The Charles Manson Nightmare Redux

(20 July 2020)

New review. “A great read… a dramatic, almost Chandleresque narrative.” David Black on American nightmares revisited, in “CHAOS – Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties,” by Tom O’Neill.

“O’Neill studied the bestselling book, Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi, lead prosecutor at Manson’s trial. Bugliosi’s case went as follows. Manson was a huge fan of the Beatles, and believed that the lyrics on the White Album were somehow addressed to him personally. Tracks such as ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Little Piggies’ were taken to mean ‘the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race’. The Manson Family would escape Helter Skelter by taking refuge in a bottomless pit in the desert (‘a place Manson derived from Revelation 9’) and breed until he had 144,000 followers to take over the world. To O’Neill, this fable of bat-shit craziness didn’t explain anything. Bugliosi himself said in an interview with Penthouse in 1976 that he believed while Manson’s followers believed his Helter Skelter bullshit, Manson did not. In which case, why did he organise the murders and how could he have manipulated his followers into carrying them out?2 Bugliosi, as O’Neill was to discover, was corrupt, greedy and (according to his own family) psychotic. ”

https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster80/lob80-chaos-charles-manson.pdf

Dialectical Butterflies – videos by Dave Wise

2
Although these two short films on Woolley Colliery in West Yorkshire are credited to Underground Butterflies and Lola Bueno in reality they were put together by Stuart & David Wise in 2017-8. The subterfuge is telling but had to do with a stark fact: engage in on-the-spot autonomous ecological activity that attempts to recreate a lost nature or help re-invent nature by creating a rich, varied terrain on a so-called barren wasteland quickly results in brutal repression by the powers that be. Usually this was / is a combination of a developmental agenda aided and abetted by various traditional nature ‘conservation’ bodies. In this case, Wates the building company was given a first rate greenwashing grade by Butterfly Conservation and the RSPB alongside more local so-called ecological bodies.
The first film here begins with the echo of machine gun fire followed by the sound of snarling dogs, etc, sounds which were incongruous but then tellingly morphing into that still haunting song from south Northumberland, The Black Leg Miner. (Indeed many miners around the former Woolley Colliery – but not all – rejoiced in our often brutally hands-on efforts and clapped us on the backs, never forgetting our own family background around miners who where the first people to reveal to us as tiny tots some of the glories of nature).
This was quickly followed by the second film which hinted at other influences especially that of Surrealism as we adapted the background music in Salvador Dali’s and Luis Bunuel’s haunting classic film from 1929, Un Chien Andalou. The music is a mix of fast and fiery Argentinean tangos together with Wagner’s reflective, even dreamily soothing Liebestod.(Moreover, I had also just read Bunuel’s autobiography My Last Sigh (1982) wherein he says his favourite European city was Newcastle-upon-Tyne and yet  – of all things – a city he’d never visited!)  Most importantly Stuart had befriended a Spanish anarchist woman, prone to much existential suffering because of the ghastly state of things world-wide. She was called Ana Bueno and lived in Madrid but was also knowledgeable about the north of England and Scotland. In a way Stuart was besotted with her in a kind of aura of spiritual identification. She became quite an inspiration so much so that her surname was placed on the film as co-author. Her name was however changed from Ana to Lola as we were afraid that Brexit could mean that Border Control plus the horrific Little Englander mentality, just might deny her entry and we knew how attached she’d become to the landscapes of northern England. On top of all that, Ana had provided us with a series of really incisive wall slogans from Latin American countries which were turned into individual muros one page  webs and now alas, all deleted by unknown malicious intervention.
 Stuart then embarked on the preparation of other provocative films though this time in and around Wormwood Scrubs in west London. Most of the footage dealt with our transformation of Martin Bell’s Wood as we cleared the area of intensively invasive bramble sometimes growing ten metres high then turning the ground into an original form of pasture woodland to be colonised with an ever intensifying organic bio-diversity. These clips weren’t just about nature but also about other inhabitants especially the rough sleepers for whom the Scrubs was home and which we befriended whilst pointing out to them some of the rare creatures they shared their home with. Thus theirs some terrific clips of a guy asleep on a mattress as small blue butterflies dance around his bed. Inevitably nature bureaucrats as is their brief were always pressuring the police to get rid of rough sleepers  ASAP. (On the northern colliery spoil heaps there were sometimes small collectives of homeless people hidden away from prying eyes and occasionally we were able to warn them that police were in the vicinity; information that was always gratefully received). Moreover these clips increasingly emphasised the liberating ambience of the Scrubs where significant memorable encounter is an everyday event – on the old and new “commons” which must be established everywhere as part of the process of destroying capitalism everywhere. Unfortunately this film was never completed as Stuart’s death intervened though a young intelligent film maker, Una Burnand, had become aware of its possibilities and filmed some of our discussions – among other things – in the weeks prior to Stu’s long goodbye…. These film clips have yet to be spliced together in a good narrative which is basically my fault  as I experience heart-wrenching PTSD whenever I return to old haunts.

Once we truly got stuck into things – abandoning the camera somewhat – we went out to provoke in the here and now though not in an underhand, nasty way as we continued to emphasise what a magnificent terrain Woolley Colliery was. Even reaction knew that. However our praxis was hardly confined to anarcho-leftism but was action without an overall, obvious narrative and one that disturbed people even playing with conventional notions of ‘madness, or, as a friend said of us at the time, “strange, intense, criminal agitators of the heart” – a comment he picked up from Kerouac’s Big Sur. Maybe, it could be said that we went OTT with species introductions even though they were carefully chosen knowing their essential foodplants were thriving here.

Moreover, there was nothing insane regarding our knowledge of nature especially the particularities regarding the creation of a vibrant biodiversity. One of our axiomatic slogans we kept endlessly repeating was “Clued-in feral wilding of public spaces subverts suicide capitalism” and one that was even painted up on a bird box on London’s Wormwood Scrubs. These spaces became for us active derives endlessly meeting new people or as a web of Stuart’s was called on Dialectical Butterflies  “As Common as Muck. Ten male Adonis Blues; the nitrogen fix and other wildcat forays: Chance and a different kind of derive”. (Again it should be given prominence AGAIN as it links in a wildcat way nature specialists like E.B. Ford with Lautreamont and William Blake, etc.).

If we thought  things were bad around 2017 in UK PLC, things were about to get incomparably worse as we have entered a period enlightened in comparison to today where all true ecological initiative is more and more treated with utter contempt. Indeed the brownfield sites of colliery waste in 2017 were just to say beginning to be recognised as somewhat amazing arenas in their own right due in part to our influence. For instance, Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment was undoubtedly influenced by our ‘mad’ praxis as she called for “A Duchampian approach to nature”.  Alas, In the grim early 2020s it’s back to Destroy, Destroy, Destroy inseparable from Build, Build, Build and an ambience where there must be no mention of communally occupying anything that would disturb an imperious worship of money unknown in history. (See the slogan below we sprayed on a bridge in Bradford sometime in 2017).
Moreover, along with countless small so-called derelict spaces, it must be remembered that between 2010 and 2020 we targeted three main areas for re-wilding: Ruskin’s ‘Industrial Gorge’ in Bradford’s Shipley suburb, Wormwood Scrubs in West London as well as Woolley Colliery, West Yorks. Inevitably, there was a fair amount of blurring and overlap so the photographs below depicting incisive slogans could be applied to one and all. In Shipley finally the powers that be utterly wrecked that amazing arena as they simultaneously came after us with guns blazing threatening us with serious indictments involving jail having obtained London addresses and phone numbers, etc. Thugs were even deployed to give us a good going over. Our response was to disappear into thin air hence we wore masks when there was a filmed interview with us around the same time. Some people responded by saying we were ridiculously paranoid and silly. Two years previously and we would have readily agreed with them as previously it never entered our heads that there would be such a heavy response regarding genuine ecological activities.  But as we mentioned previously, Jaime Semprun and his Nuisances companions had come to the same conclusion. We rapidly – and sadly – realized that the only activity the system would allow was that of greenwashing and a truth more relevant today than ever. 
(Dave Wise, January 2024)

Music Videos – Two Miners Songs

Two traditional Northumberland/Durham miner’s songs – Music and videos by David Black

1 – Byker Hill and Walker Shore
The song dates from the late 18th century. The music for this video was recorded in 2010, and released on Go Canny records.
The footage of the Sword-Dancers of Winlaton, County Durham is from a Pathe newsreel of 1926. The pitmen were carrying on a centuries old folk tradition, going back to beginnings of coal-mining in the area in the 15th century.
The pitmen veterans featured in the film would have been born in the 1850s and ‘60s. Their parents would have been around when the Winlaton iron foundaries were still working and the Chartists were active:
‘Winlaton was a hotbed of insurrectionary plotting and secret manufacture of weapons such as pikes, knives, caltrops (spikey metal contraptions for disabling horses’ hooves), and even cannon and grenades. Winlaton also had a lively branch of Female Chartists.’
( ‘1839: The Chartist Insurrection’ , Black and Ford, Unkant:2012).
90 years on, in 1926, with the General Strike looming, the iron works were long gone and Winlaton had become a coal-mining township. Now, 95 years later, Winlaton is a commuter village.

2 – The Blackleg Miner. In memory of the ‘Cramligton Train-Wreckers’ in the 1926 General Strike.

Preface to Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD by David Black

Preface to Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD by David Black

BPC Publications. London 2020 

Contents

1 – MK-Ultra: The CIA’s ‘Mind Control’ Project

Sorcery

Midnight Climax

Heartbreak Hotel: the Death of Frank Olson

Human Ecology: an MK-Ultra Front

Personality Assessment

2 – How the CIA Failed the Acid Test

Magic Mushrooms

Harvard Trips

Timothy Leary and Mary Pinchot

‘Captain Trips’: Alfred Hubbard

Coasts of Utopias

3 – London Underground

Centre of the World

Psychedelic Situationists

The 1967 ‘Summer of Love’

4 – David Solomon and the Art of Psychedelic Subversion

Psychedelic Jazz

Acid Revolution

5 – Steve Abrams: E.S.P., C.I.A., T.H.C.

Parapsychology

Potboilers

SOMA, Solomon and Stark

6 – The New Prohibition versus the Acid Underground

Psychedelic Alchemy

Owsley and the Grateful Dead

Heat

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Money Matters

Orange Sunshine

7 – The Atlantic Acid Alliance

Richard Kemp – Liverpool’s LSD Chemist

Tripping with RD Laing

8 – The British Microdot Gang and the Veritable Split

9 – The Downfall of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

Ronald Stark and the Brotherhood

Takeover

Operation BEL

The Scully-Sand Conspiracy Trial

10 – Timothy Leary’s Reality Tunnels: One Escape After Another

Political Intoxication

Weather Underground: Stalinism on Acid

Armed Love

Hotel Abyss

Leary ‘Co-operates’

11 – Operation Julie: the Hunters and the Hunted

S.T.U.F.F.

The Chase

Showtrial

12 – The Many Faces of Ronald Hadley Stark

Busted in Bologna

Italy’s ‘Years of Lead’

The Red Brigades

Lebanon

Prison Wager

13 – Tricksters

14 – Acid 2.0: Redux or Recuperation?

Preface

Like atomic power and artificial intelligence, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was discovered in the closing years of World War Two. Since then, atomic bombs and computers have been the constant source of fears that combined they might bring about the destruction of humanity. LSD has aroused similar fears. Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who discovered its effects in 1943, likened the LSD trip to an ‘inner bomb’. He warned that, if improperly used and distributed, LSD might bring about more destruction than an atomic detonation. But it has also been argued that, if properly used and distributed, LSD use might actually change people’s consciousness for the better and help to prevent nuclear war. Professor David Nutt, who sat on the British Labour government’s Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs until he was sacked in 2009, argues that the study of psychedelics is essential for understanding the nature of consciousness itself:

‘This is core neuroscience. This is about humanity at its deepest level. It is fundamental to understanding ourselves. And the only way to study consciousness is to change it. Psychedelics change consciousness in a way that is unique, powerful, and perpetual – of course we have to study them’.

As is well known, in the 1950s and early ‘60s the US Central Intelligence Agency used LSD, in secret and illegal experiments, on unwitting subjects. The CIA did so according to Cold War logic: if the Russians could work out how to use LSD in bio-chemical warfare — or in ‘brain-washing’, as a ‘truth drug’, or even as a ‘Manchurian Candidate’ — then the USA needed to work it out first.

In 1953, the CIA launched a top-secret ‘mind-control’ project, code-named MK-Ultra. The CIA’s assets in the US medical profession ‘officially’ labelled LSD as ‘psychosis-inducing drug’, only of use in psychiatric analysis and research. Many CIA officers, contractors and assets however, became enthusiastic trippers themselves, in full knowledge that LSD could produce atrocious as well as enchanting hallucinations. Knowing the secrets of LSD, they thought of themselves as a kind of anti-communist spiritual elite who, unlike the US citizenry at large, were ‘in the know’.

But by the end of the 1950s, with no sign of the Russians contaminating the water supply with LSD, there were plenty of signs in the United States that the psychedelic experience was escaping its captors. Some of the researchers in American hospitals – who had little awareness that their work was being secretly sponsored by the CIA — realised that LSD had ‘spiritual’ implications, i.e. for developing an ‘integrative’ enlightened consciousness, conducive to visionary creativity. These researchers stressed the importance of ‘set and setting’ in properly supervised LSD sessions. The English scholar, Aldous Huxley, who took his first LSD trip in 1955, related in his essay Heaven and Hell the hallucinogenic experience to the visionary works of William Blake:

‘Visionary experience is not the same as mystical experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and “going to heaven” is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point, from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence’.

Huxley, though an advocate for psychedelic drugs, wanted them strictly controlled. In contrast, Timothy Leary, who first took LSD in December 1961, became the ‘guru’ of psychedelia as LSD ‘escaped’ into the counter-culture of the 1960s. The ‘escape’ has been the subject of conspiracy theories which have been weaponised in today’s so-called Culture Wars. According to one widely-held view, the entire psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s was engineered by the CIA as part of a plot by some secret global elite bent on mass mind-control. For elements of the Right, the psychedelic counter-culture undermined ‘traditional values’ such as patriarchy, nationalism and subservience to authority. On the Left, some see the 1960s hedonism of ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll’ as having been a distraction from politics. The theory, as it has spread, has thrown in extra villains for good measure: satanists, MI6, the psychiatrists of the Tavistock Institute, the Grateful Dead, and Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, etc, etc.

In truth, the extent of the CIA’s involvement in the psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s has always been difficult to determine; not least because Sidney Gottlieb, head of MK-Ultra, illegally destroyed the project’s operational files in 1973. Nonetheless, some leading figures of the counter-culture, such as Timothy Leary, can hardly be discussed without reference to the CIA – not least because Leary himself had so much to say about it. In the present work, whilst I pay only scant attention to conspiracy theories, I make no apologies for investigating, where necessary, real conspiracies.

The underground networks of acid producers and distributors on both sides of the Atlantic were described after their downfall in the nineteen-seventies in such terms as ‘Hippie Mafia’ or ‘Microdot Gang’: so out of their heads that they didn’t know any better; or were ‘only in it for the money’; or were tools of organised crime and/or state agencies. In an earlier ebook I noted that nearly everyone involved – the psychedelic revolutionaries, the financiers, intelligence and anti-drugs agencies, CIA-sponsored scientists and researchers – operated to a greater or lesser extent outside of accepted standards of ‘legality’, or didn’t even recognise them; hence the title: Acid Outlaws: LSD, Counter-Culture and Counter-Revolution. But although the term ‘outlaw’ certainly fits many of people in this study, it doesn’t fit all of them by any means. Stephen Bentley, ex-undercover police officer and author of Undercover: Operation Julie – The Inside Story, takes exception to my use of the term ‘questionable legality’ regarding of some of the surveillance methods he and his colleagues used:

‘Questionable by who? Illegal – mostly not… Yes, I smoked a lot of hash… and did some cocaine. Technically, that was illegal. Tell me what I was supposed to do given I was undercover. I wasn’t Steve Bentley. I was ‘Steve Jackson’ – wild, carefree, giving all the impression I was a dealer. I’m now 72 years’ old. I don’t care for the historical revisionism applied to Operation Julie recently. It was a highly successful and unique police investigation carried out professionally under difficult circumstances’.

On my reference to the ‘ham-acting of drunken undercover officers’, Bentley retorts:

‘Maybe you should try living a lie for the best part of a year; doing things alien to you; becoming a different person. Those who know will scoff at the thought of it being an act. It’s not. You become someone else – believe me’.

The point is, I concede that although Stephen Bentley mixed with ‘acid outlaws’ and behaved like one when he was infiltrating them in north Wales in the 1970s, he certainly wasn’t one himself. Steve Abrams – who inspired me twenty years ago to write about this subject in the first place – wasn’t an outlaw either. He is described in an obituary in Psychedelic Press – quite accurately — as a ‘psychedelic trickster’. Many of the leading players who feature in this tale were certainly outlaws at various times but primarily they were tricksters. In Carl Gustav Jung’s definition of archetypes, the ‘Trickster’ surfaces in many stories in mythology, folklore and religion. More generally, anthropologists studying indigenous cultures in various parts of the world identify the trickster with cunning crazy-acting animals such as the fox or coyote, shape-shifting gods such as Loki in Norse mythology and rustic pranksters in human form. In the literature of Greek antiquity, Prometheus, the son of a Titan, tricks the gods with his buffoonery and steals fire from heaven for the benefit of human kind, for which he is severely punished by Zeus. As the historian of religion, Klaus-Peter Koepping, puts it:

‘In European consciousness Prometheus becomes the symbol for man’s never-ceasing, unremitting, and relentless struggle against fate, against the gods, unrepentingly defying the laws of the Olympians, though (and this again shows the continuing absurdity) never being successful in this endeavor, which, however, is necessary for the origin of civilized life (the ultimate paradox of rule breaking as a rule)’.

Like fire, psychedelic drugs can be dangerous as well as beneficial. In various ways the tricksters who feature in this book tended to believe that their antics were beneficial to humanity as well as themselves; and in most cases had to suffer the consequences of their actions. CIA MK-Ultra chief, Sidney Gottlieb, believed that that his immoral and dishonest actions were outweighed by his patriotism and dedication to science, but his reputation has been posthumously trashed (a biography by Stephen Kinzer calls him as ‘the CIA’s Poisoner-in-Chief’). On the ‘other’ side, the reputation of Timothy Leary, who likewise believed he was acting as a patriot and saviour of civilisation, has shape-shifted from brilliant scientist to mystical guru, wanted criminal, wild-eyed revolutionary, renegade informer and finally self-aggrandising ‘showboater’.

I sent a copy of the previous book to Tim Scully, a most significant actor in the events unfolded in this story. Scully is a meticulous researcher (he is compiling a history of LSD production in the US) and, as it turns out, a very reliable witness. Scully, born 1944, was in 1966 taken on as apprentice to the famous LSD chemist Owsley Stanley (AKA Bear Stanley). After Owsley withdrew from LSD production following a bust of his tableting facility in December 1967, Scully was determined to continue. After making LSD in successive laboratories in Denver, Scully began to work with fellow psychedelic chemist, Nick Sand (another trickster). Their collaboration led to the establishment in November 1968 of a lab in Windsor, California, which ultimately produced well over a kilo (more than four million 300 μg doses) of very pure LSD that became known as Orange Sunshine. Scully, in writing to me, pointed to a number of errors in my writings regarding events in the USA. Generously, he provided me with a lot of very useful information: firstly, on how underground LSD production was organised in the United States in the 1960s; secondly, on the relations between the American LSD producers in the United States, their collaborators in Great Britain, and the ‘Brotherhood of Eternal Love’; and thirdly on the alleged CIA asset, Ronald Stark, who Scully knew and did business with. With further research and fact-checking I realised that none of the previous books on the subject (including mine) have accurately covered these three issues. I hope – whilst making no claim to have written anything like a comprehensive or definitive history of the LSD underground – that this one does.

Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA

Lobster magazine (winter 2019) has an article by  author David Black on why he has published a second, updated edition of his ebook, Acid Outlaws: LSD, Counter-Culture and Counter-Revolution. (now withdrawn and replaced by Psychedelic Tricksters: A True Secret History of LSD). The article, entitled ‘Getting it Wrong and Getting it Right: Ronald Stark, LSD and the CIA’ is available online.

 

Iain Sinclair: Poetry with the AMM All-Stars on Resonance FM

Iain Sinclair reads extracts from his poem Fifty Catacomb Saints accompanied by Peter Baxter – percussion; Robert Goldsmith – baritone sax; Paul Shearsmith – trumpet, pipes, squeakers, Jew’s harp; Dave Black – electric guitar; Graham Davis – synths; Luke Davis – typewriter; and Out To Lunch  – splash’n’klang, piano, mouthnoiseThis session was broadcast live on Resonance FM 104.4, July 12th 2018.

https://archive.org/details/FiftyCatacombSaints12-xii-2018