1960s LSD GURU TIMOTHY LEARY COOPERATED WITH FBI

WASHINGTON - Counterculture guru Timothy Leary cooperated with FBI
agents investigating a radical group in 1974 and informed on group
members who just four years before had helped him escape from prison,
newly released FBI records show.

Caught, incarcerated again and facing up to 25 years in jail, Leary
told an FBI agent he wanted to see "if I can work out a collaborative
and . . . an honorable relationship" with "intelligence and
law-enforcement people that are ready to forget the past," according
to a transcript of FBI interviews with Leary in May 1974.

"I want to get out of prison as quickly as I can," Leary said in a
meeting with an FBI agent, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and
two California law-enforcement officials.

His information identified his collaborators in a 1970 prison
escape.

Fourteen pages of Leary's FBI file, including interview transcripts
and FBI reports, were published on the Internet this week by The
Smoking Gun, a site that publishes documents obtained through the
Freedom of Information Act. The FBI confirmed their
authenticity.

The FBI released 585 pages, said Bill Bastone, the site's
editor.

Leary, who died of cancer in 1996, described for the FBI how members
of the leftist Weather Underground helped him escape from a California
prison in 1970. Their identities were blacked out.

Leary wrote in his 1983 autobiography that the FBI wanted him to
inform on the Weather Underground but that he did not "want to be
called a snitch." He wrote that he told the FBI "the story of my
hair-breath escape," but he gave no details in the book of what he
told the FBI.

Rumors that Leary was cooperating with the FBI circulated in 1974, and
left-wing leaders said the "high priest of LSD" was simply lying to
federal agents to get out of jail.

Todd Gitlin, a New York University professor and author of a book
about the 1960s, said the disclosure that Leary cooperated and
provided names was "surprising but not shocking."

"He was not a man of political principles," said Gitlin. "He'd do
anything to get out of jail - he'd escape with the Weathermen or
inform on them, whatever it takes."

A former Harvard lecturer who was kicked out of the university after
he conducted experiments with psychedelic drugs, Leary became the
foremost prophet and proselytizer of LSD during the 1960s. The drug
inspired Leary's most famous line: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

His advocacy of drug use brought numerous run-ins with the law. In
1970 he was serving a 10-year sentence for marijuana possession when
members of the Weather Underground helped him in a daring escape from
a jail in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Nothing Leary told the FBI resulted in criminal charges, said Douglas
Rushkoff, Leary's literary agent and a close friend.