Was Charlie Manson sheep-dipped?

[Jan Klimkowski]

With regard to the Krassner article, my view is that the alleged involvement of **** is most interesting as a possible scenario.

The truth or otherwise of whether **** actually was Naval Intelligence or MK-ULTRA or to quote the hooting Mansonites teasing Sadie Mae Glutz:

"Ha, ha, you fucked a CIA guy."

is long since lost in the mists of time.

I agree with John Judge that Manson's claim to Timothy Leary of how he, Charlie, used LSD to "control" people is provocative, and suggests that Family "acid" may not have been the drug commonly known as LSD. There have also been other attempts to finger the Family's "LSD" connection - including the vague identification of a military intelligence figure.

However, the larger scenario is the interesting one to me. By the sixties, MK-ULTRA and parallel programmes within other spooky agencies, appear to have gone anthropological...

Cults and "new religious movements" appear to have been particularly favoured fronts for "mind control" experiments in the field.

The Manson Family actually had the lot: sex, drugs, guns - and ultimately, assassins for hire. And the cult used sex rituals, social isolation, and severely mind-altering narcotics to break down bourgeois "rules" and "inhibitions", and turn middle-class kids into malleable true believers in nonsensical apocalyptic visions like Helter Skelter.

Whatever Charlie (or his Controllers) was ultimately up to, like MK-ULTRA's Ewan Cameron with his electroshock and psychic driving, Manson was breaking down the personality, creating tabula rasae, and then putting brand new software in.

As a liberating vision, Helter Skelter is so ridiculous it could have been penned by L Ron Hubbard....