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Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties Hardcover – June 25, 2019

by Tom O'Neill (Author), Dan Piepenbring

4.6 9,505 ratings

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A journalist's twenty-year fascination with the Manson murders leads to "gobsmacking" (The Ringer) new revelations about the FBI's involvement in this "kaleidoscopic" (The New York Times) reassessment of an infamous case in American history.

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?

O'Neill's quest for the truth led him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. The product of two decades of reporting, hundreds of new interviews, and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, Chaos mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. This is a book that overturns our understanding of a pivotal time in American history.

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Print length

528 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown and Company
Publication date

June 25, 2019
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.85 x 9.55 inches
ISBN-10

0316477559
ISBN-13

978-0316477550
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Annie Jacobsen

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Was it possible, I asked, that the Manson murders were an MKULTRA experiment gone wrong? “No,” he said, “an MKULTRA experiment gone right.”

Highlighted by 623 Kindle readers
In the crossed-out sections of Bugliosi’s notes, to my astonishment, DeCarlo described three visits by Terry Melcher to the Manson Family—after the murders.

Highlighted by 554 Kindle readers
“It dovetails right in,” he said. “Manson was an informant.”

Highlighted by 492 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

“This is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend…It’s fucking amazing…This shit goes deep and it’s fascinating.”―Joe Rogan

"Chaos is less a definitive account of the murders than a kaleidoscope swirl of weird discoveries and mind-bending hypotheticals that reads like Raymond Chandler after a tab of windowpane."―The New York Times

"What if everything we thought we knew about the Manson murders was wrong? O'Neill spent 20 years wrestling with that question, and Chaos is his final answer. Timed to the 50th anniversary of the Manson murders, it's a sweeping indictment of the Los Angeles justice system, with cover-ups reaching all the way up to the FBI and CIA."―Entertainment Weekly

"O'Neill's discoveries are stunning, especially when he's discussing the inexplicable leniency shown by law enforcement officials and by Manson's parole officer."―The Washington Post

"If Helter Skelter whets your whistle, then O'Neill's blistering account of the conspiracy to cover up the flaws in the Manson prosecution is definitely your cup of tea."―Nerdist

"A page-turner stacked with gobsmacking facts."―The Ringer

"O'Neill's skillful accumulation of facts, untainted by bluffery, is a victory for honest discourse ... The discoveries that O'Neill has shared with the world-about lies, suppressions, and conflicts of interest-should scare the hell out of us."―Sean Howe, Bookforum

"Forget Tarantino's film, journalist O'Neill has been working on this book for 20 years and has found all kind of interesting things, including unreleased documents and new interviews that show legal misconduct... Conspiracy or not, this is what you call beach reading."―Style Weekly (Richmond)

"Whatever you think you know about the Manson murders is wrong. Just flat out wrong. Tom O'Neill's twenty years of meticulous research has unearthed revelations about the murders, the murderers, the prosecutors who tried them and a rogues gallery of cops, drug dealers, bent doctors, famous celebrities, grotesque government research, secret agents and shadowy figures in a conspiracy/cover up so sweeping and bizarre, you'll be as astounded as you are terrified. If your friends call you paranoid, maybe they're just ignorant."―Joe Ide, author of IQ and Wrecked

"Gripping masterful stuff. A dazzling and compellingly obsessed journalistic detective story that invites you down the rabbit-hole to a sex, drugs, and celebrity-serial-killer America. O'Neill's sunk decades into uncovering something far freakier than Helter Skelter ever admitted. Buckle up kids, this is true crime at its truest and most compelling."―Charles Graeber, Executive Producer of The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann and New York Times bestselling author of The Good Nurse

"Fans of conspiracy theories will find this a source of endless fascination."―Kirkus

"Top-notch investigative work ... An excellent work of investigative journalism proving the 'true story' is not always the truth."―Library Journal

"Riveting ... True crime fans will be enthralled."―Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

About the Author

Tom O'Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared in national publications such as Us, Premiere, New York, the Village Voice, and Details. He graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and currently resides in Venice, CA.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company (June 25, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 528 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316477559
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316477550
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.01 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.85 x 9.55 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #290,401 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #408 in Political Intelligence
- #724 in Serial Killers True Accounts
- #1,261 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts

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4.6 9,505 ratings

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Dan Piepenbring

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Dan Piepenbring (email: piepenbring@protonmail.com) is a writer and editor in New York. He collaborated with Prince on the musician’s memoir, "The Beautiful Ones" (Spiegel & Grau, October 2019). A #1 New York Times best-seller, the book was named one of the best of 2019 by The Washington Post and The Guardian. An excerpt of Piepenbring’s introduction appeared in The New Yorker.

With Tom O’Neill, he cowrote "CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties" (Little, Brown; June 2019). An excerpt appeared on The Intercept.

From 2014 to 2017, Piepenbring edited The Paris Review Daily. He is an advisory editor at the magazine. He’s also worked as a staff writer at BonAppetit.com, an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a creative executive at Scott Rudin Productions, and a researcher at the Institute for the Future of the Book.

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Tom O'Neill

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Tom O’Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist and entertainment reporter whose work has appeared in national publications such as Us, Premiere, New York, The Village Voice and Details. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties was published by Little, Brown in the summer of 2019 (paperback in the summer of 2020).

CHAOS is available in the United Kingdom (paperback title: Chaos: The Truth Behind the Manson Murders) and has been translated into Spanish, Polish and will soon be available in Russian.

To see original documents, video clips of archival material and to listen to selected audio excerpts of author’s interviews with subjects from the book, please go to author's website or social media pages:

Website: tom-oneill.org

Instagram: chaoscharlesmanson

Facebook: ChaosTheBook

Twitter: chaosmansonbook

Email: trmo@aol.com

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PW

A Tour De Force.

Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2024

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So well written and so well researched this book is in a category of its own for True Crime and History. This is an incredible story but he has the documents to back it up. To the author's credit he does not speculate on what might have happened and instead he focuses on proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the official narrative, penned by a certain best-selling author/Los Angeles prosecutor, could not have happened. Also interesting that the entire A List of Hollywood, who LOVE free publicity, refused to be interviewed for this. Ample evidence is provided to draw one's own conclusions about who committed the crimes and who was framed and who was orchestrating a cover-up.

11 people found this helpful

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Lisa Castells

Super interesting book!

Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2024

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I listened to this book on audio from my library and wanted to have it in my personal library for reference and for my kids to read one day. Very unexpected and legitimate research in this very interesting book. It is really much like a Whodunnit and who is covering everything up all over the place. And plenty of surprising name dropping in here as he tries to unravel all the inexplicable 'coincidences' and inconsistent stories and data. This really is a fabulous book. And he has the integrity and honesty to not even make a conclusion at the end - but we can if we want to - since there are so many linkages and circumstantial evidence but no way to track it all down now to make a solid case on so many players and involved parties. Just a WOW read!

9 people found this helpful

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Max Kaufman

Question everything

Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2023

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Dude, you won't believe the rabbit hole I went down reading "Chaos" by Tom O'Neil. This book is like a conspiracy theory jackpot – it's insane! So, I'm totally into all things conspiracy, and this book had me hooked from the get-go.

O'Neil goes deep into the whole Manson Family murder scene, right? But here's the kicker – he starts connecting these dots to the freakin' CIA's MK Ultra program. Can you believe that? The government messing with our minds, dude!

The research in this book is next level. O'Neil dives into declassified documents, interviews, and all that crazy stuff. He lays out this whole idea that maybe there's more to these murders than what we've been told. And let me tell you, it's messed up to think that our own government could be involved in such dark stuff like mind control experiments.

Reading "Chaos" legit had me on edge, man. The thought that we might not even know the full extent of what's happening behind the scenes? That's some scary stuff. I mean, I always suspected that there's more to the story, but this book took it to a whole new level.

I've gotta say, though, that while "Chaos" is totally mind-blowing, it can get a bit heavy with the conspiracy theories. It's like, you're reading it and thinking, "Is this for real?" But hey, that's the nature of the beast when you're diving into these kinds of topics.

Bottom line, if you're into conspiracy theories and you're cool with having your mind blown wide open, "Chaos" is totally worth a read. Just be ready to question everything and maybe sleep with one eye open, man. It's crazy to think the CIA could be messing with our heads like this!

26 people found this helpful

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S. Wetzel

Once again down the rabbit hole we go...

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2019

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So...

I approached this book with trepidation. I am not easily swayed by conspiracy theorists and their (more often than not) crackpot theories. I always read such books without suspending my disbelief and usually for my own enjoyment and entertainment rather than to take up the cause. I further questioned Tom O'Neill's bona fides as he is not an investigative reporter a la Woodward or even Capote for that matter. However, once I read the book, and having been familiar with the case since reading the original Helter Skelter, Ed Sanders' The Family, Jeff Guinn's The Life and Times of Charles Manson, and numerous other books either re-hashing the case or sociological analysis of the lasting impact from other nonfiction writers and memoirs from former Family members, I have to admit O'Neil may be on to something here and there. Other reviewers have pointed out some grandiose verbiage in his prose; others point out what they see as an annoying habit of repeating himself to make his points clear; and others attack him ad hominem for daring to question the "official" explanation and history of the case and its participants.

Like many other authors and readers before him, O'Neill points out that the Helter Skelter motive is flimsy and Vince Bugliosi steamrolled the witnesses and the jury to prove it was the only motive. This is nothing new. I vaguely remember reading an interview with Bugliosi about 20-25 years after the trial and he hinted that he took a "crapshoot" with that angle, and, let's face it folks - it worked. He got his convictions. In one sense, that's all a DA is ultimately looking for. Now in this book, some interesting things come to light that maybe he tampered with witnesses, perhaps even going so far as to suborn perjury, but since he has passed away, no legal ethics committee or other form of judicial oversight is going to overturn the verdicts. Manson and Susan (Sadie) Atkins are also dead, and it's highly unlikely that Tex Watson, Patty Krenwinkel or Leslie Van Houten are ever going to be paroled (though Van Houten has been recommended twice, but denied by the governor of California both times). Even Stephen Kay, who was an assistant DA during the original trial and has campaigned against the parole of the convicted Family members ever since then, admits that a line of inquiry could be convened, but what would that accomplish in the long run.

O'Neill, for his part, never bucks the fact that Manson and his followers were guilty of their crimes, heinous as they were. He doesn't absolve anyone from blame. What he does do, is present an argument that there were cover-ups about the case both during the original investigation, the trial, and the aftermath of the murders. He proposes that the Hollywood elite have taken some sort of vow/code of silence and no one speaks of the case or of even having ever met, let alone hung out with, Charlie in those final years of what is probably the most tumultuous decade in American history. He has uncovered questions about why a federal parolee could wander up and down the California between the Bay Area and Los Angeles without raising red flags. He has found links between the seamier side of the Southern California lifestyle and FBI/CIA operations to infiltrate and disrupt the "counterculture" of the anti-war movement specifically, and the general unrest related to civil rights and student demonstrations.

Where O'Neill falls a bit flat in his argument is that he is so easy to dismiss Manson as an "career criminal with a lack of formal education who couldn't possibly persuade others to do his bidding." This is the mistake everyone makes with Charles Manson: they UNDERESTIMATE him. You see a short man with long, unkempt hair and beard, denim shirts and jeans, and mocassins and you immediately think "hippie." When he opens his mouth to speak, you hear an Appalachian drawl (Manson was raised in West Virginia near the Ohio border) and one immediately stereotypes as an uneducated hillbilly -- Manson was by his own admission barely literate, but some of his surviving handwriting exemplars on letters and notes show a man capable of putting down thoughts to paper, albeit in a deliberate scrawl. And then there's the explosive temper and the "crazy Charlie" act. I've heard a lot of people refer to Manson as "insane." Charles Manson was many things, but "insane" was not one of them. His "crazy Charlie" act was exactly that: an act, a show to unsettle others into thinking he was nuts. Charlie learned from many other career criminals how to run a con. He even took a Dale Carnegie course offered by one of the federal prisons he was incarcerated in. He learned to read (very slowly) but was well versed in the Bible and (as it's well know), read Hubbard's Dianetics and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, or had parts read to him, both of which helped to formulate his philosophies. Combine that with a natural, charismatic personality and you have someone who could easily lead others and eventually use programming techniques/informal brainwashing to have them carry out your orders. It's not that far-fetched and yet O'Neill keeps running into people who can't understand how a "nobody" like Manson could do what the CIA and other government agencies could not when it came to controlling his disciples.

In the end, O'Neil chalks it up to the zeitgeist of the 60's, the general isolation of the rich and famous not wanting to elicit more scandal than necessary, and the general refusal of law enforcement agencies to admit they were a bit remiss in initial investigations and for obvious reasons, no one from a district attorney's office is going to admit to any wrongdoing for fear of a mass upheaval in overturned convictions.

So...what's the takeaway?

To paraphrase, or rather upend, Neil Young (one of the few surviving celebrities from the ear willing to discuss the case), perhaps it's better to "fade away instead of burning out."

117 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Very good book!

Reviewed in Canada on April 21, 2024

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The author did a great job of speculating and just provided an incredible amount of information. Great book, very interesting topic.

Attila Kuruc

Stunningly intriguing

Reviewed in Spain on December 3, 2023

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Absolutely mind boggling. The content is so interesting that it is hard to put down this book once you start reading it. Grateful that these types of writers still exist in order to deliver such an intricate story. Could not recommend it enough

sarah r.

This is the most dangerous book I've ever read, and the most important one. Unputdownable!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 10, 2023

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This is simply a thrilling and illuminating book, its almost like reading a thriller, I honestly could not put it down. The author's dedication to this story is not only commendable but also the information that he has uncovered was stunning and at times stomach churning. He reveals a world and a host of sinister people that will horrify you. I never had any interest in Charles Manson or anything to do with him. But I am now seeing this entire story completely differently and how overall information is given to us by the media, the government and the legal system. What the author has uncovered is important and dangerous and well worth reading. This book is not only really interesting, and a page turner but its an important body of work in my opinion.

4 people found this helpful

Thorsten D.

Vergessen aber sehr Augenöffnend

Reviewed in Germany on May 19, 2023

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Ein weiteres Beispiel von Geschehnissen die heute völlig vergessen sind und dennoch zeigen wieviel unheimliche Hinweise in einer vermeintlich aufgeklärten Mordserie stecken. Nicht vom reisserischen Titel ablenken lassen. Der Autor hat sich sehr viel Arbeit mit der Aufarbeitung gemacht und die Implikationen sind...verstörend.

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Miko

Gripping, well told, well researched.

Reviewed in the Netherlands on April 6, 2023

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Clinton made an apology on behalf of US government for MK Ultra, but it does not mean they admitted everything. Maybe they just wanted to end the discussion?
‘’The Sun, the moon and the truth are three things that cannot remain hidden’’.
Buy this book, buy two one for a friend.

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Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties Hardcover – June 25, 2019

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