Military Intelligence in the Hollywood Hills; Dave McGowan and the 60s Laurel Canyon Story

OK, so as interesting as this story is (and this recent Fetzer interview is worth a listen though there are better ones that go deeper into the story), I don't know that one aspect of this has really been touched on:

Why did these musicians who were sons and daughters of the military and intelligence elite end up in the Hollywood Hills?

I haven't heard a good explanation for this, though there may be one out there... and may even be a similar one to this I am going to propose here.

Now note, that I have not read McGowan's book on the Laurel Canyon yet, though I plan to at some point. Maybe he puts it together more in the book.

What I have heard from McGowan in an older interview is that the whole 60's hippie/counter-culture/music scene may have been an intel op, to discredit/taint the anti-war movement.

There certainly was some weird presence of the military and intel community in the Hollywood Hills of LA, for instance the secret Lookout Mountain film studio and the mysterious Nazi base in Rustic canyon.

And from a purely military strategy point of view, it would make sense to have a military presence in the Hollywood Hills, and they are centrally located and command the LA region, and are also a very knotty secluded set of hills that would be easy to hide in and conduct secret activities. And LA was vulnerable to a Japanese attack during WWII.

So my hypothesis is this:

1) before/during WWII, the military sets up active and secret bases in the Hills
2) after the war, these bases stay on secretly, and military intel types staff them
3) during the Cold War and with the rise of UFOs in the 40s and 50s, then the start of the Vietnma war and the JFK assassination, things got very weird. Intel types started thinking up ways to control the population, to distract them from the war, from communism, from what the government was doing. They started experimenting with drugs and music as methods of psychological control.
4) kids from senior military and intel officers came from families who had more money, could travel to LA as a fun experience or for education (the Doors members all were UCLA students).
5) Here's the key-- these kids who became Hippie musicians were given names by their fathers of intel and military types who lived in the Hills, maybe even this was done innocently by the fathers, who thought they were setting up their kids with a support network.
6) Once the military/intel types started meeting these kids in LA, they recognized their potential, to be developed into young new Hippie rock stars, and to use them for their music/drug psy-op

The drug angle is particularly interesting -- McGowan says that many of these people were involved in serious drug trafficking. This fits perfectly with the influence of the intel community-- and also why for the most part, this community avoided any trouble from the law.

So, it should be interesting when I read McGowan's Laurel Canyon book, how much he goes into these ideas. I hope the book just isn't a cavalcade of names and hippie musician escapades, and that it goes deeper into the secret intel establishment.