In 1970, Timothy Leary was broken out of jail by the radical group the Weather Underground. Interestingly, they were paid $25,000 by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love to do so. I’m going to write about the Brotherhood in more detail, but as I understand it, they cornered the acid market in the late 60’s with a new breed of acid called “Orange Sunshine” which is what Manson and his followers were allegedly using on the nights of their murders. It was also supposed to have found it’s way to the Altamont concert and the notorious Hell’s Angels slaying during the Rolling Stones set. Further, Orange Sunshine made it’s way to soldiers in Vietnam as well. In any event, Leary seems to have had a pre-existing fellowship with these guys, and from what I read publicly endorsed their brand of LSD. The Brotherhood was also connected to Ronald Stark, who was a known CIA agent, as far as I understand it. But again, I’ll come back and explore that further. I just wanted to lay the historical groundwork for what follows.

When the Weathermen broke Leary out of jail (he’d been imprisoned in a minimum security facility on marijuana charges), they hid him in a series of safe-houses, and then smuggled him out of the country to Algeria, where he is said to have holed up with Eldridge Cleaver and other wanted members of the Black Panther party. Cleaver allegedly became suspicious of Leary and arrested him for a time as a “counter-revolutionary” - why? That site on Leary’s possible CIA affiliations has an interesting trail to follow with regards to that:

Fall 1969: According to declassified government documents, CIA now has a CHAOS agent with “particularly good entree into the highest levels of the domestic radical community,” who is providing “extremely personal data.” It is decided to send this agent to infiltrate the overseas headquarters of the Black Panthers, but this will not be accomplished for many months.

Right, so after Leary was sprung from jail, he released something called the P.O.W. Statement, the full text of which I found here. In it, he proclaims that the free people of the counter-culture are victims of genocide by “short-haired robots” intent on destroying freedom through “the complete web of free wild life by the imposition of mechanical order.” After a bunch of stuff about peaceful resistance, loves and drugs, he goes “whole hog”:

Resist physically, robot agents who threaten life must be disarmed, disabled, disconnected by force … Arm yourself and shoot to live … Life is never violent. To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.

[…] Listen comrades. The liberation war has just begun. Resist, endure, do not collaborate. Strike. You will be free.

[…] Listen, the hour is late. Total war is upon us. Fight to live or you’ll die. Freedom is life. Freedom will live.

Later, after Leary was recaptured, of course he became an FBI informant, in addition to whoever else he may have been working for. Check out this BBC article on it, or visit the Smoking Gun to read Leary’s FBI file where he proclaims his motivations for becoming a snitch. In it, Leary proclaims:

I would prefer to work constructively and collaboratively with intelligence and law enforcement people who are willing to forget the past.

Apparently, he was indeed keen on forgetting the past. This is a far cry from his POW Statement, which read:

There is no compromise with a machine. You cannot talk peace and love to a humanoid robot whose every Federal Bureaucratic impulse is soulless, heartless, lifeless, loveless.

More from the CIA-Leary site:

But after a few months out of public view, Leary comes into the open as a government informant. Under the code-name CHARLIE THRUSH, he turns State’s evidence against the Weather Underground. Freed from prison, he is taken into custody for fear that radical revolutionaries have marked him for execution. His former colleagues in the movement form a group calling itself People Investigating Leary’s Lies (PILL). Abbie Hoffmann declares that “Timothy Leary is a name worse than Benedict Arnold.” Allen Ginsburg says that Leary is “like Zabbath Zvi, false Messiah, accepted by millions of Jews centuries ago.”

Just who was the real Timothy Leary, and who was he working for and towards what ends? This all happened a bit before my time, so I’d love to hear some first-hand accounts of all this madness and what you make of it.