Netflix has released the documentary film true-crime documentary is based on a book by Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, published in 2019. This groundbreaking book has been brought to life by filmmaker Errol Morris, formerly a private investigator.

O’Neill’s theories in the book showcase a twenty-year obsession with the Manson Family case, showcased in the Charles Manson and Manson family killings. One of the connections the journalist makes is to the CHAOS Operation.

The CHAOS Operation Was A 1960s CIA Initiative To Counter Black Panthers & The Antiwar Movement

CHAOS Aimed To Infiltrate And "Neutralize" Key New-Left Movements

The CHAOS Operation was started by the director of the CIA, Richard Helms, in 1967. The goal of CHAOS was to “neutralize” the Black Panthers (per Jacobin), along with general Black activist movements and the anti-war movement, which was particularly gaining traction in the Bay Area. 1967 also saw the “Summer of Love,” which primed the ground for Manson’s guru influence on his following. At the same time, the MKUltra program was doing mind-control experiments with LSD on unsuspecting participants, which is another major topic in the documentary, connecting them with Manson’s techniques on his followers.

Helms launched CHAOS with the approval of both President Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, who was California’s governor at the time. CHAOS was not the only operation launched with this goal in mind - J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI also revived an operation named COINTELPRO and focused it on the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1967. The strategy of these operations was to infiltrate and wipe out these left-wing movements by manipulating them into committing crimes.

The FBI Pitted Black Panthers And Satan’s Slaves Against Each Other

COINTELPRO Utilized The Conflict Between These Groups

The CIA and the FBI are central to O’Neill’s theories in the Netflix true-crime documentary, speculating on the possible tangential advantage Charles Manson and his "family" could have presented to these organizations during a time of national panic and a feeling of impending Civil War. Focusing on COINTELPRO, he further alleges that the FBI orchestrated the murders of two of the Satan’s Slaves group on the UCLA campus by deceiving their rivals, the Black Panthers, into thinking they were being ambushed.

Satan’s Slaves and the Black Panthers were already in conflict over a power struggle, which, according to O’Neill’s narrative, is what made them easy to pit against each other. He claims that the FBI’s COINTELPRO Operation instigated the murders of two Satan’s Slaves on the campus of UCLA by making both groups believe they were going to be attacked by the other. By forcing the Black Panthers’ hands to commit the crime, the event further fueled the negative national perception of the group.

Why Manson Could Have Been Useful To Operation CHAOS

Manson May Have Been Made An Example Of

Something O’Neill hones in on in the CHAOS documentary is the prosecutor, Bugliosi, and his motivations for pushing the Helter Skelter theory. The documentary shows the infamous Charles Manson saying, “Helter Skelter simply means confusion […] but you can’t sell a book with the truth,” implying Bugliosi pushed a narrative that set him up for life with the book’s profits and the rights to the Helter Skelter movie. The prosecution narrative succeeded in painting a picture of anti-war and hippie movements as threatening.

According to the overwhelmingly accepted Helter Skelter theory, Manson’s followers believed that Biblical scripture foretells a race war in which Black people would wipe out all white people, but they would be spared, and they would escape to the desert and live in the “bottomless pit.” O’Neill concedes that the followers may have believed this, but that Manson’s motivations were different. However, Bugliosi’s narrative links them to national fears of race war and sets him up as the white knight protecting America by succeeding in prosecuting Manson and his “family.”

This is possibly a tangential link between the Manson Family murders and the CHAOS Operation. The crime scenes had statements such as “death to pigs” written in the victims’ blood, which read as if they were using the language of the Black Panthers’ sentiments to make a statement about the crimes. Although Tom O’Neill maintains in CHAOS: The Manson Murders that he cannot definitively claim that Manson was used as a tool in this way, he expresses the belief in the documentary that Manson was able to get away with it for two years because of the political optics.

Source: Jacobin