You can fight city hall. You can change the world. It might not seem like much of a change at the time, but you have the power as an individual to do a great deal.


Jolly West was a psychiatrist in the Air Force working with prisoners coming home after being held captive in North Korea. They came back with stories of atrocities committed by American forces during the conflict. Whether or not these things actually happened is still an open question, but if they stayed with their stories many were about to be court martialed for treason.

One of West's primary interests was looking for methods of changing what a person thinks or believed. After working with these men most changed their story and said their were conditioned or “brain washed” by the North Korean captors. West was successful but it is not clear whether he reversed the Korean efforts or did some brain washing of his own to remove the memories of the atrocities.

This work caught the attention of the black sorcerer, Sydney Gottlieb who invited him to join the CIA working on mind control. While West denied working for the CIA, much evidence turned up in later years confirming the relationship. There are many letters between the two, with Gottlieb using the pseudonym Sherman R Griffith.

After leaving the service, Jolly West took a position at the University of Oklahoma working with patients. This was on of many universities doing research on portions of the mind control program. One of the patients, apparently was Jimmy Shaver. While records showed he signed up for the program because of migraine headaches, that is all we have. The term “apparently” was used because a section of the project records went missing and, coincidentally, was the section that would have contained Shaver's record.

One night, Shaver took a three year old girl that her parents left in a car while they went into a bar for some drinks. He then raped and murdered in a way no child should ever have to experience. When they found him he wandering around disoriented and covered in blood. He was subsequently found guilty of first degree murder and received the death penalty. West was in the court room when the sentence was handed down and he took it very hard. From that point on he became a passionate advocate for the abolition of the death penalty.

He then moved to UCLA and began doing some work in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district where he connected with David Smith who operated a free clinic taking care of the hippie population in that area. Among the clinic's occasional patients was Charles Manson and one his girls who frequently found herself with an STD.

Jolly West set up an office in the clinic and also acquired a facility where some of his students from UCLA would work with the hippies and observe the effects of LSD on them. Charles Manson seemed to have developed the kind of mind control of some of the young girls in his “family” that fascinated West. Manson had learned hypnosis from a night club performer and, combined this with drugs could get the family members to do pretty much anything he desired.

What West believed was the Manson's success with they young female followers was based on that they were young, coming to the city, looking for their place in life and were highly susceptible to his methods – and that they were not quite as applicable to older, more defined personalities.

West's students were not always sure of the purpose of their efforts and him habit of showing up as the college professor some days and dressed like one of the hippies other day contributed to this confusion.

When Jack Ruby's trial came around, Jolly West asked the judge if he could work with Ruby. Somehow the judge smelled a rat and refused to permit it. However, after the conviction, and death sentence, a psychiatrist was selected to work with Ruby – and that psychiatrist assigned West to the case.

Just days before Ruby had been evaluated as completely sane and in full possession of his faculties. West met with him alone in his cell without anyone else around, and by the time he left Ruby was hiding under his bed afraid of all the people that were coming to kill Jews. At a subsequent press conference, Jolly West regretfully announced that Jack Ruby had just suffered a psychotic break with reality and that he probably would not recover.

The Warren Commission decided Ruby was no longer a reliable witness and was no longer interested in his testimony.

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
by Tom O'Neill, Dan Piepenbring

Over two grim nights in Los Angeles, the young followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant. With no mercy and seemingly no motive, the Manson Family followed their leader's every order -- their crimes lit a flame of paranoia across the nation, spelling the end of the sixties. Manson became one of history's most infamous criminals, his name forever attached to an era when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia -- or dystopia -- was just an acid trip away.

Twenty years ago, when journalist Tom O'Neill was reporting a magazine piece about the murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Then he unearthed shocking evidence of a cover-up behind the "official" story, including police carelessness, legal misconduct, and potential surveillance by intelligence agents. When a tense interview with Vincent Bugliosi -- prosecutor of the Manson Family and author of Helter Skelter -- turned a friendly source into a nemesis, O'Neill knew he was onto something. But every discovery brought more questions:

-- Who were Manson's real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties?
-- Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him?
-- And how did Manson -- an illiterate ex-con -- turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers?