Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties

I'm going to keep this shirt and sweet.I was almost 11 years old that summer of the gruesome murders. We had the moon landing almost 3 weeks before, and Woodstock would happen the following weekend. The killings eventually overshadowed everything.The book is long, yes, with many people and directions to follow. Don't let reviews dissuade you from picking this up. Tom keeps you on the path, I followed his revelations and narratives very easily. You have to realize that this book is not a one hour detective TV show. It's a true story revolving around personal agendas, narcissism, control, malevolence, evil, hubris, self preservation, out and out lying, and, murder most foul.It's not pretty. Neither is life in the world of drugs and crime. There are definitely still loose ends. There will be, if the players refuse to accept and profess their culpability, and stop hiding behind lies and fake lack of recollection. Now, many people are dead.The why is elusive, many stories and agendas that Inter weave with willing or unknowing subjects. Sequence of events that overlap and sometimes interconnect months later. I don't believe there is one big WHY. There are many, many whys that keep the story and events moving until August 1969.I read Helter Skelter when it came out and it scared the living he'll out of me. I'm 66 now and this scares me still, but for different reasons. The depths of evil and personal aggrandizement that occurred and always will, is scary. If you were alive then and remember, this is a must read.

Going into this book you need to understand there is not going to be a smoking gun that proves all of the authors assertions. He started writing this and researching back in 1999 which was 30 years after the murders and didn't publish until 2019. Unfortunately that means that a lot of documents and key players were lost to time, but that doesn't negate the authors claims of what possibly happened all of those years ago.Having read Helter Skelter and Manson in his own Words, I found this to be a fascinating journey which picks up where the mainstream narrative left off regarding the case of Charles Manson and his followers.I appreciated the fact the author also presents their findings and never attempts to strongarm the reader into believing their claims, but rather just gives you their evidence and allows you to make your own conclusions.Honestly I don't know where I stand with all of this new information. I seems too fantastic of a tale to be real, but on the other hand I do have confidence in the author and the validity of their claims. Some things which bothered me since Helter Skelter and seemed to bother the author as well is, if Charles Manson was such a threat and habitually breaking their parole, why was he constantly being let go? Why did Charles Manson's Parole Officer know all of this and yet constantly go to bat for him, even going to the extent of taking Manson's kid when he went to jail for a bit? Why did Helter Skelter deliberately leave out the fact that Terry Melcher met with the family AFTER the murders?So many unanswered questions here and I don't know what to make of it.Anyways, enough of my rambling. It was an excellent read and I absolutely recommend.

The meta-story of Tom O’Neill’s book, Chaos, is the one that describes the ongoing sense of “I,” incomplete, the grade the author himself would award his 20-year effort in producing it. It begins with the overt disconnection of information from narrative, the one which we today labor under to the point of rejecting basically everything that claims some gnostic transcendence. The sense that everything we encounter has a basis that is nebulous instead of solid. Interestingly the dispute that O’Neill brings to the fore is not in any fashion that Charles Manson wasn’t an evil mastermind of the exaggeratedly gruesome murders of his victims, but that his motives weren’t the ones made famous by Vincent Bugliosi, whose principal fame arose from his bestselling chronicle of the murders, Helter-Skelter. The now deceased Bugliosi and the author eventually became estranged over certain nuances that O’Neill claimed were whitewashed less for prosecutorial convenience and more for a deeper, nefarious agenda that itself has seeped through everything we all today encounter.MK-ULTRA, the often misapprehended CIA counterintelligence operation that began in 1953 (and probably still goes on in some advanced form) but was cancelled by agency director Richard Helms in the 1960’s, with “all of its files being destroyed,” is proposed as Manson’s actual master, but apart from his probable, but thinly documented association with it through the infamous Louis Jolyon West (who is a recurring character throughout the genre), one comes out of CHAOS with nothing substantially adding to the record. Still, there are enough shadowy figures who were around the late-‘60’s LA ”scene” that O’Neill introduces, importantly “Reeve Whitson” and Charles Tacot, woven unmistakably into an ecosystem that included intimate familiarity among Manson and his ‘family,’ The Beach Boys, record producer Terry Melcher, the LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, Mama Cass andPapa John Phillips and many others, that one cannot but weave this together with (RIP) Dave McGowan’s Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon, which makes the case that the very music scene that we of a certain age were completely (and delightedly) immersed in was itself an intelligence operation intended to anaesthetize boomer resistance to aggressive US foreign policies, which disastrously burned down like a Buddhist monk on a Vietnam street. It bears noting, though neither of these authors mention it, that Frank Zappa (himself fingered by McGowan as being the scion of a military intelligence figure) has a line in his song Plastic People, “There’s this guy from the CIA whose been creeping around Laurel Canyon…” and Thomas Pynchon has a whole 1980’s novel, Vineland, that centers around intelligence agencies infiltrating the California hippie scene of those “summer of love” days, for business and pleasure. So, the ideas here aren’t new, per se.I heard O’Neill on Joe Rogan and instantly recognized the Philadelphia patois that we sons of it acquire (and which is defiantly resistant to accurate synthesis), with the side benefit of easy evaluation of his sincerity. By that time, Chaos was flying off the shelves and I had to wait until a week ago to get my copy, devouring its 442 pages quickly, in testimony to the author’s craft. There is nothing like the hasty-pudding that is published by so many in the alternative research field that slows down reading like incessant typographical and other editorial errors, but some will be grateful as am I, to see that is no impediment here. Where I will criticize O’Neill (and I recall devouring Bugliosi’s book when it was new) is that I still think, despite his boldness in some cases to obtain information, he has found the MK-ULTRA cabinet bare, leaving me with the sense that he was heedful of the repeated warnings he got to ‘stay away!’ in an Amityville Horror kind of way. I feel certain that whenever “files were burned” that they are simply stowed out of sight, with the traces to them having been obliterated. Still, attack dogs and a secret police stand ready to rub out those who dare sniff a trail.Which brings us to the current pathology of 2020, a time where our own clarity hardly approaches the clear view that is suggested by eye chart results of a similar value. Manson’s Bugliosi-celebrated purpose was to bring about race war (which he seems to have associated with Helter-Skelter, a crappy track on the bloated Beatles’ “White Album”), a theme that seems to be resurrected from the ashes of burned crosses of the post-bellum South and more recently in the attacks on cities, landmarks and statues. It’s all a lot of reading, but who cannot see that these seemingly inscrutable actions to sow fear and division in America merely are updated versions from a well-worn playbook? Whether or not it’s the CIA, who, as O’Neill hastens to reiterate, have no mandate on domestic soil, the FBI, an external foe, someone completely different, or a combination, can we not see that we are being and have been, played throughout our lifetimes?My own assessment is that our governmental apparatus has been thoroughly hijacked by intelligence “services,” which are themselves divided. The Pro-America faction sides with Trump and the anti-American, anti-Trump factions are world government buffs. Back in the ’60’s, the intelligence and armed services were mainly conservative and patriot- oriented. Beginning in the ’50’s and more successfully since then, our enemies have thoroughly infiltrated them with lefties and foreign agents. Turns out, Joseph McCarthy was right.