16S 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.