Pubdate: 1 Jul 1999
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
Contact:  http://www.boston.com/globe/
Author: Karen Gullo, Associated Press

FBI FILES SAY LEARY INFORMED ON RADICALS

WASHINGTON - Timothy Leary, the counterculture guru whose ''turn on, tune
in, drop out'' preachings made him an antiestablishment icon in the 1960s,
quietly cooperated with the FBI in 1974 and informed on a radical left group
to win freedom from prison, newly released FBI records show.

His information identified his collaborators in a 1970 prison escape. Four
years later, caught and jailed again, Leary told an FBI agent that 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.

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

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.

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 a band from the
Weather Underground helped him escape from a prison in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Leary told the FBI that the group helped get him false IDs and helped plan
his escape out of the country.

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

Rushkoff said too much was being made of the FBI files. He said they simply
confirm what Leary had said in his writings.

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