This day, August 08, marks another anniversary of the horrific murders of seven men and women in 1969, five of them on the night of August 8th and 9th at Cielo Drive and a married couple on the night of August 9th and 10th on Waverly Drive, which have come to be known as the Tate-LaBianca Murders, or the Manson Murders.
These gruesome killings of Sharon Tate (who was over eight months pregnant with her unborn baby boy), Abigail Folger, Wojciech (also sometimes spelled Voytek) Frykowski, Jay Sebring, and Steven Parent at Cielo Drive, and of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca the following night, traumatized the world and would continue to do so throughout the decade to follow.
Intrepid researcher and broadcaster Mae Brussell (1922 - 1980) almost immediately realized that these murders fit into a pattern she had already seen playing out many times previously, including in the murders of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
You can hear Mae giving some of her analysis regarding the Manson operation from a broadcast she initially aired in October of 1971, just two years after the killings, in this archived file.
In that broadcast from 1971, Mae states very clearly -- backed up with evidence -- that the killings were a political operation, pre-planned and executed with evidence of military precision and tactics including the cutting of telephone lines and the silencing of dogs on the property, with the purpose of discrediting and indeed destroying the anti-war counter-culture movement that had been growing ever since the start of the Vietnam War and which was growing to a crescendo in the summer of 1969.
Following on Mae's analysis, John Judge would later explain in a 1990 interview with Prevailing Winds Research (or PWR):
The Manson Family didn't come out of nowhere. Charlie Manson was a long-time racist and pimp and inhabitant of juvenile criminal facilities. His mother was a prostitute. In fact, she was close friends with another prostitute who was the mother of Sara Jane Moore, someone that Manson played with, a kid that was part of another conspiracy -- he grew up with one of the key figures in another operation.
[. . .]
The women came from top-ranking military intelligence families -- they weren't little girls off the street with no money. They came from families with a lot of bucks and with ties into the Pentagon. Once the scenario was set up they gave him MKULTRA drugs, the mind control drugs, to give to the women.
[. . .]
They let him think he was king out there in the desert in his little shack and beefed him up with the idea that there was going to be a race war and he was going to survive and all this crazy stuff. After he was rearrested and dragged back in, Manson said, "I want to know who was peeing on my leash." Because he understood that he was let out a certain amount and then dragged back in, pulled back with a collar before he could bite. So he understands enough to know that he was manipulated. No pleasant fellow. I mean, not somebody you'd want to spend a lot of time with, but not him the real mover and shaker of the situation.
The killer was Tex Watson, whose family is in the sheriff's office in Dallas and was at the time of the Kennedy assassination. The Watsons are the dominant family there who ran the turf for the sheriff's office under Captain Fritz. Tex Watson was well connected enough that they couldn't even extradite him to California for trial. Vincent Bugliosi said they had to go down and try him in Texas. In Texas he gave a completely different trial if you get that transcript. He didn't say that Manson ran Watson and controlled him by mind control and hardcore charisma and all the nonsense that he pushed up in California. He said that Watson did the killings and Watson made the decisions and that was the case. Watson took the girls with him -- Charlie wasn't there. Watson went into the house, and this was an all-American boy, a football star, born-again Christian: no one could understand why or how he became a hippie convert.
I don't think he was. I think the drugs at the ranch were supplied by military intelligence. The ranch itself had been the scene of many of the western movies that were made by Howard Hughes in the '50s -- the Spahn Movie Ranch -- where they had their operations. Jane Russell was out there and The Outlaw was made there. The owner of the ranch next door, who eventually bought out the Spahn Ranch after The Manson Family scandal was over and is turning it into a Bavarian beer garden operation is the Krupp family -- the munitions and arms provisioners for Nazi Germany. Not the sort of folks who'd have just a bunch of scrounger neighbors without commenting on it.
So I think the whole thing was a setup to discredit hippies and the counter-culture and the left. After that period, you never saw any positive images of counter-culture people on the media. All you saw was Manson and the idea that if you didn't go along with the society, dropped out, or lived communally or took drugs that you'd turn into this raging beast and stab people in the stomach. In the same way Altamont, I believe, was set up by military intelligence to discredit Woodstock and to be the dark side of the coin with The Rolling Stones and Melvin Belli. But there were deeper connections behind who Manson was and whom he knew.
[. . .]
Robert Kennedy ate dinner at the Tate house the night before he went to the Ambassador and was shot, so I think there is a link between the Robert Kennedy assassination and this circle. I think it's basically a Pentagon-Hollywood Axis, as Mae Brussell called it. Key people who hung around the Tate house were part of that drug circle that was fairly sadistic. They'd take young kids in off the street and rape them, black magic nonsense: there were tapes of that the police found in the house. There were also clues that didn't match such as a pair of glasses that didn't belong to any of the family members -- the bodies seemed to have been repositioned after the time of the murder -- maybe evidence removed.
[. . .] but the reality is that the CIA is training the assassins. So I think Manson was basically set up to take this fall. He's not beyond killing somebody, but I don't think that he did the actual Tate and LaBianca murders. Those people were also drug dealers. Voytek Frykowski was a big dealer of MDA and Mr. LaBianca was a coke and smack dealer for the Toronto syndicate, the drugs that were coming down through Toronto after the Cuban connection and the Marseilles connection had been cut off. A lot of drugs came through Seattle and down the coast into San Francisco and the Bay Area. So these people were major dealers and I think they pulled a burn and got paid back as part of this scenario because when you do these things at the orchestrated level they usually are "bonus operations" -- you get several things done at once. That's how you peg it, you know: we're going to do a killing, let's make the killing count, accomplish as many things as they could. Judge For YourSelf: 221 - 225.
The implications of the above analysis -- analysis which argues (based on abundant evidence) that the Manson operation was deliberately used to "discredit the hippies and the counter-culture and the left" and that official government agencies have trained assassins (including assassins involved in the murder of domestic citizens) and supplied Manson with mind-control drugs (and with mind-control techniques, which were also perfected using experimentation on domestic citizens, as argued based upon abundant evidence in author Tom O'Neill's 2019 tour-de-force book Chaos) -- are enormous.
One of the more interesting movies ever allowed out of Hollywood to explore some of these implications is Three Days of the Condor, released in 1975.
While the movie may on the surface seem to have nothing to do with the gruesome killings of 1969, the plot features the cold-blooded murder by contract killers hired by higher-ups within the CIA of seven unsuspecting other CIA intelligence agents in a New York office -- and protagonist Robert Redford repeatedly expresses his shock regarding those "seven people killed" (by his own agency) throughout the rest of the film.
If you have never seen it, you may want to watch it before reading further.
If you have seen it, you know that Robert Redford's character (Joe Turner) discovers -- simply by reading the published books and articles available to everyone, and then connecting the dots for himself -- evidence of a plot to seize control of oilfields in the Middle East and Venezuela. When he presents this analysis to his superiors in his New York City office, who then forward the analysis up to higher headquarters, a hit team is dispatched to kill everyone in the office (including of course Turner, who escapes the carnage because it was his turn to pick up lunch that day when the hit team arrives).
At the end of the film, having continually evaded the killers sent to track him down, Redford's character has a confrontation with the agency's New York Deputy Director, "J. Higgins," played by Cliff Robertson. During this confrontation, the character of Higgins gives his justification for the extra-legal activities that his agency performs on behalf of those seeking to gain control over the world's natural resources -- "games" which sometimes result in the murder of citizens as part of the collateral damage.
While Redford's character expresses his disgust at such an argument -- and repeatedly brings up the murder of seven people -- Robertson's character gives a pointed defense of his agency's mission and argues that such operations are necessary to ensure that the ordinary citizens never run out of food or fuel. Above is a clip of that final confrontation, and below is a transcript of the core of the argument, with Robert Redford's character labeled as Turner and Cliff Robertson's labeled as Higgins:
Turner: Do we have plans to invade the Middle East? Do we?
Higgins: No -- absolutely not. We have games: that's all. We play games: what if? How many men? What would it take? Is there a cheaper way, to de-stabilize a regime? That's what we're paid to do.
[. . .]
Turner: Boy -- what is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same as telling the truth?
Higgins: No -- it's simple economics. Today it's oil, right? In ten or fifteen years: food, plutonium. And maybe even sooner. Now what do you think that people are gonna want us to do then?
Turner: Ask them.
Higgins: Not now -- then. Ask 'em when they're running out: ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who've never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em: they'll just want us to get it for them.
Turner: Boy -- have you found a home. Seven people killed, Higgins.
Higgins: The Company didn't order it.
Turner: Atwood did -- Atwood did! And who the hell is Atwood? He's you: he's all you guys. Seven people killed! And you play fucking games!
Higgins: Right -- and the other side does too. That's why we can't let you stay outside.
The repeated reference to seven people killed may or may not be an intentional reference to the killings attributed to the Manson "Family," but I would suggest that the repetition of that phrase in 1975 would almost certainly have evoked that connection in listeners, either consciously or unconsciously. The fact that in the Condor film's murder scene, two of those seven victims are women (one of them the young and beautiful girlfriend of Redford's character at the show's start) just as there were two women killed in the Cielo Drive murders, may or may not be seen as supporting evidence for such an interpretation.
In the above confrontation, Cliff Robertson's character Higgins gives a well-delivered argument in which he basically says that without cut-throat and sometimes distasteful operations, Americans might someday run out of fuel -- or even out of food.
This argument, of course, is completely specious, since the United States is not only a self-sufficient producer of food but in fact a massive exporter of food -- although its policies have deliberately sought to destroy the ability of other nations to be self-sufficient producers of their own food, as Michael Hudson has documented with overwhelming evidence in his book Super Imperialism, which was initially published in 1972 and of which the revised 2003 edition is available in its entirety online here.
As for the subject of oil, this part of the dialogue gets to the heart of imperialism itself, and the use of clandestine operations and even overt war to seize the natural resources of other nations -- which Higgins attempts to falsely justify as necessary and "for the good of the people."
As if the only way for the people of the nations of earth to enjoy the bounty of nature's gifts and the resources of the world requires taking those resources by force, accompanied by deception, assassination, and the occasional murder of a nation's own citizens by the agencies of that government.
That false justification is exactly what the rising tide of the counter-culture and the anti-war movement was turning away from en masse during the 1960s -- a rejection which, according to the analysis of Mae Brussell and John Judge cited above, was seen as such a threat that the Manson operation was employed in order to discredit and destroy the counter-culture and its rejection of such cynical and criminal tactics.
Robert Redford's character Joe Turner, then, can be seen as a figure who has connected the dots, simply by reading the available books and articles, and who is traumatized by the callous and double-crossing murder of seven people -- perhaps representative of the situation in which (according to the 1975 film) we all find ourselves.
The character of Kathy Hale, played by Faye Dunaway, is also traumatized during the film -- in this case, because Turner himself kidnaps her as part of his desperate escape. We see that she is living a life of loneliness, taking photographs she won't show to anyone, and together her character and Redford's can perhaps be seen as embodying the predicament of living in a society that is dominated by the kind of cynical and brutalizing and even murderous powers for whom Higgins acts as spokesman.
When Higgins lays out a hypothetical scenario in which the people are running out of food and oil and challenges Turner to tell him what he thinks the people will want their government to do then, Redford's character replies: "Ask them."
Obviously, this reply embodies the assumption that in a democracy, the actions of the government should be dictated by the people.
Higgins' disdainfully replies that (essentially) the people don't care about democracy -- they only care about having the fuel for their cars and the heat for their homes and the food for their table, and they don't care how it gets there.
But that is not true.
If it were true, then deception would not be necessary in covering up plots to seize resources -- and Higgins would not care at all when Turner says he has leaked the story to the press (specifically the New York Times). The film's writers give us another thought-provoking line at the end of the movie, when Higgins asks Turner how he can be so sure that the Times will even print the story -- implying that the same powers that Higgins represents may be in control of the media as well.
Of course, this hint regarding control over the media reveals that, despite the confident assertions Higgins delivers in the above scene, the people would in fact care about the murder of seven people by one's own government agencies -- which is exactly why those agencies feel the need to control the media and prevent such information from becoming public knowledge.
Such was the situation implied by the film in 1975 -- which may well have included a reference to those horrific killings that took place in 1969 -- and if we consider these matters carefully and connect the dots, we may find application to the situation we face today.
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For previous posts on this subject, please see also:
- "A heinous assault on human life, democracy, rule of law, and the psyche of the world"
- "Meditations: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"
- "Stars, Myths and Tarantino films: New podcast discussion with DJ Ezza"
