The gangster, the assassin and the CIA psychiatrist

In The Departed, Jack Nicholson plays Frank Costello, a Boston crime boss with an unsettling calm and a relationship with the FBI that runs in the wrong direction. The character was drawn in part from James "Whitey" Bulger, who really did run South Boston, really was an FBI informant, and really did leave sixteen years of bodies behind him.

What the film does not touch is the strangest documented thing about him. In 1957, in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Bulger volunteered for a medical study and was given LSD roughly fifty times over eighteen months by a doctor working, unknown to him, on a contract funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

That is the thread this piece follows. It leads through the behavioural research programmes of the 1950s and into the career of one psychiatrist who turns up, repeatedly, at the edge of cases everybody knows. The overlaps are genuine. Almost everything built on top of them is not, and separating the two is the entire job.

1. What happened to Whitey Bulger

Bulger was serving time for bank robbery when he was recruited into what he was told was research towards a cure for schizophrenia. The doctor running it was Carl Pfeiffer of Emory University. Prisoners were held in a secure room in the prison hospital basement and given large doses of LSD-25.

Pfeiffer's CIA funding was revealed in 1977, during the congressional investigations that followed the disclosure of MKULTRA. He had administered LSD to inmates at Atlanta and at the Bordentown Reformatory in New Jersey.

Bulger wrote about it for the rest of his life. He described hallucinations, and decades of broken sleep and nightmares he attributed directly to the experiments. He also described what the researchers asked him while he was dosed — questions that had nothing to do with schizophrenia.

Would you ever kill anyone?

One of the questions put to prisoners during the Atlanta LSD sessions

So what was the agency actually trying to learn? Not, on the surviving evidence, how to build an assassin. The prisoner drug work sits inside a broader set of questions the CIA was asking in the 1950s: whether a drug could make an unwilling person talk, whether it could induce amnesia for an interrogation, whether it could be used to discredit someone, and — defensively — whether an adversary could do any of that to an American officer.

2. What MKULTRA actually was

It is routinely described as a mind control programme, and that phrase does more harm than good. It implies a capability. What the surviving records show is a long, expensive, largely unsuccessful search for one.

MKULTRA was authorised in April 1953 and ran for about two decades as an umbrella over some 150 subprojects, contracted out to universities, hospitals, prisons and private researchers — many of whom did not know the ultimate source of their funding. The subjects were drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, suggestibility, dissociation and amnesia.

Most of the records were destroyed on the director's order in 1973. What survives does so because a cache had been filed with financial paperwork in the wrong place and was missed; it surfaced in 1977 and runs to roughly twenty thousand pages.

3. Dr Louis Jolyon West

West was a psychiatrist of real standing. He chaired the department of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma, then from 1969 led the department at UCLA and its Neuropsychiatric Institute for twenty years. He was a recognised authority on coercive persuasion, cults and violence, and he published extensively.

He also held CIA money. MKULTRA Subproject 43, a grant of $20,800 beginning in 1955 and ending in 1956, funded a proposal he submitted titled "Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility", accompanied by a document on "Studies of Dissociative States".

He is also remembered for one grotesque experiment. In 1962, attempting to induce musth in an elephant at Oklahoma City Zoo, West injected a bull called Tusko with a very large dose of LSD. The animal collapsed within minutes and died. It was published, and it is a fair measure of how far the era's researchers were prepared to go with a drug nobody understood.

4. Jack Ruby

On 24 November 1963, two days after the assassination of President Kennedy, Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, on live television.

In late April 1964, with Ruby in custody and deteriorating, West examined him. He found Ruby psychotic — an acute paranoid state, with hallucinations and suicidal ideation — and concluded he was technically insane and needed immediate psychiatric hospitalisation.

That is the documented connection, and it is remarkable enough on its own. A psychiatrist who had held a CIA contract to study hypnosis and dissociation was, nine years later, the man who assessed the mental state of the person who killed the president's alleged assassin.

The honest question is narrower and better: how did a man with that particular research background end up in that particular cell? The answer may be entirely mundane — a small professional field, a famous case, an obvious name to call. But it is worth asking, and it is where most accounts either stop or leap.

5. Sirhan Sirhan, and a link that is not there

Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 5 June 1968. He has always said he cannot remember doing it.

In January 1969 the psychiatrist Bernard Diamond, professor of law and psychiatry at Berkeley, hypnotised Sirhan in his cell. Under hypnosis Sirhan relived the shooting. Diamond had him write, and he produced repetitions of "Kennedy must die" — the same compulsive repetition found in notebooks seized from his home.

Diamond testified for the defence and argued diminished capacity: that Sirhan had entered a dissociated state, and that it was self-induced rather than imposed by anyone. He was candid about how it sounded, describing his own account as preposterous, unlikely and incredible — and maintaining that it was nevertheless what had happened.

That distinction matters more here than anywhere else in the piece, because Sirhan is the case where the programmed-assassin narrative is most often asserted. The documented position is: a man who cannot remember, a defence psychiatrist who induced a trance and concluded it was self-generated, and no established connection to anybody funded to study the subject.

6. Haight-Ashbury, 1967

In 1967 West was in San Francisco, studying the Haight-Ashbury counterculture. His papers, held at UCLA, document the project. It ran during the summer that tens of thousands of young people arrived in the district, and it involved contact with the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, founded that June by David Smith.

Charles Manson was released from Terminal Island in March 1967 and went to Haight-Ashbury. He and the people gathering around him were in the same few streets, using the same free clinic.

Manson's San Francisco parole officer was Roger Smith, a criminology researcher. Smith's caseload reportedly reduced from around forty parolees to Manson alone, and he had Manson report to him at the clinic. Manson was arrested repeatedly during this period and his parole was never revoked.

This material comes principally from Tom O'Neill, whose twenty-year investigation was published as CHAOS in 2019. It is serious reporting and it is secondary evidence — a journalist's reconstruction from archives and interviews, not a document set you can pull yourself.

So what is left is proximity: a CIA-funded researcher into dissociation and suggestibility, working in a district at the same time as a man who would shortly demonstrate an unusual capacity to reshape other people's behaviour, both connected to the same small clinic. Unusual, unexplained, and a long way short of a programme.

From that proximity grew the claim that the agency created Manson. The distance between the two is the subject of this article.

7. Patty Hearst

Kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February 1974, Patty Hearst was photographed weeks later taking part in an armed bank robbery. At her 1976 trial the defence argued she had been coerced into it.

West was appointed by the court as an expert on coercive persuasion, and worked without fee. With the psychologist Margaret Singer he interviewed Hearst extensively and produced a thirty-five page report. He testified that she had not been in her right mind, and afterwards published an appeal for her release.

By this point West was the pre-eminent American authority on brainwashing and coercive control. That is the plainest reading of why he appears again: the field was small, and he was the person you called.

The timeline

**April 1953** — MKULTRA authorised under CIA director Allen Dulles.

**1955–56** — MKULTRA Subproject 43 funds West at the University of Oklahoma: hypnosis, suggestibility, dissociative states.

**1957** — Whitey Bulger given LSD at Atlanta federal penitentiary under Carl Pfeiffer of Emory, on CIA-funded work.

**1962** — West kills an elephant with LSD at Oklahoma City Zoo.

**22 November 1963** — Kennedy assassinated. **24 November** — Ruby shoots Oswald.

**Late April 1964** — West examines Ruby and finds him psychotic.

**March 1967** — Manson released from Terminal Island, goes to Haight-Ashbury. **June 1967** — Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic opens. **Summer 1967** — West conducting his Haight-Ashbury study.

**5 June 1968** — Robert Kennedy shot by Sirhan Sirhan.

**January 1969** — Bernard Diamond hypnotises Sirhan. **August 1969** — the Tate–LaBianca murders.

**1969** — West appointed head of psychiatry at UCLA.

**1973** — MKULTRA records destroyed on Richard Helms's order.

**1976** — West evaluates Patty Hearst for the court.

**1977** — Surviving MKULTRA financial records surface; Pfeiffer's prison work is named.

Where each connection actually stands

**Bulger → CIA-funded drug experiments** — Documented. Atlanta, 1957, Pfeiffer, confirmed in the 1977 disclosures.

**Bulger → Jolly West** — Not established. Different researcher, different institution. No connection found.

**West → CIA behavioural research** — Documented. MKULTRA Subproject 43, 1955–56, named in the surviving records.

**West → Jack Ruby** — Documented. Examined him in late April 1964 and found him psychotic.

**West → influencing Ruby** — No evidence. Nothing in the record indicates anything beyond assessment.

**Sirhan → hypnosis** — Documented. Bernard Diamond, January 1969, testified to in open court.

**Sirhan → Jolly West** — Unverified. We found no reliable source. Treat any claim of it as unsupported until one is produced.

**Manson → Haight-Ashbury clinic environment** — Documented, via O'Neill's reporting. Same district, same clinic, same months.

**West → experimenting on Manson** — Unproven. O'Neill, who looked hardest, says he never found it.

**West → Patty Hearst** — Documented. Court-appointed, interviewed her with Margaret Singer, testified.

**CIA → creating or programming these individuals** — Unproven, and not supported by anything in this article.

The question worth asking

Not whether the CIA built assassins. On the available evidence it tried to learn things it never learned, spent twenty years failing, and destroyed the paperwork out of embarrassment and legal exposure rather than to hide a success.

The better question is why so many of the era's defining criminal cases intersect with the small world of American behavioural research — and the answer may be less sinister and more uncomfortable than a conspiracy.

The field was tiny. Perhaps a few dozen people in the United States were seriously working on hypnosis, dissociation and coercive persuasion, and the agency funded a meaningful share of them. When a court needed an expert on why someone had done something inexplicable, the list of names was short. West was on it because he was good, and he was good partly because he had been paid to become good at it.

That produces exactly the pattern we observe: the same handful of specialists appearing around the same handful of famous cases, for reasons that are professional rather than conspiratorial — and with funding histories that make the coincidence look like design.