| A recently published book titled, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Dan Piepenbring and Tom O'Neill (2019), links Dr. West to Charles Manson. West was working at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic for at least three months in 1967 when Manson was known to frequent the place with his girlfriends on a regular basis. This alone may not sound like much, but considering the knowledge we now have about MK-Ultra, it may be good to take a closer look at this relationship. According to O’Neill’s book, Chaos: “Early in his career, West researched methods of controlling human behavior at Cornell University. During the Korean War, he helped to “deprogram” returning prisoners of war who’d allegedly been brainwashed.” (71) In regards to Jack Ruby, O’Neill writes: “Not long before Ruby was due to testify for the Warren Commission, West examined him alone in his jail cell. He emerged to report that Ruby had suffered an ‘acute psychotic break.’ Sure enough, Ruby’s testimony before the commission succeeded only in making him sound unhinged. He could never fully explain why he’d decided to kill Oswald.” (72) The authors of Chaos seem to suggest the Tate–LaBianca murders may have been accomplished through Manson’s use of hypnosis on his followers: “Another paper by West, 1965’s ‘Dangers of Hypnosis,’ foresaw the rise of dangerous groups led by ‘crackpots’ who hypnotized their followers into violent criminality. Contrary to the prevailing science at the time, West asserted that hypnosis could make people so pliable that they‘d violate their moral codes.” (73) West goes on to cite two instances when this type of hypno-programmed killing occurred. A double murder in Copenhagen and one instance that was ‘experimentally induced’ by the US army. In a 1967 psychiatry textbook, West contributed a chapter titled ‘Hallucinogens,’ describing LSD and warning kids about its dangers. (74) According to O’Neill, one of the books West was in the process of authoring but never completed, was called Experimental Psychopathology: The Induction of Abnormal States. At one point West set up a crash pad in the Haight, and paid hippies to staff it, and allowed hippies to stay there, but he himself was rarely ever there, and suspicions circulated concerning his motives, so the pad never became anything too important or discussed much. Basically, this was a CIA laboratory, set up to supervise and monitor and study the minds of hippies and how they were thinking. What else was this used for we can only guess. O’Neill does not say whether Manson visited or stayed at the Haight pad. (75) Among the notes O’Neill collected on West during his investigation into the Manson murders, was a batch of research papers on hypnosis, some of which were letters between West and his CIA handler, named “Sherman Grifford.” O’Neill searched and searched and finally found a reference for this name in Marks book, The Search for the |
Manchurian Candidate. Buried in a footnote was the following: “CIA operators and agents all had cover names … even in classified documents.” Sidney Gottlieb was ‘Sherman R. Grifford.’ (76) Objectives of the experiments were outlined in communications between them both. O’Neill quotes from papers he uncovered, which included a plan to discover “the degree to which information can be extracted from presumably unwilling subjects (through hypnosis alone or in combination with certain drugs), possibly with subsequent amnesia for the interrogation and/or alteration of the subject’s recollection of the information he formerly knew.” Also discussed were honing “techniques for implanting false information into particular subjects … or for inducing in them specific mental disorders.” O’Neill then goes on to say: “All of these were the goals of MK-Ultra and they bore a striking resemblance to Manson’s accomplishments with his followers more than a decade later.” (77) As late as 1972, West was still trying to advance the work of MK-Ultra by opening up a lab in an abandoned Nike Missile base in the Santa Monica Mountains. The name of this location would be called “The Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence.” According to O’Neill, the proposal for the grant money revealed that West had “planned to test radical forms of behavior modification, implanting electrodes and ‘remote monitoring devices’ in prisoner’s brains,” and that “A federal investigation concluded that the program involved ‘coercive methods’ that threatened ‘privacy and self-determination’.” (78) One last important connection O’Neill makes to the Manson family is Manson’s hypnosis training. Apparently Manson was trained in hypnosis by a fellow named William Deanyer, who had learned hypnosis while enlisted in the Navy. This fact was confirmed by his daughter who claimed to have seen her father teaching Manson. (79) I would assume Manson was using LSD, hypnosis and also forms of torture with the installation of fear, in his subjects. With all the millions of people who now take LSD on a regular basis, we see nothing like this behavior in the hippie communities. It only occurs where cults take root, like the Twelve Tribes (false) hippie cult that travels around in a false hippie bus, preaching their bullshit at festivals all over the world, similar to the Children of God, founded by David Berg. (71) Chaos, p. 342 (72) ibid, p. 343 (73) ibid, p. 345 (74) ibid, p. 345 (75) ibid, 349-50 (76) ibid, p. 360 (77) ibid, p. 361 (78) ibid, p. 367 (79) ibid, p. 369 |