles Manson a CIA Asset? w/Tom O’Neill,” Joe Rogan, #1459: See about 6:30 into the video and other parts of the clip,
. ↑
Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019), 78–79. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 185-207. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 226–29. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 232-33. ↑
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 28-35. ↑
Democracy Now interview of Paul Robeson, Jr., on July 6, 1999, YouTube video posted on July 4, 2022,
: In this video of a Democracy Now! Interview, hear of evidence supporting this was a British hospital with doctors working with British MI6 (Military Intelligence 6) and the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations that was collaborating with the CIA. This summary starts at about 10:00. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 360-66. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 365. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 284-85, 288. Note that the author of this article was a one-time PO in Baltimore with a caseload of nearly 100 probationers and parolees. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 300-302, 311. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 301-302. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 310. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 300-302, 311. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 311, 322-23. ↑
O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS, 369. ↑
Idem. ↑
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers (South End Press, 1990), 132. ↑
JRE Clips, “The Official Narrative”; Churchill and Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers, 132, containing a copy of this FBI letter. Also, O’Neill and Piepenbring, CHAOS. ↑
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression (South End Press, 1988), 77–84. ↑
Zain Murdock, “The Black Panthers’ Strategy to Turn Police into Pigs,” PushBlack, June 25, 2024, https://www.pushblack.us/news/black-panthers-strategy-turn-police-pigs. ↑
This was under the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). ↑
Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2000), 135, 144. ↑
Great exposé, John. I will cross post and reference our interviews.