ACID DREAMS, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL HISTORY OF LSD: THE CIA, THE SIXTIES, AND BEYOND

A Bitter Pill

Tim and Rosemary arrived in Algiers with great expectations. "Panthers are the hope of the world," he wrote to Allen Ginsberg. "How perfect that we were received here and protected by young Blacks. Algeria is perfect. Great political satori! Socialism works here.... Eldridge is a genial genius. Brilliant! Turned on too!" The Panthers were also enthusiastic. At a "solidarity" press conference, they announced that "Dr. Leary is part of our movement," having previously been active "among the sons and daughters of those imperialist bandit pigs."

The alliance between Cleaver and Leary was hot news, and Algiers was suddenly crawling with media. But the much-publicized meeting of the minds quickly degenerated into a battle of egos. Leary didn't like Cleaver's heavy-handed security measures. All visitors were frisked -- even Leary's friends -- and drugs were banned from Panther headquarters except on rare occasions when Cleaver said it was okay to get high. In his discussions with Cleaver, Leary emphasized that "you've got to free yourself internally before you attempt to free yourself behaviorally." The Panthers, however, were not receptive to Leary's "spiritual" politics. Nor were they keen on his idea of inviting draft resisters, antiwar activists, hippies, rock stars, Weatherpeople, and other dissident groups to broadcast a "Radio Free America" program throughout Europe. Cleaver had no intention of providing a forum for a multitude of voices on the left. He was quick to brand nearly everyone else "revisionist," heaping ridicule on Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones, and white radicals such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Soon would come the split with Panther leader Huey Newton, fomented in part by FBI subterfuge.

The FBI was also responsible for stirring up tensions between Leary and his hosts. An undercover operative who had infiltrated the New York chapter of the Black Panther party sent a poison pen letter to Cleaver urging him to discipline Leary for his cavalier, individualistic behavior. Tim and Rosemary were busted at gunpoint at Panther headquarters while black CIA agents who had penetrated Cleaver's entourage monitored the situation. A CIA document dated February 12, 1971, reported that "Panther activities have recently taken some interesting turns. Eldridge Cleaver and his Algiers contingent have apparently become disenchanted with the antics of Tim Leary.... Electing to call their action protective custody, Cleaver and company, on their own authority, have put Tim and Rosemary under house arrest due most probably to Leary's continued use of hallucinogenic drugs."

Leary had smuggled twenty thousand hits of LSD into Algiers and was planning to turn on all of Africa. This scheme didn't impress Cleaver, who was fed up with Leary's stoned gasconades. "Something's wrong with Leary's brain," the Panther chief declared in a communique to the underground press. "We want people to gather their wits, sober up and get down to the serious business of destroying the Babylonian empire." As far as Cleaver was concerned, the psychedelic counterculture would henceforth be considered quasi-political, if not downright dangerous. When he spoke of LSD, he invoked the specter of drug-induced totalitarianism. "To all those of you who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration and leadership," Cleaver concluded, "we want to say to you that your god is dead because his mind has been blown by acid."

Leary, for his part, felt he had come up against a new kind of chauvinism -- revolutionary chauvinism -- and he wanted out. But not so fast. He could leave -- at a price. Once again the Brotherhood of Eternal Love came to the rescue, chipping in $25,000 to facilitate Leary's release. As they scrambled to get out of Algiers in early 1971, Tim and Rosemary were aware of the gravity of their predicament. They had no legitimate travel papers and additional advance money for Leary's book on his prison escape (Diaries of a Hope Fiend) was not forthcoming. Whoever could help them at this point became an instant ally. A British woman employed as a stringer for Newsweek introduced the Learys to a well-educated Algerian bureaucrat named Ali, who made no bones about his association with the CIA. Ali promised to arrange exit visas for them. Rosemary wondered if they could trust such a man. "He's liberal CIA," Tim assured her, "and that's the best mafia you can deal with in the twentieth century."

The fugitive couple fled to Switzerland, hoping to obtain political asylum. Leary spent the first six weeks in jail while Swiss officials reviewed his case. Life behind bars was relatively pleasant thanks to a mysterious benefactor named Michel-Gustave Hauchard, who provided Leary with fine wine and assorted delicacies during his incarceration. Described by Leary as a tall, silver-haired gunrunner, Hauchard had strong enough lines into the Swiss council to secure Leary's release from prison. He also had the funds to bankroll Leary in the high style to which he had become accustomed. Leary nicknamed him "Goldfinger" and accepted an invitation to stay in Lausanne at his luxury penthouse with an exquisite view of the lake. In return Tim merely had to sign away half the money from his forthcoming book to Hauchard.

While in Switzerland, Leary was treated to gourmet lunches, dinners at expensive restaurants, and weekend parties with wealthy foreigners. Old friends such as Billy Hitchcock dropped by to visit. Leary also contacted Dr. Albert Hofmann, the Sandoz chemist who had discovered LSD nearly thirty years earlier. They met for the first time at a cafe in Lausanne. Hofmann told Leary about his informal "wisdom school" centered around psychedelic sessions with leading European intellectuals, including Ernst Junger, the German novelist and mystic. Leary asked Hofmann about the dangers of LSD, and the elderly scientist insisted there was no evidence of brain damage caused by the drug. The only dangers, he maintained, were psycho- logical and could be avoided by supportive conditions. In the final analysis Dr. Hofmann affirmed the importance of LSD as an "aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality."

Leary's legal status remained ambiguous during his eighteen-month sojourn in Switzerland. He was without a valid passport, but he had money, which is tantamount to a passport for a man on the run. When Bantam Books came through with his $250,000 advance (half of which went to Hauchard), Leary bought a spiffy yellow Porsche and a state-of-the-art stereo system. He traveled from one Swiss canton to the next, each allowing him to stay for just so long. His insecure and terminally jangled lifestyle was wearing on Rosemary's nerves. For seven years they had been together through high times and the all too frequent cycle of arrests, trials, convictions, jail, escape, and flight. While Tim was convalescing in a hospital after a minor operation, Rosemary had a love affair with an old friend. Leary was high on acid when he found out what had happened, and he told his wife to pack her bags and leave. It was a final break; he would almost never mention her name again.

With Rosemary gone, Leary was no longer moored to any kind of personal stability. He was floating in his own version of a Fellini film, accompanied by a half-desperate circus of wired, burned-out dopers, self-styled revolutionaries, informers, journalists, and starfuckers. Besides the mysterious Hauchard, various smugglers and power peddlers offered him deals that only further confused the issue of who his friends really were. Weary of a life in constant flux, perhaps a little bored at age 50, Leary was ready for a change of scene. Soon a woman would enter his life who could have walked off a page of a Thomas Pynchon novel.

It's not clear why Joanna Harcourt-Smith was so intent on tracking Leary down. Born in Saint Moritz, she was a young globe-trotting adventuress who'd been married twice before she met Leary. Her father was a British aristocrat and her stepfather one of the wealthiest men in Europe; she was also the niece of Simon Harcourt-Smith, a London publisher.

In the fall of 1972, Joanna met Michel Hauchard for drinks in New York. Hauchard, her ex-lover, bragged that he "owned" Timothy Leary, openly waving the check from his book advance. Joanna boarded the next plane to Geneva, and arranged to meet Leary at a nearby cafe. Tim was immediately attracted by her wit and sexy smile. As they drove back to Leary's pad, Joanna reached into her pocket, pulled out two hits of windowpane acid, swallowed one, and said of the other, "Whoever eats this will follow me." Leary gobbled the psychedelic, precipitating an all-night session of lovemaking, speaking in French, and overall grokking. The next morning, Tim told his housemates that he had found his perfect love.

Joanna filled a void in Leary's life created by the chaotic events and uncertainties of two years on the lam. She and Tim became almost a single entity. They tripped together, took long baths in a big tub, living only for the moment. But there were still problems with the Swiss authorities. Leary had been denied asylum three times, and he was tired of pleading his case from one canton to the next. Hauchard told him that it wouldn't be safe to stay in Switzerland much longer.

With some prodding from Joanna they decided to drive off in his yellow Porsche for a "honeymoon," even though they were not officially married. In Austria, they were joined by Dennis Martino, whom Leary had met a few years earlier in Laguna Beach through the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. (Martino's twin brother, David, was married to Leary's daughter, Susan.) Martino had participated in numerous drug smuggling operations for the Brotherhood until he was busted for selling marijuana. After serving six months in prison, he jumped probation and fled to Europe.

By this time a federal task force composed of thirteen agencies -- including the FBI, CIA, BNDD, IRS, Customs, and the State Department -- was gearing up for a major crackdown on the Brotherhood. Operation BEL, as the Brotherhood sting was called, scored its first major victory in August 1972, when narcotics agents arrested forty people in three different states. The predawn raids were ordered on the basis of twenty-nine secret indictments handed down by an Orange County grand jury. They marked the culmination of a year-long investigation that netted a million and a half LSD tablets, two and a half tons of hashish, thirty gallons of hash oil, and $20,000 in cash. Cecil Hicks, the district attorney of Orange County, fingered Leary as "the Godfather" of the largest drug smuggling network in the world and vowed to press for his extradition from Switzerland. "Leary is responsible for destroying more lives than any other human being," Hicks declared.

Leary felt the heat from Operation BEL as he pondered his next move in Europe. Further complications arose when Joanna grew weak and yellow with hepatitis. She refused hospitalization, telling Leary that unless they kept traveling, American agents would catch up with them. The wandering fugitives were short on cash, but Joanna suggested they head east, perhaps to Ceylon, where they could rendezvous with some of her friends and charter a yacht. An idyllic life in the South Seas was envisioned. But first, at Joanna's insistence, they would stop in Afghanistan, a country that had no extradition treaty with the US. Martino was in contact with some hash smugglers there, and Joanna said she knew the royal prince. Certainly he'd help them get to Ceylon.

The decision to fly to Afghanistan proved to be a fatal mistake. Kabul, the capital city, was swarming with American narcotics police who were investigating the hashish smuggling ring associated with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The three were taken into custody while Terrence Burke, a former CIA agent assigned by the BNDD to work on the Brotherhood conspiracy case, convinced the Afghan authorities to deport Leary.

In an unusual display of largesse Joanna was permitted by US officials to accompany Leary on a flight to Los Angeles at a cost to taxpayers of $1,086 for her one-way first-class ticket. Why this was done, neither the State Department nor the BNDD was willing to say. Perhaps it was Joanna's reward for leading Leary into a trap. Although she had known him for only a month, it was Joanna who persuaded Leary to leave Switzerland and embark on a whirlwind tour that ended with the debacle in Kabul. Tim never suspected that she might have had anything but the purest of motives for seeking him out. A few hours before they landed in the States, he took out pen and paper and scribbled a note that would serve as Joanna's introduction to radical circles in America: "The right to speak for me I hereby lovingly give to Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who is my love, my voice, my wisdom, my words, my output to the world. "

On January 17, 1973, four days after being nabbed in Afghanistan, Timothy Leary stepped off a plane in Los Angeles and looked out at fifty helmeted policemen with riot guns lining the path to the Volkswagen bus that would take him away. When BNDD agent Burke formally placed him under arrest, Leary responded by flashing his trademark ear-to-ear smile to the camera crews. But it was little more than a mask, for the High Priest was actually in quite a fix. In addition to the grand jury indictment alleging his involvement with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, he now had to answer for his prison escape. Leary was in no position to scoff at these charges. With bail set at $5,000,000 (the highest ever for an American citizen), the Justice Department looked forward to Leary's escape trial as a means of getting at one of their prime targets: the Weathermen, whose members topped the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

The escape trial began in March, 1973. The jury took less than two hours to return a guilty verdict, and Leary was sentenced to five years in addition to the twenty he was serving when he escaped. This time it would be hard time at Folsom. Undaunted, Joanna predicted that Leary would be out of prison in a few weeks. "We'll simply leave our bodies.... We believe in miracles," she told a reporter. "Timothy Leary is a free man.... He's stronger than ever. He's happy."

Joanna rented an apartment on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco and proceeded to organize a Leary Defense Committee. Fundraising benefits were held in the Bay Area and Los Angeles, but she squandered all the money on cocaine, jewelry from Cartier's, and long-distance calls to her mother in Spain. Joanna's erratic antics and high-rolling lifestyle alienated many of Leary's friends. When Allen Ginsberg, accompanied by Joanna and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, visited Tim in Folsom, he warned that she might be some kind of "double agent." Joanna looked at Tim and sloughed it off. "Oh, you know, he just hates women," she said, apparently in reference to Ginsberg's homosexuality. Leary asked Ginsberg if he would take over the defense committee, but Ginsberg was unable to assume such a heavy responsibility. In exasperation Leary threw up his hands as if to say, "Even if she is an agent, she's all I've got."

In November, 1973, Leary was transferred from Folsom to Vacaville Prison, previously the site of an extensive CIA drug testing program. While in Vacaville, he learned that Dennis Martino had been working as a government informer and that he and Joanna were having a relationship. Martino had struck a deal with the BNDD after they were busted in Kabul. As an undercover narc he was instrumental in arranging the arrests of at least two dozen people, some of whom were old associates from his dope-dealing days with the Brotherhood. His diligent service earned him some brownie points, but Martino's controllers refused to let him off the hook until he persuaded Leary to cooperate with the feds.

For Leary the confirmation that the people closest to him were working with his captors had to be a terrible blow. Joanna privately maintained that she was really a double or triple agent. According to Martino she routinely met US marshals at the door of her Telegraph Hill apartment in the nude, hoping to catch them in compromising situations; Martino hid in an adjacent room and taped the conversations. Joanna later told Ginsberg that she was monitoring the feds so she could blackmail them by threatening to make public the various "deals" they had proposed for Tim's release.

Leary, meanwhile, had begun to wither under the systematic pressure exerted by his most intimate contacts. Little by little Joanna and Martino brought him closer to the break desired by his jailers. The turning point came in April 1974. Leary indicated he was ready to talk. The FBI made it official when they pegged him with the code name of the songbird, "Charlie Thrush."

Leary defended his decision to collaborate with the feds by invoking the spectacle of Watergate. He compared his own situation with that of President Nixon, who would soon face impeachment for obstruction of justice and conduct unbefitting a chief of state. "You've got to tell the truth," said Leary.

I can't condemn Richard Nixon for shutting his mouth because I'm shutting my mouth. I'm not getting paroled until I'm rehabilitated. I'm not getting out behind the lawyers. I've had a chance to analyze, as a psychologist, Nixon's downfall. I've had a chance to see that I'm locked up because of the way I played secrets. I know some people might get hurt. But if I can tell my story and get it all out, karmically, I think I'm free within. And if I'm free within, it will reflect without.... When I look at Socrates, I see that all they wanted him to do was just say he was sorry. He didn't have to drink the hemlock. Maybe if the offer was poison, I'd take that, I don't know. But it is prison. I'm a rat in a maze, staring at the door, looking for another door and there isn't one. Like it or not, when you're in the prison system, you come out through the system, unless you escape, and that didn't work."

Leary was grilled by the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), but most of the information he gave was already common knowledge among law enforcement experts. But the feds had other uses for Leary. They wanted his assistance in setting up the arrest of George Chula, an attorney who had previously defended both Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Leary told a grand jury that Chula had given him a small chunk of hash when they met at the Orange County courthouse the previous year. Joanna also gave damaging testimony, describing an encounter with Chula wherein he allegedly offered her marijuana and cocaine. When asked why she was testifying, Joanna told the grand jury that she found 99% of the drug culture "to be dishonest, lying people [who didn't know] where they were coming from and where they were going." Chula was subsequently convicted of a minor marijuana violation and served forty-five days in jail.

"LEARY WILL SING," declared a Chicago Tribune headline. Soon there were rumors of a massive grand jury circus, with Leary fingering many of his former associates. After all, one of the main reasons the authorities went to such trouble to have Leary inform was to let everyone know about it in order to create fear and distrust among political and cultural activists. Also, it would be a way of trashing their values -- the High Priest would turn out to be a fighter for his own skin just like everybody else. The media had always latched onto Leary as the one figure who personified the psychedelic movement, and by exposing him as a fink the entire subculture was implicitly discredited.

Although he insisted he was innocent on the "karmic" level, those who felt threatened by his actions took a different view. "I'm digesting news of Herr Doktor Leary, the swine," wrote Abbie Hoffman, who went underground after being busted for cocaine possession (which he claimed was a police setup). "It's obvious to me he's talked his fucking demented head off to the Gestapo.... God, Leary is disgusting. It's not just a question of being a squealer but a question of squealing on people who helped you.... The curses crowd my mouth. ... Timothy Leary is a name worse than Benedict Arnold."

Out of anxiety as much as a desire to get the facts, a unique press conference was called at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 18, 1974. It was sponsored by a group calling itself People Investigating Leary's Lies, or PILL. A panel of counterculture heroes organized and moderated by journalist Ken Kelley addressed an audience of nearly two hundred. Jerry Rubin spoke first, reciting the facts as he knew them. It was a loose chronology and not much was certain. Rubin wondered what had really happened to Leary. Was he brainwashed in Vacaville -- a prison with a reputation for behavior modification abuse of its inmates? Had only a phantom Leary survived? Or did his finking demonstrate that he never really took his politics seriously? "He may have gotten frightened -- experienced an ego break," Ram Dass suggested, "or he may have lost control under the pressures of prison and developed a direct paranoid state where the ends justify the means."

When it was Allen Ginsberg's turn to speak, he began by chanting OM for a few minutes. He had written something for the conference called "Om Ah Hum: 44 Temporary Questions on Dr. Leary." These questions, ranging from witty to paranoid, brought out all the contradictions Leary's informing posed for the New Left. Ginsberg's open-ended tirade went in all directions, and that was its purpose -- not to defend the informer, but to illustrate that the left versus right conflicts of the 1960s were no longer black and white, if they ever had been, and that the gaps in Leary's recent history made it imperative not to simply denounce him.

"Should we stop trusting our friends like in a Hotel room in Moscow?" Ginsberg asked.

Is he a Russian-model prisoner brought into courtroom news conferences blinking in daylight after years in jails and months incommunicado in solitary cells with nobody to talk to but thought-control police interrogators? ... Is he like Zabbathi Zvi, the False Messiah, accepted by millions of Jews centuries ago, who left Europe for the Holy Land, was captured by Turks on his way, told he'd have his head cut off unless he converted to Islam, and so accepted Allah? Didn't his followers split into sects, some claiming it was a wise decision? ...

Is Leary exaggerating and lying to build such confused cases and conspiracies that the authorities will lose all the trials he witnesses, and he'll be let go in the confusion? ... Is he trying to clean the karmic blackboard by creating a hippie Watergate? ... Is Joanna Harcourt-Smith, his one contact spokes-agent, a sex spy, agent provocateuse, double agent, CIA hysteric, jealous tigress, or what? ... Will citizens be arrested, indicted, taken to jail for Leary's freedom? ... Doesn't the old cry "Free Tim Leary!" apply now urgent as ever?

A can of worms had been opened. Paranoia was rampant among radicals who feared that Leary might be talking about any number of people he'd been in contact with over the years. Some blamed Leary for being a turncoat, others directed their anger at the government and the criminal justice system. The discussion grew increasingly acrimonious as the afternoon wore on. There for all to see were the signs of disintegration -- fear, backstabbing, confusion, resentment, animosity. "The 1960s are finally dead," said Ken Kelley after the conference adjourned. "That was just the funeral."

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