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Leary Helped Destroy The 1960s New Left By Turning The Youth Onto Drugs
During the mid-1960s, as political activism against the Vietnam War and other social ills skyrocketed, Dr. Timothy Leary, a former University of California at Berkeley and Harvard professor, traveled the U.S. urging young people to “turn on” to LSD, “tune in and drop out” of “high school, junior executives” and other societal institutions.
Leary had been fired after distributing LSD to students at Harvard in 1963 and subsequently moved to the Millbrook Estate in New York where he continued to carry on experiments with LSD through a foundation that he established.
At the time, Leary’s message seemed subversive.
Leary was touting LSD as a consciousness-expanding drug that could induce sexual euphoria among women and lead to the development of a more peaceful society.
However, in hindsight, Leary proved to be a false prophet who helped destroy the 1960s movements by pushing young people to take a drug that fried their brains and diverted their energy from political activism.
Carl Oglesby, the one-time president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the leading 1960s-era campus anti-war organization, wrote in 1988 that “we have to contemplate the possibility that the great American acid trip, no matter how distinctive of the rebellion of the 1960s it came to appear, was in fact the result of a despicable government conspiracy….If U.S. intelligence bodies collaborated in an effort to drug the entire generation of Americans, then the reason they did so was to disorient it, sedate it, and depoliticize it.”
An examination of Leary’s career makes it apparent that U.S. intelligence bodies were, indeed, behind the drugging of American youth.
Leary himself said in an interview with journalist Walter Bowart near the end of his life that he was working as an intelligence agent since 1962. “I was a witting agent of the CIA” which, he claimed, had recognized him as “an important national asset.”
Asked by Bowart to elaborate on whether CIA people were involved in his LSD-proselytizing groups in the 1960s, Leary responded: “Of course they were. I would say that eighty percent of my movements, eighty percent of the decisions I made were suggested to me by CIA people.”
Leary continued: “I like the CIA! The game they’re playing is better than the FBI. Better than the Saigon police. Better than Franco’s police. Better than the Israeli police. They’re a thousand times better than the KGB. So it comes down to: who are you going to work for? The Yankees or the Dodgers?”
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Doing Exploratory Work For The CIA
Possessing a wild and rebellious streak, Leary’s connection to the CIA went back to the 1950s when, as a young psychology professor, he developed a personality test called “the Leary” that was used by the CIA.
At the time, Leary was a professor of clinical psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and Director of Psychology Research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland.
Coming from a military family, Leary’s father, Tote, had been a dentist with the rank of captain at West Point when Douglas MacArthur was Superintendent there.
After agreeing to leave West Point following issues with the so-called “honor committee” because of his womanizing tendencies, Leary was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943 and was sent to the psychology subsection of the Army Specialized Training Program, which included three months of specialized study at Georgetown University.
By the time he obtained his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, Leary had sought to liberalize the way that psychologists interacted with their patients, believing that the therapist ought to be a “democratic participant” in group therapy sessions rather than an outside authority figure.
Leary’s viewpoint dovetailed with the burgeoning anti-psychiatry movement that sought to humanize the psychiatric profession.
Believing that “everything that could be found in mental disorder could be found in anyone,” Leary said that “the world was a madhouse,” and that insane asylums were “more terrifying than Dachau because the captors claim to be healers.”
Based on a review of data collected from hundreds of patients, Leary’s 1957 book The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (John Wiley & Sons) depicted social interaction as a kind of game in which people played assigned roles they could be coached to improve upon, or modify if they were unhappy.
The CIA gravitated to Leary—who had a genius-level IQ—because the personality archetypes he laid out could help the Agency manipulate people. Additionally, his research aimed to find ways to change human behavior—including through dispensation of psychedelic drugs in a controlled setting, which was a CIA obsession.
Leary admitted to interviewer Walter Bowart that personality-assessment research in the late 1940s and 1950s was an offshoot of an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) research project and was “CIA initiated.”
The OSS project had been headed by Dr. Henry Murray, Leary’s boss at Harvard in the early 1960s, and Donald W. MacKinnon, a OSS alumni and UC Berkeley psychologist who collaborated with Leary at Harvard in the early 1960s.
In 1948, while completing his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, Leary became acquainted with influential CIA operative Cord Meyer, Jr., as a member of the American Veterans Committee (AVC), a liberal alternative to the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Founded by the CIA, the AVC sought to elect Harry S. Truman over Republican challenger Thomas Dewey in the 1948 election. Leary was said to have brought enormous energy and a lot of ideas for fundraising to the organization.
Leary credited Cord Meyer—who led the purging of communists in AVC—with “helping me understand my political-cultural role more clearly.”
Lecturing Leary about communism and the importance of liberal resistance to it, Meyer had headed CIA programs that infiltrated liberal-left groups such as labor unions, creative-academic societies and student groups.
In his memoir Flashbacks, Leary recounted receiving a visit when he was teaching at Harvard from Cord Meyer, Jr.’s ex-wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who took part in an LSD session with him.
After that session, Meyer gave a lecture on the CIA’s interest in using such drugs for brainwashing and interrogation, which she seemed to know a lot about. Leary believed that “there was something calculated about Mary, that tough hit you get from people who live in the hard political world.”
Later, Leary learned that Meyer had an affair with President John F. Kennedy. He came to believe that she was murdered in October 1964 for giving LSD to the president and recording this information in her diary, which the CIA seized after her death.
Leary’s ties to the Meyer’s appear to be crucial in his relationship with the CIA. Meyer had told Leary: “The CIA creates the radical journals and student organizations and runs them with deep-cover agents. Dissident organizations in academia are also controlled.” Included, presumably, was the psychedelic club run by Leary at Harvard.
Allegedly Meyer told Leary: “Since your research is of vital importance to the intelligence agencies of the country, you’ll be allowed to go on with your experiments as long as you keep it quiet. You are doing exploratory work the CIA tried to do in the 1950s. So they’re more than happy to have you do their research for them. As long as it doesn’t get out of hand.”
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Fighting A War At The Neurological Level
Leary claimed to have had some kind of spiritual and religious epiphany while taking magic mushrooms in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in the summer of 1960. He was also said to have been inspired by a 1957 Life magazine article by Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan vice president with intimate ties to the intelligence establishment, who supposedly had a profound spiritual experience taking magic mushrooms in Mexico.
Offered a position at Harvard for the 1960-1961 academic year, Leary began teaching courses on the use of psychedelic drugs and carried out LSD experiments with his colleague, Dr. Richard Alpert.
Dr. Aldous Huxley and Dr. Humphry Osmond appear to have selected Leary as a key person to advance research on psychedelic drugs in the service of the Cold War and arranged for his position at Harvard.
Grandson of one of the founders of the Rhodes Round Table group, an elite body that aimed to advance the interests of the British empire, Huxley was the author of the 1954 book The Doors of Perception praising the consciousness-expanding effect of hallucinogenic drugs and a visiting professor at MIT who had been brought in to help oversee Operation MK-ULTRA by CIA Director Allen Dulles.
MK-ULTRA was a CIA mind-control program designed to develop methods for controlling human behavior.
Dr. Osmond also conducted research for Operation MK-ULTRA at Princeton and the University of Saskatchewan, working closely with Dr. Carl Pfeiffer of Emory University, who was a key academic figure involved in MK-ULTRA.
Drs. Osmond and Huxley were allegedly introduced to LSD by Captain Al Hubbard, a special investigative agent for the OSS in World War II who was known as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.
Researcher Jan Irvin frames it that Osmond and Huxley hired Leary on behalf of the CIA to take on the persona of the “hip drug pusher” who would proselytize LSD among the youth.
John Potash reported that funding for Leary’s research at Harvard—along with other professors involved in psychedelic drug research working under Osmond and Huxley—came from the Human Ecology Fund, which had been started by the CIA at Cornell University Medical School in 1959 and was used as a conduit for CIA funding of psychological research.
Previously, Leary had received government grants through the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which is known to have been one of the conduits for MK-ULTRA research.
Leary was recruited to work at Harvard’s Psychological Drug Research Center by Dr. Frank Barron, who previously worked with Leary at the Berkeley Institute of Personality Assessment and Research, which Leary admitted was “funded and staffed by OSS-CIA psychologists.”
Leary’s psilocybin research project was approved by Dr. Henry Murray, the Director of the Harvard psychological clinic, who, according to Leary, had monitored military experiments on truth-drug brainwashing and interrogation when he was with the OSS.
Not surprisingly, Murray—who had conducted a series of psychologically damaging experiments on undergraduate students that involved testing for reactions to extreme stress—took a keen interest in Leary’s work and even supplied him with magic mushrooms.
A declassified CIA memo directing an agent to accumulate more information on the Leary-Alpert psychedelic experts at Harvard noted that “some individuals known to have taken the drugs have sensitive security clearances and are engaged in classified work.”
The CIA in the 1950s and early 1960s thought that psilocybin and LSD were magic substances capable of altering human behavior and even winning wars without battlefield casualties.
Sidney Gottlieb arranged for the CIA to purchase the world’s entire supply of LSD in the early 1950s, distributing it to institutions under false pretenses.
After the exposure of the Operation MK-ULTRA, CIA Director Stansfield Turner (1976-1980) admitted that LSD research on college campuses and elsewhere was funded by the CIA.
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Identifying himself as a cold warrior, Leary told Walter Bowart: “I saw after Hiroshima, there would never be a big world war. World War III would be at the neurological level, not at the level of tanks and planes and bombs…I proceeded as an intelligence agent since 1962, understanding that the next war for control of this planet and beyond, had to do with the control of consciousness. So, I had to think very carefully about that…I wanted my side to win the war.”
Leary also said that, while he was a witting agent of the CIA, he did everything in his power to throw out Nixon, whose War on Drugs he objected to.
Leary was especially proud of a project he ran at Harvard—financed by the Uris Brothers Foundation—where he gave psilocybin and LSD to inmates in a controlled setting at the Concord prison in Massachusetts.
Leary claimed that the program was successful in reducing recidivism rates and proved his theory of “set” and “setting” that a user’s experience with psychedelic and other drugs was shaped by the environment in which the drugs were taken.
The Concord experiment fit the pattern of Operation MK-ULTRA, by which Ivy League scientists like Leary performed drug experiments on prison inmates who served as human guinea pigs.
Mellon-Fortune Front And The CIA As Drug Pusher
Researcher Jan Irvin suggests that Leary and Alpert’s firings from Harvard—for distributing LSD unwittingly to students—was staged to set the stage for Leary becoming a hippie guru whose spiritual message Harvard had tried to suppress. During the semester of Leary’s firing, he had actually stopped teaching his classes, which is what really led to his dismissal.
After leaving Harvard, Leary and Alpert established a non-profit foundation called the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which continued to carry out drug experiments and advocated for LSD as a consciousness-expanding drug.
IFIF fit the paradigm by which wealthy institutions and individuals fund “astroturf” non-profits that make it appear that a particular cause—in this case LSD use—was being promoted by passionate individuals.
IFIF’s financing came from William Mellon Hitchcock, a wealthy financier who was the nephew of former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, one of the richest men in America, and a grandson of William Larimer Hitchcock, the founder of Gulf Oil.
Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain wrote in their book Acid Dreams: The CIA, the Sixties and Beyond that “certain influential members of the Mellon family maintained close ties to the CIA. Mellon family foundations have been used repeatedly as conduits for Agency funds. Richard Helms was a frequent guest of the Mellon patriarchs in Pittsburgh during his tenure as CIA Director.
Dubbed “Timothy Leary’s godfather” and the “Daddy Warbucks of the counter-culture,” William Mellon Hitchcock had a bank account at Castle Bank in the Bahamas, a CIA bank founded by Paul Helliwell for money-laundering purposes and was the lead investor in a Meyer-Lansky linked gambling and casino company that established a private intelligence operation.
Hitchcock allowed Leary to live for meager rent at his family’s 40,000-acre Millbrook Estate in Dutchess County, New York, where Leary and some of his former Harvard associates continued with their LSD and drug experimentation and hedonistic lifestyle.
Walter H. Bowart, in a 1970 article in Gallery magazine entitled “How the CIA Planned the Drugging of America,” wrote that the “International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), Castalia Foundation, and the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD)—all Leary-led organizations—did little to further scientific research. Their major accomplishment was to make LSD a household word and to encourage people to try the drug.”
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Baby Boomer Youth As Human Guinea Pigs?
Dr. Sidney Cohen, a CIA-linked LSD researcher involved with MK-ULTRA and a veteran of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, stated in a 1963 CIA memo: “I think we need people like Tim and Al Hubbard. They’re absolutely necessary to get out, way out, too far in fact, in order to move the shit…I must confess that when I studied LSD, and then I heard that it was getting out on the streets, I said this’ll never sell. It’s too intense, people will be too shook up. But it didn’t work that way at all. I’m not quite sure I know why. But apparently people were able to sustain it—this intense response.”
These comments seem to suggest that Leary functioned with Alpert as a drug pusher for the CIA, which wanted to continue the clandestine MK-ULTRA experiments above ground, with baby-boomer youth functioning as human guinea pigs.
A CIA memo dated November 1, 1963 ordered all CIA groups involved in mind-control operations to report if any agency personnel were involved with either Leary or Alpert or IFIF. The response to this in-house memo, if there was one, was not released by the CIA, which appears to have been pulling the strings behind the scenes.
In a 1979 conversation with Cohen, Leary referenced “undercover agents” in Los Angeles and “cells,” which is intelligence lingo, providing more evidence of Leary’s work for the CIA.
Elmer Gantry And The Shift From The “We” To The “Me” Generation
Leary’s strategic cultivation of a friendship with Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg was especially important to the advancement of the psychedelic revolution, as Ginsberg provided Leary with an entrée into the New York City artistic world and became a key youth counter-culture influencer.
Leary also turned on influential rock musicians like Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon who adopted lyrics from some of Leary’s speeches.
A brilliant self-promoter and showman, Leary enlisted media expert Marshall McLuhan to help him to improve his public appeal and image. McLuhan encouraged Leary to wear hippie beads and Native-American bandanas and to adopt the slogan “turn on, tune in and drop out,” which McLuhan had derived from a Pepsi commercial.
Through magazine interviews, television appearances, movies, records and books, Leary came to project himself as the culture hero of a new generation fighting for an individual’s right to alter his own consciousness—a right Leary maintained was guaranteed by the U.S. constitution.
Leary scored a major public relations coup with a 1966 Playboy magazine interview describing how LSD was a great aphrodisiac.
Also significant was the fact that Leary got the influential countercultural magazine The East Village Other to promote the psychedelic revolution.
The East Village Other was founded by Walter Bowart, who had gone with Leary to testify about LSD before Congress in 1966.
Bowart was married to Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, William’s sister, who served on the board of IFIF and financed The Grateful Dead’s first album.
According to a 1968 FBI memo, Jerry Garcia, the leader of the Grateful Dead, was employed to “channel youth dissent and rebellion into more benign and non-threatening directions.”
Leary’s value to the Agency became clear as youth abandoned traditional forms of protest and political organizing and spent their time getting high, listening to rock ’n’ roll music and having sex.
At the famous January 1967 Human Be-in at Golden Gate Park, Leary sat on the stage dressed from head-to-toe in white with his hands together as if in prayer.
Fashioning himself as a religious figure, he urged youth to eat acid as part of a spiritual-communal ritual. The Grateful Dead and other San Francisco rock bands played at the be-in and increased the bandwagon effect to encourage “tripping.”
Descriptions of the event reported that only Jerry Rubin and Allen Ginsberg talked about protesting the Vietnam War and that they were largely ignored.
The Human Be-in created an overriding theme around the idea of expanding consciousness through LSD and other drug taking, rather than organizing Middle America to end the Vietnam War and humanize the policies of the American government, as Martin Luther King, Jr., SDS and serious political activists were then advocating.
Ironically, when LSD became illegal in October 1966, supplies of the drug dried up and were replaced with other kinds of chemicals, including veterinary tranquilizers and heroin mixed with amphetamines, which youth were taking thinking it was LSD.
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Dismissing student activists as “young men with menopausal minds” who were “repeating the same dreary quarrels and conflicts for power of the thirties and forties of the trade union movement, of Trotskyism and so forth,” Leary told youth at a press conference “don’t vote, don’t politic. You can’t do anything about America politically….the choice is between being rebellious and being religious.”
The latter statements marked the transition between the “we generation” of the 1960s to the “me generation” of the 1970s, which focused much of its energy on achieving spiritual growth through drug use and later eastern religions, yoga, meditation or something else.
This generation, in turn, abandoned any effort to build working-class and anti-imperialist political movements.
In a column in Granma in the 2000s, Fidel Castro wrote “both in the U.S. and in Europe the big outdoor rock concert were used to stop the increasing discontent among the population…according to recently released CIA documents (thanks to the Freedom of Information Act), Allen Dulles purchased over 100 million doses of LSD—almost all of which flooded the streets of the United States during the late 1960s….Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own acid…The overwhelming majority of anti-war protesters went into SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) on the basis of outrage at the developments in Vietnam. But once caught in the environment defined by the Tavistock Institute’s [which Huxley and Osmond were part of] psychological warfare experts, they became depoliticized.”
In his 1968 book The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary spoke about the advent of a “post-political society based on ecstasy” in which rebellious youth did not aim to change the U.S. political structure but rather to change the individual mind.
This was convenient for America’s power elite, which could continue with business as usual, unperturbed by the wave of youth dropouts living on the margins of society.
The contempt for traditional American culture and destructive nature of the drug culture, furthermore, could be expected to produce a political backlash—as it did—that would re-empower conservative forces and move the country rightward.
The San Francisco-based Ramparts magazine—a key New Left publication—compared Leary to Elmer Gantry, a hypocritical preacher in a Sinclair Lewis novel who led members of his congregation astray.
Mary Jo Worth depicted Leary in The Village Voice as a “Madison Avenue huckster” who was a front for Hitchcock’s money. The entire psychedelic movement, she wrote, was “nothing more than a scam perpetrated by a power hungry clique.”
Indeed, though Leary had developed some innovative ideas early in his career, including that environmental factors shaped people’s experience with drugs, his claim that LSD could open up new circuits of the brain and induce elevated human intelligence, creativity, sensuality and consciousness and spread pacifist ideals was not grounded in scientific evidence or lived reality for most LSD users, some of whom experienced severe adverse effects from the drug.
Leading A Generation On A Path To Destruction
At the peak of Leary’s fame, his daughter Susan—who lived a troubled life after her mother committed suicide—wrote a letter to him telling him that he appeared to have lost his sanity seeking to save humanity by teaching them about chemicals and was leading a generation on a path to destruction.
The Millbrook Estate at this time had become, according to Leary’s Harvard colleague Ralph Metzner, an “Addams family house of horrors,” filled with “decadence and depravity and dabbling black arts,” with “lost souls wandering the premises in permanently drugged states,” provoking sometimes “vicious conflicts that led to violence.”
This mirrored the Haight-Ashbury scene, which one CIA agent referred to as a “human guinea pig farm.”
For their book Acid Dreams, Lee and Shlain interviewed a former CIA contract employer who said “CIA personnel helped underground chemists set up LSD laboratories in the Bay Area during the summer of love to monitor events in the acid ghetto.”
Dr. Jolyon West, an important figure in the CIA’s Operation MK-ULTRA who treated Jack Ruby after the JFK assassination and other CIA assassins, rented an apartment at the Haight for monitoring purposes.
In 1967, Time magazine had a big spread on the hippies. Time Inc.’s vice president, C. D. Jackson, had headed psychological warfare operations for the CIA during the Eisenhower administration.
Along with constant media coverage, one of the most popular songs of the time, “San Francisco” by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, led young people to flock to Haight-Ashbury to become part of the hippie scene. Researcher Dave McGowan found that Phillips, not coincidentally, had come from an intelligence family.
Key suppliers of LSD to the hippie scene, such as Owsley Stanley III and Ronald Stark, were found to have ties to U.S. intelligence.
The “Johnny Appleseed of LSD,” Colonel Al Hubbard, was also involved in Operation MK-ULTRA and frequently spoke to Leary and supplied him with LSD.
Hubbard interceded to prevent Leary from going to prison after Texas authorities were intent on giving him a 30-year prison sentence for smuggling marijuana across the Texas-Mexico border.
At a reunion between LSD pioneers in February 1979 at the home of Dr. Oscar Janiger in Los Angeles, Leary turned to the 77-year-old Hubbard and said: “The galactic center sent you down just at the right moment.” Hubbard responded: “You sure as heck played your part.”
This exchange suggests a conspiracy between the two men that was behind the so-called psychedelic revolution, which is reinforced by the fact that Hubbard received a birthday greeting from Ronald Reagan.
In the late 1960s, Leary’s drug proselytizing and experiments were financed by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, which was headed by another CIA operative, Ronald Stark.
The destructiveness of the drug culture became apparent when leaders of the Weather Underground, who took copious amounts of acid, celebrated the Manson killings, carried out violent terroristic acts and disbanded SDS after taking its name.
At its peak, SDS had established over 300 campus chapters and had over 100,000 members. The organization could have evolved into a dynamic force in American politics to challenge the corporate takeover of both major political parties and the U.S. empire’s war machine.
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A Name Worse Than Benedict Arnold
In September 1970, members of the Weather Underground helped Leary break out of the San Luis Obispo prison after he had been incarcerated on drug charges.
Leary had pledged his solidarity with Weather Underground in a “POW Statement,” which read: “Listen Americans! Your government is an instrument of totally lethal evil. Resist actively, sabotage, jam the computer… hijack planes, trash every lethal machine in the land….To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act….Total war is upon us….WARNING: I am armed and should be considered dangerous!”
This deliberately inflammatory communiqué had the effect of re-establishing Leary’s bona fides in the radical underground, and turning American opinion farther against the New Left through its over-the-top rhetoric and calls to kill police and carry out other crimes.
After his prison escape, Leary went into exile in Algeria where he briefly linked up with members of the Black Panther Party.
Declassified documents reveal that the CIA had a CHAOS agent—with “particularly good entree into the highest levels of the domestic radical community”—providing “extremely personal data” who had been instructed to infiltrate the overseas office of the Black Panthers.
This agent is thought to have been Leary, whose escape from prison and exile to Algeria may have provided him with a cover story. A CIA memo recorded its Panther informant being overseas precisely when Leary was in Algeria.
The Panthers were little impressed with Leary. Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver stated that, “although he had no pretension of being a psychologist,” it was clear to him that there was “something seriously wrong with both Dr. Leary and his wife’s brains” as a result of them taking an “uncountable number of acid trips,” and that both were “nonfunctional in a political context.”
The same was true of much of the New Left at this time—in part due to false prophets like Leary having led it astray.
From Algeria, Leary went to Switzerland supposedly with the help of a CIA agent. How he got the funding to travel and live in the most expensive European country remains to be seen.
Captured subsequently as a fugitive, Leary was imprisoned again at Folsom, and then released in April 1976 by California Governor Jerry Brown after he became an FBI informant.
For a period during his incarceration in 1973, Leary was sent to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, which was involved in CIA mind-control experiments, including one that led to the creation of the CIA cut-out Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), an ultra-radical left-wing cult that adopted outlandish rhetoric and carried out criminal acts as part of the effort to discredit left-wing politics.
Leary wrote suggestively that, when he went to Vacaville, “I was not there as a patient, but as a worker on the trusty staff.”
These comments lend the impression that Leary was continuously working for the CIA in mind-control projects that were designed to destroy the 1960s movement and political left.
People in the movement suspicious of Leary formed a group calling itself People Investigating Leary’s Lies (PILL). Yippie founder Abbie Hoffmann declared that “Timothy Leary is a name worse than Benedict Arnold,” while Allen Ginsberg said that Leary was “like Zabbath Zvi, false Messiah, accepted by millions of Jews centuries ago.”
Some years later, Hunter S. Thompson, said “Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.”
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The End Of An Illusion
After Leary got out of prison in 1976, he stopped proselytizing for LSD and never again was involved in progressive politics in any way.
Just before his release, not coincidentally it seems, he wrote an article in the right-wing National Review attacking counter-cultural figures including John Lennon as a sell-out and phony, in terms later adopted by Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman, after he had been subjected to CIA mind control.
In the 1980s, Leary went on a speaking tour with Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy, who had arrested him and shut down the Millbrook Estate, earning him at least $2,500 per appearance.
Leary also began designing computer software and hailed the coming of the information highway and potential for space travel before his death in 1996.
One of the organizations with which Leary was involved—the L5 Society, which promoted space colonization and establishment of private enterprise in space—was financed by a retired military officer with known intelligence connections.
Somehow, by this time, he had become wealthy despite not having any gainful employment since his firing from Harvard in 1963.
Leary’s career generally embodies how the so-called “deep state” effectively co-opted the youth movements of the 1960s and helped steer it into a destructive, non-political path.
The consequences have been cataclysmic, with the implosion of the 1960s left setting the groundwork for today’s dystopian political environment with two parties that have supported endless war, engaged in blatant corruption and the gutting of the social safety net.
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ALL SOURCES ARE HERE
Republished from COVERT ACTION
LSD...The CRACK EPIDEMIC...HEROIN...the FENTANYL CRISIS ... The Synthetic Opiod Crisis ..... all more than likely ORCHESTRATED
Not surprised, Ngl but I appreciate tying up in a concise readable post