The following came from Paul Davids, the filmmaker responsible for the film/video Timothy Leary's Dead, a video that depicts the good doctor in his last days, replete with a head removal sequence that most regard as bogus.
"I checked out your web information on Leary's file, and you sure have your facts in place. I have been repulsed to see the "mainstream" regurgitating old news as new news for now. Was it Time or US News and World Report that had Leary listed among their "Losers for the Week"? Videos are still available of Timothy Leary's Dead . It has had extensive TV air play outside the US but there's been no US deal. It showed in theaters here in 1997 but in spite of a tremendous amount of publicity in national mgazines and a lot of newspapers (thanks to our excellent publicists) it didn't have the impact we hoped for in theaters.
The ending of the film has been a fascinating sociological experiment: ie, did Leary have his head removed for cryogenic preservation or not? If not, was the ending of the movie special effects? Then how is it you can literally count the whiskers on his chin? Of course, plenty of those close to Leary have assured the world that the cryogenic thing never happened. So where does that leave me? About half the US press declared it a hoax (including Entertainment Weekly which called it an "egregiously clever hoax that out-huckstered Leary's hucksterism) and half declared it real, including New York Times (review declared Leary was "a headless body in a topless orbit").
In Australia and in the June 1999 showings in France there seem to have been no doubters among the press. They're sure it happened. Our final scene in the movie is there to deliberately cast doubt on the decapitation scene that preceded it -- i.e., one moment we're seeing Leary die and his head removed and frozen, and the next moment we see Leary is still alive and a plaster life-mask cast is being made of his entire head as he breathes with straws up his nostrils. A filmmaker with a hoax motive would have never had that last scene to cast doubt and offer a "way out" for those who don't want to believe the decapitation they saw was true.
This has been quite a learning exercise in disinformation! And the motivation is certainly tinged with political overtones. If Tim's head survives on ice, then Tim is not really dead. Watch out Establishment. Like the Frankenstein monster, he will rise up from the grave to be your ultimate undoing.
The bottom line, though is that I think I made a really sensitive movie about Dr. Tim that was done with affection and which made him look so damn nice and with such a wonderful sense of humor it makes it almost impossible to cast him as "the bad guy" ever again. Also in the film he's sharp as a tack, even near the end (so much for the theory that psychedelics mushed his brain). I miss the old prophet and think the world is a sorrier place for the loss of his courageous individuality, even if some of his bravado was but tilting at windmills. I can tell from your response to the latest Establishment salvo that you appreciated his contribution to our century, too.
By the way, I did wonder whether the recent showing of Timothy Leary's Dead in France might in some way have motivated the release of "new" anti-Leary propaganda here in the Land of the Free. One result of my ending in the film is that it gives Tim the last laugh that he wanted and deserved -- as one Canadian reviewer put it, "Somewhere over the rainbow, Timothy Leary is laughing his head off, if he still has a head, that is."
Keep up the good work.
FLYING SAUCERS ARE REAL!!
Paul Davids
Renowned JFK researcher Walt Brown kept very busy for the last three years creating the Global Index to the JFK Assassination on CD-rom [Mac or PC]. It references 100 carefully chosen book from Anson to Zirbel,. Brown selected the 100 works he felt were the most widely read, from the early ones right through to 1998. He also chose JFK books available at reasonable cost, plus the 12 volumes of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, its Report, the 26 Volumes of the Warren Commission and their report.
The Index lists 17,185 names in almost 2,400 pages . The names are identified and cross- referenced among 175 subsets [FBI, mafia, Ruby's friends, Oswald's relatives, et al]. "So if you are trying to remember the name of the fourth SS man at Bethesda," says Brown, "you go to 'Secret Service' and find 'O'Leary, William.' You then go to his listing and find all citations."
Example:
O'Leary, William, "Muggsy," (Secret Service agent--one of four known to have been present at Bethesda autopsy), 99 in Brown, Warren Omission; 612, 636 in Lifton, Best Evidence; 197 in Livingstone, Killing Kennedy; 58, 88, 113, 130, 251, 325, 342, 347, 386, 388, 391, 431-432, 435, 453, 455, 515, 535, 596, 640, 666 in Manchester, Death of a President (cited therein as John J. O'Leary); 57-58 in Model and Groden, JFK: Case for Conspiracy; (cited therein as William O'Leary, an agent who had been in the followup car in the motorcade); 45 in Palamara, Third Alternative; 754 in Twyman, Bloody Treason; 533 in Weisberg, Postmortem; Warren Commission 26 Volumes: II, 99;
...note: Name, identification, citations in secondary sources (conspiracy-theme books and lone assassin works), plus references to WC and HSCA volumes.
Global Index of the JFK Assassination is in limited supply. Brown offers it to subscribers of his JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly at $39.95 postpaid and will make the same offer for readers of this "Things Are Gonna Slide" column until August 15, 1999. A subscription to JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, one of the best journals on the assassination might also be in order. It costs $26/year and is published on-time in January, April, July, and October. Make check to: Walt Brown P.O. Box 174 Hillsdale, NJ 07642.
Just in:
Recent media coverage about Timothy Leary's "cooperation" with the FBI brings into focus the Orwellian character of today's tabloid media environment. Focusing on documents selectively released by the FBI, and initially published by the "true crime" webzine, The Smoking Gun, a news story picked up by the Associated Press presented the fact that Leary testified about the radical left in 1974 in the hopes of speeding up his prison release as shocking news. Young readers, or those with a short historical memory, were lead to believe that Leary was a secret FBI collaborator, hiding behind a mask of countercultural anti-authoritarianism. We refer the Associated Press and all other conscientious reporters to their own periodicals during this period. We also refer them to the final chapters (39-41) of Leary's own autobiography, Flashbacks. (Tarcher/Putnam, 1983). Leary found his interaction with the Feds important enough to make it the closing chapter. He was certainly aware that it was no secret. Trumpeting the fact that Leary answered the agency's questions as news is utterly dishonest.
Journalists who wish to investigate this situation further will be rewarded with a complex adventure story about a heroic man whose rights were consistently violated by various government agencies, who served 4-1/2 harsh years in prison and another 1-1/2 years in exile, and who finally evaded several lifetimes worth of further prison sentences while doing negligible damage to friends and acquaintances.
Here are a few salient facts:
* Timothy Leary faced about 100 years in prison. Twenty years were for a total of less than half an ounce of marijuana; another five for escaping from prison. That alone would have put him away for the rest of his life. But in addition, he faced 75 years on some bizarre conspiracy charges around global distribution of LSD. Of his thirty "co-conspirators," twenty-nine were unfamiliar to him. In contrast, Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayres and Jeff Jones, leaders of the Weather Underground, received fines and suspended sentences when they finally turned themselves in, due to the disclosure that the FBI had committed illegal acts against them.
* Nobody was seriously injured by Leary's interaction with the FBI, with the exception of his former attorney, George Chula, who received three months in prison after being set up on a cocaine bust by Leary's girlfriend, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, working on the outside for the DEA. He has never come forward to express any anger toward Leary. Two other former lawyers of Leary were placed at risk, as was his wife Rosemary, but the lawyers could not be indicted without testimony from Rosemary, who was living underground in another country, whereabouts unknown. Leary's archivist, Michael Horowitz, was called before a Grand Jury investigating the escape, but Leary had told the authorities that Horowitz was not in on the escape, so it was just a "fishing expedition."
* The Weather Underground, the radical left organization responsible for his escape, was not affected by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the escape for which they proudly took credit. They never even mentioned his testimony, because none of them were impacted by it.
* While in exile, Leary was illegally kidnapped by US agents in Afghanistan (which had no extradition treaty with the U.S.) and brought back to America. On returning to prison, he was thrown into "the hole" in Folsom Prison. His bail was five million dollars, the largest in history up to that point. President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled him "the most dangerous man in America."
* Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was "We understand."
* When Leary first agreed to talk to the FBI about those involved in his es ape, the agents were so dissatisfied with his testimony that they put him out on the "main line" at a Minnesotas prison under the name "Charles Thrush," a songbird. This was a blatant attempt to label him a snitch and get him murdered by prisoners, or at least to scare him into giving the FBI the kind of answers they wanted.
* After his testimony, Leary remained in prison for close to two years. His release had as much to do with Nixon's downfall over the Watergate scandal, the fact that the FBI had been exposed for illegal activities against radical groups, and the transition from Ronald Reagan to Jerry Brown as governor of California, as it did with any useful information the FBI might have received.
* There are lots of FBI files on Tim Leary. The government has released a select number of them, which were clearly chosen to hurt his reputation. The FBI is still doing its best to slow down the release of Leary's full file, reports political researcher and government critic Kenn Thomas, who has made a Freedom of Information Act request.
The friends of Timothy Leary:
R.U. Sirius
Robert Anton Wilson
Paul Krassner
Douglas Rushkoff
Michael Horowitz
Richard Metzger
Further note from Kenn Thomas: Some mention should be made that Leary was originally sentenced to 30 years for the 12/65 Laredo, Texas, bust but the sentence was overturned by the US Supreme Court. It was a significant victory that eliminated the self-incriminating Marijuana Tax Act. (When they couldn't get him on that, they came up with the smuggling charges. He was sentenced to ten years for that, another ten years for a second bust in California--to be served consecutively not concurrently--thus the 20 years--and denied bail.) FBI demonizing and even the corrective comments of his friends and supporters aside, Tim Leary's place as a civil rights champion is a matter of legal history.
Readers are again directed to the artcile in the current issue of Flatland about the Tim Leary file. It spells out quite precisely what the FBI has, what it has let out and to whom, and what the obstacles are to full release.
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