Was Charles Manson a CIA Asset? w/Tom O'Neill | Joe Rogan

What I would do, I would seduce people into this story and get them as obsessed as I was. Pretend I'm a guy and you're trying to pitch me this book. In the beginning in the first years, just that the trial that had occurred that had been prosecuted by Vincent Bouliosi had a lot of malfeasance in it by the prosecution, I was able to document that they planted a former prosecutor on the defense team to sabotage the defense. I found out that two or three of the principal witnesses, including Terry Melcher, who played a big part in this, and we'll probably talk about that at some point, lied on the stand, suborned themselves in a murder trial. If you commit perjury in a murder trial, you could be convicted of murder. You could be sentenced to a murder, you could get a murder sentence too because of that. So there was about a dozen of those and none of them happened all at once. So if you committed perjury during a murder trial, you could be sentenced for murder for the same amount of time that someone would get sentenced if they murdered somebody. You are subject to an actual capital. You could be sent to the chair. The five people who were convicted of murder in the first trial, once had I been around and able to prove this in the early 70s, Vincent Bouliosi and the three people who lied on the stand in a material way, in a very important way, they all could have been tried for that perjury and sentenced to the same or given the same sentence that the people who had gotten the death sentence. And I told you that I just got to the 11th chapter of your book. And essentially what I'm getting so far, I haven't finished the book, but what I'm getting so far is there was some sort of a CIA program where they were, explain how they did it. They infiltrated these hippie communities and they allowed Charles Manson over and over and over again to get out of jail. They knew that he was committing all these crimes and instead of incarcerating them- Well we have to be careful when we say they. Who's they? Yeah, we have to kind of break it all down. Let's break it all down. One of the other things I found out that was very significant was that Manson had a parole officer, his first parole officer, who kind of had given him a get out of jail free card for the first year after Manson was released from prison in 19- This was Smith? Roger Smith, yeah. And he was a criminologist in the Bay Area. Manson violated his parole the day that he was released in Los Angeles. And this is one of the, you'd think it's a little lie, but it's an important lie that Vince Bouliosi presented, not just at trial, but also in his book. At trial it's much more serious. He changed the narrative. He said Manson had been given permission to travel to San Francisco from LA when Manson was paroled. Manson hadn't been given that permission. He just showed up there. They originally were going to violate him, send him right back to prison, and someone stepped in and took care of that and let Manson stay in San Francisco, and he was assigned to Roger Smith. It took about a year and a half, but through a Freedom of Information Act process I got his federal parole file. And those were the kind of seeds of how I found out that Manson had this immunity from prosecution for the two years he was out of prison from 67 until the murders occurred in the summer of 69. I'm sorry to interrupt, but who was Smith doing this for? Who was giving him the instructions to continue to let Manson out and to continue to monitor him? Well, that's the problem. I didn't get the whole file, and the file I got had redactions. He would report to the head office, and they would give him instructions, and then he would violate those instructions, and there'd be no repercussions for him or for Manson. For instance, Manson was arrested in July of 1967, three or four months after he got out of prison when he was under Roger Smith's supervision, for interfering with an officer who was trying to arrest one of his first young followers, Ruth Ann Morehouse, who was 15. And he was put in jail, pled out, so he got a three-day sentence, a new probation sentence as well, and all that was hidden. It's not in Bouliosi's book. The parole officer, Roger Smith, a week later wrote to the head office that Manson was doing fine, and he actually recommended that Manson be allowed to go to Mexico and work in Mexico. And the head parole office in the United States, since his federal wrote back, and they said, that's insane. The job that he was going to do in Mexico was surveying soil for insecticides. I mean, it had nothing to do with, I have all these documents showing this. Who was hiring Charles Manson to survey soil? It was a company in Nevada, which disappeared a couple years later. So it was a bullshit company thing? I believe so, yeah. What do you think they were doing down there? See, that's it. I don't like to speculate, because I can't prove it. All I know is just the fact that his parole officer asked to send him not only to Mexico, to the country that Manson had been deported from in 1959, the last time he was a free man he had violated his parole then. He was arrested in Mexico, right? He was arrested in Mexico and brought over by the federales and given over to federal custody for, it was a drug violation and some other stuff. So why would his parole officer send him back to this place three months after he'd been released and how do you supervise somebody who's in another country? Can I make a summary just for people who are like, what the fuck is going on right now? Essentially what you're saying is that Charles Manson was a part of some sort of a program. Yes. And that through this program, they were using him and using with LSD and all the members of the family. They were turning them violent. Why do you think they were doing this? Again, this is where I got to reel it in a little bit. Yeah, I understand. I have to be real careful about not saying anything that I haven't been able to prove. What I've proven is that he was getting leniency from the federal government and the law enforcement, first in San Francisco that year, the person who represented the federal government there was his parole officer, Roger Smith, the federal parole officer who was giving him leniency. Roger was also doing drug research at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which opened in June of 67. Manson, during that period, turned into the Manson that we're familiar with today, the monster, the embodiment of evil, as Vince Bulliossi called him, the guru who could control the minds of these followers. So he would come into the clinic to see Roger. Well, he went for two reasons. It was a free clinic. It was at the height of the Summer of Love, the summer of 67. And he would come in with the women, the girls. He had about five or six followers then, and they would walk behind him. They wouldn't speak unless he spoke to them. Any command he issued towards them, they would follow. And they became very well known around the clinic, and they were there principally for Manson to see Roger for his weekly parole appointments. And then the girls were going in for STDs, and there were some pregnancies and stuff, and they were getting free treatment. That was the summer that the Manson family formed. And then they left in late 67, early 68, and migrated down to Los Angeles and became this killer cult. It's crazy how quickly this all happened. It's insane how quickly it happened. So people don't understand, we're talking about two years. We're talking about 67. Manson is in Haight, Ashbury, 69, the Tate-Labianka murders, and then the trial, and then everything else. Two years. Yeah. Is the speculation that Charlie Manson was basically just sort of a two-bit criminal who had spent most of his life inside the system and had been incarcerated for, what, half of his life? Half of his life when he was released about age 32 and 67. All federal institutions too, which was interesting. Even Bulliossi pointed that out in his book. First of all, his mother was a prostitute. She would get sentenced to jail for petty theft or prostitution, and she'd hand him off to her parents or other people. And by the time he was 10, 11, 12 years old, he was stealing cars, committing petty theft and stuff. So then he was sent to juvenile detention centers and schools, reform schools, all run by the federal government. And then when he committed his first crimes as an adult, which was again car theft, the first crimes were car theft, but when he stole the cars, he crossed state lines. So then it became a federal offense, and he got imprisoned with much more serious sentences if it's a federal offense and if it's a state. And he'd do these long sentences back to back to back, and then every time he was released, he either violated parole or probation. And they were actually strict with him in the 50s and early, well, till 60, when he finally went to prison for seven years. It wasn't until 67 when he came out that all of a sudden it was hands off. Now, what do you think happened? In prison? Did they find him in prison? Well, again, I'll go there with you. And I kind of lay out... Speculation. Yeah, what I do in the book is... And I get criticism for this, which we knew was a good possibility, is I lay out circumstantial evidence for a case with proof of each circumstance, but when you put them all together, that's the hardest part, is linking them, finding the bridges. What I do is show what the objectives were of either the federal government's case through MKUltra and then other programs, COINTELPRO and CHAOS, and the law enforcement in Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. So MKUltra began in the federal prisons, experiments on prisoners. Famously or notoriously, Whitey Bulger, I don't know if you've heard about this, but a few years ago, it was revealed that Whitey Bulger had been a part of MKUltra experimentation in the 50s when he was incarcerated. And after he was convicted, he was claiming that he believed that all of his violence was a product of what had happened to him in prison when he was experimented upon with LSD through these scientists. So theoretically, Manson was in the prime place where the experiments were occurring in prisons before he was released in 67 in federal institutions. They couldn't do it in the state. Did Manson ever talk about any experiments that took place to imprison him? No. Never. No, no. I actually have not only his federal parole file, which was the hardest thing to get because it had never been released from 67 to 69, but I also have the one prior to that from the 50s to the 60s and all the correspondence. And he would talk about these doctors coming in to examine him, and he didn't trust them and he didn't know what they were doing. And this was late 50s. And unfortunately, he never had the first names for the doctors. There were two. One of them was Dr. Hartman. I can't remember the other one's name. There was a Mortimer Hartman in Los Angeles who was one of the early psychiatrists using LSD in the 50s. Cary Grant was one of his patients. So theoretically, he could have come out of the program or the experimentation that began there. But I hate to even... I rather... And again, it's hard to kind of synopsize all this without showing all the documentation and stuff of what was going on and where he was and how everything matches up. But you'll see that when you get through Chapter 11. Okay. So I wish I got to it. You know, it was a rush to get to that far. So 1967, he gets out of jail. And how long before he hooks up with this clinic? So he got out in March of 1967. The clinic opened in June of 1967. So just a few months. Yeah. Well, Roger Smith, he was actually living in Berkeley, Manson was, and he got his first follower Mary Bruner, and then two or three or four more. And then Roger was the one who suggested that he go to the hate to absorb the vibes. He thought Manson might benefit from the love and peace vibes that were happening in the summer of love. And Roger Smith was his parole officer in 1967, but also was his parole officer before that. Was that proven? Well, no. Roger Smith's... Well, his assistant, that's good. You remember that. And Roger Dalia told me, she was his assistant at the clinic, at the Haydash Berry Free Medical Clinic when he was running his amphetamine study in 1968. She said that Roger had told her he met Manson when he was doing probation work in Illinois in the early 60s. I eventually interviewed Roger several times, and Roger denied that. And when I went back to Gail, she was shocked. She was like, I can't believe he's denying that. That was a connection. That's why Manson was able to leave Los Angeles. He was sent to Roger Smith. So Roger could be his parole officer. I was never able to document that Manson had been in Illinois except for three days in 61... Excuse me, in 60 when he was brought from Mexico to Texas, and then they brought him to Los Angeles to be violated in front of the judge there. He did spend three days at Joliet Prison where Roger Smith worked, but he was there a year or two later. So that was one of the many frustrating moments where everything made sense except for one but one very important hole, which was, well, they weren't there at the same time, at least as far as the official record shows. So if Smith was a part of these experiments, and if Smith was also his parole officer and did know him before he did the seven years before he got out, which is when it's speculated that Manson was possibly experimented on, and Smith might have been aware of the entire process of it and was supervising him upon his release. So that's why every time Manson got arrested, which should have just locked him up, they would just let him go. And Smith, to give you a little background on Smith, as he told me, he called himself, he goes, I was a rock ribbed Republican from the Midwest, and I came out, he went to Berkeley to the School of Criminology to become a criminologist. I think in 65 or 66 he was getting his master's and his PhD, and his special area of study was in the beginning gangs, collective behavior and violence, and then how drugs would make some of these gangs that he had people he was working with infiltrate, students infiltrate to get information. Yeah, this was in Oakland in the ghettos in like 65, 66 when the Panthers were forming. Then in late 66, he decided to become a federal parole officer while he was still writing his dissertation. And he got assigned to something called the San Francisco Project, which was an experimental program run by the federal government to see how different numbers of parole clients' caseloads for a parole officer were, you know, supervision. It was about recidivism. So if you had the lowest load was 20 clients, the largest was like 50 or 60, were you able to supervise? I mean, you wouldn't think that 50 or 60 is going to be a lot more difficult, but it always wasn't. And Smith joined that program where he's supposed to be paying much more attention and care to his clients because it's part of a special program called the San Francisco Project. And in fact, he was, I mean, he was, he was seeing Manson more than he was even officially supposed to. You know, it gets even crazier. After 68, he stopped being his parole officer. He was actually removed. And he said it was voluntarily so he could focus more on his drugs and violence research at the clinic. Manson's three or four women followers got arrested in Mendocino. They had lured a couple young boys into a house, given them LSD. Manson had sent them out up to Mendocino to recruit people for the family. The three women were, four women were arrested. One of them, Mary Bruner, had the first baby with Manson in the group. Roger Smith and his wife, Carol, went up to Mendocino and petitioned the court to take foster custody of the child until Mary was, until her case was resolved. So they were the foster parents of Manson's son. I mean, everything was irregular about this. That actually, that case is pretty interesting. So Mary Bruner and Susan Atkins, two women who actually killed for Manson in 1969, were convicted of contributing to the delinquency of minors, illegal drug possession. And without a trial, they pled out. And then there was what they called a sentencing phase where a probation officer is assigned to decide whether or not they should be sent to prison or given probation, supervised probation. So I got access to their files, Bruner's and Atkins. And in the file were recommendations to the court by Roger Smith and his wife saying, these are good women. They shouldn't go to prison. Susan Atkins, who stabs Sharon Tate. Is that proven because she said it and then she went back and forth and back and forth? Yeah. Is it proven? Because Tex Watson clearly was a murderer, right? Yeah. Yeah. So she had said that Tex did it. She couldn't do it. But this was later on. Yeah. Her first accounts were that she did it. And then when she testified to the grand jury, she said that she didn't do it. She held Sharon while Tex stabbed her. Later in prison, she said that she did do it. Then she changed again. She go back and forth. But she was pretty brutal. And Mary Bruner and Susan Atkins were given probation instead of being sentenced partially based on Roger Smith's recommendation. Roger Smith identified himself as a former parole officer with his expertise. And he said he had known both of them for two years, which was also a lie. He had only known Susan. He could have known Susan for two years. He knew her for about a year. He did know Mary pretty well. And he never disclosed that he was Manson's parole officer. Manson's identified in these same files as the person who lured these women into crime, that they were his communal wives, that they would steal for him, prostitutes themselves for him. And the other people that they interviewed, the probation officer argued against it, saying they're going to go right back to this guy who's down in Los Angeles and continue their life of crime. But the judge released them. Now this was, they were doing Charlie's bidding, according to the record. What they were trying to do was recruit people into the family. And so they would offer them drugs and sex and a lot of women and bring them to these parties. And where they screwed up is they got an underage boy who was freaked out. And he was the son of a local sheriff. And he set his legs, turned into snakes. That's what they screwed up in that situation. And that's how they got arrested that time. And still they got released. Which is really crazy. There's so many of these instances where Charlie or members of the family were arrested. And then it seemed like the police officers who were holding them were being told, hey, you got to let these guys go. This is a higher situation. It's above your pay grade. Yeah. Well, a real turning point in my reporting was after I got access to Manson's parole file and saw that, I mean, and Heller Skelter Bullioski, I think, describes two arrests that Manson got released on technicalities, shoddy police work or something, when he should have been violated. But what he didn't do was talk about three or four more. And if you've gotten up to chapter 10, you've seen all that stuff laid out. So when I got this record, a pretty substantial record, I took it to someone named Louis Wocknick, who was a retired judge and a retired district attorney from the Valley out around here, Van Nuys. Because I needed somebody with the expertise and the knowledge of how things worked. Because you have to look at everything in context. Things work out differently today than they did in 2009 or 2000 when I interviewed him. But he was there in 69 in the DA's office. I brought the documents to him. We laid them all out on his kitchen table. And he's looking at them. And the poor guy was very sick with cancer. And he talked like this, but I had the recorder going. And he's looking at all the documents. And he's seeing this pattern of catch release, catch release. And he's going, chicken shit, chicken shit. This is all chicken shit. He goes, he shouldn't, he should have gone back the first time. He goes, they wanted him out. He said he was more important to somebody out than in. He goes, you've got to find out who it was. And I go up. How do I do that? And he goes, you're not going to be able to. He's an informant. I go, but who should I, what should I look at? He goes, well, he was working either for local law enforcement, the federal government, the FBI, but somebody wanted him out there doing whatever he was doing. So that was important. Another turning point was a bunch of years later was when I brought similar materials to Stephen Kay, who was Bouliosi's co-prosecutor in the case. Can I stop you for a second? So the speculation, his speculation was that Charlie was an informant. Well, and again, an informant has many definitions. It's not just informing on crime. It also can be doing the police's bidding. That's where the CIA's bidding. With the CIA or the FBI. Being a part of a program. Where they're allowing this. And also there's speculation that the goal was to try to diminish the anti-war movement. And that this guy was a part of the hippie movement. And then so now people would associate hippies with violence and drugs and murder and all this horrific stuff.