Was 1960's Laurel Canyon a CIA PSYOP?
This month's mixtape includes a paranoid longread on the weird scenes inside the Canyon.
Welcome inside The Wax Museum, where this exhibit comes with a heavy dose of acid and paranoia. Our monthly curated mixtape is at the bottom, so if you’d rather skip the strange trip we’re about to take, scroll down and enjoy the tunes. For the rest of you, let’s head up into the hills.
It’s the spring of 1968. Beach Boy Dennis Wilson is cruising Sunset Boulevard in his custom red Ferrari when he spots two barefoot hitchhikers, Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey. He picks them up and a day of poolside drugs and sex follows. Later that night, after a recording session, Wilson returns home to find a wiry man in his driveway, arms wrapped around the same girls, eyes burning. He kneels and kisses Wilson’s feet.
That man was Charles Manson.
Within months, Manson and his Family were living in Wilson’s house, eating his food, driving his cars, and using his Hollywood connections. Wilson even recorded a Manson song, “Cease to Exist,” retitled “Never Learn Not to Love.”
Believing Manson had real talent, Wilson introduced him to The Byrds producer Terry Melcher, who entertained the idea of signing him but eventually passed.
Manson didn’t take the rejection lightly. In August 1969, he sent his followers to Melcher’s last known address: 10050 Cielo Drive. Melcher had moved out. Instead, they slaughtered Roman Polanski’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four others — including Folgers coffee heiress Abigail Folger and Beach Boys hairstylist Jay Sebring — in one of the most infamous crimes in American history.
Overnight, the dream of the 1960s turned into a nightmare. Peace and love curdled into fear and suspicion. Was this just the result of random chaos? Or was something more deliberate unfolding?
"There’s this guy from the CIA, and he’s creeping around Laurel Canyon" - Frank Zappa, “Plastic People”
Ninety minutes before Sharon Tate’s housekeeper found the bodies at Cielo Drive and notified police, Tate’s photographer got a phone call: she was dead. The caller was Reeve Whitson — friend of Wilson, Melcher, and Manson.
Whitson later admitted he had the house under surveillance and acted as a behind-the-scenes go-between for LAPD and military intelligence during the investigation. Whitson’s ex-wife and daughter told researchers he frequently met with “agency men” and disappeared for months on “government business.” If true, he may have been operating within a long-standing intelligence playbook, one that treated culture as a battlefield.
In 1953, CIA director Allen Dulles declared psychological operations (PSYOPS) the primary weapon of the Cold War. By 1962, Army officials were calling for psychological expertise to fight a “new kind of war” that could exploit “national vulnerabilities” and neutralize political opponents, especially left-wing movements at home.
By the early 1960s, those experiments had moved into the field, most notably the CIA’s MKULTRA program, which tested mind control techniques, LSD dosing, and other methods of shaping behavior. One of MKULTRA’s top psychiatrists, Dr. Louis “Jolly” West, seemed to appear at every American breaking point: he examined Jack Ruby after Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, evaluated Sirhan Sirhan after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and later consulted in the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
In 1967, West was running the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, studying the hippie subculture and its drug use. Manson and his followers were regulars there before drifting south to Los Angeles and into Laurel Canyon. West’s research focus — prolonged LSD use, group manipulation, and the sway of charismatic leaders — mirrored the exact conditions inside the Manson Family.
Whether Manson was a subject, an informant, or just a pawn is still unclear. But as a federal parolee who was arrested more than a dozen times in just a few years, often for violent crimes, and almost always released the same day, he seemed untouchable.
The early anti-war movement was disciplined and deeply political. But when psychedelics flooded the streets, protests turned into festivals and organizing was replaced by flower power and personal liberation. The CIA later admitted to helping spread LSD through various channels. Rock stars became the new spiritual leaders, and the revolution lost focus. Then came Manson, whose brutality drove the final nail into the hippie coffin.
Overseeing all this, perched high above Laurel Canyon sat Lookout Mountain Laboratory, a top-secret military film studio operating from 1947 until its closure in 1969 — less than two months before the Manson murders. Outfitted with soundstages, editing suites, and vaults of classified footage, it produced thousands of films documenting nuclear tests and other defense projects. A handful of Hollywood insiders, from Walt Disney to Ronald Reagan, had clearance to work there.
Officially, it had nothing to do with the music scene unfolding just below, but for some, the timing and proximity are hard to ignore. Was it simply observing, or did it have a hand in shaping the scene? Today, the building is privately owned by actor Jared Leto — a fitting twist for a place already steeped in secrets.
Some researchers push the theory even further, suggesting the rock stars themselves may have been willing — or unwitting — participants in a larger PSYOP. The military and intelligence connections are almost endless.
The “spontaneous” Laurel Canyon scene took root in 1965, the same year the Gulf of Tonkin incident — based on dubious intelligence — escalated the Vietnam War. Commanding U.S. Naval forces that fateful night was Admiral George Stephen Morrison, father of The Doors’ Jim Morrison. While one Morrison ignited a war, the other scored its soundtrack.
Frank Zappa’s story is just as curious. His father, Francis Zappa, was a top chemical weapons specialist at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal, a facility tied to both chemical warfare research and MKULTRA mind control experiments.
Zappa’s manager, Herb Cohen, a former Marine, was among the first to arrive in Laurel Canyon. In 1961, Cohen was in the Congo at the exact time Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was tortured and killed in a CIA-backed coup — a moment when the agency was sending jazz musicians overseas as cultural cover.
Stephen Stills, one of the Canyon’s earliest stars, grew up in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama while his father worked on covert U.S. operations. These countries, perhaps not coincidentally, were all sites of American-backed coups during that era. John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas had his own proximity to power, attending the Naval Academy before winding up in Havana at the height of the Cuban Revolution. Jackson Browne entered the world on a U.S. military base in postwar Germany while his father worked for the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA.
The deeper you dig, the more the lines blur between the counterculture’s leading voices and the very power structures they appeared to oppose.
“There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear” - Buffalo Springfield, “For What It’s Worth”
There’s no single smoking gun here. What you do find is a web of government operations, mysteriously protected criminals, and an uncanny number of military connections woven into the music and the myth.
Maybe Laurel Canyon really was the epicenter of a cultural awakening. Or maybe it was something else — a staged play designed to redirect dissent and neutralize radical politics. A revolution you could dance to, but one that would never threaten power.
Either way, here we are over sixty years later, and the set pieces have changed, but the script feels the same. Music, festivals, and hashtags still channel dissent into harmless outlets. The violence hasn’t stopped, the inequality has deepened, and the empire rolls on. The question isn’t just what happened in Laurel Canyon, but whether we’re still living in its aftermath.
Monthly Mixtape: Weird Scenes Inside The Canyon
Stream: Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music
Enjoy a sunlit stroll through 1960s Laurel Canyon that slides into a fever dream of paranoia, cult shadows, and cosmic melancholy before coming up for air.
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Thanks for reading and listening. I feel like Charlie in the mail room right now. I’ll see you back here on Friday with The Weekender!
Sources:
David McGowan - Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream (2014)
Tom O’Neill - Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019)
Stephen Kinzer - Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2019)
Andrew Hickey - A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Episode 177 Parts 1-4 “Never Learn Not To Love” (2025)
I don't know whether to laugh, cry or just pretend I never read this. Very interesting regardless.
Combining music and espionage history? Yes please. 👏🏼