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    Re: Lobster Magazine Winter 2020 Archived Message

    Posted by Sinister Burt on October 1, 2020, 7:17 pm, in reply to "Lobster Magazine Winter 2020"

    The book on Manson that was reviewed looks like it may be interesting too (i read bugliosi's book years ago but always thought it was bit dodgy). Some parts sound a bit tenuous in the review, but maybe less so in the book. Here are some excerpts (maybe only of interest to people who know the subject a bit)

    'Beyond Bugliosi: the Manson murders revisited' - review of 'CHAOS Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties Tom O’Neill (with Dan Piepenbring)

    "...According to ex-LASO detective Preston Guillory, Manson was never arrested ‘because our department thought he was going to attack the Black Panthers’ (intelligence had revealed Manson’s shooting of Bernard Crowe). Guillory told O’Neill: ‘I believe there was something bigger Manson was working on. Cause a stir. Blame it on the Panthers . . . Maybe a witting player in someone else’s game.’ Another interviewee, former assistant District Attorney Lewis Watnick, made the ‘educated guess’ that ‘Manson was an informant’.

    ...

    Of particular interest was Reeve Whitson (1931-94), who served Vincent Bugliosi in the Manson trial as a ‘witness wrangler’. Whitson had telephoned Tate’s personal photographer, Shahrokh Hatami, at 7 am, 9 August, to tell him of the Cielo murders, ninety minutes before Tate’s maid arrived at the scene and discovered the carnage. At Bugliosi’s behest Whitson threatened Hatami with deportation to Iran – to force him to give false testimony at the trial that he had seen Manson at the property looking for Terry Melcher five months earlier.

    Why the lie? According to his associate, Frank Rosenfelt, the former CEO of MGM pictures, Whitson was ‘friends with Jay Sebring and Polanski was a buddy of his, and the Beach Boys – and he met Manson through all this’. Another acquaintance (not named) recalled, ‘The entire Manson situation, the Black Panther movement and probably other similar movements . . . people were discredited by certain things that, according to Reeve, may have been staged or done by government authorities in order to make them look bad.’ Close friends of Whitson believed he had been infiltrating the Family and ‘felt bad’ about not being able to prevent the murders. Almost everyone who knew Whitson well believed he was working for some branch of the CIA, operating in various parts of the world as an anti-communist penetration agent and fixer. O’Neill writes, ‘Once he’d consumed me, I found myself fixating on possibilities that I would’ve dismissed as insane only months before.’

    ...

    In August 1967, J Edgar Hoover had reanimated COINTELPRO ‘to prevent militant Black Nationalist groups and leaders from gaining respectability’. The Tate-Polanski house on Cielo Drive had become a gathering place for ‘liberal Hollywood’ figures such as Mama Cass, Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda – all of whom were reportedly under FBI surveillance. Abigail Folger, one of the Cielo victims, was an outspoken civil rights activist. Hoover’s memo says, ‘An anonymous letter is being prepared for Bureau approval to be sent to a leader of the PFP [Peace and Freedom Party] in which it is set forth that the BPP [Black Panther Party] has made statements in closed meetings that when armed rebellion comes the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites.’ As O’Neill points out, ‘Less than a year after this memo was written, Manson’s followers lined up four denizens of liberal Hollywood in Roman Polanski’s home and cut them to pieces, leaving slogans in blood to implicate the Black Panthers.’ "

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