Inside the CIA’s wild project MKUltra and how it was connected to Charles Manson’s cult

Charles Manson and the crimes of his family have been covered from pretty much every angle, and almost always, the CIA’s MKUltra is dragged back into the spotlight.

Throughout Netflix’s documentary Chaos: The Manson Murders, the mysterious government project MKUltra was name-dropped a number of times with little explanation about what it actually was, when it ended, and what its end goal was. Though details are still scarce due to the classified nature of the brainwashing programme, here’s what details we do know and how it was allegedly connected to the Manson family.

What was Project MKUltra?

Way back in 1953, the CIA started a very secret project known as Project MKUltra that was headed up by its top chemist Sidney Gottlieb. Though its methods and tests differed over the years until it was ditched in the early ’60s, they had but one goal: To develop a truth serum and learn how to alter the minds of human beings.

The shady experiments often employed barbiturates and LSD without consent to make the human brains more malleable. Their test subjects are said to have included CIA agents, college students, psychiatric patients, cancer patients and prisoners, many of which did not fully understand what was being done to them. Ted Kaczynski, the man who would become the Unabomber, was also subjected to experiments and psychological testing.

The CIA put a stop to the barbaric experiments in the 1960s when the Inspector General’s staff learned of MKUltra and President Gerald Ford established a committee to investigate the programme further. The very next year, the President banned “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”

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There are still countless questions about MKUltra to this day because the CIA destroyed evidence in 1977 when Senator Ted Kennedy led congressional hearings to investigate the use of LSD.

How was it connected to Charles Manson?

To understand why Charles Manson is often connected to MKUltra we must first cover the political unrest of the time, namely the FBI’s Cointelpro and the CIA’s Operation CHAOS. Both of the highly secretive programmes were designed to identify and infiltrate leftist groups such as the Black Panthers, civil rights movements, and anti-war organisations. Their answer to such cultural revolutions was mind control, of course.

There is no concrete evidence that Charles Manson was involved in MKUltra, but Journalist Tom O’Neill – who spent nearly two decades investigating the Manson family’s crimes – has long supported the idea that the two could be connected.

“What he did aligned with the objectives of both those groups, which basically wanted to turn society against the young hippie movement,” he told Jacobin in 2023. “They wanted people to think of them not as harmless young kids with long hair, smoking pot and experimenting, but rather as dangerous bogeymen, out to kill your daughters or abduct your kids.”

In the Netflix documentary, which is based on Tom O’Neill’s book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, Tom names Dr Louis ‘Jolly’ West a number of times as having been connected to both MKUltra and Charles Manson. The doctor has always denied such claims but he did have an office at Haight Ashbury Free Clinic where Charles Manson’s family frequented.

“I think there is a good likelihood that Manson is a product of MKUltra, whether he was knowledgeable about it or not,” O’Neill said. “But I haven’t been able to definitively prove it. I chased this story for 20 years, hoping to get conclusive information one way or the other, but I could neither disprove it nor prove it to my satisfaction.”

Chaos: The Manson Murders is available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news, drops, quizzes and memes like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook. 

Featured image credit: Everett/Shutterstock & Netflix