Was Charles Manson a CIA Puppet to Create Killing Machines Using Mind Control?

The country was shocked — and gripped — when members of a cult known as the Manson Family brutally murdered actress Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, and eight others in the summer of 1969.

The cult’s eponymous leader, Charles Manson, was ultimately convicted on several counts of conspiracy to commit murder, as were several of his followers, whom he had instructed to kill at least nine people over a several-week period: Gary Hinman, Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, Abigail Folger, Steven Parent, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca and Donald “Shorty” Shea.

The Manson Family murders, which occurred in Los Angeles, have long sparked intrigue and theories as to what preceded them. 

Prosecutors alleged the murders were part of Manson’s vision of Helter Skelter — a plan to ignite a race war named after The Beatles’ song. But a new Netflix documentary, Chaos: The Manson Murders, directed by legendary documentarian Errol Morris, delves deeper into the case and traces Manson’ path from career criminal to aspiring musician to vicious cult leader.

The film even introduces the theory that Manson had links to the CIA and MKULTRA — the infamous and mysterious agency study of LSD and mind control.

The documentary, which premieres March 7 on Netflix, is based on the 2019 book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, by Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring. 

O’Neill, who is featured prominently in Morris’ documentary, spent years researching the case and has called into question law enforcement’s Helter Skelter narrative.

Two years before the Tate-LaBianca murders, Manson was living in San Francisco while out of prison on parole. While there, he began attracting a following of girls and young women, with whom he would go to the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic.

In the documentary, O’Neill reveals that Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a brainwashing and LSD researcher who worked on MKUltra, recruited subjects from the clinic to be studied.

Around that same time, O’Neill claims, the CIA was studying how to create “programmed assassins.”

The film also draws parallels between Manson's apparent attempt to connect the murders to the Black Panthers and the FBI's COINTELPRO and the CIA's Operation CHAOS, programs that the agencies used to surveil and sometimes infiltrate left-wing groups in the 1960s.

Though O’Neill admits he can’t definitively link Manson and West, the documentary reveals several potential links, including the fact that LSD was used frequently by Manson Family members. 

The documentary reveals that Manson, despite being arrested multiple times, was spared having to go back to prison because of letters of support from his parole officer in San Francisco, with whom he would meet regularly at the medical clinic.

Over time, Manson was able to brainwash his followers, including Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Leslie Van Houten, among others, who were convicted of the murders.

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Regarding the use of LSD, O’Neill says Manson got his followers to “completely abandon their sense of morality and their code of ethics and to believe that there was no such thing as evil.” 

O’Neill says that in a report to the CIA, West also said he was successfully able to use LSD to create false memories in subjects.

“What does it all mean?” O’Neill asks in the documentary. “I’m very honest about not knowing.”

Manson died in prison in 2017 at age 83. Some of his former followers, including Watson, Krenwinkle and Bobby Beausoleil, remain in prison today for their roles in the murders.