The Okhrana Infiltrated Every Revolutionary Party. Then the Tsar Fell Anyway.

Lex Fridman opens with the question a historian of spies cannot dodge: which intelligence service has been the most powerful? Rick Spence, who studies espionage, secret societies, the occult, and military history, refuses the usual shortlist. He does not name the CIA. He does not even name the KGB. Measured by longevity and consistency, he says, the prize goes to the Russian services as a chain — Tsarist police, Cheka, KGB, and the modern SVR and FSB — not to any one logo. Westerners, he adds, still tend to see Russians as either bumbling idiots or diabolical geniuses, with no middle ground. Both caricatures show up in the record. None of the services is infallible.

The late-nineteenth-century ancestor is the Okhrana, formally the Department of Police and the Special Corps of Gendarmes. Its job was to protect the imperial regime from interior enemies, mainly revolutionaries, and it got very good at the work. The method was co-option, infiltration, informers, and, above all, the agent provocateur: a person planted inside a target group, steered into leadership, and used to provoke actions that justify a crackdown. By the years just before 1917 the Okhrana had people in every radical party that mattered — Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, great and small. Nothing discussed in a central committee meeting stayed unknown for long, and Okhrana men were often in a position to shape the decision.

That success creates the riddle Spence likes. If the secret police effectively ran the opposition, how did revolutionaries overthrow the regime? His answer is that they did not. There were two Russian revolutions in 1917. The first, in March by the Western calendar, unseated Nicholas II. Bolsheviks were nowhere to be seen; Lenin and Trotsky had nothing to do with it. It was, Spence says, a parliamentary coup inside the Duma, aimed at an emperor the politicians thought was bungling the war. The provisional government that coup installed — soon dominated by moderate socialists, with Alexander Kerensky as its quasi-dictator — is the one Lenin overthrew eight months later. The fatal threat to the Tsar was not the underground. It was the Tsarist political system itself.

Spence then says the heresy out loud: was Lenin an Okhrana agent? He is a heretic and proud of it, he tells Fridman, and the case is about results, not rumor. Entering the twentieth century there was, nominally, a single Marxist house, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were factions of it. Lenin wanted a small, militant vanguard that would seize the state and induce socialism from above. The Mensheviks, oddly the actual majority, thought that sounded vaguely totalitarian. They opposed him ineffectively from the start, outmaneuvered at every step, and lost. Starting around 1903 Lenin took one party and split it into angry camps, with a confused middle in between. Who benefited from that disunity? The Okhrana.

Spence will not claim the police put Lenin in place, only that they may have helped, through people around him, and that Lenin may have been witting or unwitting. He did, in any case, accomplish exactly what they wanted, and Spence finds the convenience suspicious. The same years raise a second question about the Okhrana itself. Intelligence services collect information, including on people inside their own government, and they know how to leverage it. Spence's opinion — he stresses that history is mostly opinion — is that between about 1900 and 1917, people inside the Okhrana were playing their own game, one in which loyalty to Nicholas II was no longer required. In 1917 a very effective organization suddenly looks ineffective, then reappears almost at once as the Cheka. Compartmentalization means you never need everyone in on the plan, including the nominal boss. The Okhrana once had its revolutionary agents kill the Minister of the Interior, an imperial bureaucrat who was not, in their eyes, one of them.

Lenin, in power less than a month, created the Cheka in December 1917 to fight counter-revolution and sabotage. He put a politically reliable old Bolshevik, Felix Dzerzhinsky, at the head of it. Dzerzhinsky built the shop out of the Okhrana. In the early 1920s, Spence says, the rank and file may have been 80 to 90 percent former imperial officials. They were professionals who needed to eat; an agent provocateur works for whoever pays. The Soviets stayed excellent at planting people in opposing organizations. The exhibit is the Cambridge Five — Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and perhaps more than five — recruited at Cambridge and pushed toward the top of British intelligence. The CIA and FBI were penetrated too, in the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen cases. If it came down to a Super Bowl of moles, Spence would give the Soviets the edge.

Where, Fridman asks, is the center of power in a compartmentalized service that starts to eat itself? Dzerzhinsky died in 1926 after a heated speech. The usual story is that Stalin had him killed; Spence thinks Stalin sometimes gets blamed for deaths he did not order, and notes that Dzerzhinsky was not even Stalin's opponent. His guess is an inside job. The successor, Vyacheslav Menzhinsky, was more dilettante than secret policeman; behind him stood Genrikh Yagoda, ambitious and murderous, who ran things until the purges took him too. In any corporate organization, Spence says, watch the immediate subordinate. That is the person planning to move into your chair.

How do you get someone to work for you? Intelligence officers still recite MICE. M is money: people are greedy; Ames had an expensive wife. I is ideology, which the Soviets used ruthlessly in the 1920s and 1930s. True believers would betray their grandmother for the greater good, even though recruiting from the open Communist Party also handed enemies a talking point. The inverse is just as useful. There is no anti-communist like an ex-communist. Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, and Elizabeth Bentley had all been part of the red faithful; after they lost the faith they tore up much of the KGB's American network. C is coercion, usually blackmail — gambling, in the old days homosexuality. The Okhrana's nastier version was to arrest a batch of revolutionaries, take one aside, and explain the choice. Refuse, and your comrades stay in jail; we release you anyway and spread the rumor through our other agents that you folded. How long do you live then? You have no choice. Effectiveness was insured by running several agents in the same committee who did not know one another. Their reports had to match. Periodically the service even burned its own people to sow panic.

Around 1908 that method produced a textbook operation. The Socialist Revolutionaries were the largest revolutionary party, more anarchist than Marxist, devoted to propaganda of the deed and fond of blowing people up. The head of their terrorist wing was Yevno Azef. He was an Okhrana agent. Every assassination he planned, he planned with his control. When suspicion rose and his price rose with it, the Okhrana arranged to have him exposed. What does a party do when it learns the chief of its terrorist brigade was secret police? Consternation and mistrust: nobody could tell who was sitting next to them. Spence wrote a biography of Boris Savinkov, Azef's ambitious number two, who expressed absolute horror. He should have. Savinkov was a police agent too. They already had the replacement waiting. He was, Spence thinks, legitimately shocked. He had not suspected his boss.

E, finally, is ego, and Spence thinks it is the most important letter. Some people betray for the Machiavellian joy of deceit. Philby always claimed the communist cause, but in the preface to his autobiography he wrote that one never looks twice at an offer of service in an elite force. Recruitment by the NKVD in the 1930s left him chuffed: a first-rate organization wanted him. If Spence had to pick among ideology, the romance of communism, and ego as the driver of Philby's treason, he would pick ego. Ames's CIA career was hit-or-miss; he never felt he got the postings, promotions, or credit he deserved, and that kind of grievance sticks in the craw. Fridman puts the rush in one picture: you are the only one who knows that the person sitting across from you, to whom you have sworn loyalty, is being betrayed. How many people can resist that, plus a little money and a little push? Spence's answer is that the letters mix. You can cook a recipe.

The structural difference Spence keeps returning to is unity versus split. Okhrana and KGB both housed foreign intelligence and internal security in one organization, answerable to the same people. The American model evolved the other way. J. Edgar Hoover insisted the FBI would own counterintelligence on American soil. The 1947 charter did not quite bar the CIA from spying on Americans — you can always find a way — but it gave the agency no police or judicial powers. It cannot arrest, interrogate, or jail. It has to borrow those from someone else. FBI and CIA have never been chummy; rivalry is the default. A single service has more leeway. A retired KGB officer once told Spence, with amusement, that in his role he could be anywhere, at any time, in or out of uniform. He was authorized to do that.

The folk claim that Russians are simply meaner, with less respect for human rights, is only partly cultural, Spence thinks. All of these services are good at abuse. Russian history is long, contentious, and bloody, and it teaches a first lesson: never trust foreigners. Every government on the border is a real or potential enemy and will invade if it gets the chance. That pairs with the old British observation that countries do not have friends. They have interests, and interests change. Suspicion is the job. You safeguard your secrets, steal the other side's, and hide what you took. Trust is not in the position description.

Are there laws they will not break? Spence quotes John le Carré on his early recruitment into British intelligence. He was told up front that if you do this, you have to be willing to lie and you have to be willing to kill. In ordinary life those are vices. In a realm where deception is the rule, dishonesty is a virtue, and being able to lie convincingly is a skill you need. Killing is frowned upon until the circumstance arrives in which you must be able to do it. Once you enter that world, le Carré felt he was being told, the moral rules of British society no longer apply. If you are squeamish, you will not fit.

How often did the kill part actually happen? Spence answers with a CIA program that was not, on its face, about shooting people. MKUltra, running from the 1950s into the 1970s, is usually filed under mind control. He has a declassified FBI memo from 1949, two years after the CIA was born. The Bureau was not invited but had someone in the room. The meeting was in a private New York apartment, which is a way of saying it never officially happened. CIA men were there, including Cleve Backster, the godfather of the lie detector and later the man who thought plants could feel. They talked about hypnotic suggestion. Redactions remain, but two ambitions are clear: erase memories, and implant false ones. MKUltra would not be named until 1953; Artichoke and other efforts were already leading there. Spence does not think it ultimately matters whether you can do those things. What matters is that they thought they could, and they were going to try.

The surviving MKUltra-era files keep asking whether you can get someone to put a gun to a head, pull the trigger, and not remember. Interestingly enough, Spence says, you could. One participant described the real prize as the architecture of the human mind: how it is put together, and how you might take the pieces apart and reassemble them. Could you build an alternate personality, send it on an agent job, then switch it off, so that the person who was captured, tortured, even had fingernails torn out, had no memory of the secret? Imagine the mischief, Spence says. The legal scandal is simpler. These were medical experiments on people without their knowledge and against their will.

Most of the records were destroyed on order in the early 1970s, as the Church Committee bore down and the mid-decade was a bad time to be the CIA. The experiments had been crimes against American citizens. The lesson the agency took, in Spence's telling, was not never do this again. It was never do this again in a way that leaves the agency's fingerprints on it. You can pay people. You can subsidize research. You can set up venture firms and funnel money to private hands. If something goes wrong, you have perfect deniability. Fridman hopes that innovative spirit is weaker in the United States now. Spence does not sound convinced it vanished.

Fridman puts a live conspiracy on the table: was the CIA behind Jeffrey Epstein, collecting sexual kompromat on the powerful? Spence starts with what Epstein was doing. He was a businessman with a lucrative sideline as a high-level procurer of young girls, and he filmed much of the activity. Ghislaine Maxwell, Spence recalls, once argued they did it to protect themselves. There is nothing new about getting influential people into compromising rooms and turning a camera on. In early-1930s Berlin, just before the Nazis took power, the occultist Erik Jan Hanussen kept a yacht called the Seven Sins and a club, the Palace of the Occult, with cameras everywhere. He filmed important people, including the Brownshirt chief of Berlin, in various states of undress, for blackmail.

Even if blackmail was not Epstein's own plan, other people knew what he had. Who would like dirt on Prince Andrew? Important people went to that island. Spence is not trying to let Epstein off the hook. He was either running his own blackmail business or someone was using him as a front. "I think we're kidding ourselves if we try to pretend that's not what was going on." American intelligence would have reasons to swoop in: politicians oversee budgets; one of them might even become director. Hoover understood the move. He stayed FBI director as long as he did because he systematically collected dossiers on politicians, which can always be justified as protecting the Bureau. Bureaucratic creatures, Spence says, exist to perpetuate themselves and to grow. Nobody wants to go out of business. Fridman reaches for the deep state; Spence is willing to talk about entrenched bureaucrats and a new president who walks in, sees the file on himself, and understands which mechanisms not to touch.

Pizzagate and QAnon come up as the carnival version of the same fear. Spence is not saying those specific stories are true. He asks where the ideas come from. Do pedophiles exist? Yes. Do organized pedophile networks exist, sharing images on the dark web? Yes. Does child trafficking exist? Yes. Whether a given tale of an elite cult is real is one question. All the ingredients for such a thing to be real are there, and at some point someone will put them together. In fact, he says, they already have. That is the method he will use on secret societies for the rest of the conversation: separate what you know from what you believe, and do not dismiss a story because it is ugly.

Fridman jumps to gatherings of elites. First correction: Bohemian Grove is a place, not an organization. It is 2,700 acres of old-growth redwoods north of San Francisco, where the Bohemian Club meets. The club began in the 1870s; the original five members were three journalists, a merchant, and a vintner, none of them terribly wealthy. Bohemian was supposedly slang for an itinerant newspaperman. Then the club became fashionable, rich men wanted in, and one of them bought the grove. It is an old-boys summer camp: cabins with goofy names, skits, costumes. Some of those skits look like pagan human sacrifice. Spence says they are skits. The motto is "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" — no business in the woods, just robes, an owl, and the burning of a few effigies.

Why the robes, the mask, the giant owl? Ritual, Spence says, is simply a series of actions in a precise sequence meant to produce an effect. That description also fits a play, a symphony, and every movie you have ever seen, complete with a soundtrack that tells you what to feel. The Grove's key rite is the Cremation of Care: important people gather at the lake, carry a wicker figure, and burn their troubles. It is meant to produce solidarity and relief. How seriously do they take it? Some people around the owl are bored and cannot wait for it to end. Some get caught up. Some take it as mystical or religious. Intention decides whether a ritual is silly or sinister, and Spence does not assume the latter. He also notes that he went to summer camps and never carried out mock sacrifices in front of an owl.

Focusing on the grove as a getaway, he argues, misses that the club exists all year. Despite the no-spiders motto, the summer meeting includes lakeside talks. Around 1968 Richard Nixon, making his political comeback, was invited to give one. In his memoirs he realized he was being auditioned. That talk, he thought, was the real beginning of his second presidential campaign. He was being vetted. Inviting political leaders to speak is itself weaving. The private venue is perfect for it. Are these men picking the president, or only deciding which horses to back? The latter is the simpler story, Spence says, which does not make the former false. Nixon did get the nomination and the office. Alex Jones's claim of Satanic child sacrifice is, to Spence, a popular mutation of a more ordinary fact: the general public finds rich people inherently suspicious, and enormous new fortunes invite the question, why me, and what does providence want done with this money?

Occult, Spence reminds the room, just means hidden. The premise, shared with most religions, is that the physical world we notice is a small slice of a larger reality, and that occult methods let you enter that reality or pull it into this one. Stage magic fascinates because it mimics the real thing: you know it is a trick, yet you cannot see how it breaks the laws. All roads, Fridman jokes, lead to Aleister Crowley. Crowley's definition, which Spence paraphrases, is that magick is the art and science of causing change to occur in conformity with will. Someone once called it tipping the luck plane so the marble rolls your way. Does a luck plane exist? Spence does not know. Do not get overly bothered, he says, trying to decide whether you can bend reality. Get bothered that people believe they can, will go to great lengths to try, and often believe they have succeeded.

Rituals focus will and attention. His everyday example is a high-school football pep rally: animal-totem costumes, a gym full of people chanting that the other team will die and ours will win. That is a magic ritual. So is the current fashion for visualizing and "manifesting" success. You do not even need to know you are doing it. A cultist would say the crowd is pouring energy somewhere, and maybe, just maybe, you nudge the odds — while the other school runs its own rite, so the bigger mojo wins. Fridman agrees that groups of humans conceiving a thing and willing it into the world is part of how civilization got built, and that charismatic leaders can point the same power at horrors. We do not call the constructive versions cults.

The sour definition of a cult, which Spence repeats without fully endorsing, is that someone at the top knows it is a scam; in a religion that person is dead. Fridman asks whether the leader always knows. Spence says people begin to believe their own bullshit, and that too is part of magic. If not the head, then a lieutenant. The dead giveaway is excessive reverence for the leader. In 1970s Santa Barbara, while Spence was in graduate school, a local group he thinks was the Brotherhood of the Sun collected followers' money and belongings; the leader bought a yacht, and members worked unpaid in cult businesses. A friend joined. Spence's only question was: what is the matter with you? That bafflement, he says, sparked his interest in secret societies. Disclaimer: he is not now and never has been a member of any fraternal order, secret society, or cult that he knows of. He could not even hack the Boy Scouts. Join an organization and someone starts telling you what to do. He has spent his life trying to avoid that. Fridman names the pull Spence cannot feel: the desire in the human heart to belong.

The Thule Society was a small Munich occult group that appeared around 1917 and 1918. Its key figure, Rudolf von Sebottendorff, was born Adam Rudolf Glauer and took a noble name by adoption. Spence is drawn to vague men who show up and start doing things. In the decade before the First World War, Glauer spent years in the Ottoman Empire, a hotbed of intrigue. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908–1909 was a military coup plotted in Masonic lodges, notably Macedonia Risorta in Thessaloniki; technically lodges do not do politics, Spence notes, but the meeting ends and the same men keep talking. Sebottendorff was initiated, including by a Jewish merchant and Kabbalist named Termudi, and apparently mixed in gun running. During the war he returned to Munich with money at his disposal and took over a small occult study circle. Spence's working theory is that someone sent him — Prussian political police or German intelligence — to mobilize esotericism for a war that was about to collapse from psychological exhaustion.

Thule was a branch of Ariosophy, a racist Germanic offshoot of Helena Blavatsky's theosophy. Blavatsky claimed messages from ascended masters in the Himalayas; she was later shown to have written the letters herself, and the doctrine was copied anyway. Her root races were gobbledygook that seemed to include everyone. Early-twentieth-century German adapters turned spiritual evolution into a story that Aryans were the highest humans and Germans the highest Aryans. The soil was identity panic. Germany as a state dated only to 1871; before that it was a geographic expression of Prussians, Bavarians, and people in leather shorts speaking related dialects. Italy had the same problem. You invent a standard dialect, drill it through schools, and Wagner strip-mines old myths into nationalist opera. Thule — a frozen Atlantis, a mythical Arctic homeland — is the mystical version of that invention. It was never a mass movement. It appealed to people who already had an esoteric bent, and it framed Germans as one racial family against Marxism's class war, which nationalists heard as Germans being taught to hate other Germans in the middle of a war.

By 1919 the German army was paying Sebottendorff's bills. The officer corps had dumped the Kaiser to save itself; the Ebert-Groener pact traded army support for the socialist government against a promise that the general staff would survive, and that deal helped crush the Spartacists. The army already knew how to finance revolution abroad. In 1915 a Russian revolutionary code-named Parvus, Alexander Helphand, pitched the Germans in Constantinople: give me marks and I will subvert Russia out of the war. The conservative general staff paid, and it basically worked — after which the regime their money helped install threatened to spread into Germany. Thule was a small piece of the effort not to be hoist by that petard. Under Sebottendorff it spawned "rings," including the German Workers' Party, a local outfit meant to pull workers away from Bolshevism. Spence calls it counter-communist rather than anti-communist: you do not build a total opposite, you build a mimic. That mimic became the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The army's trained propagandist, still on the payroll until 1921, was Corporal Adolf Hitler. Captain Karl Mayr spotted him as a stray dog looking for a master, a man other soldiers would listen to. Hitler had even worn a red armband during the brief Bavarian Soviet Republic. He was sent into a room of about fifty people whose first topic was how and why to abolish capitalism — evil, they agreed, but to be destroyed from a nationalist point of view, not an internationalist one.

Antisemitism, Spence insists, is a bad word for Jew-hate, coined in the 1870s by Wilhelm Marr, himself part Jewish, because an -ism sounded scientific and Judenhass sounded crude. Most Semites are Arabs; nobody hates Jews, Arabs, and Maltese equally. Before the nineteenth century, hostility was mainly religious. Jewish emancipation between about 1800 and 1850 dropped legal walls and turned German Jews into Jewish Germans, opening the professions. Industrialization created losers — craftsmen wiped out by factories — who noticed that a visible share of the new capitalist, legal, and medical elite was Jewish, not a majority but over-represented in the cities. Jews were also visible on the revolutionary left: Rosa Luxemburg, Eugen Levine, Karl Radek, Trotsky. They did not need to be most of the movement, only numerous, prominent, and easy to point at. The army could pour on anti-capitalist rhetoric because it was never going to overthrow capitalism, and the capitalists knew it. The real target was the left, and the method was to name the Jewish names beside Lenin. That is the soil into which a forged document was about to fall.

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is, Spence says, one of the most troublesome works of literature ever to emerge, and its origin stories are mostly wrong. The standard tale has the Okhrana fabricating it in Paris in 1904–1905 under Pyotr Rachkovsky, with Matvei Golovinsky adapting Maurice Joly's Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. At the supposed moment Rachkovsky had been fired and was not in Paris. Spence's research rule is to go back to the first iteration. In 1903 a small right-wing St. Petersburg sheet, Znamya, serialized an uncredited text about a Judeo-Masonic plot. Early versions mention Freemasons more often than Jews. It is not meeting notes. Nobody takes minutes that way; it reads like a Bond villain's monologue, and if you had a plan for world domination the last thing you would do is write it down. Italian scholar Cesare Michelis, in The Non-Existent Manuscript, bolded the phrases that match Joly: they are scattered, a sentence here and there. That is not how you plagiarize. Spence's hunch is that Joly himself wrote an unpublished descendant of his own material, and someone later found it.

Joly's world was 1850s–1870s France, opposition to Napoleon III, duels, and a bitter break with Adolphe Crémieux — radical, Freemason, Jewish, at one point a leader of both Scottish Rite Masonry in France and the Alliance Israélite. One man welded the two labels together. Joly died in obscurity, probably a suicide; his journalist son moved in circles on the fringe of the Okhrana's French press operation after the Franco-Russian alliance, when Russian money was already subsidizing friendly Paris papers. A decade later the text pops up in St. Petersburg. The brew, Spence thinks, is French: the Dreyfus affair, the Panama scandal, and the Taxil hoax, in which Léo Taxil sold a Masonic-Satanic conspiracy complete with child sacrifice, then called a press conference in 1897 and told church dignitaries he had made it all up. People still insist it was true because they want it to be. The Protocols did not take off until after the First World War, when English, German, French, and Dutch editions appeared in 1919. A ruined world wanted an explanation. The document offered an evil plan in motion. Spence's name for such objects is a turd on a plate: it is just there, it makes no sense, and you cannot stop asking who put it there.

Jew-hate is not an accident of 1903. Spence traces a version to the Greco-Egyptian historian Manetho around 300 BC, including an early blood libel and an Exodus story in which Hebrews rob their hosts and the Egyptians are glad to see them go. Greeks prided themselves on cosmopolitanism; Jews would not fold their God into someone else's names, and later Roman Judea was typed as stubborn and miserable to govern. Christianity, Spence says, plagiarized the special relationship and then kept Jews around as an artifact, because one sign of the Second Coming was supposed to be their mass conversion. Sunday school in his childhood told the Old Testament as a European prequel, always "Hebrews," never Jews. Modern antisemitism, though, he still dates to emancipation and industry: the ghetto had cut both ways, and assimilation produced a myth of a single undifferentiated Jewish will that his own experience, as a non-Jew, does not support. People who talk that way, pressed, usually exempt the individuals they actually know. What they hate is a cartoon. After seventy-odd years among his fellow creatures, Spence says he understands them less than he did at seventeen. The basic take: most people, most of the time, are polite, cooperative, and kind — until they are not. The tipping point is unpredictable.

Until about age thirty-three, Charles Manson was an unexceptional petty criminal: cars, bad checks, unsuccessful pimping and dealing, not a violent résumé. In 1967 he left Terminal Island a model prisoner who had learned guitar, claimed Scientology, and, Spence will say something kind here, could actually sing. The Beach Boys recorded one of his songs without him. If he had been less of a weirdo he might have gone further in music. Instead a career small-timer turns into a Svengali who sends people out to kill. The first oddity is parole. He leaves Los Angeles County for the Bay Area, a violation, walks into a parole office two weeks later, and instead of going back to prison gets Michael Smith. Smith ends up supervising one parolee: Manson. Smith is also a University of California graduate student in group dynamics, especially drugs and gangs, tied to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. Manson never holds a regular job, runs with young girls and ex-cons, is arrested repeatedly, and nothing sticks. Who gets that card? Informants. Spence's suspicion is the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ancestor of the DEA: federal parolee, federal officer, drugs-and-groups researcher. Back in Los Angeles, on the fringes of music and film, dealing drugs and girls, Manson looks to Spence like an early Jeffrey Epstein, given free rein until murder made him too hot to cover.

Sharon Tate and her friends die at Cielo Drive; the next night Leno and Rosemary LaBianca are bound and hacked. Messages in blood are meant to look like Black Panther work. The trial story is Helter Skelter: Beatles lyrics, an apocalyptic race war, Manson ordering sloppy killings he did not attend. How any of that ignites a race war is never explained. Spence's simpler sequence starts earlier, with Gary Hinman, a musician who cooked drugs in his basement and sold them to Manson, who sold them to the Straight Satans. The bikers said a batch made their brothers ill and wanted $2,000 back. Bobby Beausoleil and some of the girls went to collect; Hinman refused, was tortured, and died, with the scene dressed to blame Panther-linked customers. Beausoleil then drove Hinman's car up the coast with a bloody knife inside, pulled over to sleep, and was arrested. He was popular with the girls. Consternation. How do you get Bobby out? Copycat killings: make new scenes look the same so he could not have done Hinman, he only borrowed the car. Vincent Bugliosi wanted Helter Skelter because it was a story people could understand. His star witness, Linda Kasabian, was present at both later murder sites, claimed she only drove, got total immunity, proclaimed love for Beausoleil, and was, others said, a chief proponent of the copycats — also high most of the time and convinced she was a witch. If Manson had sat in a suit and spoken normally, that testimony would have been weaker. Spence is not saying he was innocent.

Revenge on record producer Terry Melcher, a former Cielo Drive tenant, also fails Spence's test: Manson knew Melcher had moved and probably knew where. He knew the house; the family had "creepy crawled" places like the LaBiancas', sneaking in to move furniture and terrify. At Spahn Ranch, Squeaky Fromme slept with George Spahn so the family could camp; they ran credit-card fraud, stolen cars, a chop shop. LSD, lots of it from the Free Clinic, and sex were the levers. Tom O'Neill's book Chaos, Spence says, demolishes Bugliosi's narrative and turns up Reeve Whitson, a man with no judicial function hanging around the prosecution who later surfaces as a CIA officer in Central America — and who appears to have called about the Tate bodies before the housekeeper found them, without calling the police. Manson was scrawny, not physically intimidating, and still held large men. Fridman asks how, without a real ideology. Spence points at belonging. Many of the young women came from middle-class homes full of dysfunction; their parents did not love them; they were semi-runaways; now they had a family, and children, some of them Manson's. The pull toward belonging, Fridman says, is what gets humans into trouble.

Spence grew up in California in the years a writer later branded Killerfornia. The Tate-LaBianca murders fell on his high-school graduation birthday. Young female hitchhikers vanished at an alarming rate; some bodies have never been attributed. He is not sure the Zodiac killings were all one person. Early attacks targeted couples; the last, a cab driver shot in downtown San Francisco in front of witnesses, is a different pattern. He checked locations, victims, and moon phases for a ritual signature and found little. At Lake Berryessa the killer wore a hooded costume and a circle-and-cross symbol, used gun and knife clumsily — some victims lived — and aimed more violence at the women. He told the press he was collecting souls for the afterlife. Take him at face value, Spence says, rather than wishing that away. A Halloween card sent to San Francisco papers copies the wheel of grisly deaths from a 1951 Tim Holt western comic; whoever made the card had seen that cover. The ciphers were not meant to be hard. Then he vanished, in the Jack-the-Ripper tradition of toying with newspapers. They did not know whom to look for. A longtime suspect's DNA did not match. Fridman notes shared coloring with Son of Sam and the Monster of Florence: couples, isolation, occult talk, prosecutors reaching for Satanic cults they could not quite prove. Do Satanic cults exist? Yes, even a harmless one in Spence's hometown, robes and a chicken and a naked altar if that is your taste. Serial killers exist. Ritual murder exists. Are they necessarily connected? No. Could they be? Yes. "Don't ever tell me that something is just too crazy for people to do, because that's crazy talk."

The Illuminati we mean began on May 1, 1776, in Ingolstadt, founded by law professor Adam Weishaupt. The real name was the Order of Perfectibilists; Weishaupt said never let the organization be known under its real name anywhere. Illuminati only means people who have seen the light — Roman Christian converts were illuminati — and the word is not a trademark. The symbol was an owl almost identical to the Bohemian Club's, sacred to Minerva. Weishaupt's plan was to replace existing religions and governments with a one-world order run by the Illuminati, because "we wish to make men happy and free, but first we must make them good." He wanted women recruited through vanity and a promise of emancipation, the better to influence men, with no intention of delivering, because the future would be a boys' club. Some readers draw a line from that program to the Communist Manifesto. The Bavarian government obtained inner texts; Spence thinks Weishaupt leaked them for publicity, and recruitment continued. Bavaria banned the order four times, which means the first three failed, like papal bans on Freemasonry. Visibility is not transparency. A black box on the table is still a black box. Weishaupt understood that nothing is more convincing than a concealed mystery, and that ego is the Achilles heel — the same E in MICE. After the bans, members scattered, including to Paris, and then came the French Revolution. Anyone can start a club and call it the Illuminati. Fridman says intelligence agencies would want to infiltrate such rooms. Spence flips it: or secret societies infiltrate the agencies.

His definition of a secret society is that existence is usually not the secret; what they do is. They are self-selecting. You do not just join; they pick you, put you through tests and initiations, and take oaths of loyalty. That is also how you enter an intelligence service: polygraphs, field tests, a vow of silence with dire consequences, an us-versus-them priesthood of special knowledge. If you question them, they say they know things you do not. An effective society or agency will not let you know what it does not want known, and will mislead you if you get close. The most important one is probably the one that never advertises. Around it sit visible clubs: Bohemian, Bilderberg — largely the creation of Józef Retinger, a Polish schemer expelled from Britain, France, and the United States, the éminence grise behind Prince Bernhard — plus the Council on Foreign Relations, Le Cercle, and stay-behind networks such as Gladio. Spence's question is how many secret organizations you need when the membership lists overlap. He does not buy a single small group running the world, because if they did it would run more efficiently. What concerns him is disparate groups who think they are in charge. The Nazis had twelve years and a racial fantasy with no basis in reality. Look at the mess. Always be clear, he told students, about what you know and what you believe. You know your name and your birthday. You probably believe you know your father because your mother said so, unless you trust a DNA test. Beliefs, true or not, start to drive action. Utopias do too. Listening to old Wobbly songs, Spence heard a sweet hymn of the commonwealth of toil and pictured a children's choir in front of a hammer and sickle. The sentiments are legitimate. The horrors they licensed were real. Do we learn from that? He is unconvinced.

What gives him hope that humans might still be here in a thousand or ten thousand years? The same sentence he offered as anthropology: most people are cooperative and kind most of the time, and you usually get back what you put in. He has a fascination with airplane meltdowns, those psychotic breaks that always end with police dragging someone off after inconveniencing the cabin. Road rage is the ground version. Those people were polite until they snapped, and that too is in the makeup. Fridman answers with the other half of the species: we cooperate at huge scale, build empires and laws, and he wants the magical thing that makes us human to survive even if robots claim consciousness and love. "Well, let us hope so," Spence says. Nobody, he adds, has ever asked him so many interesting questions. Or so many questions. Fridman closes with John F. Kennedy: a free society is historically opposed to secret oaths, and the dangers of excessive concealment outweigh the excuses for it.