Timothy Leary

Timothy Leary directed clinical research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland from 1954 to 1959, where he published The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality (1957), which became the basis for personality assessment tools subsequently used by the CIA and military. He joined Harvard University as a lecturer in 1959. That year he ate psilocybin mushrooms while on vacation in Mexico, an experience he later described as the most profound of his life, and returned to Harvard with the conviction that psychedelics represented a fundamental tool for psychological research.¹

The Harvard Psilocybin Project

Leary established the Harvard Psilocybin Project in fall 1960, obtaining psilocybin free from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. Sessions were conducted in both formal research settings and informal apartment gatherings with music and candlelight. His collaborator was Richard Alpert, an assistant professor of education and psychology. Participants in the project's broader circle included Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky (who visited Leary's house in Newton, Massachusetts in December 1960), and Aldous Huxley, then a visiting lecturer at MIT. Huxley advised Leary to offer the experience to "talented, well-born, intelligent rich" and to work discreetly within institutions rather than provoking public controversy.¹

His curiosity had been stimulated by Gordon Wasson's 1957 Life magazine article about the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms, an expedition that had been partially facilitated by CIA contractor James Moore, who accompanied Wasson's 1956 Mexico expedition while on the Agency payroll. Soon Leary was quoting in his own published work from CIA contractor Harold Abramson and others, brought together for scholarly drug conferences by the sometime Agency conduit, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. From his base at Harvard, Leary became the most vocal and famous advocate of psychedelic drugs, preaching the gospel of consciousness expansion.²

Henry Murray, chairman of the Harvard Department of Social Relations who had run the Personality Assessments section of the OSS during World War II, approved and volunteered for Leary's psilocybin research project.¹

The Good Friday Experiment (1962)

In collaboration with doctoral candidate Walter Pahnke, Leary administered psilocybin double-blind to ten theology students and professors during a Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel at Boston University in 1962, with ten others receiving placebos. Nine of the ten psilocybin recipients reported intense religious experiences. Pahnke's dissertation concluded the experiences were "indistinguishable from, if not identical with," classical mystical experience.¹

Harvard Firing (1963)

Tension with Harvard administrators escalated through 1962, triggered in part by a sensationalized Harvard Crimson account of a faculty meeting that prompted an FDA investigation. On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted to relieve Leary from teaching duty and terminate his salary, on grounds that he had failed to keep classroom appointments. Alpert was separately dismissed on May 27, 1963, the first Harvard faculty firing in the twentieth century, for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate student in an off-campus apartment.¹

IFIF and the Millbrook Period

After leaving Harvard, Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), which attracted approximately 3,000 dues-paying members. An attempt to operate a summer session in Zihuatanejo, Mexico was shut down after approximately six weeks by the Mexican government following negative press coverage. Billy Hitchcock, grandson of Gulf Oil founder William Larimer Hitchcock, provided his 4,000-acre Millbrook estate in Dutchess County, New York, at $500 per month. Leary established the Castalia Foundation there and ran high-dose group sessions, published The Psychedelic Review, and hosted a wide circle of visitors including Charles Mingus, Alan Watts, R.D. Laing, and journalist Paul Krassner. In April 1966, Dutchess County prosecutor G. Gordon Liddy led an early-morning raid on the mansion, finding only a small amount of marijuana; the bust was dismissed when the Supreme Court ruled suspects must be informed of their rights upon arrest.¹

Legal Troubles and Prison

In December 1965, Leary was arrested at the Laredo, Texas border crossing on discovery of marijuana. He was convicted and faced a potential 30-year sentence. In December 1968, a second arrest followed in Laguna Beach, California. Convicted in February 1970 on both the Laredo and California charges, he received a combined 20-year sentence and was held at San Luis Obispo minimum security prison. On September 12, 1970, he escaped by traversing a highwire across the prison fence and was extracted by members of the Weather Underground. He eventually traveled to Algeria, where he expected to work with Eldridge Cleaver's Black Panther office but was placed under effective house arrest by the Panthers over his LSD advocacy. He subsequently traveled to Switzerland before his arrest in Kabul in 1972 and deportation to Los Angeles, where bail was set at $5,000,000, then the highest set for an American citizen. He testified as a federal informant in exchange for reduced sentencing and was paroled in 1976.¹

CIA Surveillance

On November 1, 1963, the CIA issued a memorandum ordering all domestic field offices to report immediately on any involvement with Leary, Alpert, or the International Federation for Internal Freedom. The monitoring preceded Leary's public emergence as an LSD spokesman by several years, covering the period when his research was still primarily academic. Neither the specific content of any CIA reporting on Leary nor any operational use of surveillance findings has been declassified.²³

Leary's research network traced back to CIA-funded programs in ways he likely did not know at the time. Bateson, the anthropologist introduced to LSD by CIA contractor Harold Abramson, arranged Ginsberg's first LSD experience through a federally funded research program. Ginsberg brought that experience to Leary's house. The Macy Foundation, which had served as a CIA conduit for behavioral research conferences, hosted the scholars whose published work Leary cited. The Geschickter Fund, another CIA front organization, financed related research at overlapping institutions.²

The Finders

Marion David Pettie, founder of The Finders, stated that he and Leary had a close connection during the 1960s. According to Pettie, when Leary was based in New York, he would send people down to Pettie's communal property in Virginia, and when people at Pettie's place grew tired of something, they would go up to Leary's. Leary gave Pettie LSD, though Pettie claimed he never took it, keeping it in his refrigerator. A person connected with Leary accidentally burned down a house on Pettie's property while installing a sauna, destroying the LSD in the process.⁴