Psychedelics & Elitism: "Liberal CIA" Control over the Psychedelics Movement: Rockefeller, Luce, Ford, Mellon, Soros, Bronfman, Pritzker
Contents
"Liberal CIA [is] the best mafia you can deal with in the 20th century."
Harvard's mushroom, LSD and DMT pioneer Dr. Timothy Leary in his Flashbacks autobiography, p. 308. |
Intro to a complete history of psychedelics
The purpose of this article is to provide a full, structured history of psychedelics, including all relevant substances, gurus, researchers, establishment ties and key areas of debate. Originally this article was meant to be a rather brief chapter of ISGP's Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM. Such a chapter actually existed for a while, but soon turned out to be too limited in scope because psychedelics have only been a side-track of Coast to Coast AM. This much more extensive article has now replaced it. And it only took 2.5 years.
For those who may wonder about it, this article is written from a pro-psychedelics point-of-view. I myself got interested in psychedelics in 2012. Working on ISGP resulted in regular pauses of a year or more (because psychedelics generally push me to stop the ISGP effort... and I'm extremely stubborn), but all in all I still managed to get into the psychedelic state for about 600 hours. In order, I took ayahuasca variations, Hawaiian Baby Rose Seeds, ibogaine, DMT (okay, I couldn't get this one to work), Mapacho, magic mushrooms, Salvia Divinorum and LSD.
Just as important to some maybe: I never smoked cigarettes. Cocaine or heroin I never took. Ketamine I never used. No experience with MDMA / XTC either, although this substance doesn't appear to be bad at all. Weed I ate once. Three grams, so I passed out for 12 hours and learned it's a little different than the earlier-mentioned psychedelics in the sense that more doesn't exactly lead to more intensity and vividness. Unlike Salvia, I never smoked weed; I'm wary of any lung damage. Being from the Netherlands, the mentioned psychedelics are legal or semi-legal. For now at least.
Keep in mind though, this article is NOT about the effects of various psychedelics. It's simply about providing a history of psychedelics that is as unbiased and free of any kind of cultism or disinformation as possible. Psychedelics are very simple. You don't need politicians, jungle trips, shamans, gurus, or rituals making them more complex than they really are. All these things, except politicians, might make psychedelics more exciting in some cases - and in the process tremendously more expensive - but you can do without them. An individual, a substance, and whatever is attached to a particular substance, can work things out all by themselves (watch out with LSD in particular though!). Or better said maybe, the individual will be worked out by the substance.
With that, it appears the "back to basics" message is one of the primary messages of this article, similar to how the first psychedelic pioneers got involved in a rather playful manner. This, and planting, growing, creating and spreading psychedelics everywhere, regardless of what state laws say. A good psychedelic is worth more than a thousand psychiatrists. Governments obviously need to keep the machine running. It's hard to say to what extent psychedelics are going to interfere in that, but at the very least there should always be a back channel available in each and every country through which citizens can obtain psychedelics. People who have taken them will understand why.
Right off the bat, let's provide a few examples as to why information related to psychedelics and elitism is rather hard to fully trust. Avid ISGP readers of the "liberal CIA" series of articles have already been aware for a number of years that there exist all kinds of establishment ties to today's wave of psychedelic gurus. But also when one looks at supposedly independent researchers into the psychedelics community, one often sees the same peculiar ties.
Take John D. Marks, author of the 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, a key reference for anyone trying to understand the CIA's drug and psychedelics testing programs of the 1950s and 1960s. Reality is, Marks is a first rate "liberal CIA" intelligence asset. As the acknowledgments-section makes clear, this book was sponsored by Robert Borosage and Morton Halperin of the Institute for Policy Studies, a key "new left" outfit that has received millions upon millions in financing from the Ford, Rockefeller, Open Society (Soros) and other key "liberal CIA" foundations. In later decades, Halperin in particular became a direct Soros employee.
Marks' history also came to include the Esalen Institute, Rockefeller alien abduction disinformer John Mack and a variety of elite think tanks and conferences through which Marks has been particularly specialized in calling for increased Muslim immigration towards the West. Find that hard to believe? Well, readers are welcome to search for 'John Marks' in ISGP's index of NGOs, or visit Marks' profile in ISGP's "liberal CIA" oversight. Marks developed the most elite of elite ties, of which the oversight below only represents a portion:
Marks' colleagues Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, William Perry, David Abshire, Paula Dobriansky, Dov Zakheim, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Jane Harman all are to be found in ISGP's Superclass Index, meaning they have not just been top government officials, but also have extensive history in the Trilateral Commission, CFR and related globalist NGOs. That does put the worldview of even the most veteran conspiracy theorist upside down, doesn't it?
One of the last peculiar ties this author ran into before finishing this article involved Martin Lee, the author of the popular book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, The Sixties, and Beyond. A year after publishing this book in 1985, Lee became the long-time founding editor of Extra!, a magazine that received funds from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Family Fund and closely-allied MacArthur Foundation.
It makes one wonder if Lee, among other things, purposely left out the deep Mellon family ties of Alan Watts, despite exploring the ties of the Mellon family to the Millbrook estate. Maybe that is because the Mellon connection to Millbrook can still be written off as a coincidence. But when one takes all historical establishment connections to the psychedelics community into account, it becomes much harder to draw the conclusion that all of these ties are a coincidence. In fact, it is impossible to draw such a conclusion at that point. The Mellon family alone simply has too many ties to psychedelics, UFO and even "alt right" networks, for these connections to be considered merely a roll of the universal dice.
In other words, these examples once again indicate that the information that reaches the public is much more controlled than most people would even dare to imagine.
PART I: HOFFMAN, HUXLEY, OSMOND, JANIGER, WASSON
The LSD, mescaline and mushroom pioneers of the 1950s
Arguably the modern history of psychedelics began on April 16, 1943 when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, a researcher for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, accidentally discovered the powerful psychedelic effects of LSD, a small amount of which he had absorbed through his skin that day. Hofmann isolated the substance from the chemically very similar natural compound LSA. This compound can be found in Hawaiian Baby Rose Seeds and, to a lesser extend, in Morning Glory Seeds. LSD is many times more powerful than LSA and, as Hofmann experienced, can even be absorbed through the skin. Three days after this accidental discovery, on April 19, Hofmann decided to give himself an experimental dose of LSD. Thinking 250 microgram would be a threshold dose to experience any effect, he actually provided himself with more than 12 times the minimally required dose of 20 micrograms. After calling in a sick day, he went on an epic psychedelic bicycle ride back home - to this day remembered by psychedelic enthusiasts as "Bicycle Day".
Unfortunately, Bicycle Day, despite its hilarious origin, falls three days after Hofmann's true discovery of LSD and thus has no legitimacy. Its 1985 inventor originally meant to celebrate it on April 16, but was forced to push it on to April 19 to make the celebration for that year fall into the weekend. For some reason the April 19 date stuck around, but the fact is, weekend or no weekend, the real Bicycle Day falls on April 16.
It took a few years for knowledge of LSD to spread. The first publication in the United States was produced in August 1950 by St. Louis State Hospital-based psychiatrists Anthony K. Busch and Warren C. Johnson. They were offered a batch of LSD by Hofmann's Sandoz corporation in Switzerland when they inquired for a drug that could "induce a transitory delirious state". Based on a small study involving 29 psychiatric patients with rather serious mental disorders, they concluded that LSD "may offer a means for more readily gaining access to the chronically withdrawn patients [and] serve as a new tool for shortening psychotherapy." The effects of LSD varied quite a bit, but in many cases the psychedelic made patients relive their past traumas and allowed them to much better discuss their issues. 1 Busch and Johnson never really became involved in the network of psychedelic researchers. They reported that LSD had some benefits to mental patients and that was it. 2
What is nevertheless noteworthy to mention is that Anthony Busch, who served as the clinical director of St. Louis State Hospital from the 1940s to 1960s, was a nephew of the founder of the St. Louis-based Anheuser Busch brewery fortune. 3 The Anheuser Busch family basically have served as the establishment kings of St. Louis throughout the 20th century. They have been very close to the Rockefeller family, joined the 1001 Club, along with the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Bechtels, Ford and Mellon, were particularly close to the Nixon administration through "Mr. Fixit", Peter M. Flanigan, a Busch family member; have maintained CIA ties and "liberal CIA" ties and have also been suspected of close relations with Opus Dei. These ties are explained a bit more in Appendix A. Also, Dr. August Busch, Oscar Janiger and fellow psychedelic researcher Sidney Cohen are known to have attended conferences of the Rockefeller and CIA MKULTRA-linked Macy Foundation. 4 Granted, it's entirely possible the majority of the participants in these Macy conferences never had a clue about these ties, but it nevertheless remains an interesting fact.
Another, today much better known, early expert to become interested in LSD for its potential medical value was Dr. Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist who in 1951 emigrated to Saskatchewan, Canada, to study the medical value of different psychedelics at the Weyburn Mental Hospital. Apart from LSD, Osmond was very interested in mescaline, which in North America is derived from the peyote cactus and has been used in Native American rituals of the Apache, Comanche and Kiowa tribes for hundreds of years. Peyote's first reported use goes back to 3,700 B.C. to Indian tribes in Mexico, where the peyote cactus is native (apart from a tiny part of Texas). It took 5,600 years, until 1897, for mescaline to be isolated and another two decades, until 1919, before it was synthesized. Aleister Crowley, the famous British occultist, was using mescaline in his Rites of Eleusis by 1910, but widespread use didn't really catch on in the western world until Osmond got involved in the early 1950s and teamed up with famous Brave New World author Aldous Huxley. Huxley actually spent a day with Crowley on October 4, 1930. It's likely Crowley extensively lectured Huxley on mescaline, but it would take two more decades for Huxley to take the substance himself.
Huxley moved to California in 1937. Before that, and as discussed in the Fabian Socialism chapter of ISGP's Pilgrims Society article, he maintained ties to Britain's establishment, although he, along with friends as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell and his brother Julian Huxley, basically represented the most moderate and "radical" aspect establishmentarians as Nancy and David Astor still tolerated around them. Huxley, along with his new American friends, would continue to draw this hard-to-define line between "outsider" and "establishment" in the United States. Julian Huxley, who remained in England, would go on to establish the World Wildlife Fund with the backing of just about every elite family in the United States and Europe.
In May 1953 Osmond administered Aldous Huxley a dose of mescaline. Huxley went on to write a 70-page account of this experience in his 1954 book The Doors of Perception, in turn inspiring the name of Jim Morrison's band, The Doors. In 1956 Osmond and Huxley were trying to come up with a proper overarching name for substances as LSD and mescaline. In a letter he wrote to Osmond, Huxley suggested the somewhat hard to pronounce "phanerothyme". His exact sentence read: "To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gram of phanerothyme." 5 Osmond's well known reply was:
| "To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic." 6 |
"Psyche" means "mind". "Delic" is derived from the Greek work "Delos", meaning "to manifest". Thus literally the word "psychedelic" means "mind manifesting" or "manifested by the mind" - which can be interpreted in multiple ways. Osmond proposed his word "psychedelic" to the public in 1957. It has been in use ever since.
In 1955 the BBC made a recording of Osmond guiding Lord Christopher Mayhew through a mescaline experience. Considered too shocking, it was never broadcasted. Despite all of Osmond's research, experimenting and partaking in Native American peyote rituals, he never really found much medical benefit to the use of mescaline.
In contrast, in the 1950s Osmond reported a very impressive 50 percent cure rate among 1,000 alcoholics he had given large doses of LSD. 7 In another study involving 24 of the worst case alcoholics, Osmond and a partner found that they achieved a cure rate of about 33 percent. Another 33 percent experienced very significant benefits, if only temporary. 8 Six other studies, carried out by different researchers from 1966 to 1970, revealed roughly similar results. In one study, which involved providing a single, smaller dose of LSD to individuals in a treatment program for alcohol abuse, the consumption of alcohol was reduced in 59% of the participants. This only went for 38% of those who only received the traditional treatment. What is primarily sad about this last series of studies is that modern researchers only rediscovered these effects of LSD in 2012 and were left speculating about the effect several doses of LSD might have had. Not a word was said either by these modern researchers about the earlier studies of Osmond. 9 One would think science would have studied and acknowledged the therapeutic benefits of LSD by now.
As for Aldous Huxley, soon after he contacted Osmond over his mescaline research in 1953, he also became involved with California-based LSD researcher Dr. Oscar Janiger, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Irvine who was active in LSD research in the 1954-1962 period. Janiger carried out his own experiments with LSD and provided it to a number of celebrities, the most well known, apart from Huxley, being actor Cary Grant. 10 A key supplier of both LSD and mescaline to the Janiger-Huxley-Osmond circle in this period became a certain mysterious, wealthy, OSS veteran named "Captain" Al Hubbard. 11
In 1991, Oscar Janiger commented - undoubtedly jokingly - that "nothing of substance has been written about Al Hubbard, and probably nothing ever should." 12 Getting details on Hubbard's life indeed isn't easy, even today. During the prohibition years of 1920 to 1923, Hubbard had been a rum runner. By World War II he was running supplies and arms from the supposedly still "neutral" U.S. to Canada on behalf of FDR and the OSS. These supplies were then secretly shipped to England, which was trying to survive a Nazi onslaught. After World War II and after a presidential pardon for his smuggling operations, Hubbard managed to become president of the Vancouver Uranium Corporation (seemingly a first-rate national security responsibility), making him a Rolls Royce-owning multi-millionaire who was able to build all kinds of largely unspecified high level connections. In the book Acid Dreams, for example, Hubbard's connections are summarized as, "His prestigious government and business connections read like a Who's Who of the power elite in North America." 13 How enlightening! Apparently his connections of the 1950s and 1960s included the Joint Chiefs 14 and the pope. 15 His involvement in the 1960s and 1970s in SRI at the invitation of Willis Harman, an old LSD convert of Hubbard 16, most certainly would earn him the label "liberal CIA". Looking at its trustees and international board, SRI was controlled by the Bechtels and their Bohemian Grove and 1001 Club friends, certainly from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Hubbard first took LSD in 1951 while staying in England. It was administered to him by Dr. Ronald Sandison, the first clinical experimenter with LSD in Great Britain. Sandison had met with LSD inventor Albert Hofmann in Switzerland in 1950 when Hofmann was dosing spiders with LSD to observe changes in the manner in which they would spin their webs. According to his own account, Sandison had limited interaction with some of the more well-known American researchers. 17 Still, by the 1990s he was serving as a trustee of the Hofmann Foundation, a hub of all international psychedelic gurus that was set up in 1988. The international board may have hardly ever met, but he was invited nevertheless. He has also served as a scientific advisor to the Soros-allied Beckley Foundation, founded in 1998 by Countess Amanda Feilding, an individual historically tied to the Leary group in England. Creating ISGP's "liberal CIA" oversight has come in handy.
Hubbard's first experience with LSD sparked a huge interest in him in the transcendental value of psychedelics. In 1953 Hubbard invited Osmond to the Vancouver Yacht Club in order to score a little mescaline. It marked the first time these two men met. 18 Soon after, Hubbard became a monthly supplier to the Janiger-Huxley group in California, Osmond in Canada 19, as well as other experts who had trouble obtaining various psychedelics, LSD and psilocybin in particular.
Osmond and especially Hubbard actually developed the idea to dose world leaders with LSD in order to change the consciousness of the planet. They had some limited success with "a prime minister, assistants to heads of state, UN representatives, and members of the British parliament" 20, but names and details remain a carefully guarded secret. Hubbard's efforts of supplying experts and leaders of society alike earned him the nickname "The Johnny Appleseed of LSD" among his friends. 21
In June 1957, LSD and mescaline enthusiast Aldous Huxley, followed in close succession by Al Hubbard and Dr. Humphry Osmond, met with Gordon Wasson 22, the public relations vice president for Morgan Guaranty Trust and amateur ethnomycologist who just a month before, in May, had his article Seeking the Magic Mushroom published in Life magazine. The article described Wasson's 1955 quest to Mexico to find and experiment with "strange and hitherto unstudied mushrooms with vision-giving powers." With that article, he brought another powerful psychedelic to the public's awareness apart from LSD and mescaline: psilocybin-containing psychedelic mushrooms. The same article also discussed Wasson's subsequent trip in 1956 "to identify the hallucinogenic mushrooms and to command a steady supply of them for laboratory study."
Life magazine's owner, Pilgrims Society member Henry Luce, and especially his Dame of Malta 23 wife Claire Boothe Luce, were major supporters of psychedelic drugs as LSD and mushrooms. 24 While not Eastern Establishment by birth, Wasson did manage to become a Morgan banker and CFR member. He had been a Century Association member as early as 1939, along with Henry Luce, easily explaining how the Luce couple heard about his adventures through mutual friends and invited him to write an article about his experiences. 25 Huxley, Hubbard and Osmond did not get along too well with Wasson, by the way. They were a little taken aback by his open display of wealth and refusal to take any other psychedelic serious. 26
The Life article inspired a number of individuals to do their own field research into psychedelic mushrooms. One was the incredibly curious Andrija Puharich, a major disinformation pusher on the supernatural and future mentor of Uri Geller who went to visit the same remote shaman as Wasson in 1960 on an expedition financed by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps at Edgewood Arsenal, the University of Washington and the Aluminum Company of America. 27
In fact, the 1956 trip of Wasson had been financed under the CIA's MKULTRA program, Subproject 58 to be exact. While speaking about this in the late 1970s to author John Marks, both made it appear as if the CIA had infiltrated Wasson's second expedition. 28 What wasn't mentioned is that CIA director Allen Dulles was another long-time Century Association member who frequently corresponded with Wasson throughout the 1950s, the first time many years before Wasson went to Mexico. 29 While Wasson and Luce on the one hand and Dulles and his CIA on the other had different objectives in mind with regard to researching psychedelic drugs - personal interest vs. offensive and defensive use in interrogation and brainwashing - their close ties are undeniable and has let to a lot of speculation and misdirection over the years.
Another person inspired by Wasson's adventures in Mexico was the UCLA-educated psychologist Frank Barron. He went to Mexico in 1958 and came back with a large bag of magic mushrooms. 30
PART II: LEARY'S GROUP AT HARVARD
The mushroom years of 1960-1962
There's a lot more to Barron. After graduation from UCLA, he went to work for the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) at UCLA Berkeley and became a nationally renowned expert on creativity. 31 According to Leary, IPAR was a think tank "funded and staffed by former OSS-CIA psychologists", with his friend Barron twice refusing to become "director of psychological personnel of the CIA." 32 The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Ford Foundation were all used as conduits for "Rockefeller CIA" funds to witting and unwitting candidates, so it is hard to figure out who exactly Barron was, especially upon noticing he also was a co-founder of the Esalen Institute. He certainly has "liberal CIA" written all over him.
The relationship between Leary and Barron goes back to graduate school at UCLA, where the two were drinking buddies. By 1959 Leary is concluding a career as director of psychiatric research at the rather elite Kaiser Memorial Hospital. 33 Despite creating a psychology test that has been implemented by the CIA, Leary has developed doubts about the effectiveness of psychology. 34 Also, his wife has just committed suicide. He goes to live with his two children in Florence, Italy.
One day, in Florence, apparently on a sabbatical to this very same town, Barron decides to visit his friend here. He tells Leary about his experiences with magic mushrooms, but Leary is skeptical and advises caution to prevent him from losing his credibility. As a parting gift, Barron offers Leary $500 of his Ford Foundation grant to go and interview Arthur Koestler in London. In addition, Barron informs him that David McClelland, head of Harvard's Center for Personality Research, happens to be in Florence as well, has read Leary's book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, and might be interested in hiring him to Harvard. 35 McClelland indeed is in Florence - on a Guggenheim Fellowship. 36
Leary takes Barron up on this last offer and has lunch with McClelland the very next day. After elaborating a bit more on his very progressive views on psychiatric treatment, McClelland hires him with the remark, "There's no question that what you're advocating is going to be the future of American psychology. You're not a lone voice. ... You're just what we need to shake things up at Harvard." 37 With that, Leary returns to the United States to become a professor at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality, where he is allowed to teach graduate students based on his own, modern, practical views of psychology. 38 Alternately, Leary described his assigned as having to come up with "better methods of behavior change" for psychiatric patients. 39
McClelland staffed the Harvard Center with several "maverick instructors", according to Leary. Among them is a certain Richard Alpert, the well-to-do son of the last president of the New Haven Railroad. This actually is the aspect Leary will end up mentioning in his biography, including that Alpert enjoyed his apartment penthouse and limousines. 40 His father's wealth also explains why Alpert was in the possession of a pilot license at such a young age, complete with his own Cessna airplane. He used it at one point to pick up Leary in Mexico and fly him back to the United States. 41 A little additional checking reveals that the biography of Richard Alpert's father, George Alpert, is really impressive. He was one of the leading Zionist leaders of the United States of his time with ties not only extending to the White House, but also to leading Jewish families as Warburg, Bronfman, Lehman and Oppenheimer. It even looks as if Alpert was part of the Mossad-allied Jewish intelligence underground in the United States known as the Sonneborn Institute. It took a while to compile George Alpert's biography. Here's what it looks like:
- Born in 1898. Graduated from Boston University Law School and became a district attorney.
- Boston lawyer and founder of the law firm Alpert & Alpert with his brother. 42
- At the end of World War II, Alpert was a trustee of Associated Jewish Philanthropies, Combined Jewish Appeal and Hebrew Teachers College, a director of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA.org), as well as president of Middlesex University, all of it in Boston. 43
- Trustee of the American Institute for International Information, Franklin Hospital and Temple Ohabei Shalom, also at the end of World War II. 44
- Key founder of Brandeis University in Boston and the university's first chair/president 1946-1954, and after that a lifetime trustee. Elites as Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman and Philip Klutznick have been deeply involved in Brandeis over the years. 45 The university used to be known as Middlesex University, of which Alpert was president, and briefly was known as the Albert Einstein Foundation, of which Alpert was a director. It was the first secular Jewish American university in existence. 46
- National co-chairman of United Jewish Appeal at the end of World War II. 47
- National vice-chairman of the United Palestine Appeal at the end of World War II, with Albert Einstein serving as honorary chairman. UPA's honorary co-chairman and U.S. Haganah/Sonneborn Institute leader Rudolf G. Sonneborn served as chairman of the national council at the time. 48
- Director of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee from at least 1944 to at least 1961, co-vice chairman in the late 1940s, and chairman of the New England Region. Key names of the JDC in this period (and beyond) were Edward Warburg and wife; Abe Bronfman, Samuel Bronfman, Herbert H. Lehman (CIA-tied), Harry Oppenheimer (1001 Club) and others. 49
- Director of the New Haven Railroad 1952-1954 and last president 1956-1961. Went back to his Alpert & Alpert law firm after that.
- Key founder/fundraiser, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Yeshiva University, in the 1953-1955 period, together with Pilgrims Society members Walter Annenberg, Thomas Dewey and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as then-U.S. vice president Richard Nixon. 50 Member, board of overseers, until at least 1966, together with Annenberg, Max Stern and Laurence Tisch. 51
- Present at a dinner with President Richard Nixon in 1969 with Gabriel Hauge and a number of other influential persons. 52
- Died in 1988, with an obituary in the New York Times. 53
I guess we're all aware that to a large extent Harvard is reserved for the sons and daughters of the establishment, but these connections still are a little mind-blowing. Most people are looking at Leary and Alpert as anti-establishment figures, yet they themselves, and so many of their closest associates, have the most incredible establishment ties imaginable.
In any case, Leary takes a liking to Alpert at Harvard. At the time, everything still seems relatively mundane. Both professors are guiding graduate students, Alpert still is very much Alpert - instead of "Ram Dass" - and there is little to no talk about psychedelics. Once again, Frank Barron is about to change that.
Six weeks after his own hiring, Leary is asked by his superior, David McClelland, if he knows anyone for a one-year appointment to the Center for Research in Personality faculty. Leary suggests Barron, who is promptly hired as a visiting professor for a year. Leary is surprised at how close the ties are between Harvard's Center for Personality Study and California's IPAR, where Barron is working, prompting him to remark:
| "At the top level everyone seemed to know everyone. I was interested in how these power networks worked, especially when they involved psychology and the government." 54 |
One thing Leary's friend Barron and Leary's boss McClelland certainly have in common is the Ford Foundation. Barron received financing from the foundation when visiting Leary in Florence, while McClelland - coincidentally also in Florence at the time he recruited Leary and that on a Guggenheim Fellowship - used to be director of psychological studies for the Ford Foundation in 1952 and 1953. 55
As already documented in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article (a term actually coined by Tim Leary) and The Cold War Rockefeller CIA network section of ISGP's Pilgrims Society article, the Ford Foundation, even more so at the time, was completely synonymous with CIA operations and completely controlled by Allen Dulles, David Rockefeller (who received full briefings of Allen Dulles and his CIA division chiefs, including on MKULTRA, and had promised Dulles the Ford Foundation presidency if Eisenhower would not make Dulles CIA chief), John McCloy and a number of their friends. "CIA" doesn't even cut it. Both Harvard and the Ford Foundation were, and are, two of the most valuable pearls in the Eastern Establishment's power structure. Permanent private sector CIA operations have always been part of that. As documented in the articles just linked, John McCloy at one point argued to staffers who had grown wary of the Ford Foundation's relationship with the CIA "that if they failed to cooperate, the CIA would simply penetrate the foundation quietly by recruiting or inserting staff at the lower levels." The only thing McCloy forgot to mention is that he and his closest establishment friends actually were (and are) the CIA, State Department and media - all in one.
That does make one wonder if there was anyone besides McClelland who decided that Leary would be a suitable candidate for Harvard. That doesn't have to be anything nefarious, certainly not at the time. The CIA and establishment had far less to hide in that period, the internet didn't exist, and conspiracy thinking, apart maybe from big business influence on politics, hardly existed until the years after the 1963 Kennedy assassination.
Still, the ties of individuals as Anthony Busch, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Janiger, Al Hubbard, Gordon Wasson, Frank Barron and Richard Alpert do make one wonder what on Earth was going on within the early psychedelics community. Even Leary has countless establishment and intelligence ties from birth. These involve General Douglas MacArthur, General George Patton, UCLA, Frank Barron, possibly the Kaiser Hospital, Mary Pinchot Meyer, the Mellon family, the neoconservative Hudson Institute, and Gianni Agnelli-linked Joanna Harcourt-Smith. It's really too much to discuss here, so maybe we should list everything in appendix B. As the reader will see, this trend doesn't end here either.
As a visiting professor at Harvard throughout 1960, where he sets up a center for drug studies, Barron is able to get Leary excited about magic mushrooms, in no small part by showing him Gordon Wasson's May 1957 article in Life magazine Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Leary spends the summer of 1960 in Mexico, ingesting the exact same mushrooms as Wasson did. That August, the whole Harvard clique spends summer in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Barron, Leary and Alpert are situated in a villa, along with Leary's children and a number of associates. McClelland is situated 10 miles away on a working vacation in which he's trying to stimulate the local economy through psychological means and a supposedly superior Protestant work ethic. It is here that Leary first ingests the magic mushrooms. As with Wasson and Barron, he is sold rather quickly: "In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain, and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen years as a diligent psychologist." 56
Back at Harvard, Alpert - who didn't take the mushrooms in Mexico - is quickly won over to the cause. With the consent of their superiors at Harvard, Leary and Alpert begin to include the psilocybin, the synthesized active ingredient of magic mushrooms, in their experimental psychological treatments on volunteer prisoners in the Concord Prison Experiments and with students at Harvard. It is during the beginning stages of these experiments that even more names of the emerging psychedelics scene begin to coalesce. On November 8, 1960, on the day of John F. Kennedy's election, LSD and mescaline enthusiasts Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond arrive in Cambridge (Harvard) where they meet for the very first time with Leary. Huxley is given his first dose of psilocybin and quickly decides to join the prison experiments. 57
The mysterious Captain Al Hubbard plays a role in the Harvard saga too. He may well have been the first to supply the Leary group with a batch of psilocybin pills or possibly supplied them in a period that they were impossible to get from Hofmann's Sandoz Corporation in Switzerland. At a 1979 meeting of many psychedelic pioneers, Leary exclaims to Hubbard, "Oh Al, I owe everything to you. The galactic center sent you down at the exact right time!" after which Hubbard explains to have first met Leary around 1960 while providing him with a batch of 500 tablets. As Leary responds a little absent-minded with, "I remember that," the room bursts out in laughter. 58 A lot of the details of their first meeting appear to be unknown.
Then there are some of the other pioneers, as described by Leary:
| "I was visited by a graduate student named Ralph Metzner. ... He wanted to work on the prison project. ... "Ralph, Gunther [Weil], and I, feeling a sense of camaraderie as a result of the [psilocybin] session, drove out to the Concord prison to meet the six candidates Jefferson had selected from the pool of volunteers. Two murderers. Two armed robbers. One embezzler. One black heroin pusher. "[Soon] the convicts spoke about their mystical experiences to ... Alan Watts ... William Burroughs [and] Aldous Huxley..." 59 |
Let's take a look at these new names in Leary's circle. Ralph Metzner we'll meet several times more in this article, but by the 1990s his psychedelics research was co-financed by Laurance Rockefeller through the Heffter Research Institute.
Gunther Weil has been a psychology student at Harvard since 1961 who also served as an elite Fulbright Scholar. A Harvard student until 1965, Weil was not just involved in the Concord Prison Experiments, but also the IFIF project and Millbrook. With Leary and Metzner he edited The Psychedelic Review, an irregularly published magazine in the 1963-1971 period that featured articles of just about every prominent psychedelic researcher and enthusiast: Gordon Wasson, Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Alan Watts, Gerald Heard, Humphrey Osmond, etc. Even the notorious Bronfman agent and CIA asset, Ira Einhorn, who later fled the country for murdering his girlfriend, was published in here. 60 Some of these individuals still need to be discussed.
After graduation in 1965, Weil was invited by Abraham Maslow - the most influential psychologist involved in the Esalen Institute - to teach at the Jewish Brandeis University, where Richard Alpert's father was deeply involved in. Weil went on to become a successful psychologist with clients that included "JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Credit Suisse ... Harvard JFK school [and] MIT Media Lab." 61
Meanwhile, Weil kept involved in "alternative" circles. In 1978, for example, UFO researcher Jacques Vallee gave a lecture at his house. Present in the room was the notorious Ira Einhorn, a long-time friend of Weil. 62 In 1981 Weil brought qigong master Mantak Chia to Harvard, taught him how to teach to groups instead of just individuals, and continued a life-long association with him. 63 From 1994 to 1998 Weil was founding chairman of the National Qigong Association. His Media Lab appointment starting in 2012 demonstrates that Weil kept his old friendships even in old age, because he was hired here by director Joi Ito, a godson and very close friend of Timothy Leary. 64
William Burroughs II was a gay, drunken, heroin-addicted Beat Generation author who back in 1944 shot his estranged wife to death in a failed William Tell enaction. In 1953 he traveled to Peru in search of ayahuasca, sending letters of his travels and experiences with the vine back to the United States to poet Allen Ginsberg, a cousin of LSD pioneer Dr. Oscar Janiger. 65 Ginsberg quickly followed Burroughs to Peru to experience ayahuasca for himself. 66 In 1963 the two men published Burrough's letter under the title The Yage Letters. By that time both Burroughs and Ginsberg had become intimately involved in Leary's circle at Harvard. Burroughs was directly part of the Concord Prison Experiments; Ginsberg more on the periphery. Leary and Barron first introduced Ginsberg to mushrooms on November 26, 1960 at Leary's Harvard residence. 67 Like Alpert and many others, he was quickly won over.
Interestingly, Burroughs came from a wealthy family. He even was a nephew of Ivy Ledbetter Lee 68, a member of the elite Pilgrims Society. 69 In 1914, in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre on striking miners and their wives and children, Ivy Lee became the public relations agent for the Rockefellers. Along with Edward Bernays, he is actually considered the father of public relations and corporate propaganda. At the time of his death in 1934 he was involved in U.S. cartel negotiations with I.G. Farben in Nazi Germany. 70
As for Alan Watts, we need to spent a little more time on this individual.
Alan Watts' road to Harvard - and the birth of Esalen
Alan Watts was born in 1915 in faraway England. From an early age he took a huge interest in religion, spirituality and philosophy, so much so that by age 16 he was secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge, a group established by the Theosophist Society. Zen Buddhism always remained Watts' main interest, but he also became highly educated on Taoism, Hinduism, Theosophy and Christianity, as well as psychology - Jungian in particular. 71
Still in his late teens, in 1934, Watts also was a follower of Dimitrije Mitrinovic, a strange cult-like figure along the lines of Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley who headed the New Britain Movement. The movement involved author H.G. Wells and future prime minister Harold MacMillan, but lasted no more than a few years. Mitrinovic later set up his very own New Atlantis Foundation. Watts had discussions with Mitrinovic at his home and was quite in awe of him. Despite that, it is clear from his biography that Watts considered Madame Blavatsky and her successor, Alice Bailey and her Lucis Trust, to be complete frauds. He didn't believe a word of them about secret masters operating from hidden Tibetan monasteries where lost knowledge about (never-existing) lost continents as Atlantis and Lemuria could be found. 72 Refreshing.
In 1938 Watts moved from London to New York City and lectured around to make some semblance of a living. In 1945 he became an ordained Episcopal priest here, a function he was forced to step down from in 1950 over marriage and personal belief issues. By that time Watts lived in a country house in Poughkeepsie, close to the (future) Millbrook estate, north of New York City, and was becoming a close friend of a certain Joseph Campbell 73, a well-known mythologist who had just finished writing his seminal The Hero with a Thousand Faces book. Interesting detail? Campbell was supported for life by Laurance Rockefeller and Paul Mellon. 74 Mellon was a Pilgrims Society member, with both men later becoming 1001 Club members. Laurance Rockefeller's brothers, David and Nelson, as well as their father, were Pilgrims Society members.
Watts benefited in kind. He credits Campbell with "saving his life" by arranging for him grants from the Bollingen Foundation, according to Watts, the only foundation to "pay any attention to off-beat people interested in such matters as Oriental philosophy, medieval alchemy, and Egyptian magic" at that time. 75 In turn, Campbell has stated, "I don't know if anybody would ever have heard of me if it hadn't been for Bollingen," a reference to Bollingen publishing his seminal 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces after his initial publisher rejected it. 76 Laurance Rockefeller loved the book. It influenced his thinking, alongside the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and, much later, Deepak Chopra. 77
Watts' first grant from Bollingen involved researching "spiritual documents of the Orient", awarded to him in 1951. 78 His publisher became the closely-linked Pantheon Press. He first established a relationship with the owners of Pantheon - Kurt and Helen Wolff - around 1946. 79 The Bollingen Foundation was founded in 1942 by Paul Mellon and his wife Mary. 80 Despite World War II and the foundation briefly having to cease its activities, in 1943 Mary sought out the then-new, small-time Pantheon Press to become the foundation's (future) publisher. She negotiated the deal with the exact same persons who would soon approach Watts: the then-freshly-immigrated German couple Kurt and Helen Wolff. 81 Unfortunately, Mary died in 1946 and as a result John D. Barrett took the helm of the Bollingen Foundation. Watts, Campbell and Barrett became good friends 82, with Campbell joining the foundation's board of trustees in 1960. 83 Paul Mellon, Campbell's benefactor alongside Laurance Rockefeller, always stayed in charge of the foundation until disbanding it in 1973. By that time the foundation had already been winding down its operations for a decade, starting in December 1963. 84
Mary Mellon's interest in myths and mystery religions didn't start with the founding of the Bollingen Foundation. Even before that she was the key financier of the annual Eranos conferences in Switzerland. 85 Founded in 1933, these conferences brought together the psychologist Carl Jung, a major inspiration of Mary Mellon, with leading experts on yoga, meditation, myths, ancient religions and ancient mystery religions. These conferences were interrupted in 1942 due to World War II. Finances had to be cut while Paul Mellon and his brother-in-law, David Bruce, another leading Pilgrim (from an ancient Templar family), became OSS chiefs. The OSS chief in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, a future Pilgrims vice president and CIA director, stood in contact with the Eranos leadership: founder Olga Frobe and Carl Jung. 86
From 1945 on, the Bollingen Foundation of the Mellons continued its efforts to restart the Eranos Conferences, financially backing its founder, Olga Frobe, and many of the speakers until at least the 1960s. "At enormous expense" the foundation also had numerous Eranos-related books translated into English and distributed in the United States. 87
Alan Watts had hardly made the "life saving" acquaintance of Joseph Campbell in 1950 and received his first Bollingen grant for studying "spiritual documents of the Orient" in 1951, or he was leaving New York for San Francisco to become the main lecturer of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. It appears this move was part of his grant, because Bollingen Foundation funds to Watts only stopped in 1953. 88
The American Academy of Asian Studies was financed by businessmen Louis Gainsborough, with Frederic Spiegelberg as its chief organizer. 89 Spiegelberg was an old friend of Watts whom he followed from London to New York and then from New York to San Francisco. By the time Spiegelberg brought Watts to San Francisco he was an extremely popular professor of Asian studies - especially Indian - for quite a number of years. In 1948-1949 he was studying Tibetan monasteries and Indian nationalist and spiritual guru Sri Aurobindo on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation 90, immediately after which he went back to India on an almost equally elite Fulbright scholarship. 91 It is at this point that Gainsborough, about whom not much is known with regard to establishment connections, approached Spiegelberg to set up the American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS).
Spiegelberg brought his Stanford student Haridas Chaudhuri with him as a main staffer. His old friend Alan Watts he brought in from New York City. 92 According to Spiegelberg, Michael Murphy was the first Stanford student who signed up for classes with the AAAS with Chaudhuri and Watts. 93 Dick Price, another Stanford student, came to study with Chaudhuri and Watts at the AAAS in late 1955 and early 1956 after returning from postgraduate work at Harvard. 94 Allen Ginsberg, the Oscar Janiger cousin who became part of Leary's Harvard group, is also known to have attended some of the (very popular) conferences at the AAAS in the 1950s. 95
In 1962 Michael Murphy and Dick Price famously founded the Esalen Institute. Less well-known is the fact that they founded this institute based on advice coming from older generation mentors as Aldous Huxley. 96 Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell 97, the latter two supported by Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation, with Laurance Rockefeller being another major supporter of Campbell. Laurance Rockefeller also was an important behind-the-scenes advisor to Michael Murphy since the founding stages of Esalen and donated millions to the institute. 98 The Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation and Carnegie Foundation all had some involvement with the Esalen Institute in the 1960s and early 1970s, which otherwise appears to have been reasonably profitable on its own. 99 It should be clear what forces were behind the founding of Esalen, an institute we will get back to in a later chapter.
Moving back in time a little, in 1953, in addition to his service as dean of the American Academy of Asian Studies, the vocally very blessed Alan Watts was provided with his own radio program at KPFA, greatly aiding him in expanding his audience. KPFA was owned by the Ford Foundation-financed Pacifica Radio. Watts retained his program at Pacifica until his death in 1973. 100
In early 1962, Alan Watts all of sudden moves back east again, to New York City and Harvard University, to become part of the Concord Prison Experiments in which prisoners are dosed with psilocybin. As already discussed, these experiments are being carried out by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Frank Barron, Ralph Metzner, Aldous Huxley and William Burroughs, with Al Hubbard, Allen Ginsberg, Humphry Osmond and Gordon Wasson all dropping in on occasion. It actually marks the first time Watts meets in person with Timothy Leary. 101
Interestingly, it again appears we find the influence of Paul Mellon in this move of Watts to Harvard, as Watts' 1962-1964 research fellowship at Harvard coincides with another grant of Mellon's Bollingen Foundation for 1962-1964. 102 Meanwhile, due to the family wealth of the Alpert family, the Leary group is able to improve its Harvard headquarters to "a three-story six-bedroom house". 103
It is only in December 1961, three months after the start of the Harvard Psychedelic Project, that Leary takes his first LSD. That's quite a surprise considering a number of Leary's friends have already been exposed to LSD for a number of years at this point. Granted, the Harvard Psychedelic Project of 1961-1963 is what largely brought the East and West Coast psychedelic pioneers together. And it wasn't until the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Copenhagen, Denmark, that Leary met Aldous Huxley, a key member of "LSD West" with Dr. Oscar Janiger and Al Hubbard. 104 At this conference, Leary, Alpert, Huxley, Frank Barron and a certain Henry A. Murray, the former chief of Leary's psychological department who by then was creating the future Unabomber in a top secret CIA MKULTRA research project he was running at Harvard, all held speeches. 105 Meeting Huxley appears to have expedited the Leary group's discovery of LSD.
The immediate person responsible for "turning on" Leary is British aristocrat Michael Hollingshead. Leary receives a first letter from Hollingshead in late October 1961. Soon after, the two meet and Leary invites Hollingshead to participate in the Concord Prison Experiments. 106 On an interesting side-note, Hollingshead's letter arrived the same day as one from Allen Ginsberg, whom Leary had introduced to psilocybin the previous year at Harvard. This time Ginsberg wasn't in search of ayahuasca in South America, but was smoking weed on the Ganges in Calcutta with India's holy men, who "wear beards, long hair [and] don't wash." 107
To expand a little on the Hollingshead story, in 1960 this person became an acquaintance of Aldous Huxley, after ringing up the California-based author in the hope of obtaining a little mescaline. Instead, Huxley made Hollingshead aware of Albert Hofmann and the potency of LSD. Using a friendly doctor, Hollingshead promptly ordered a gram, enough for 5,000 doses. He mixed the LSD with sugar and kept it all in a mayonnaise jar. After his first experience, leading to an instant spiritual crisis, Hollingshead called back Huxley and was given the advice that he should meet with Timothy Leary at Harvard. It didn't take long for Hollingshead to show up there with said mayonnaise jar under his arm. As LSD had played a major role in him losing his job, he was also broke and desperate for income. That situation played a role in Leary offering him a job. 108
Interestingly, until weeks before arriving at Harvard, Hollingshead had been secretary of the New York City-based Institute for British American Cultural Exchange. Here he shared the board with a variety of Anglo-American elites, including Lionel Trilling, a Cold War Rockefeller CIA asset deeply involved in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and Farfield Foundation network - not entirely unlike Aldous' brother, Julian Huxley. 109 The Institute's headquarters was located in the 50th Avenue office - right next to the United Nations building - of board member Huntington Hartford, a multibillionaire who was a member of the Pilgrims Society, a super-elite group we come across all the time in relation to psychedelic researchers. There's more. Hollingshead described his daily activities as secretary of the Institute until the summer of 1961, when he forced himself to quit: "Most of the time I spent smoking grass; and, towards the end, getting stoned on acid [LSD]... some of my time was spent meeting and talking with executives of the large Foundations like the Carnegie and the Rockefeller Institute, to try to get more money for our programmes." 110 There it is again, the Rockefeller connection, not to mention the overall "liberal CIA" one.
Already in late 1960, while still employed at the British American Cultural Exchange for some time, Hollingshead founded the Agora Scientific Trust on New York's Fifth Avenue. Officially a "research" institute, it is said to have been the site of many parties where anything from doorknobs to the food was laced with LSD. It is also said that quite a few dignitaries, including United Nations officials, were "turned on" in this establishment. 111
Key financier of the Agora Scientific Trust is obscure Long Island-based millionaire Howard Teague. Another key supporter is Victor Lownes, the number 2 guy in Hugh Hefner's Playboy empire, which for many years supported LSD and marijuana legalization. Psychologist and former LSD researcher Jean Houston was a co-founder. 112 Houston was extremely close to Margaret Mead of the Macy Foundation conference. She wrote a bunch of new age books and in 1996-1997 worked as a controversial spiritual and psychological advisor to Hillary Clinton at the White House. In no small part through Houston, Laurance Rockefeller got his bogus UFO disclosure initiative to the White House. 113 When the Clinton-Houston cooperation became controversial, Houston complained that she had "lost income, grants and an opportunity to serve on the board of a Laurance Rockefeller foundation." 114 Considering their shared interests, the link between the Macy Foundation and the Rockefeller family, and Houston's involvement in the Laurance Rockefeller-backed Esalen Institute since at least the early 1970s 115, one wonders to what extent a relationship already existed between the two. Certainly Houston represents a second important Rockefeller link of Hollingshead.
At the time Hollingshead came to Harvard on the advise of Aldous Huxley, he also served as a semi-personal envoy of Eileen Garrett, a super-wealthy alleged medium and founding president of the New York Parapsychology Foundation, which, along with its Nice, France chapter and the U.S. and London-based Societies for Psychical Research 116, has all the hallmarks of being curious control structures over paranormal thinking. Richard Alpert and others described Hollingshead as a criminal, as "manipulative and immoral", a "con man" and a "scoundrel". 117 Even Leary continually wondered about Hollingshead's theatrics, but gave him a chance anyway. 118 With that, Hollingshead ended up becoming a long-time associate of the Leary group, first at Harvard and later at Millbrook.
Oddly, it actually takes several weeks of persuasion by Hollingshead to get Leary to take LSD. Leary is of the opinion that psilocybin is more than exciting enough for the time being and has the idea that LSD is less spiritual because it has been created in a laboratory. He only changes his mind in early December 1961 after observing a young female friend on Hollingshead's acid uttering incredibly spiritual words, while in ordinary life this girl, who never finished high school, never even expressed the slightest interest in philosophy or religion. Leary's LSD session lasts all night.
In the morning Leary goes out for another day of work to the Concord Prison, but his thinking has been completely transformed. From this moment on he feels like he's just an actor, creating his own reality. Dr. George Litwin, a Harvard colleague of his who happened to be present in Leary's house the night before and decided to sample from Hollingshead's mayonnaise jar as well, has also not fully descended to Earth yet. Both men need to spent a few days in contemplation of what they just experienced, away from friends and colleagues. 119 Almost immediately Alpert realizes that with LSD Leary and Litwin have gone beyond merely psychedelic psychotherapy and into something much more spiritual and missionary. Sensing that "LSD spelled the downfall of our plans to win Nobel Prizes and full-professor posts at Harvard", Alpert is hesitant for a while to take LSD. 120 Eventually he takes the plunge. Whereas Leary came out on the other side of his LSD trip as the "high priest", Alpert essentially is reborn as "Ram Dass". It will still take a few years before these men fully take on these respective roles, but the LSD seeds are firmly planted.
In this same period the Leary group establishes connections with the Swiss inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, who not only provides the group with LSD, but also psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms that chemically is very similar to DMT. In 1959 Hofmann learned to synthesize psilocybin from mushrooms through batches supplied by Gordon Wasson. 121 As Leary explained it, "we owed our psilocybin supply to the diligence of a New York banker [Wasson] and the craft of a Basel chemist [Hofmann]." Wasson would soon visit Harvard for a private meeting with the Leary group. 122
During the first two years of the Harvard Psychedelic Project, rumors begin to surface about a new psychedelic "nuclear bomb" named dimethyltryptamine (DMT). By that time DMT has become known as "the terror drug" due to the enormous amount of intense and negative experiences being reported by people on it. William Burroughs took it in London and fully agrees with the notion. Dr. Oscar Janiger is the one to have introduced DMT into Californian circles some time after 1957. He learned about the potential of DMT, found only two references to it, both Hungarian and dating to 1957; decided to have a batch of it made, and injected himself (more powerful than smoking it). He later admitted it was "a dangerously stupid, idiotic thing to do." Next Janiger phoned up Alan Watts to "bet him that he had a drug that could finally shut him up." According to Janiger, Watts indeed didn't utter a word for the half hour that he was under the influence of DMT. Janiger's next step was to hand the drug to Al Hubbard - still making monthly supply runs to Janiger's clique - and tell him to distribute it along his network and gathering experience reports. Apparently, "Everyone who took DMT agreed that it was a hellish half hour, with absolutely no redeeming qualities." 123
Similarly, in the fall of 1962 a psychiatrist informs Leary that less than 4% of his more than 100 test subjects have had a positive experience with DMT. Without having taken the drug at this point, Leary suggests that all these negative experiences are simply the result of self-fulfilling and self-sustaining prophecies, in large part due to the clinical laboratory setting. Both men, Leary and the psychiatrist, agree to take DMT at the home of the latter, with a doctor, a Hindu monk, and female companions present. Turns out, both have a very positive experience, with Leary colorfully comparing his experience to "being fired out the muzzle of an atomic cannon with neon-byzantine barreling." Leary experiences DMT - which also he takes in its most potent form: intravenously - to be even stronger than LSD. Experimental sessions will follow on more than 100 volunteers, this time with over 90% describing their experiences as positive. 124 It appears not only the setting, but also trust in the safety of the drug and the experience matters a lot.
John Lilly: Isolation tanks, Ketamine, dolphins... banker father
Through a close association with John Lilly, the inventor of the isolation tank in 1954, the Leary group is also aware that sensory deprivation can induce altered states of consciousness. 125 In fact, in 1961 Aldous Huxley reports to Timothy Leary that he has spoken with the somewhat notorious Dr. Joly West about the hallucinogenic effects of improved isolation tanks that West is experimenting with. 126
Lilly isn't just seen as a pioneer of the isolation tank, but is also well known for his Ketamine experimentation starting in the early 1970s and his dolphin research. This last type of research is partly funded by new age transvestite Reed Erickson, also one of the discoverers of questionable remote viewer Ingo Swann. Leary and his wife enjoy swimming sessions with Lilly's dolphins, with Lilly becoming a follower of "Ram Dass", the Hindu guru Richard Alpert is transforming into. But while Alpert sticks to LSD and the occasional mushroom or DMT trip, Lilly goes overboard with his use of Ketamine (and cocaine, according to his friend Rick Doblin), destroying his mental and physical health. 127
Ketamine is a very interesting psychedelic for a variety of reasons that are beyond the scope of this article. Unfortunately, and in contrast to virtually all other psychedelics, Ketamine tends to be addictive. It is also increasingly cast into a negative light now that it has become the new drug of choice for many cocaine users looking for something more exciting. 128
Not entirely insignificant is the fact that Lilly came from one of the wealthiest, most influential families in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His father, Richard C. Lilly, was president of First National Bank of St. Paul from at least the 1920s until 1945 and then chairman from 1945 to 1955. First National Bank used to be an asset of the J.P. Morgan empire, headed by his primary agent, George F. Baker (and his father). George F. Baker, Jr. became a director of the bank in 1949. Both the Morgans and Bakers were Pilgrims Society. The Pilgrim James Stillman Rockefeller was president of First National Bank from 1952 to 1959 - thus during the Saint Paul chairmanship of Richard Lilly - and chairman from 1959 to 1967. First National became Citibank, Citicorp, and eventually Citigroup. Its New York City headquarters has always been dominated by Pilgrims Society members.
Lilly studied at Caltech under Paul Dirac and other famous physicists. This study he could have financed by himself through a scholarship. After that, through his father he was able to have a sit-down with Charles Horace Mayo of the elite-funded Mayo Clinic, who advised him to go to Dartmouth Medical School. Lilly complied, but after two years decided to move to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue a career in medical research instead of therapeutic practice. After graduation here in 1942, Lilly worked at the Johnson Foundation under Detlev Bronk 129, a key and very elite Rockefeller scientist and one of the few with that occupation to join the Pilgrims Society. In the 1950s Bronk joined John D. Rockefeller, III is his Population Council, a project co-funded by the Richard Coyle Lilly Foundation in later decades. 130 For the most part, donations of this foundation aren't particularly noteworthy, except maybe Planned Parenthood, which is funded by all the top foundations.
John Lilly's younger brother, David M. Lilly, graduated from Dartmouth in 1939, briefly worked at the U.S. Treasury in Washington, D.C. served as treasurer and chair of the Minnesota Republican State Finance Committee in the 1960s, and eventually, in the 1976-1978 period, was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the board of governors of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, John Lilly was teaching and participating in seminars at the Esalen Institute. After his Washington appointment, David went back to Saint Paul to serve as dean and vice president for finance and operations of the Minnesota School of Management while also serving on the board of Honeywell, General Mills and other corporations. 131
As discussed in the book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, to which Lilly contributed, Lilly actually was extremely close to mind control research, although not voluntarily. In 1953 he worked in the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) on pioneering brain implant research, where "he devised a method of pounding up to 600 tiny sections of hypodermic tubing into the skulls of monkeys, through which he could insert electrodes..." The CIA in particular wanted him to classify his research. Lilly refused and soon found himself shut out of the entire research community, because most had agreed to allow their work to be classified, with the CIA messing around with his security clearance.
Lilly left the field of brain implants in 1954 over ethical concerns and pressure from the CIA, invented the isolation tank, and started working on sensory deprivation. Meanwhile, his next-door colleague, Dr. Maitland Baldwin, quietly "agreed to perform terminal sensory deprivation experiments for ARTICHOKE's Morse Allen..." Allen was the CIA's main guy in the search for the Manchurian candidate.
It's a strange state of affairs. Lilly didn't want to participate in the mind control programs, but still found himself surrounded by the "liberal CIA" crowd of the Esalen Institute and the like while trying to stay away from CIA. And he came from a rather elite family.
Harvard's Richard Evans Schultes and pioneering research into peyote, ayahuasca, shrooms and Morning Glory seeds in Latin America; partnership with Hofmann and Wasson
At this point we really should discuss Richard Evans Schultes, a very important Harvard ethnobotanist who operated in close proximity to the Leary group. As mentioned earlier, Schultes studied peyote in Mexico as an undergraduate in 1937. It wasn't until 1951 that the earlier-discussed Dr. Humphry Osmond would bring mescaline, the active ingredient in the peyote cactus, to the forefront of psycho-medical research.
In 1938 and 1939 Schultes traveled through the wilderness of Mexico's southern Oaxaca province to help identify magic mushrooms as the Aztec's "Teonanacatl" and Morning Glory seeds as the Aztec's "Ololiuqui". During World War II Schultes was the first westerner to take and study ayahuasca in South America. Only in the 1950s it was the turn of the earlier-discussed William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg to get involved with ayahuasca.
Burroughs and Ginsberg, of course, were intimately part of Leary's Harvard network by the early 1960s, both professionally and privately. 132 Schultes, a traditional plant specialist with very conservative views, remained a little on the outside, but nevertheless operated very closely to Leary. Hilariously, Leary described his group's relationship with Schultes as feeling like "novices" and "natives whose drug habits he was observing". They were very interested in Schultes' work, treated him with the utmost respect, but due to his "openly expressed right-wing political views" and "continual government sponsorship of his work" also were not surprised to learn "that his reports were used by the CIA in its brainwashing experiments during the 1950s and 60s." Vice versa, Leary wrote that Schultes "was always cordial to us but distant." 133
Schultes apparently got along best with the esteemed Swiss scientist and LSD inventor Albert Hofmann and the wealthy Eastern Establishmentarian Gordon Wasson. In 1959 Schultes sent Morning Glory seeds to Hofmann's lab in Switzerland for chemical analysis. That same year Hofmann synthesized psilocybin from Sierra Mazateca psychedelic mushrooms obtained by Wasson, who in turn was following in Schultes' steps by traveling to the region for mushroom research. In the early 1960s, it was through Schultes that Wasson contacted Leary to ask if he could come over for tea. 134 Soon after, Hofmann's Sandoz corporation began to deliver both psilocybin and LSD to the Leary group at Harvard. Almost two decades later, in 1979 and 1980, Albert Hofmann would write books with both Schultes and Wasson. Clearly there was a long-term, but rather low-profile cooperation between these very important researchers. 135
The 1962 Hofmann-Wasson quest to find Salvia Divinorum
On September 26, 1962, while Leary's team is dosing Harvard students with LSD and becoming ever more controversial, Hofmann and his wife touch down in Mexico City to meet with Gordon Wasson for a new expedition to the exact same area where Wasson, and before him Richard Evans Schultes, got his mushrooms from in the 1953-1956 period. They are joined by Mrs. Irmgard Weitlaner Johnson, a person with an interesting personal and family history.
In 1936 Irmgard's father, Robert Weitlaner, at Huautla de Jimenez, became the first westerner to confirm rumors that off the beaten track in the remote Oaxaca province, ancient Aztec mushroom cultism still existed. Specimens he shipped to Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard arrived in such a deteriorated state that they couldn't be identified anymore. Two years later, in July 1938, while Schultes was running his own expeditions in the neighborhood, Robert took his daughter, Irmgard, and her soon-to-be husband, Jean Johnson, back to Huautla de Jimenez to observe a traditional mushroom ritual (they weren't allowed to participate). Johnson documented the experience in a Swedish journal in 1939. He also wrote about a tea made of Salvia leaves that the shamans used in the off-season when mushrooms weren't available. Unfortunately, Johnson was killed during World War II. Irmgard's father, however, remained a prominent researcher, wrote about Salvia in 1952, and worked for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
In other words, the information gathered by the Weitlaner-Johnson family, as well as Richard Evans Schultes, in the late 1930s is what brought Gordon Wasson and his wife to Huautla de Jimenez a first time in 1953. In 1955 they were finally allowed to participate in a mushroom ritual. This time, in September 1962, Wasson and Hofmann are primarily going to try to find specimens of the exact Salvia plant used in Mazatec rituals. They are looking to bring back samples to the West and also to participate in a Salvia ritual. Locals generally refer to the plant as "Hojas de la Pastora". Later the researchers will determine that Salvia most likely was known by the Aztecs as "Pipiltzintzintli".
After two days of travel by jeep they arrive in the region. Their government documents ensure the cooperation of the locals. From the first village, they travel on donkeys deeper into the jungle to a second village. Hofmann describes the tiny village as being located in paradise in terms of its surroundings, but at the same time being a little troubled on the social front. Locals explain about one empty hut that a man murdered his wife there and now is spending life in prison because of it. In another hut a man was murdered by his wife over an affair. The village leader doesn't walk through town without being accompanied by two heavily armed guards for fear of being murdered over the raising of illegal taxes. As with the first village, women do not appear to roam the streets freely. In this village, Hofmann and Wasson are only provided with Salvia samples that have no roots or flowers, so, as already planned beforehand, they meet with a contact and move on to the next village.
In this next village, San Jose Tenango, the duo is provided with plenty of proper Salvia samples to take home, analyze, and hopefully synthesize. The group is really hoping to experience a traditional shamanic ceremony with this plant, but all the "curanderos" they ask come up with excuses. They also can't get any of the curanderos to tell them where exactly this plant is growing naturally or where they are cultivating it. To understand the reason, we only have to look at Marina Sabena, the curandero who introduced Wasson to magic mushrooms in 1955 through her ceremonies: she had her hut burned down after Wasson published her name in his 1957 Seeking the Magic Mushroom article in Life magazine. The locals, or quite possibly jealous shamans, did not appreciate her handing these "secrets" to the "gringos".
Luckily for Hofmann and Wasson, word of their arrival and intentions spreads quickly. At the last moment they are invited to partake in a ceremony, led by a sympathetic curandero. At night, they are led hush-hush style though a secret path in the jungle, accompanied by "strange bird-calls from the darkness", to a secluded hut on a mountainside, just outside the village. You couldn't write it better for a movie. Hofmann later publishes the name of the curandero in question, so let's hope she didn't get her hut burned down too.
During the Salvia ceremony the curandero and Wasson each drink a tea made of 12 leaves; Hoffman's wife gets 6 leaves. Unfortunately for Hofmann, he is suffering from a severe stomach upset and has to pass. About 20 minutes after drinking, they start to have psychedelic visions. The effects are not nearly as powerful as those of magic mushrooms, explaining why local shamans only use them in the off-season when the mushrooms aren't growing. The shamans only chew rolls of leaves or make tea of different numbers of Salvia leaves to supposedly cure various diseases and afflictions. The highest reported doses involve teas of about 120 leaves total. 136 That may seem like a lot, but inhaling the Salvinorin A content of just one leaf would have produced more intense experiences. Salvinorin A, the active component of Salvia, is one the world's most potent psychedelics.
The following day Wasson and Hofmann travel to Huautla de Jimenez. Here they meet with Wasson's old friend, the curandero Marina Sabina. They offer her their psilocybin pills. Sabina's whole family partakes in the psilocybin ceremony, with Hofmann now finally being able to drink a Salvia tea for himself. It is made of 10 leaves and prepared by a 10-year-old virgin, supposedly because this makes the potion "especially active". Sabina confirms the effects of the psilocybin pills are exactly the same as when using unsynthesized psychedelics mushrooms and is thrilled to now be able to run mushroom ceremonies year round. 137
Similar to ayahuasca and Ibogaine for the longest time, Salvia has always been among the most obscure psychedelics. Timothy Leary never mentioned Salvia in his 1968 biography High Priest or his 1983 one Flashbacks, but did mention the interest of some of his friends in ayahuasca. In the 1970s and 1980s a researcher named Jose Diaz conducted research on Salvia with Sierra Mazateca shamans, but his work remains obscure to this day. Since the 1990s the main promoter has probably been Daniel Siebert, also not a particularly visible psychedelic researcher. Siebert set up a website called the Salvia Divinorum Research and Information Center, which anno 2017 has the same layout that it had back when it was founded in 1995. In December Siebert attended MAPS' "3rd World Conference on Salvia Divinorum" alongside Ralph Metzner. Despite his vague expertise, obscurity and medieval-looking website, in the early 2000s Siebert continually appeared as a spokesman in major media outlets, including the New York Times 138, Los Angeles Times 139 and CNN. 140 I always wonder about that, because none of these outlets have ever expressed the tiniest interest in picking this ISGP admin as a spokesman for "the conspiracy theorists".
In any case, from Siebert we learn that rooted Salvia cuttings were sold at one place in California for $100 a piece back in the early 1970s. The price went down to $25 in the early 1980s. Eventually Siebert was able to obtain a cutting from a visitor of a Terence McKenna lecture in the early 1980s, who had specifically brought along this plant to share cuttings with anyone interested. From Siebert we also learn that while there were reports going back to the 1970s that students of the National University of Mexico City were smoking dried Salvia leaves, that this practice was completely unknown in the West until the mid 1980s when a poet named Dale Pendall tried it and got an effect. From then on it became more and more common to smoke Salvia, but for the longest time this method was seen as not generating a particularly powerful experience.
By the late 2000s, with the emergence of broadband internet, Salvia was sold more and more on the internet. Soon the potency of the natural product was vastly increased by repeatedly extracting leaves between 5 and 40 times and then dripping the extract back on to a little bit of original dried leaf. That's why these days one sees "5x", "10x", etc. with Salvia products being sold. From that point on Salvia slowly started to get the name of being one of the most powerful psychedelics in existence.
The 1963 booting of Leary, Alpert and Metzner from Harvard
At Harvard in late 1962, in the same period that Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann are stomping around in the Sierra Mazateca in search of Salvia plants, Timothy Leary and allies Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner are running into ever more bureaucratic resistance from traditional psychologists at Harvard over their not-particularly well-controlled LSD research among Harvard students. Apart from the break with traditional methods of therapy and doing research, at the personal level these traditionalists see the amount of student volunteers for their own therapeutic programs dwindle. Leary and Alpert, on the other hand, have more volunteers for their programs than they can handle. Leary later describes the situation as follows:
"Graduate students, not yet committed to a system, were lining up at our office doors for neurological fieldwork. Following our contract with [Harvard] University we excluded undergraduates, who were the most interested group of all. Drugs were becoming ultra-trendy. Every weekend the Harvard resident houses were transformed into spaceships floating miles above the Yard. At this point the opposition made its first move." 141 |
This opposition doesn't just involve regular, traditional researchers. Quite a few of them are linked to CIA MKULTRA mind control research. This may or may not be a coincidence, but at the very least it means that these professors are connected. Dr. Robert Heath, Tulane University's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology chairman from 1949 to 1980, becomes one of Leary's better known critics. 142 Back in the 1950s, Heath was involved in LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and brain implant tests on monkeys and mental patients on behalf of the CIA and Army. 143 Dr. Max Rinkel at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and the first person to import and experiment with LSD, emerges as an important critic of the Leary group. So does Harvard's Dr. Henry Beecher. Both Rinkel and Beecher maintain CIA MKULTRA ties. 144
Probably the most important opponent is Dr. Herbert Kelman, positioned in the same Center for Personality Research as McClelland, Leary and Alpert. He's been worried about the cultic approach Leary, Alpert and Barron have been taking since observing them all together at a May 1961 conference in Copenhagen. 145 Besides having received a small grant from the infamous CIA front the Human Ecology Fund 146, he later has an esteemed career at Harvard's elite Weatherhead Center for International Affairs 147, founded by CIA officer Robert Bowie and Henry Kissinger in 1958, with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington being among the elites involved over the years. 148 Curiously, in 1984 Kelman will write an article for the New York Times in which he argues against scholars working with or for the CIA. 149 Controlled opposition under all circumstances and in all situations appears to be the name of the game, as Leary and others already were on to him more than 20 years before:.
| "Professor Herbert Kelman stormed into the office of director McClelland, voicing serious complaints about our project. McClelland decided to convene a staff meeting to air the grievances. Graduate students were to be invited — most unusual. The reason for Kelman's annoyance was apparent. Fewer students were coming to his office to assist on this tame questionnaire projects. "Kelman was a formidable rival. He had undeniable clout in Washington, as demonstrated by an uncanny facility for obtaining annual grants, fellowships, and visiting professorships in foreign countries. Actually no one could explain why he was in the Center for Personality Research since his field was social and political psychology. Richard and I knew that Kelman was preparing an ambush." 150 |
Kelman largely leads the charge that eventually gets Leary, Alpert and their associates removed from Harvard. The media joins the effort, including Time magazine of LSD pioneer Henry Luce. Time warns that "hallucinogens" are "taken for kicks by beatniks and hipsters" and are "mimicking the psychoses, the most crippling of mental illnesses". A dose of LSD, so small as to be almost invisible", can "destroy a man's mental equilibrium" and "throw an emotionally wobbly individual into a mental hospital." Maybe not entirely untrue, but at the same time this message of the media is extremely biased and a serious exaggeration. 151
Apart from just personal grievances, it appears that national security interests are worried that Leary and allies are trying to introduce the masses to LSD, instead of sticking to a small network of elites or a few isolated psychiatric patients. So much is clear from a May 1962 article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists in which Leary, Alpert, Hollingshead and Gunther Weil, almost in the same trolling fashion the media is using to ban psychedelics, are suggesting to add LSD to the water supply of major cities in an effort to "prepare" the American people for potential Soviet attack involving the use of psychedelic agents. 152 Yeah, they wish! It is largely in this period that pressure on the Leary group strongly increases. According to Kennedy mistress and top-level CIA wife Mary Pinchot Meyer, this pressure largely comes from the top of the CIA: men like Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, James Angleton and Frank Wisner. Leary later recounts Mary Meyer's words to him:
"Oh, you reckless Irishman. You got yourself in trouble again [with your article in the Journal of Atomic Scientists]. It's magnificent, these headlong cavalry charges of yours. Mais ce n'est pas la guerre." ... Publicity [is what you did wrong]. I told you they'd let you do anything you want as long as you kept it quiet. ... "You poor innocent thing. You have no idea what you've gotten into. ... It's time you learned more. The guys who run things - I mean the guys who really run things in Washington - are very interested in psychology, and drugs in particular. These people play hardball, Timothy. They want to use drugs for warfare, for espionage, for brainwashing, for control. ... Until very recently control of American consciousness was a simple matter for the guys in charge. The schools instilled docility. The radio and TV networks poured out conformity. ... "You may not know that dissident organizations in academia are also controlled. The CIA creates the radical journals and student organizations and runs them with deep-cover agents. ... [Your] IFIF plan [to set up international psychedelic training centers] was ingenious [but] they would have infiltrated every chapter [and] not [have] let CBS film you drugging people on a lovely Mexican beach. You could destroy both capitalism and socialism in one month with that sort of thing." 153 |
Leary's appointment at Harvard will run out on June 30, 1963, so the leadership of Harvard is not too bothered with trying to fire him. In early April, however, he decides to go "on leave" to Los Angeles without mentioning anything in advance. 154 As a result the university terminates his position and salary per April 30. 155
With the help of a snitch named Andrew Weil, Harvard is able to fire Alpert on May 27 for having provided psilocybin to an undergraduate student. It appears the Harvard leadership is taking this highly unusual measure after learning that although Alpert's appointment at the Center for Personality Research expires on June 30, he has been able to obtain a position at Harvard's School of Education into the next year. Alpert is fired from both positions. 156
Meanwhile, Ralph Metzner, who has just finished his Ph.D. at Harvard, leaves of his own free will at this point. Various professors and associates urge him to distance himself from Leary and Alpert, but he has taken too many psychedelics to have an interest in doing that.
The Andrew Weil angle on the Leary-Alpert firing
The firing of Leary and Alpert from Harvard is often portrayed as having been the result of an article in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper by Andrew Weil, a student at Harvard at the time who later became one of Harvard's psychedelic researchers. Early 2010 articles in the New York Times about Don Lattin's book The Harvard Psychedelic Club are a prime example of this. 157 Fact is, that the May 28, 1963 article of Andrew Weil 158 had nothing to do with the firing of Leary and Alpert. Leary was already gone and Alpert was cleaning out his office while this article was published. As the previous section makes clear, both men had been drawing the ire of various influential Harvard professors since at least May 1961.
What is true, however, is that Weil was the snitch that made it possible for Harvard to fire Alpert. As for the story here, Leary and Alpert had refused to take Weil and his dorm mate Ronnie Winston up in the psilocybin project, because they were undergraduates. Undergraduates were banned from these tests, so the hands of Leary and Alpert were tied. By Leary in particular, the students were given the recommendation to try and find their own source of psychedelics, but that was it. Subsequently, Weil in particular really did his best to obtain psilocybin. He even wrote to Aldous Huxley for advice. These efforts failed, but eventually he and Winston were able to obtain mescaline and started their own research circle at their dorm.
Things changed after Winston met Alpert again at a party and the two struck up a homosexual relationship, whether this involved sex or not. Alpert, who wouldn't openly admit to his homosexuality for another three decades, would invite Winston to lunch, fly him around in his private jet and... hand him psilocybin pills. Apparently Alpert, and possibly Winston, kept Weil away from these pills, so the "jilted lover" squealed to the leadership of Harvard university about the affair. The affair itself was not made public, but the fact that Alpert had provided Winston with psilocybin came to serve as the excuse to get rid of Alpert. A May 27, 1963 press release by Harvard president Nathan Pusay announced that Alpert was fired because he had "violated an agreement which he had entered into in November, 1961, not to involve undergraduates in his work with drugs." The next day, Weil wrote his devastating article about Leary and Alpert in the Harvard Crimson - once again without mentioning the homosexual affair between his dorm buddy and Alpert.
Arguably Alpert deserved to be fired. Some might say that his love affair with a student violated Harvard's ethical principles. Another argument might be that Alpert deserved to be fired, because he simply didn't do things very smart. By starting an affair with one of his undergraduate students and then giving this one student, against regulations, a drug his entire dorm is begging for, is just asking for problems. He wouldn't be the first person to do stupid things for love - or the first guy to do stupid things for sex - but when you roll the dice, you have to pay the price.
There's more though. In November 1963 Weil published a lengthy article in Look magazine about the situation at Harvard during the years Leary and Alpert were running their experiments with psychedelics here. It leaves one with the strong impression that the removal of Leary and Alpert from Harvard wasn't just about CIA mind controllers getting jealous, nor was it simply a case of a squealing "jilted lover". Points made in the article include:
- Mescaline and LSD sugar cubes were clandestinely traded at an ever increasing rate on the Harvard campus, to the point that the FDA started to take notice of the black market and preparing to do searches.
- Already in 1961 two Harvard undergraduates temporarily ended up in a mental hospital after either taking mescaline or psilocybin.
- Dr. Herbert Kelman complained about a growing "insider sect" of participants in the psilocybin projects who considered nonparticipants "square".
- Maybe for obvious reasons, Leary and Alpert refused to give up their personal stash of psilocybin pills to the University Health Services in order to make sure that the pills were only used during controlled experiments.
- Meanwhile, from October 1962 on Leary and Alpert were setting up their International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), with chapters in Mexico, Los Angeles and Boston. The chapters involved the creation of "multifamilial ... transcendental communities" where whole families were supposed to live in one large compound, seeking and experiencing the divine.
- There was criticism that the experiments of Leary and Alpert largely came down to "cocktail parties" where both subjects and observers were under the influence of psychedelics, with data being gathered in a highly unscientific manner. Leary and Alpert creatively countered with the claim that "no one was qualified to observe people under the influence of psilocybin unless he was in the same state." 159 [159]
It's kind of hilarious to read this criticism and the responses of Leary and Alpert, because all of it is so recognizable. People who take too many psychedelics will become thoroughly irrational to outsiders, unless they ignore the messages coming through. Obviously, a situation like this could not persist at Harvard. If you are the president of Harvard, what are you going to tell the parents of a student who is run over by a car while high on LSD? Or if some other kind of accident happens? Or if the student decides to "drop out" after using psychedelics? Even Weil said that he backed off of mescaline use, because he was worried that "any more of these insights might convince [me] that Harvard was a complete waste of time." 160
To summarize, it was probably inevitable that Leary, Alpert and Metzner left Harvard. It was a clash between the ultimate in rational thinking versus the ultimate in irrational thinking. Either Harvard was going to control psychedelics or psychedelics were going to take over Harvard and probably, in the end, stop it from being a university altogether.
It's important to note that there's something very odd about "Weil the Squeal" that makes one wonder to what extent the Harvard controversy was scripted. This will be discussed in a later chapter.
PART III: THE POST-HARVARD YEARS
From Harvard to "Mellon country" - Millbrook
As mentioned, by the time they are fired from Harvard in April and May 1963, Leary and Alpert, with the aid of Ralph Metzner, already are in the process of setting up the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) 161, a scheme to develop a network of national and international psychedelic training and retreat centers. Alan Watts is the symbolic head of IFIF. 162 Harvard professors Dr. George Litwin, with whom Leary took LSD for the first time, and Dr. Gunther Weil are other founding directors of IFIF, as is Dr. Huston Smith, the long-time chairman of MIT's philosophy department and a participant in the Harvard Psychedelic Project. 163 Their first project is in beautiful Zihuatanejo in southern Mexico, close to the Oaxaca mountains where Gordon Wasson found his magic mushrooms. No less than than 2,000 people apply for a spot. Leary, Alpert and Metzner select a first group of 35 participants who will pay $200 per month to live at the retreat and take LSD daily. The center will only be in operation for six weeks, from May 1 to June 16, 1963. Pressure of the FBI and CIA on the Mexican government results in a crackdown. Subsequently Leary & Co. try to restart the project in Dominica and Antigua, but this also fails, with the CIA warning Dominica that Leary's group is trying to establish "an alleged happiness hotel". 164
Luckily for the Leary group, establishment help comes just in time. In mid 1963 Richard Mellon "Billy" Hitchcock, a heir to the earlier-mentioned Mellon family 165 that played such an important role in keeping Leary friends as Joseph Campbell and Alan Watts afloat, offers them to live and continue their research at the giant 64-room Millbrook estate, just north of New York City. 166 Like Paul Mellon and the Rockefellers, the Hitchcock family belongs to the Pilgrims Society. 167 It also has similar ties to the OSS and CIA. 168
In Acid Dreams, Billy Mellon Hitchcock is described as the "black sheep" of the Mellon family. 169 That may have been so, but the book, considered an authority, doesn't mention the Bollingen Foundation of Paul Mellon that played such a crucial role in the life of Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell, alongside Laurance Rockefeller. That alone make one wonder if Paul Mellon didn't delegate or approve the Millbrook project to his much younger relative, who undoubtedly would have a much better time getting involved. As we'll see in the next section, Billy Mellon Hitchcock also did much more than just provide a home for the Leary gang.
What also shouldn't be overlooked is that Christopher Mellon, another great-grandson of William Lamar Mellon, Sr. besides Billy Mellon Hitchcock, in 2017 joined the board of Tom DeLonge's top-level but super-disinformative UFO disclosure group, the To The Stars Academy, literally launched two weeks before this article was finished. Similar to every other board member of the TTSA, Chris Mellon has deep intelligence connections. Looking at this information, as well as the Mellon family's similar involvement in the "alt right" movement through Richard Mellon Scaife, what are the chances that Billy Mellon Hitchcock solely supported the Leary group from the kindness of his heart? Maybe not too great. In fact, one of Tim Leary's later-life best friends would become UFO disclosure disinformer Carol Rosin, who also happens to have become involved with DeLonge. It's a small world after all.
Moving back to Millbrook, as soon as Michael Hollingshead hears about the new living quarters of the Leary clique at Millbrook, he abandons his Agora Scientific Trust in New York City, where he moved to early in 1963 when it became obvious that Leary, Alpert and Metzner wouldn't be able to continue their LSD work here.
At Millbrook the activities are incorporated under the Castalia Foundation, with Leary as president. The foundation, in effect, is useless, because it never receives tax-exempt status.
Birth of the hippie movement: LSD and rock music
With Millbrook as their new base of operations, the connections between all these early psychedelic researchers coalescing around Timothy Leary only intensify. It is in 1964, at Millbrook, that Leary, Alpert and Metzner write their classic book The Psychedelic Experience, which largely comes to serve as the bible for the hippie movement and other psychedelic enthusiasts in years to come. 170 An excerpt of the book reads:
"Experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, religious or aesthetic ecstaties, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc." 171 |
The book solidifies Leary's status in particular as the godfather of psychedelics and the emerging hippie movement.
In September 1965 the somewhat troublesome Hollingshead is send to London by Leary and Alpert with 5,000 doses of LSD and 300 copies of the Millbrook-produced book The Psychedelic Experience. In London he sets up his World Psychedelics Centre, paid for by "a generous friend". Individuals visiting lectures and LSD-laced parties include Victor Lowes, the number 2 man in Hugh Heffner's Playboy empire who also backed his Agora Scientific Trust in New York City; Julian and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, children of Pilgrims Society president and U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Lord David Ormsby-Gore; filmmaker Roman Polanski; the Dutchman Bart Hughes, "the high priest of the trepanation movement"; William Burroughs, Beatles member Paul McCartney, and many others we today have never heard of. "American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor, and political activist" Norman Mailer is also involved with Hollingshead's group in London. 172
So is Countess Amanda Feilding, the then girlfriend and later wife of Joey Mellen, a law graduate from Oxford who serves as the founding vice president of the World Psychedelics Centre. 173 Both are followers of the earlier-mentioned Bart Hughes - who made it to national Dutch television in 1965 - and similarly decide to drill holes in their brain (trepanning) in order to experience a permanently heightened state of well-being. 174 Feilding is well-known today in the psychedelics movement as the founder of the Beckley Foundation, which has its pro-psychedelics letters signed by elites as George Soros, George Shultz, Frank Carlucci and others, as well as Noam Chomsky.
The success of the World Psychedelics Centre is short-lived though and Leary's ideal of having the Centre organize a Beatles or Rolling Stones concert at the Royal Albert Hall laced with LSD never materializes. 175
This ideal had not at all been unrealistic. Certainly in the 1964-1967 period, while based at Millbrook, the Leary group is good friends with many of a new generation of world famous musicians. Examples are Jim Morrison of The Doors 176 [176], John Lennon, formerly of the Beatles 177; the far less famous Merry Pranksters of Ken Kesey 178, the Rolling Stones 179, Jimi Hendrix 180, Joan Baez 181, and especially The Grateful Dead. 182 Billy Mellon Hitchcock is actually financing the illegal LSD labs of Grateful Dead manager Rock Scully. During concerts this LSD is sold or freely distributed to the crowd 183, with Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts sometimes appearing on stage to deliver spiritual messages and protest the Vietnam War. 184 Another drug popular among members of The Grateful Dead that has not been mentioned yet is STP, which they prefer over the short-lasting and foul-smelling DMT. 185
Leary's psychedelic messages come to serve as an inspiration to The Moody Blues 186 and, in a different way maybe, The Who. 187 All of them, except The Who, are supporters of Leary. Around the time Hendrix is the big star at the legendary Woodstock '69 festival, the number one symbol of the hippie generation, he is supporting Leary in his political campaign for governor of California. So is John Lennon, who will write Leary's campaign song Come Together. Joan Baez also performs at Woodstock, along with The Grateful Dead and The Who. The Doors and The Moody Blues cancel their appearances at the last moment, something which certainly The Doors come to regret. Basically the only big names at Woodstock not directly associated with Leary are Janis Joplin and Creedence Clearwater. That is, as far as I have been able to piece things together.
The influence of Reverend Tim in music circles extends to this day through Katy Perry, whose father was a friend of Leary and whose mother dated Jimi Hendrix. 188 Coincidentally, Perry's husband for a while, comedian and former heroin addict Russell Brand, has been a prominent and tireless advocate of "let love rule" policies and Soros-style drug legalization programs. He also behaves very strangely during immigration debates. For example, during a November 12, 2014 debate on the BBC's Question Time with the Euroskeptic, anti-immigration Nigel Farage, Brand really played with people's emotions. When he gives a reply to Farage, he starts out with a look of utter disgust and then starts to make emotional appeals for the poor and disabled:
| "I sometimes almost feel worried about you, Nigel Farage. The reason I feel worried is because a lot of people feel worried in our country .... afraid .. and frustrated. There's a corrupt group in our country using our resources, taking away our jobs, taking away our housing, not paying taxes, exploiting us. And there is. There is an economic elite that this man's party is funded by... There was an economic crash... Farage is pointing at immigrants and the disabled and holding his nose. Immigrants are not causing the economic problems and suffering that we are experiencing. ... He is a poundshop Enoch Powell and we ought to watch him. ... "[We've seen] cuts against the poorest among us, the disabled, people that we need to be looking after. We need to close tax loopholes that are exploited by big corporations." |
Granted, Farage should have focused on Third World immigrant crime statistics, but Brand is behaving here like a dirty, globalist politician of the "liberal CIA" "new left" persuasion. And with behavior like this, on BBC prime time no less, it's getting increasingly hard to believe he is an independent force. It's all just show between extremist liberal and extremist conservative forces.
Moving on, besides Woodstock, a second very powerful symbol of the hippie days that is tied to the Leary group and their message, is the psychedelically-painted bus that Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters are driving cross-country in the mid to late 1960s, "going from acid test to acid test". The Grateful Dead, at this point still known as The Warlocks, perform at such an acid test for the first time in December 1965 - and grow closer Kesey's group. 189
Death of the hippie movement, strange Weathermen, and Leary's great escape
The psychedelic Dark Ages set in at the end of the summer of 1966. The Leary group sees it coming and in September 1966 promptly sets up the League for Spiritual Discovery, a quasi religious group with Leary as a highly entertaining high priest that travels college campuses around the country to protest the upcoming ban of LSD. The opening show in New York City makes it to Time magazine, where it is summarized as "religioso gimmicks, weirdo music, sexo fantasy, all boffo." It's during the existence of the League for Spiritual Discovery in the 1966-1968 period that Leary's mantra, "Tune in, turn on, drop out," can be heard everywhere. 190
None of it matters. In early October 1966 LSD is banned in California. Great Britain, where Hollingshead is in prison over drug charges with his World Psychedelic Centre shut down, bans the substance at the exact same time. That same year, on the other side of the United States, a fanatical assistant district attorney general named G. Gordon Liddy comes to Poughkeepsie and starts doing what he can to shut down the Millbrook mansion of Leary & Co. with frequent stake-outs and raids. 191 He succeeds in this in 1967. As Leary later admits, Liddy "did indeed run us out of the county." The raids were only partially effective though, because Leary also admitted to have received a tip before a major raid of Liddy, allowing the group to get rid of incriminating substances. 192
As the situation at Millbrook is breaking down, Richard Alpert travels to India to become the Hindu guru Ram Dass. Ralph Metzner goes to New York to write a book about consciousness. Leary, meanwhile, is trying to rid himself of legal trouble over a marijuana arrest. 193
One of the last spasms of the psychedelics movement is the January 1967 Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs conference, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). Ironically, the HEW is a 1954 creation of Nelson Rockefeller, who has also been briefed on the fact that its NIMH is used as an occasional conduit for CIA MKULTRA research. More relevant maybe, Richard Evans Schultes and Andrew Weil of Harvard, Alexander Shulgin of UCLA and LSD inventor Gordon Wasson are among the speakers. The purpose of the conference is to share knowledge about psychedelics, including any medicinal value, with the idea being to hold follow-up conferences in the future. With the emerging "War on Drugs", nothing will come of it.
LSD is banned nationally in October 1968, while LBJ is still in office. In 1970, under Nixon, LSD becomes a Schedule I drug, reserved for "habit-forming" substances with no known medical value. Apparently all the studies revealing that LSD can help patients open up about their issues or overcome alcohol addiction have been tossed into the garbage can.
Already in March 1966, Leary is sentenced to 30 years in prison, a $30,000 fine, and forced psychiatric treatment for the possession of less than 1 gram of marijuana that he was caught with on December 22, 1965 while crossing the Mexican border. 194 Leary appeals, remains out of prison, appears on television shows, runs for governor of California with support from major musicians, and finally has his sentence overturned in 1969 on grounds that it is unconstitutional. 195 Unfortunately for Leary, by that time he had been arrested a second time for marijuana possession - also less than a gram - in December 1968. Leary claims the marijuana was planted on him, but no matter, in January 1970, with Nixon in office, he is thrown into prison for "six months to 10 years". 196 With LSD fully banned from the United States at this point, Nixon in office and the Vietnam War continuing to deteriorate, the psychedelic Dark Ages have set in completely. The only choice for U.S. soldiers in Vietnam at this point is heroin.
Incredibly, because Leary himself has designed the justice system's psychological tests, he is able to manipulate the system and manages to be send to a minimum-security prison to work as a gardener. If that's not enough, he manages to escape prison in September 1970 with the help of the student terrorist organization, the Weathermen Underground, which operates in much the same manner as Germany's Rote Armee Fraktion. Reportedly Leary's Brotherhood of Eternal Love paid $25,000 to the Weathermen to facilitate the escape.
According to Leary, these dealings went through his lawyer at the time, Michael J. Kennedy. 197 That statement does make sense: other clients of Kennedy included key Weathermen operatives Bill Ayers (a later close friend of Barack Obama; his stepson, Chesa Boudin, became a Rhodes Scholar and translator for the anti-US Hugo Chavez) and wife Bernadine Dohrn, Black Panther Party founders, Native American protesters, Jack Scott, someone who sheltered the mind-controlled Patty Hearst and two members of her Symbionese Liberation Army; and the mafia chief John Gottie, Sr. 198 A lawyer like that strongly reminds me personally of Dutch lawyers as Pieter Bakker Schut, Adele van der Plas, and Britta Bohler who always represented key terrorists (including the Rote Armee Fraktion), mob bosses, and environmental activists, including those who assassinate state leaders (i.e. Volkert van der Graaf, who killed Dutch prime minister-to-be Pim Fortuyn). These lawyers were or are intimately part of the "liberal CIA" disinformation circus. Adele van der Plas, in fact, has deep ties to the psychedelics movement, ayahuasca in particular. That also makes one wonder about the real purpose of a lawyer as Michael Kennedy.
Actually, the Weathermen themselves also have "liberal CIA" written all over them, something that has became all too clear since Weatherman Bill Ayers' close connection to President Obama since the 1990s in the Rockefeller-linked NGO circuit. The Soros-linked Wade Rathke also used to be a Weatherman, while first-rate "liberal CIA" (and Mossad) asset Greg Palast, another pillar of the independent free speech, at one point was "advised" to go to the University of Chicago to basically subvert the right "from within". And let's not even mention that during the first half of the 1970s in California, Palast received poetry lessons of Allen Ginsberg, the veteran psychedelics guru close to Timothy Leary, Oscar Janiger, Aldous Huxley's widow and all the rest. Ginsberg actually is the one who told Palast he would make a great journalist and with that changed Palast's career perspectives. Fascinating, a top Mossad and later "liberal CIA" asset had his career determined by a suspected "liberal CIA" psychedelic guru and Weathermen operative. At one point do these coincidences stop? For details, follow the link to Palast's page here on ISGP.
In any case, the Weathermen arrange everything for Leary's escape from the United States: "getaway cars, safe houses, false passports, plane tickets." Bill Ayers and wife Bernardine Dohrn are directly involved. The latter shaves Tim's head to disguise him, before they take him out to "drop acid and see the Woodstock movie." 199 Immediately after, the Weathermen smuggle Leary to Algeria in North Africa, where he stays with the "government in exile" of the Black Panther Party, an ally of the anti-"racist" and anti-"imperialist" Weathermen. It gets crazier. Leary is dragged along the Middle East with the Black Panthers and appears in Beirut, Lebanon in October 1970, flanked by Jennifer Dohrn, the sister of Weathermen soldier Bernadine Dohrn and herself head of the Black Panther Defense Fund. Jennifer is quoted to the press as saying that Leary is helping the Panthers with their struggle against "those imperialist bandit pigs" in the United States. The Black Panthers are huge fans of the Palestinians, who at that point are waging a war not just against Israel, but also against Jordan. They are looking to make contact with Al Fatah and Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan. 200 In addition, Black Panther head Eldridge Cleaver has been visiting hardcore communist enemies of the United States as North Vietnam and North Korea. 201 Why on Earth would Leary get himself involved with these type of extremist activities? What they certainly reek of is "liberal CIA", which has always been strongly anti-Israel and pro-Palestine.
Unsurprisingly, Leary quickly figures that the Algerian Black Panthers are more or less a criminal group. The Panther leadership certainly dislikes his open use of psychedelics. They fear it can lead to an increase in CIA and FBI sabotage operations against their government-in-exile in Algeria. Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver even detains Leary at gunpoint over the issue for a few days in January 1971. 202
His less-than-stellar experiences in Algeria, soon prompts Leary to quite literally escape to Switzerland, along with this wife Rosemary. 203 Here they live with an arms dealer for a while. On September 3, 1971 Leary has a lengthy meeting here with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss inventor of LSD. Hofmann takes the traditional stance that LSD shouldn't have been disseminated so widely to the masses, especially the youths; Leary disagrees. The men nonetheless have great respect for each other and, somewhat by chance, have another lengthy meeting in February 1972. By the time of this last meeting, Leary has separated from his wife Rosemary and is accompanied by the elite socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, with whom he has a relationship. 204 Constant pressure from the U.S. government forces Leary, accompanied by Harcourt-Smith, to flee to Afghanistan in December 1972. Unfortunately and unexpectedly, the Afghani authorities extradite Leary back to the U.S.
Back in a U.S. prison, Leary is put into solitary confinement for six months. By this time Nixon is referring to Leary as "the most dangerous man in the world" 205, a statement Leary came to consider his "Nobel Prize", "bumper stick" and "trophy on the wall." 206 It certainly is a bizarre statement, but maybe for Nixon personally not completely untrue. After all, Leary and his cohorts were leaders of the anti-Vietnam War movement. Although none were happy with Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey back in 1968, Nixon was considered by far the greatest evil - and they actively campaigned against him. Leary was primarily supportive of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. The first stood no chance and the latter was assassinated in June 1968, an event about which Leary remarked, "Then the good old boys regained their footing [as] Hubert Humphrey [was] sticking with the war faction of the Democratic Party..." 207
Luckily for Leary, he is jailed in California. California governor Jerry Brown happens to have an excellent relationship with members of the Leary group. In April 1976, during the Ford presidency, Brown pardons him from jail. Brown shows up everywhere in the Leary & Co. saga and even interviewed Leary on his radio show in 1995. The radio station in question? Leary's "favorite", WBAI 208, owned by "liberal CIA" media outlet Pacifica Radio with its long history of Ford Foundation backing and also where Alan Watts had his long-time radio show.
The total of 4 years and 2 months that he spents in prison - from January to September 1970 and again from December 1972 to April 1976 - Leary mainly uses to write books.
Leary and friends in later decades
Watergate remains a curious affair: a) the manner in which the burglars were catched by putting tape on doors locks a guard had previously removed; and b) the CIA under Richard Helms refusing to stop the FBI's probe into the affair, with the FBI simultaneously "deep throating" to the Washington Post, in turn owned by top CIA assets close to Richard Helms personally? Definitely curious.
From the time he leaves prison in 1976, Leary's life becomes a little less eventful. It's far from boring though. In 1983, the same year he publishes his main biography Flashbacks, Leary goes on a speaking tour at college campuses with G. Gordon Liddy, the extremist, ultra-right mastermind behind the Watergate break-in. Their debates are recorded on the video Return Engagement. The two become "long-time pals" and certainly until 1989 meet up on occasion for debates. 209 As mentioned, Liddy actually is very familiar to the Leary group since the 1966-1967 period when he regularly staked out and raided the Millbrook mansion as a New York state associate district attorney. 210 Soon after Liddy was hired as the key dirty tricks expert of the Nixon administration, the mortal enemy of Leary.
Over the years, Leary gives plenty of other speeches, including a 20th anniversary Harvard reunion speech with Richard Alpert on April 23, 1983 to commemorate their joint firing from Harvard. On October 1, 1988 Leary is present at a party at John Lilly's house to celebrate the opening of the Albert Hofmann Foundation. A reception is organized the next day at the St. Johns Club in Los Angeles, where Leary is also present. 211 Many major psychedelic researchers, including Albert Hofmann and Oscar Janiger, are present at the founding, with countless others involved in meetings over the years.
In 1988 Leary also organizes a fundraiser for congressman Ron Paul 212, about the only dovish John Bircher in existence. In 1984 Paul was instated as the initial chairman of the Citizens for a Sound Economy, founded by the Koch brothers. He would go on to run quite impressive presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 that were massively supported by people of the alt-left and alt-right. We have to be honest though: based on the relations he keeps with Alex Jones and the like, Ron Paul almost certainly never was a totally independent player. He's also unrealistically extreme with his fiscal and anti-"imperialism" policies.
What probably worries me the most about Leary's final days - quite literally - is that "longtime friend" Carol Rosin was taking care of him at his death bed. 213 Rosin is intimately part of Steven Greer's extremely disinformative Disclosure Project and has also served on the board of the Institute for Cooperation in Space with super-disinformer Alfred Webre and Rockefeller favorites Daniel Sheehan and Dr. Edgar Mitchell, both also involved in the Disclosure Project.
Speaking of death beds, as early as 1983, Timothy Leary paid $300 per year to the Alcor Life Extension Foundation to have his head frozen in the hope of being "reanimated" in the future. 214 The foundation exists to this day, with the prominent involvement of the libertarian billionaire Bilderberg steering committee member Peter Thiel, eccentric scientist Aubrey de Grey, and (Coast to Coast AM-invited) futurist Ray Kurzweil.
PART IV: QUESTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY
That "communal living" thing
We have to go back in time to the early 1960s to discuss one final aspect of the hippie movement: the question of technology.
One of the frequent passengers of the psychedelically-painted bus of the Merry Pranksters is a certain Stewart Brand. 215 After helping to organize light shows for The Grateful Dead in 1966, he becomes one of the top leaders of the "living communally" movement, this with the 1968 founding of his Whole Earth Catalog. The purpose of this movement - somewhat Unabomber style - is to "reinvent civilization" by going "back to basics". Goat farming, manuals on how to build wood cabins, and soon also the first solar panels become important aspects of this community. 216 The whole community is inspired by Leary's mantra, "Tune in, turn on, drop out." Ironically, one of the persons Brand explains to pay particular attention to is Marshall McLuhan 217, a 1969 Bilderberg invitee.
In 1967 Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and Phil Snyder hold a "boathouse summit" during which they, in effect, discuss the founding principles of Brand's Whole Earth Catalog:
LEARY: Well, let me explain... You have to drop out of the group, out of the small tribal group. ... Millbrook, by the way, is a tribal community. ... We're working out our way of import and export with the planet. We see ourselves as a tribe of mutants, like all the little tribes the Indians were. We have our little area there and we have to come to terms with the white man around us. ... My historical reading of the situation is that the great monolithic societies that developed in history - Rome, Turkey, so forth - and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and the minority groups, drop out and go back to a tribal form. And I agree with what I heard you say in the past, Gary, that the basic unit is tribal. And what I envision is that thousands of small groups throughout the United States, western Europe, and eventually the world dropping out. What happened when Rome fell? What happened when Jerusalem fell? Little groups of all kinds of little societies [formed]... What are we building? Well, I'm making the prediction that thousands of groups will just look around at the fake propped up American society and just open one of those doors. And when you open any of those doors it will lead you out into the Garden of Eden, which is this planet. And then you'll find yourself a little tribe, wondering around. As soon as enough people do this, if enough young people do this, it will bring about an incredible change in the consciousness of the country and of the western world. ... We need to get to people's consciousness. We got to get people to realize what they're doing to the earth. WATTS: I think that the genius is that it has no leadership. The western world has labored for many many centuries under a menarchial conception of the universe where God is the boss and political systems and all kinds of laws have been based on this model of the universe, that nature is run by a boss. ... What we need to realize is that there is a possibility of a movement, a stirring, among the people which can be organically designed instead of politically designed. It has no boss and let all the parts recognize each other in the same way that the cells of the body all cooperate together. [UNKNOWN:] A new social structure. [WATTS:] Exactly. ... Gary [Snyder], I think you have something to say here, because you, to me, are one of the most fantastically capable drop out people I have ever met. I think that at this point you should say a word or two about your own experience on how to live on nothing. ... During the time you were living this way, I visited you on occasion and you had a little hut way up on the hill side on Homestead Valley, on Mill Valley, and I want to say for the record, this was one of the most beautiful pads I ever saw. SNYDER: What it meant was cutting down on your desires, cutting down on your needs to an absolute minimum, and it also meant don't be a bit fussy about how you work or what you do for a living. ... I had it worked out with some of the guards down on the docks that they would gather [for me] 15-25 pounds of [spilled] rice and also tea. ... We used to go around at one or two in the morning ... at Berkeley with a shopping bag and hit the garbage cans out in the back. And we'd get Chinese cabbage, broccoli, lots of broccoli, and artichokes, because they thought they didn't look soluble anymore. So I never bought any vegetables for the three years I was a student at Berkeley. And when I ate meat, it was usually meat from the pet store. They don't have a law that permits them from selling it for human consumption in California, like they do in Oregon. 218 |
Ideas can't get more hippie than this: self-made wood cabins, begging for free food, voluntarily eating from garbage cans, no leadership in society whatsoever, people freely roaming the Earth in complete peace. Leary is actually challenged during the meeting, mainly about the fact that he himself hasn't dropped out of society at all, as he is still providing for himself and Millbrook by giving lectures. For someone who is supposed to be so gifted with words, Leary is not really able to refute this contradiction with particularly strong arguments. And did Rome really fall because the "the young, the creative, and the minority groups drop[ped] out"? Has anybody heard this theory before? It's usually argued that dwindling mineral resources and corruption, followed by brutal invasions of Leary's beloved "dropped out" tribes, resulted in the end of the Roman Empire.
Possibly even more important maybe is the question how a "communal society" as proposed by Watts and Leary can survive without protecting itself from other civilizations, or from criminals and gangs within its own community? And that is just where the questions begin with the survivability of the kind of society proposed here.
Basically, "living communally" in the modern world is only possible within the confines of a modern, organized society with a powerful security apparatus and a strong, healthy economy that is able to protect its citizens from criminals and foreign invaders. Darwinist science and roughly 10,000 years of modern human history appear to have demonstrated that. This means that only a portion of any modern civilization can experiment with such a way of life.
From psychedelics to Silicon Valley virtual reality technology
Despite him playing a key role in setting up the "communal living" movement, Timothy Leary always was a technology enthusiast. He and many other friends, including Stewart Brand, were studying Buckminster Fuller since the 1960s. Fuller was an architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. He published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms as "Spaceship Earth", "ephemeralization", and "synergetic". Fuller was even involved in the Esalen Institute network with countless psychedelic researchers. His Buckminster Fuller Institute is listed in ISGP "liberal CIA" index due to its countless bizarre security state and Rockefeller ties.
In another, later example, in Leary's 1983 video Return Engagement, a clip is included in which he talks to a host about computer chips getting faster and cheaper every year and how he wants to create software to enhance IQ. By this time Leary has even changed his age-old mantra to, "Tune in, turn on, take over." So instead of the younger generations "dropping out", by this time Leary thinks they should take over and push society into the direction they want to see. Most people would probably look at this as an improvement.
In 1990, while on a quest looking for Japanese youths interested in virtual reality, Leary met the then 24-year-old Joi Ito, with whom he developed a close friendship. Despite being 70-years-old, Ito gave him a tour through Japanese nightlife, including the rave scene. Leary managed just fine between all the youngsters. Eventually Leary adopted Ito as his godson and introduced him to California's leading tech enthusiasts and cyberculture anarchists, including Stewart Brand and apparently John Perry Barlow. Because of these connections Ito went on to become a major "liberal CIA" asset. 219 For that reason he was already included in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article a year ago:
| "Born in Japan. Godson of psychedelics guru Timothy Leary. Met Pierre Omidyar (later of eBay and a key philanthropist [and a top "liberal CIA" asset]) as a computer science major at Tufts. Joined the Mozilla Foundation in August 2005. Also a board member of [decades-long Trilateral Commission company] Sony, the New York Times Company, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the MIT Media Lab." |
Ito was appointed to the board of the MIT Media Lab and other major positions despite being the ultimate "drop out": from Tufts, the University of Chicago and Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. MIT Media Lab founder and Wired magazine and TED conferences co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, also the younger brother of notorious, intelligence connected superclass member Nicholas Negroponte, is the one who personally hired Ito to MIT's Media Lab in 2011. 220 Like Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant, Negroponte goes back as well to The Well / the Whole Earth Catalog, where he was one of the contributing authors. 221
Leary has hardly been the only person among his psychedelics group to develop a fascination with technology. One old psychedelic partner-in-crime from Harvard and the short-lived International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), Gunther Weil, in 2012 was hired to the MIT Media Lab by Joi Ito 222, the Leary godson who had just been hired by Nicholas Negroponte. Little is known about a direct connection between Negroponte and Leary. Both contributed chapters to the 1990 book The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, had similar interests, and moved in the exact same The Well and Silicon Valley circles. The additional Joi Ito, Gunther Weil and Stewart Brand ties do indicate that Leary and Negroponte knew each other to an extent.
An even more important partner-in-crime of Leary, Richard Alpert, became involved in the Seva Foundation with Apple founder and LSD enthusiast Steve Jobs (early funding for Apple came from Laurance Rockefeller 223 and Dr. Larry Brilliant, who later headed Google's philanthropic arm and the Skoll Global Threats Fund, named after Jeff Skoll, a key player in eBay. This once again ties back to Joi Ito, who met the future eBay founder Pierre Omidyar already in the mid 1980s, years before encountering Timothy Leary. Larry Brilliant actually was a co-founder of The Well, the continuation of The Whole Earth Catalog, with Stewart Brand. Remember how the World Earth Catalog and The Well were all about "communal living" and the technologies needed for that.
Another interesting example is John Perry Barlow, The Grateful Dead lyricist who in the 1960s was deeply involved with the Leary group at the Millbrook estate, along with others of The Grateful Dead crew, later Bohemian Grove visitor Bob Weir in particular. 224 Where to even begin with Barlow? Let's see:
- In the late 1970s Barlow was double dating with John F. Kennedy, Jr., son of the assassinated President Kennedy.
- In 1986 Barlow joined Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, and Nicholas Negroponte's The Well online community as a director. 225
- In 1990 Barlow was one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit watchdog against government encroachment on online personal liberties and fair use, today more relevant than ever. The group has been partially financed by Rockefeller Brothers Fund and is partnered with eBay's Omidyar Network. Stewart Brand later joined the EFF. A co-founder of the EFF was Mitch Kapor, at the time one of the long-time directors of the Earth Day Network, together with Laurance Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Al Gore and special counsel Ralph Nader.
- In 1992 Barlow was contacted by Robert Steele, a CIA asset and Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) member who later played an important role in managing Occupy Wall Street, became a presidential candidate for Ross Perot's Reform Party (Perot is linked to CIA through his involvement in OSS Society parties), and remains active in the alternative conspiracy movement though his Public Intelligence blog (phibetaiota.net) and Earth Intelligence Network (earth-intelligence.net).
- In 2012 Barlow co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), together with Daniel Ellsberg, who brought out the Pentagon Papers; a co-founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network (of Wikileaks fame), and Edward Snowden's group of journalists. Edward Snowden himself later joined the board of the FPF. The FPF provides funding to Wikileaks and itself is financed by the Foundation for National Progress (FNP), the publisher of the decades old left-wing Mother Jones magazine. The FNP is financed by George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the MacArthur Foundation, and has also received at least one minor grant in recent years from Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
- Anno 2017 Barlow sits on the advisory board of the Courage Foundation with Julian Assange boyfriend and PETA activist Pamela Anderson, NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake, Pentagon Papers pusher Daniel Ellsberg, John Kiriakou, the CIA veteran who disclosed the CIA's use of waterboarding; girls from Pussy Riot and the bizarre 9/11 no-plane promoting MI5 "whistleblower" Annie Machon.
- Barlow has appeared in interviews with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.
Anyone noticing a trend here? Psychedelic pioneers and "communal living" promoters turning into tech-savvy champions of online free speech, even serving as a support network for Wikileaks and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden? As usual, there's the Rockefeller and other elite backing in the background. In addition, The Well's Larry Brilliant known to given a public talk session with Dr. Richard Rockefeller, the psychedelics researcher who happens to be the son of David Rockefeller.
Another interesting fact is that The Well, ran by all these men surrounding Stewart Brand, initiated the first Hackers Conference in 1984 and continued to organize such annual conferences since 1986. It provides us with additional perspective on the rise of the Anonymous hacking group in 2011, in support of Occupy Wall Street and Wikileaks. Similar to other, later groups supporting Edward Snowden, certainly the latter two groups have received backing from the "liberal CIA" foundation network: Rockefeller, Soros, Tides, Omidyar, Google, etc. There's nothing independent about these allegedly "progressive" youthful "take over" groups. The Tides Foundation even counted/counts a prominent Bronfman, the same family also involved in the Esalen Institute at the highest levels through a certain Ira Einhorn and today, through Matthew Bronfman, in the Uniao do Vegetal ayahuasca cult and the World Ayahuasca Conferences. The same interests are active behind the scenes, always.
Similarly interesting is the fact that Kevin Kelly, the founding senior editor of Wired magazine from 1993 to 1999, continuing as a "maverick" editor since then. Kelly had been Stewart Brand's point man at the Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, The Well and the Hackers Conference since 1983. A key founder of Wired was Nicholas Negroponte of The Well and the first TED Conference, both of Stewart Brand, so we can safely say that the founder of the MIT Media Lab - Mr. Negroponte - has been a key ally of Brand for a very long time. Kelly has actually provided a poignant explanation of the apparent link between psychedelics and computer technology and Brand's key role in it:
| "Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of 'Wired' magazine, credits Brand with finally turning hippies on to the computer, showing it to be another human-scale tool, a better means than drugs to human augmentation and expanded consciousness. "Stewart brought together personal enlightenment and the personal computer," Kelly says. "Today, the Bay Area [of Silicon Valley] is all about the fusion of those two things. What seemed so contradictory in the Sixties is now so obviously complementary." 226 |
Kelly and a number of associates made a similar case in a variety of other articles, all of them coming down to the idea that psychedelics make you "drop out" of society and live communally without any need for technology. When that turned out not to be such a good idea - shocker - the hippies went looking for something "better" than psychedelics. Kelly:
| "We believed there was no hope without dope but we were wrong. ... [Drugs] didn't get any better, whereas computers never stopped getting better." 227 |
These explanations pretty much from the horse's mouth, immediately explains why I was never able to grasp what psychedelics and computer technology had to do with each other. I watched the documentary The Net about the Unabomber and I just couldn't get it. Even while writing this whole section, I still couldn't wrap my head around the idea of psychedelics and computer technology somehow having an important relationship to each other. I was only intending to describe this strange evolution and the Unabomber's peculiar role it. Then I run across the above "explanation" and it finally sinks in: the so-called "evolution" from psychedelics to computer technology, including the much-touted "virtual reality" revolution, is based on an atheist-promoting lie.
Why? Because the comparison only goes up when you interpret psychedelics as "drugs" and "hallucinogens" only good for "tuning out", "escaping", "adventure-seeking", and something you do "for kicks". In other words, when you take the stance that the messages and impressions you get while under the influence of psychedelics are little more "virtual reality" illusions. At that point you can look at computer-generated 3D virtual reality and claim that it is "superior" to psychedelics, or one day will be superior to psychedelics. Similarly, if you don't take psychedelic experiences seriously, it's possible to make the claim that computer programming languages generating virtual realities offer similar and even superior "philosophical" perspectives on the nature of reality.
As bizarre as it is for me to wrap my head around, this is actually the perspective mainstream psychology, science and psychology take. Talk about psychedelics and just about any layman or "expert" will give you a worrying look followed by questions surrounding "addiction symptoms" and the type of "hallucinations" that came up. People are so inexperienced with and uneducated about psychedelics that they just have no clue what they are about. In reality, psychedelics appear to provide enormous practical insights into the true nature of reality, complete with advice on how to best navigate this apparently extremely malleable 3D reality. While it does provide potentially very important philosophical insights into the nature of reality, computer-generated virtual reality is mainly just for entertainment while computer technology in general is ideal to make our lives easier and more entertaining.
And for that matter, in all my hundreds and hundreds of hours in very deep psychedelic sessions, I've never gotten the message that I should "drop out" of society or "take over" society. Everything simply comes down to taking responsibility for your life and to put love above anything else. Computer technology is completely irrelevant to psychedelic trips. It's just something we dreamed into existence to make our lives more fun and comfortable, but it could just as well have been something else. It's comparing apples to toe nail clippings - there's no relationship. Of course I can conjure up depressing images of a suspended brain connected to a virtual reality computer program, but even that shouldn't be able to replace the soul.
We can see more evidence of this "atheist conspiracy" surrounding psychedelics by looking at the other, more recent endeavors of Stewart Brand besides anti-domestic spying activism. In 1984 Brand was key founder of the first TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference, together with the earlier-discussed Nicholas Negroponte and Steve Jobs. Today these conferences feature all the most cutting edge, prominent scientists and authors related to the internet, the brains, cancer, genes, psychology, philosophy - you name it.
The TED conferences are a Rockefeller product these days. The owner and curator since 2001 has been the British Chris Anderson, who is married to Jacqueline Novogratz, a globalist of some reown. Novogratz came out of the Rockefeller's Chase Menhatten Bank, went on to direct programs at the Rockefeller Foundation, and more recently can or could be found at secretary of state Hillary Clinton's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, the CFR, the World Economic Forum (Davos), the Clinton Global Initiative, the Aspen Institute and other NGOs.
This Rockefeller tie-in, immediately begins to explain a number of peculiarities about the TED Talks. First, the TED Talks are super well-known, yet extremely expensive - and therefore elite - to attend. The annual membership fee in 2007 was $6,000. Second, professional rent-a-skeptics, over the line all hardcore atheists, are extremely well represented within the TED conferences.
Third, the only alternative TED talkers and guests to the overlapping Edge Foundation Billionaires Dinners have been Coast to Coast AM national security trolls Rupert Sheldrake, Deepak Chopra and Dean Ornish. Atlantis-pusher Graham Hancock is the fourth such individual invited to speak at a local Ted Talk and caused huge online controversy over his subsequent banning, paving the way for more managed, fake debate. Granted, there do not exist any truly independent speakers along these lines, but strong rent-a-skeptic presence combined with their Coast to Coast AM nemeses is suspicious at the very least.
One should also keep in mind - apart from the Rockefeller influence on the TEd Talks owner - that at the annual Edge Foundation Billionaires' Dinners, top executives of YouTube, Google, Microsoft, eBay and Amazon are all represented. These dinners are held during the annual TED conferences. The key founder here is John Brockman, a close friend of Stewart Brand since the late 1960s. Together they largely build this whole Silicon Valley PR network. First through the Reality Club in the 1981-1986 and then, from 1988, through the Edge Foundation and TED Conferences. The Edge Foundation essentially serves as the backbone of the conferences. It is a literary agency focused on the promotion of sciences as genetics, physics, mathematics, psychology, evolutionary biology, philosophy and computer technology. Almost all of the 700 past and present Edge Foundation clients have been affiliated with major universities and promoted by major media outlets. They speak at the TED Conferences and some get to hang out with the Silicon Valley and other media elites at the annual Billionaires' Dinners.
In between all of his activities, Brand, from 1989 to 2004, served as a trustee of the science-oriented Santa Fe Institute. Similar to the Billionaires' Dinners, it has been a favorite of Pierre Omidyar and convicted billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
It all makes you wonder: how on Earth did an LSD hippie on Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus as Stewart Brand become such a Silicon Valley elitist? Turns out, Brand had an elite upbringing, not unlike so many other supposed "grass roots" psychedelic researchers. Before attending Stanford, Brand went to the super-elite New Hampshire prep school Phillips Exeter Academy. Looking at a basic Wikipedia list of alumnus, we see that Brand graduated in 1956, one year after future Senator Jay Rockefeller, the son of Nelson Rockefeller; and the same year as H.J. Heinz III and John Negroponte. Considering Brand's close association with John's brother, Nicholas, in the 1980s and on, that's an unbelievable coincidence. As for H.J. Heinz III, he was the son of Skull & Bones member, Pilgrims Society member, Bilderberg co-founder and close David Rockefeller friend H.J. Heinz II, another stunning coincidence considering all the Rockefeller ties already discussed in this article. Theodore Stebbins, who ended up becoming an advisor to the Henry Luce Foundation and the Whitney Museum of American Art (both tightly locked into the Pilgrims Society network), was Heinz's roommate at Exeter. Elitist future CIA covert operations veteran J. Vinton Lawrence also graduated in 1956. Lawrence and his wife later became deeply involved in liberal CIA outlets as NPR, The New Republic and the Washington Post. David Rockefeller, Jr., the son of David Rockefeller, graduated Exeter in 1959. Future Edge Foundation, TED speaker, and professional rent-a-skeptic Daniel Dennett also graduated in 1959. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg went there as well before attending Harvard, immediately explaining the hardcore pro-Third World immigration stance of this Silicon Valley kingpin.
These connections are quite bizarre and it certainly explains Brand's later rise in Silicon Valley through the Esalen Institute and the Whole Earth Catalog. What are the chances that Brand never was a CIA agent, handled by liberal elites with a direct line to successive CIA directors? As discussed in detail in ISGP's Pilgrims Society article? It just makes no sense to assume that Brand was an independent player all these years. Most likely he was groomed from birth by the CIA and liberal superclass for one or more purposes. It really begins to look as if Brand and associates have been involved in an endless stream of MKULTRA-style socio-psychological experiments, the results to be used to run ever more complex controlled opposition networks.
The Unabomber, Harvard and questions of MKULTRA
Some of the ties unearthed in the previous section are so stunning by themselves, that it's easy to lose track of why these psychedelics-versus-technology chapters were written in the first place: Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. First, let's recap who exactly the Unabomber was.
From 1978 to 1995 the Unabomber carried out 16 mail order bombings to individuals who represented some kind of modern technology, mainly airliners, engineering, computers and genetics. In 1979 Kaczynski even tried to bring down an airliner with 72 people on board, a plot that failed due to a faulty timer. In 1985 a first victim died as a result of one of his bombs. Kaczynski's last two bombings in 1994 and 1995 also were lethal. Various other victims over the years were severely maimed. Kaczynski was only caught after he forced the New York Times and the Washington Post to publish his manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, promising to cease any further attacks if one of the two would do so. Soon after the September 19, 1995 publication he was caught, however, because his sister and brother recognized his writing style.
There's more to the story. In the 1958-1962 period, from age 16 to 20, Ted Kaczynski, the future Unabomber, studied mathematics at Harvard. During this time period he and 21 other undergraduates were subjected to "abusive" stress tests designed by Henry A. Murray, the head of the Harvard Psychiatric Clinic. The study lasted for three years, from early 1959 to 1962, and was named Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men. It should be clear why Kaczynski, a (vulnerable) 16-year-old child prodigy with an IQ of 167, was considered an important candidate. Apparently Murray was desperate to get him on board, because, according to Kaczynski's own words, he had been "pressured into participating." 228
During the first year of the experiments, subjects were asked about every tiny, little detail of their personal lives, down to their masturbation habits. During the next phase of the experiment, the beliefs and philosophies they had provided in good faith were unexpectedly and harshly attacked by a "debating partner", this while the subjects were videotaped, wired with electrodes and seated in a "brilliantly lighted room" in front of a one-way mirror. 229
Even a lengthy investigation published by The Atlantic in June 2000 couldn't identify a clear purpose for the long-running, immoral psychological study Kaczynski was part of, leading to suspicions that Murray was doing research for the CIA under the MKULTRA mind control umbrella. This is hardly a far-out suspicion, considering that during World War II Murray had been an OSS lieutenant colonel in charge of setting up the OSS Assessment School, the recruitment center for potential OSS agents. He had also been tasked by the (Rockefeller and Pilgrims Society-linked) OSS leadership to write a psychological profile of Hitler. In other words, Murray was connected and the stress test experiments at Harvard in which Kaczynski participated mirrored those he carried out two decades earlier for the OSS.
Timothy Leary himself was intimately familiar with Murray. After all, his Center for the Study of Personality (CSP) at Harvard used to be known as the Harvard Psychiatric Clinic, ran by Murray. In late 1959, when David McClelland, the new head of the CSP, hired Leary and Frank Barron, Murray had gone over to Harvard's Department of Social Relations where he set up his experiments with Ted Kaczynski and others at the department's Annex building. Murray's office only moved one door, sitting right next to McClelland's. Leary's old friend, Barron, introduced him to Murray, who, Leary claims, "expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support". As late as August 1961 Murray was part of the Leary-organized "How to Change Behavior" program at the International Congress of Applied Psychology in Copenhagen, Denmark. Murray, Leary, Barron and Aldous Huxley all were keynote speakers. One assumes that Leary had a degree of awareness of the type of studies Murray was conducting at Harvard. In fact, Leary described Murray as "the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation." 230 In 2000, the Harvard Crimson reported that, "according to his former colleagues, Murray was obsessed with mind control and used LSD, among other drugs, attempting to determine how to brainwash subjects." 231
Looking at all the information, it's more than likely that the study Kaczynski was part of had the support of the CIA. Ironically, apart from recruitment and interrogation purposes, Murray's study would have been useful in figuring out how to best break dissenting-but-intellectually-gifted members of society, in effect installing a form of enforced brainwashing, certainly over multiple generations. Conspiracy theorists and anti-Third World immigration proponents come to mind as some of the most important targets. Murray was running quite the fascist experiment and maybe it's no surprise that Kaczynski first started to develop his anti-technology views during his Harvard years. 232
The big question is, is if there was more to the experiments than meets the eye. Various articles on the Unabomber in mainstream media clearly play into widespread suspicions that the old CIA mind control experiment Kaczynski was part of may have played a more direct role in his bizarre behavior. While interesting, predictably these articles established that the Harvard stress tests may have contributed to Kaczynski's later bombing spree, but that there's no evidence of direct CIA brainwashing. That might well be the case, but it shouldn't be acceptable that the Murray Center sealed the documents on the Kaczynski study - his code name was "Lawful" - preventing the media from figuring out who the other test subjects were. 233 It would be interesting to know what exactly these individuals have been doing with their lives. If an above average number has also "dropped out" from society or has been involved in criminal or bizarre behavior, then maybe we should start to worry.
With the Unabomber it remains possible though to look at a wider web of coincidences, even without the details of the study of the other participants being known. It remains quite stunning that Kaczynski developed a perverted back-to-nature, anti-technology perspective similar to what Leary, Alpert, Brand and others from their group came to promote in the late 1960s, around the same time that Kaczynski "dropped out" from society. But where the Leary group's views went from childishly delusional to a similarly delusional idea that technology can replace psychedelics, Kaczynski stuck to the original anti-technology "let's-drop-out" idea and added a violent, terrorist, militancy to it. On top of that, Kaczynski was at Harvard at the same time that the Leary group became famous for their psychedelic activism, much of it with the consent of Murray, who at the same time was performing his supposedly secret experiments on Kaczynski. Brand:
| "You know who wound up in Thoreau's cabin? [a style of cabin published in Brand's Whole Earth Catalog] That was the Unabomber. That was Ted Kaczynski, saying, "This is evil, evil, evil." And I'll prove it by killing some of the people do [produce technology]. "And that line then leads to Bill Joy saying, "Ted Kaczynzki is right about a few things." You read his stuff and there is some sensible critique in there that we need to take seriously. Because what if we democratize weapons of mass destruction? ... That's a fair question." 234 |
Another interesting coincidence is that Kaczynski's third last victim, and the last non-fatal one, Yale University computer science professor David Galernter, stood under contract with the Edge Foundation of John Brockman and Stewart Brand at the time of the attack against him.
What do these close-circle ties and developments remind one of? That would be false opposition, as we also have seen with today's entire "liberal CIA" media and activism network, the conspiracy community, and almost certainly also the Leary group itself and its allied Weathermen militants. Is the idea that the Unabomber was a controlled opposition asset a far-fetched idea? Maybe, but the fact is that super-extensive controlled opposition networks have been created over the past couple of decades with almost never a crack forming in the "role play" of "actors" who often quite clearly have been recruited by someone or something. We can only tell so many of these modern activists are disinformers because of their rigid, blatantly false ideas and their endless curious ties, sometimes including establishment financing. Ideally, we could look at Kaczynski's immediate circle of associates and his ideas on certain conspiracies. If, for example, he would be invited to the Alex Jones Show and Rense, where he would expound no-plane theories with regard to 9/11, it's easy to determine he is a controlled opposition asset. The problem here, of course, is that Kaczynski will spent the rest of his life in prison.
What is interesting though when looking at the Unabomber from this perspective is that Kaczynski essentially was a John Birch Society extremist along the lines of all the guests of the Alex Jones network, or Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh for that matter, with whom he came to share a prison. I was only aware of Kaczynski's anti-technology stance. Reading his rather often praised manifesto (see Steward Brand above), I was surprised at how incredibly silly and irrational it was. Time and time again, Kaczynski made the case that "the left" was conspiring to use technology to enslave humanity. Here is a lengthy excerpt of what was published in both the Washington Post and New York Times:
| "One of the most wide-spread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism... Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. ... "Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors... When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom be identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights advocates... Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may not be as strong and as capable as men. ... "Today, in those universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom. (This is "political correctness.") The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control. ... Leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. ... "With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which we absolutely insist are that the single overriding goal must be the elimination of modern technology..." |
Seriously? This is the best a Harvard-educated former UCLA Berkeley professor with an IQ of 167 could come up with? I can visit Alex Jones' Infowars page today and see the exact same jabs against "the left", feminism and minority groups, the only difference being that Infowars and the John Birch Society actually have a slightly more intelligent approach by at least equating "the left" with Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the liberal Eastern Establishment.
One wonders if the New York Times and the Washington Post would have been so eager to publish the Unabomber's manifesto had it mentioned the liberal superclass and the private groups it is working through. Kaczynski only asked to be published by one of these newspapers to stop his bombing spree. He got both. It's not hard to see why these newspapers didn't mind publishing the manifesto: it revealed no important information and only served to discredit "the right", similar to the Oklahoma Bombing the year before and the WACO incident before that.
I find it additionally peculiar that Kaczynski hit various other of the classical, pointless left vs. right debating points, most notably feminism and Third World immigration. The United States in particular has been carved up for a long time between "the left" vs. "the right", which is only getting worse under the influence of politically correctness-enforcing "liberal CIA" foundations as Soros, Ford and Rockefeller and the hyper-politically correct dominant liberal establishment outlets as the New York Times and the Washington Post. The creation of extremist positions on religion, atheism,
All that having been said, there's no clear evidence that Kaczynski was a creature of the security state of some sort. Most likely Kaczynski was fully aware of Leary's "drop out" rhetoric, especially because of their shared Harvard connection. Maybe, or even most likely, Kaczynski was a fervent follower of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth movement - supported by the Leary group - and in that manner also was keenly aware of Brand's pro-technology Edge Foundation. According to Brockman, Kaczynski tended to target individuals profiled in the New York Times column of John Markoff, among which Galernter was.
Maybe - possibly - Kaczynski was influenced by security state-linked individuals at other universities after his stay at Harvard, most likely UCLA Berkeley. Looking at the absolutely enormous amount of individuals trying to lead this author astray through emails and requests for personal meet ups, this possibly should not be discounted, especially considering the Murray experiments had put Kaczynski and all his ideas on display to the CIA top.
Possibly it's all a coincidence. Or maybe the universe is just playing tricks on us, as anyone familiar with psychedelics would probably contemplate at one point or another.
Why The Net documentary is not the best
Of course, the 2003 documentary Das Netz / The Net explored the ties between psychedelics, technology and the Unabomber. The documentary is what largely inspired this whole section. However, it took me quite a while to get the purpose of the documentary. The connections between all these elements appeared to be so vague. Why did it appear to be so vague? Largely because the documentary doesn't focus on Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Alan Watts, Gunther Weil, Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow, or any of their immediate associates. Dr. Larry Brilliant and Nicholas Negroponte also are never mentioned. We do here and it clarifies a lot.
In general the whole documentary comes across as very vague. While discussing the Macy Conferences and the group's ties to the CIA MKULTRA project, the documentary doesn't explain any meaningful ties to the Brand group (note: some Whole Earth Catalog contributors visited Macy conferences) or the Unabomber. The Net doesn't even mention the earlier-discussed involvement of Oscar Janiger and Sidney Cohen in the Macy Conferences, or the fact that it was founded under Rockefeller influence and ran by a father-son Pilgrims Society duo - Clarence G. and then Clarence F. Michalis - for more than half a century. In light of all the Rockefeller and Pilgrims Society ties to the psychedelics community, these connections are not insignificant to mention here.
Instead of all this, The Net focuses on Stewart Brand, who most certainly was involved with The Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey's psychedelic bus, but whose exact ties to the Leary group, especially in the early days, remain a little obscure; The Net doesn't spell out Brand's friendship with any of the earlier-mentioned individuals. The Net also focuses on John Brockman, the long-time Edge Foundation friend of Brand who himself had little to involvement in the psychedelics movement.
Another major issue with The Net is the ignoring of Ted Kaczynski's extremist anti-"leftist" stance. When discussing the manifesto and the correspondences between the documentary maker and Kaczynski, the sole focus is on the dangers of modern technology, artificially boosting the credibility and rationality of Kaczynski. In reality Kaczynski was quite irrational. His prison interviews about his brother also make it clear that Kaczynski lived in total denial, despite his IQ of 167.
Really the primary questions The Net documentary tries to answer in rather veiled fashion are: A) was Ted Kaczynski a CIA mind-controlled anti-technology terrorist, and B) is the psychedelics community, and the aspect of Silicon Valley that it merged into, part of a controlled opposition network? Question A, in similarly veiled language, already was asked and fully discussed in the earlier-mentioned June 2000 Atlantic article on the Unabomber. That leaves question B as a more unique angle of The Net, but ultimately the documentary fails to answer any significant questions. Making things even more terrible is the fact that the host dresses in a depressing-looking Inspector Gadget costume. One would almost begin to think the film was produced as part of a controlled opposition move in order to confuse a number of very important connections. That's far from certain though, as the director appears to be "clean" for the rest.
PART V: FROM PSYCHEDELIC PIONEERS TO NEW AGE SCAM ARTISTS -- ELITES EVERYWHERE
Esalen: where the old guard and new generation got together
The founding of the California-based Esalen Institute was discussed and sourced earlier in the Alan Watts section. The institute was founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, with key advice coming from older generation mentors Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell. The latter two individuals counted Laurance Rockefeller and Paul Mellon as their key sponsors. It's not surprising to see then that Laurance Rockefeller, from the start, served as a key behind-the-scenes advisor to Michael Murphy. Laurance Rockefeller and his daughter remained involved in Esalen throughout their lives. In addition, the Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation and Carnegie Foundation all were involved in Esalen to a degree in the early decades.
When one looks at a list of participants over the decades in different Esalen workshops, countless psychedelic researchers and promoters were there: Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner, Gordon Wasson, Myron Stolaroff, John Lilly, Stewart Brand, Alexander Shulgin, Andrew Weil, and several more. Hunter Thompson, the famous drug- and psychedelics-inclined journalist, used to be a security guard of Esalen. Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, of course, essentially were co-founders. Frank Barron was a founding director. Dr. Stanislav Grof, the old Czechoslovakian LSD researcher, was a live-in scholar from 1973 to 1987.
The above oversight shows two early arms in the psychedelics movement: on the left the legitimate one of Timothy Leary and friends and on the right the little Round Table Foundation disinformation network of Andrija Puharich.
In the early days Puharich was trying to figure out if psychedelic mushrooms could be used for extrasensory perception (ESP) and out-of-body purposes. Legitimate questions one might say, but in January 1953 Puharich also began his decades-long questionable effort of channelling the Ennead, the gods of Ancient Egypt. Anyone who reads these supposed transcripts can immediately see how superficial and silly they are. In the early 1970s, Puharich recruited the Mossad's favorite "psychic", Uri Geller, to SRI and soon introduced this con artist to the world. Arthur M. Young, who later founded the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, was the second in command at Puharich's Round Table Foundation and brought us the Sirius myth of the Dogon tribe. Arthur Young's wife was wealthy, but the most connected individuals involved in financing and running the Round Table Foundation were Marcella Miller du Pont, Alice Astor, and a number of Eastern Establishment friends, all interested in ESP. Marcella was a daughter-in-law of DuPont family head Irenee Dupont. Alice was the sister of Pilgrims Society member and private intelligence chief Vincent Astor and the sister-in-law of the Pilgrim Brooke Astor, one of the closest friends of Laurance Rockefeller. Another early subordinate of Puharich, future Coast to Coast AM guest and SRI employee J.J. Hurtak, stood at the basis of the pyramids on Mars myth, years before future Coast to Coast AM guest Richard Hoagland (whose former boss, Walter Cronkite, was a Pilgrim and close associate of CIA chief and Pilgrims' officer Allen Dulles) got involved in these theories at SRI. Hurtak has also been a promoter of bogus Lemuria and Atlantis theories.
We can write a whole history here, but the most important aspect is that by the 1970s leaders of the Round Table Foundation, the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, SRI's remote viewing wing, and the Esalen Institute were all mingling, with countless of these individuals eventually ending up at Coast to Coast AM. Some of the most famous names of today's psychedelic community also have an Esalen Institute history. This begs the question: if these older and newer generation of psychedelic researchers from the Esalen Institute were and are so honest and independent, why did they allow themselves to get involved with all these disinformers over the years?
Andrija Puharich: Esalen, Bechtel's SRI, Reynolds family
In the previous chapter we briefly explained how the curious Andrija Puharich and his equally curious entourage started out as researchers of psychedelic mushrooms - both the magic mushrooms of Wasson and the Amanita Muscaria - who soon took their disinformation show on the Ennead from the Round Table Foundation to The Institute for the Study of Consciousness, Esalen and SRI. It is important to note here that SRI, to whom Puharich brought Uri Geller, was dominated by the elite Bechtel family. Most directors of SRI, including the Bechtels, belonged to the Bohemian Grove while SRI's extensive advisory board contained multiple members of the 1001 Club, once again including the Bechtels.
Maybe even more important here, from 1980 until his death in January 1995, Puharich lived on the North Carolina-based estate of tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds III, also known as Joshua "Josh" Reynolds. The Reynolds family is probably best known in alternative circles for having been included in Fritz Springmeier's fictional Bloodlines of the Illuminati narrative. Despite that, at least one member of the Reynolds family, cousin Richard S. Reynolds, Jr., has been a member of the Pilgrims Society (a group centered around New York City, not North Carolina). Several directors of the Reynolds company were also Pilgrims. In addition, the "liberal CIA" Tides Foundation and the Arca Foundation were both initially based on the Reynolds fortune.
Reynolds is extremely obscure today, but he has been described as "the patron saint of the alternate science movement" of the 1980s and early 1990s, funding projects that no one else would fund. He or his emissionaries were meeting with individuals as Tom Bearden, John Keel "and many others" 235, probably a lot of them future Coast to Coast AM guests as well. He also was a student of Adnan Sarhan at the Sufi Foundation of America - sponsored by the Esalen Institute and New York City's Pilgrims Society-linked Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine - and became one of the group's major patrons. The situation here becomes even more recognizable when Sarhan claims to have lectured at the United Nations (undoubted at its Coast to Coast AM-linked United Nations Parapsychology Society) and to have "opened the Earth Summit in Brazil on behalf of the UN". This means Reynolds' was a close ally of Al Gore, Ted Turner, Maurice Strong, Laurance Rockefeller and the like. Unfortunately, Reynolds is just too obscure to make any direct connections along these lines.
In 1994 Puharich was joined on his Reynolds estate by Elizabeth Rauscher, of the Esalen Institute and the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and her husband William Van Bise. Together they were doing all kinds of "studies" and working to publish material through Reynolds' freshly-founded Full Sky Publishing, when Reynolds suddenly died at age 60. 236 Puharich died six months later, on January 3, 1995, and it appears Rauscher and her husband were evicted from the estate by Reynolds' lawyer, because they were not included in his will 237, most likely because he died so young and suddenly.
Now, by the 1980s and 1990s Puharich may have left his roots as a researcher of psychedelic mushrooms long behind him, but his eventual long-time sponsorship by R.J. Reynolds III still is more than interesting enough to mention, especially in light of Puharich's long-suspected CIA involvement and the clear "liberal CIA" ties of the Reynolds family.
Esalen veteran and Leary's "CIA babysitter": Illuminatus! author Robert Anton Wilson
Earlier in this article the relationship between Timothy Leary and Joi Ito was discussed. Ito was first introduced to Leary in 1990. Not mentioned at this point yet is that one of the first things Ito asked him about was "whether he had actually talked to aliens as Robert Anton Wilson says in Cosmic Trigger." Leary replied that "it was all a joke. A big joke. All that stuff about magic numbers and talking to aliens was a joke." 238 Looking into who Robert Anton Wilson was, I noticed he is the author of the well-known Illuminatus! trilogy, a set of novels published in 1975. I've run into this trilogy on various occasions over the past decade, but never paid much attention to it, assuming it involves conspiracy disinformation. This time around, I thought such an association with Leary was strange, but once I left it at that.
Several weeks later, while still putting together this article, I read that Robert Anton Wilson was a Playboy magazine reporter (significant due to Playboy's support for the psychedelics and marijuana legalization movement) who, immediately before that appointment, was one of the lone reporters in 1964 to visit Timothy Leary at his Millbrook estate. Reluctantly, I decided to look a little deeper into Robert Anton Wilson and his ties with Timothy Leary.
Turns out, in 1977 Robert Anton Wilson wrote the book Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati - the reference Joi Ito was making. It was a supposedly non-fiction autobiographical sequel to his Illuminatus! trilogy in which he describes his long-time quest into conspiracy and esoterical issues. The foreword of the book, one of the most incoherent I've ever come across, actually was written by Leary, a name that appears more than 200 times throughout the book.
The book is quite relevant to this article in a variety of ways. First, Wilson explains that he was a good friend of Alan Watts since at least 1960, when he introduced him to the woman with whom he would have "his last, longest and happiest marriage." 239 He knew Leary since 1964 and describes various meetings with him over the years, including a brief one in 1966 at the Playboy Mansion because Leary "had his eyes on a Bunny he obviously intended to prong as soon as possible." 240
Secondly, Robert Anton Wilson's "alternative" network of the 1960s and 1970s literally reads like a Who's Who of conspiracy and spiritual disinformers who would later end up on Coast to Coast AM. This makes sense, because Wilson was a veteran of Esalen Institute meetings 241 - and we just described how the Esalen Institute network, including SRI and the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, stood at the basis of the later Coast to Coast AM disinformation network. Wilson was thoroughly locked into this network and in his book describes his experiences with the McKenna brothers, Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, John Keel and Brad Steiger.
Wilson took these people real serious. When the ever-curious Buckminster Fuller, with the Rockefeller and "liberal CIA" ties of his institute, and Jack Sarfatti talk about receiving "messages from interstellar telepaths", Wilson refers to them as "trained scientific observers". 242 Wilson considers Saul-Paul Sirag, an assistant of Sarfatti at the Esalen Institute and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, a "friend". In Wilson's book, Sirag explains to have observed Spectra (usually described as a super-computer on a spaceship) as a hawk-like entity also known as Horus possessing Uri Geller. 243 This falls in line with the activities of Geller's recruiter, Andrija Puharich, at the Round Table Foundation, where he claimed to be channelling the Ennead - the Egyptian gods - from 1953 on. As for the other names, one can check them on this site or on the site of Coast to Coast AM. All these individuals have been producing is an increasingly complex stream of fantasy stories. And here Wilson is taking them serious is his supposedly non-fiction biography.
A third major revelation from Cosmic Trigger is Wilson's tie to Kerry Thornley 244, a very peculiar character who:
- was an acquaintance of future JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the Marines from March to June 1959;
- subsequently wrote a book on Oswald;
- in September 1963 lived in the same New Orleans French Quarter as Oswald (and on the same Dauphine Street as Clay Shaw 245, whom he claims to have met "two weeks before the assassination", as well as the notorious Guy Banister 246) and visited the same bar without apparently ever meeting Oswald again;
- testified to the Warren Commission on May 18, 1964;
- wrote a book supporting the Warren Commission's conclusions in 1965 named Oswald;
- soon after was brought over to the conspiracy side by author David Lifton;
- was accused by JFK assassination "investigator"/disinformer Jim Garrison in 1967-1968 period of being the "Second Oswald", including a reference in Garrison's 1967 Playboy interview;
- appeared on Harold Weisberg's show over the controversy;
- provided interviews to Ramparts and other magazines;
- and wrote an anti-Garrison article talking about "highly paranoid fantasies" and "sick delusions" of Garrison and his supporters. 247
Then, right when you figure that maybe Thornley was an innocent victim of Garrison's bogus investigation, as Thornley rightly pointed out, you find that Thornley was spinning tall tales himself, including one that during his initial stay in New Orleans in 1962 he regularly spoke to two mysterious individuals who engaged him in all kinds of unusual conversations, including the question of how to assassinate President Kennedy. He later claimed that one of these individuals appears to have been CIA officer and Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. 248 Kerry, by the way, named his son Aldous Wilson Thornley, after Aldous Huxley and Robert Anton Wilson. 249
So, what do you readers think at this point? Should we lump Thornley in with Jim Garrison, Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller and Jack Sarfatti as intelligence assets of some sort? It seems to be the only logical conclusion. As this site has explained in great detail many times before, when you enter the "alternative" or "conspiracy" community there really is no point in choosing sides: no matter how many disagreements might be going on, in the end you always find that all sides are controlled opposition doing their little stage play.
So, what exactly was Wilson's tie with Oswald (and Clay Shaw and Guy Banister) acquaintance Kerry Thornley? Wilson first met Thornley in 1967, immediately before Jim Garrison's charges that Thornley had been the "Second Oswald" in New Orleans before the JFK assassination For some years at this point, since 1958, Thornley had been creating a new religion called Discordianism. Wilson became a convert and Discordianism was inserted as a key theme of his Illuminatus! trilogy.
It gets worse. As Wilson freely admits and explains as a bizarre coincidence in his book Cosmic Trigger, his doctor at the time was the sister of Mrs. Ruth Paine, the woman who took Oswald's wife and two kids in when he was having money issues. It's also Paine's house where Oswald stored the rifle he assassinated President Kennedy with. Ruth Paine and her husband, Michael Paine, were introduced to the Oswalds by none other than Georges de Mohrenschildt, one of Oswald's rather obvious CIA handlers. But it gets even crazier from here, because the parents of Michael Paine, the wealthy Ruth Forbes Paine and her husband Arthur M. Young, founded the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, the same institute so many of Wilson's scammy friends gathered around, overlapping with Esalen and SRI. Coincidentally, this is the same network discussed in the previous chapter when I hadn't even looked into Robert Anton Wilson yet.
The oversight above was created a year ago as part of a new "liberal CIA" chapter in ISGP's article on the Kennedy assassination. In this article the case is made that Oswald, as a controlled asset of the security services, was little different from all the hundreds of Esalen, SRI, Institute for Consciousness and modern day "conspiracy theorists" surrounding Coast to Coast AM, Rense and the Alex Jones Show. Robert Anton Wilson combines both worlds. He and Kerry Thornley could be added right into the above oversight. As I said, quite bizarre.
All these apparent CIA and "liberal CIA" ties actually bring us to the purpose of the Illuminatus! trilogy. Wilson explains it in Cosmic Trigger. While working at Playboy magazine as an associate editor in the 1966-1971 period, he and his co-author Robert Shae were exposed to a constant stream of far out conspiracy theory letters, not the least because Playboy featured a prominent interview with JFK assassination "researcher"/disinformer Jim Garrison. Wilson and Shae used these letters as the basis to write a crazy, over-the-top conspiracy novel involving the Kennedy assassination, men in black, strange coincidences, secret societies and divine entities. Cosmic Trigger furthermore explains:
| "Thornley and the other Garrison suspects were pictured as a weird gang of homosexual Satanic C.I.A. Nazi fanatics. It was the McCarthyism of the '50s all over again, coming from the Left. ... Mae Brussell, the world's greatest single conspiracy buff, has insisted, over various underground radio stations, that virtually all the terrorist Left is a secret C.I.A. operation to discredit the rest of the Left. ... The Bay Area Research Collective, claimed I was Leary's C.I.A. "babysitter"... "Other articles claimed the Illuminati definitely were a Jesuit conspiracy, a Zionist conspiracy, a bankers' conspiracy, etc. ... All this inspired Bob Shea and me to start work on the gigantic novel which finally emerged as the Illuminatus trilogy. We made the Discordians the Good Guys and the Illuminati the Bad Guys in an epic of convoluted treachery that satirized all conspiracy theories of Left and Right. ... "Between the first edition of the Principia Discordia, run off on Jim Garrison's Xerox machine in 1963, and the fourth edition, published by Rip-Off Press in Berkeley in 1969, only 3,125 copies of that basic Discordian text were ever distributed. Nonetheless, the V sign, somehow, got accepted by the whole counter-culture, especially circa 1966-70." 250 |
Quite amazing: Playboy editors Wilson and Shae, and an old associate of Lee Harvey Oswald, apparently inspired the world famous V-sign, first adapted in such fashion by the LSD-laced hippie and peace movements of the 1960s. I guess this is one of these bizarre coincidences worthy of the Illuminatus! trilogy.
For the rest, don't take the "CIA babysitter" comment too serious, but Wilson, Shae and Thornley most definitely were just disinformers. There is just too much evidence pointing in that direction. Today it is even more pronounced, but the fact is that already back in the days of the early Cold War the conspiracy community was (one assumes purposely) divided into extremist, nonsensical left and right-wing elements. Then these men came along and found the opportunity to create a third shade of gray by ridiculing both sides. The same thing is happening today, except that you have an infinite number of shades of gray, none of them representing the bright white light of truth.
What does this say about Leary, who was increasingly good friends with Wilson since 1964? Or Watts, whom Wilson knew very well since at least 1960? As already discussed, Watts was financially supported by Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation at that point, with at least moral support coming from Laurance Rockefeller. Leary and Watts would soon end up on the Mellon-Hitchcock-owned Millbrook estate, among other peculiar establishment connections. Same with the involvement of Leary, Watts and Wilson in Esalen: Laurance Rockefeller-backed. And what about the earlier discussed fact of "longtime friend" Carol Rosin, the Disclosure Project disinformer and director of the equally questionable Tides Foundation-financed Institute for Cooperation in Space, sitting at Leary's death bed? These connections simply make no sense. There are just too many of them. So, no, we have to conclude that almost certainly Leary, Watts, Wilson and Thornley all were assets of liberal establishment or "liberal CIA" of some sort. More evidence of that will be discussed in subsequent chapters.
"Weil the Squeal" and "nemesis" Ram Dass: allied in Rockefeller
One of the earlier chapters of this article is entitled The Andrew Weil angle on the Leary-Alpert firing. Fact is, Weil's super-prominent role in the firing of Richard Alpert, the future Ram Dass, from Harvard in May 1963 can be interpreted as having been a little peculiar.
Let's summarize what happened: as a student Weil fails in entering the psilocybin project of Leary and Alpert. He corresponds with Aldous Huxley during his attempts to get psychedelics for himself. Soon after his closest dorm mate (Ronnie Winston, the son of wealthy jeweler Harry Winston), with whom he tried to enter the psilocybin project and was running his own research circle, ends up in a homosexual or quasi-homosexual relationship with Alpert and is provided with psilocybin pills. Weil gets jealous, goes to work for the Harvard Crimson, gets Alpert fired by snitching on the professor and his friend, and writes a prominent article in the Harvard Crimson about the firing of Alpert and Leary. Later that year he pens a huge article in Look magazine about the affair. Eventually Weil becomes a leading psychedelics researcher at Harvard. He remains prominently part of the Leary group's lore until this day.
So I'm wondering: where are all the other students, professors, characters, voices? Not wanting to leave it at just raising these questions, I try to find additional peculiarities. Looking at Weil's biography, there's a first one. He may have "grown up in a middle-class family" 251, but in 1959, immediately before coming to Harvard, Weil spent a year in India, Thailand and Greece on a scholarship of the United Nations Association 252, a private NGO dominated by the Rockefeller clique. For the past 10 years, for example, ISGP has featured a photograph of Lord Jacob Rothschild, Henry Kissinger, John Whitehead and Princess Firyal of Jordan attending a United Nations Association meeting. Ted Turner, alongside Maurice Strong and a member of the Rothschild family, set up the equally private United Nations Foundation in 1998. These are the elites with the most amount of interest in psychedelics.
Just a coincidence? An second check reveals that Andrew Weil appeared on Coast to Coast AM for a first time in 2017. What are the odds? Weil has become a diet guru and is considered a foremost expert on "alternative medicine" - as usual with Coast to Coast AM members one who offers surprisingly little of actual substance. Weil graced the cover of Time magazine in 2005 and was pushed by the magazine as one of "the world's 100 most influential people". He also had appearances on CNN in 2005, 2007, 2011 and 2013. Certainly with the Coast to Coast AM link something is wrong, because nobody makes it here who is not compromised in some manner. Now Rockefeller ties are even stronger suspected. So we search for them.
Looking at Weil's later life biography, eventually his path largely mirrored that of Leary and Alpert. His 1994 Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine looks as if it would have been a favorite of Laurance Rockefeller. No ties between this institute and Rockefeller can be found, but additional checks reveal that since at least 2002 Andrew Weil has served on the advisory council of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, together with his old nemesis, Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and a certain Anne Bartley. Bartley is a board member or former board member of Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund (president) and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. She is an old Carter appointee, served on the staff of Hillary Clinton, helped set the Threshold Foundation and has been involved with Soros' Democracy Alliance. CCMS conferences have been organized at the Rockefeller Foundation's Pocantino retreat and at least one donation each has come from Laurance Rockefeller and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. The new agy Steven Rockefeller was involved in writing one of the CCMS' white papers in 1995. The CCMS has been particularly closely tied to the Rockefeller-allied Nathan Cummings Foundation, however. Other interesting council members have been involved throughout this period, including the editor of Oprah Winfrey's O magazine. In more recent years Clinton diet guru Dean Ornish joined the advisory board. Harvard and Buddhism are heavily represented.
There's more, since at least 2007 Andrew Weil has been part of the Global Council on Integral Medicine & Planetary Health of the United Nations-affiliated World Commission on Global Consciousness & Spirituality, which at the very least was active from August 1998 to 2011. The World Commission consisted of an overall council and 17 sub-councils, including ones on "Global Citizenship" and "Planetary Security". It wasn't just stacked with elites as the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Al Gore, Steven Rockefeller, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Jordanian royals, but also Coast to Coast AM spiritual gurus Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Fred Alan Wolf and, of course, the more recent Andrew Weil. Hillary Clinton's spiritual guru and former LSD enthusiast, Jean Houston, was among the council members. So was the "chemtrail congressman" Dennis Kucinich. And so were Bono of U2, "liberal CIA" asset Robert Redford and Michael Douglas.
Many of the names have been involved in other NGOs of this hyper-obscure, globalist, spiritualist, cultic United Nations (Association) back-alley network that ISGP discussed earlier in the C2C AM guests popular at United Nations headquarters chapter of its Cult of National Security Trolls article. We're talking about groups as Children of the Earth and the Institute for Planetary Synthesis, mixed in with more Coast to Coast AM-dominated groups as Edgar Mitchell's Institute for Noetic Sciences or the Institute for Cooperation in Space. The one thing all these groups have in common is that they push disinformation or vague, superficial spiritual concepts to the point it should be regarded disinformation. And what does that say about Dr. Andrew Weil? Is he the exception? Seemingly not. And it also seems he never truly left the United Nations Association network he was first brought into in 1959.
As for the Rockefeller ties of Weil's old "nemesis", Ram Dass, he and Buddhist meditation guru Master Thich Nhat Hanh were involved in setting up the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society in 1991, together with the then president and CEO of the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Soon a first conference was organized at the Rockefeller's Pocantino retreat, with Steven Rockefeller writing one of the white papers. By 1995, Ram Dass and Thich Nhat Hanh both were involved in the super-elite State of the World Forum, organized by the Rockefellers, Ted Turner, Maurice Strong and other globalist new age-oriented leaders. Today Ram Dass still sits on the "council of sages" of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), its largest historical donor having been Laurance Rockefeller. Decades before all these ties, Ram Dass, of course, was involved in the Laurance Rockefeller-backed Esalen Institute. Those are a lot of Rockefeller connections.
It appears these ties provide strong additional evidence that there was more to the Weil-Alpert feud at Harvard back in 1963 that soon brought Alpert to the Hitchcock-Mellon Millbrook estate as well. At the very least we have to acknowledge that Weil, similar to Alpert / Ram Dass, ended up in the Rockefeller fold, not unlike just about every other prominent psychedelics-affiliated guru.
Esalen: McKenna, Doblin, Strassman and... Rockefeller
At Esalen there also were some of the so-called new generation of psychedelic researchers and promoters at Esalen: Rick Strassman, the DMT researcher whose most well-known work involves the book and subsequent film DMT: The Spirit Molecule; Rick Doblin, the Dr. Stanislav Grof protege who founded the MDMA-focused Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies; and Terence McKenna, whose brother, Dennis McKenna, served as a protege and research partner of Ralph Metzner, in turn the close friend and protege of Leary and Alpert at Harvard.
Of these individuals, Terence McKenna has been the most prominent, to the point that to this day, even after his death, he is still serving as the high priest of the psychedelics movements. His brother Dennis McKenna has been catching up to him to an extent with appearances on Coast to Coast AM and the Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
What might be important to realize is that this high priest of the psychedelics movement, Terence McKenna, and his scientist brother, Dennis McKenna, were financially supported by Laurance Rockefeller since at least the 1980s through their Green Earth Foundation. In 1993 Dennis McKenna and Ralph Metzner set up the Heffter Research Institute for psychedelic studies, which similarly received financing from Laurance Rockefeller, as well as a Microsoft millionaire.
The reputation of Rick Doblin's Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) eventually was build up through the lobbying efforts of Senator Jay Rockefeller, the son of Nelson Rockefeller; and Dr. Richard Rockefeller, the son of David Rockefeller. Dr. Richard Rockefeller came to play an important research role in MAPS and also helped finance it to the tune of $1 million. Rockefeller Brothers Fund provided token financing. The billionaire Pritzker family, through its Libra Foundation, also provided money to MAPS.
MAPS, in turn, helps finance Erowid, a high-ranking website founded in 1998 that is meant to serve as a sort of Wikipedia for all things psychedelics, on top of gathering trip reports. Despite raking in MAPS funding and more than 1,200 donations per year, the site is extremely dated in information and design. It's really hard to see what "Fire" and "Earth" Erowid are doing with the money they are getting.
Then there's Rick Strassman, the other major modern psychedelic researcher with Esalen Institute roots, may not have been financed directly by Laurance Rockefeller, but indirect backing appears to have been plentiful. First, it looks as if Strassman was sucked into the conspiracy disinformation network of Rockefeller, because he is known to have canceled his DMT studies in 1995 after his subjects reported too many incidences of alien abductions. As ISGP already discussed in detail years ago, the so-called alien abduction phenomenon is a myth based on CIA and superclass financing, among them from Laurance Rockefeller and Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein. In similar fashion Rockefeller frontmen Dr. John Mack and Dr. Ralph Metzner are listed in Strassman's 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule under "advance praise", while the Rockefeller-backed MAPS group, through its Barnhart Foundation, financed Strassman in order for him to finish his book. The Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation similarly financed Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule book. The earlier-mentioned Bob Weir, John Perry Barlow and Larry Brilliant all ran the Rex Foundation. Key Soros agent Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance also was among Strassman's supporters, as was basically the entire psychedelics community.
These ties make one wonder about any direct relationships between Laurance Rockefeller and Strassman, which could well have begun at Esalen. It is at Esalen, for example, that the relationship between alien abduction godfather John Mack and Laurance Rockefeller first developed.
Speaking of aliens, by the way, Terence McKenna has also been pushing for decades that psychedelic mushrooms most likely are alien lifeforms who spurred on primate-to-human evolution. In more recent years his own brother has been discrediting this theory, but it's quite fascinating how so many in the Laurance Rockefeller sphere began to push bogus alien theories at one point or another. It didn't stop there with Terence, or with Dennis McKenna for that matter. Somehow the mushrooms also inspired them to try and prove that the I-Ching is a calendar that runs out in December 2012, at the same time as the Mayan calendar. Needless to say, the McKenna brothers have been among the most important 2012-end-of-world / global change promoters. Terence McKenna also came up with his equally nonsensical Timewave Zero theory. His idea that our entire universe can collapse into one isn't that strange per se from a psychedelic point-of-view, but the arguments he based this theory on are questionable at best.
The thing is, it's not really worth discussing any of these theories. As documented extensively by ISGP in the past, pretty much every Coast to Coast AM guest is a spook of some sort that is pushing very organized and systematic disinformation. Apart from the McKenna brothers, Strassman has also visited Coast to Coast AM, which is a huge red flag.
It appears that to this day Dennis McKenna remains the recipient of establishment financing, whether its direct or indirect. In June 2017 in Buckinghamshire, England, he organized the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs II, a privately-organized follow-up conference of the similarly-named 1st conference in January 1967. A quick look at the espd50.com website reveals MAPS and Heffter as sponsors, both with historical Rockefeller and other establishment ties. Another sponsor is ICEERS, a group that has received at least half a million dollars in Soros funding. Another sponsor is the Institute of Ecotechnics, which has received funding from Tides and undoubtedly other foundations. The fifth and final sponsor is the Beckley Foundation, a group with top-level support whose aristocratic owner, Countess Amanda Feilding, has a long history in the psychedelic community. More on ICEERS and the Beckley Foundation at a later stage in the article.
All this having been said, listening to modern interviews of Dennis McKenna or Rick Doblin, one can still learn quite a bit. Very little to no disinformation is discussed. Terence McKenna's old theories have largely been left behind by these men and replaced with scientific facts.
The elite patrons of Daniel Pinchbeck
Daniel Pinchbeck is another major psychedelics pusher with a Coast to Coast AM, but not an Esalen Institute, background. For the longest time, I suspected Rockefeller ties with Pinchbeck. After all, his main interests involve psychedelics, crop circles, alien abductions, 2012 and apocalyptic global warming, all subjects heavily manipulated by the Rockefellers and other superclass intelligence assets.
Lo and behold, a little additional checking right before this article was written revealed that from 1991 to 1999 Pinchbeck was one of the Manhattan-based party boys of Robert Bingham IV, heir to a newspaper fortune and grandson and great-grandson of Pilgrims Society members. How often have we ran into Pilgrims Society patrons in this article already? A lot. The Rockefellers, Mellons, Luces all belonged to the Pilgrims. Bingham paid the bills for Pinchbeck's Open City literary magazine, but to a large extent Bingham and the editors were just partying at Bingham's Tribeca, New York City loft.
By the time of Bingham's death from a heroin overdose in 1999, Pinchbeck had already descended into a spiritual crisis. As a result he started to research iboga, ayahuasca, LSD, DMT and other psychedelics which, tellingly, were "scorned" by his Open City colleagues. He reported on these experiences in his 2002 book Breaking Open the Head, making him a permanent fixture on the Coast to Coast AM radio show and in the psychedelics community in general. Curiously, Pinchbeck's mother used to date Jack Kerouac, the famous Beat Generation author who had been given psilocybin by Timothy Leary and his friend Allen Ginsberg in January 1961. It remains fascinating to see how these small-circle relationships work.
In 2007 Pinchbeck and his friend Ken Jordan founded the Evolver.net social network and the related online Reality Sandwich magazine. Pinchbeck became editorial director of Reality Sandwich; Ken Jordan its publisher and executive producer. Some time after the founding of the magazine, Graham Hancock became editor-at-large.
Pinchbeck has known Ken Jordan since the mid 1990s. Jordan is an interesting cat, mainly because in 1999 he launched MediaChannel.org with funding coming from "liberal CIA" foundations as Rockefeller, Open Society (Soros) and Arca. MediaChannel was founded in partnership with OneWorld.net, set up with funding from all the foundations, in addition to Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Ford, MacArthur and Omidyar. Jordan and Reality Sandwich co-founder and New York City-based activist Jonathan Phillips provide us with additional "liberal CIA" ties, but these are not important enough to be detailed here. Readers can follow the relevant link to ISGP's "liberal CIA" article for that.
Pinchbeck actually first came onto ISGP's radar as a likely "liberal CIA" asset for running an outfit called the Center for Planetary Culture in the 2013-2016 period. This "think tank" featured a bogus crop circle as its logo, with Pinchbeck being flanked with two very beautiful and very educated assistants. Maybe Center for a Planetary Cult would be a better name. The question, of course, is where Pinchbeck got the money from to pay for these assistants and the entire effort. At first I thought: Ken Jordan maybe. But there was no obvious link. Second thought? Tides Foundation. And lo and behold, in 2013 Pinchbeck received $250,000 for a "Center for a New Planetary Culture" from Tides. No additional grants were made, so it makes sense that the Center had to close down again in 2016.
The Tides Foundation is an establishment "liberal CIA" clearing house closely allied with George Soros, Bill Gates, the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller foundations. A lot of fringe projects various elites don't want to be directly affiliated with are financed through Tides. Conspiracy and new age disinformation asset John Perkins, a close ally of Pinchbeck, has received funding through tides. So have various projects of Laurance Rockefeller and Disclosure Project lawyer Daniel Sheehan. There are various other examples, including Occupy Wall Street.
In 2015 Pinchbeck worked together with the Sierra Club, 350.org, the WWF and Rainforest Action Network - all Tides Foundation recipients - to bring Facebook into the climate movement. The meeting was organized at Facebook headquarters. It should be clear at this point that Pinchbeck is a complete and total tool of the liberal superclass. There's not an ounce of independence in him.
To summarize, in the 1990s the Pilgrims Society-linked Robert Bingham IV was Pinchbeck's patron, since 2007 it has been Rockefeller/Soros ally Ken Jordan, and in the 2013-2016 it was the Tides Foundation. All of a sudden Pinchbeck's rise to prominence and his obsession with 2012, alien abduction, crop circle and apocalyptic global warming ideas make a lot of sense. Of course, it was right because of these obsessions that this author started to look for any Rockefeller elitists ties. They are just very easy to predict at that point.
Pinchbeck is seen as one of the premier pushers of 2012 end-of-the-world speculation, mainly through his 2006 book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and then in 2009, with Ken Jordan, Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age. His theories were featured from the New York Times to Coast to Coast AM, the Alex Jones Show and The Young Turks. Fellow-Coast to Coast AM guests the McKenna brothers, John Major Jenkins and Greg Braden are also credited with having started the modern 2012 movement. The thing is, any kind of apocalyptic or spiritual revolution type ideas for 2012 are modern inventions, which makes sense, considering the Rockefeller and other elitist influences on conspiracy and the new age are always aimed at the promotion of disinformation, in this case to help promote environmental consciousness.
Graham Hancock: scammer of the ages
As mentioned in the previous section, in 2011 Graham Hancock joined Daniel Pinchbeck and Rockefeller/Soros ally Ken Jordan at the online psychedelic magazine Reality Sandwich as editor-at-large. Traditionally, Hancock has been known for his books on ancient (alternative) archeology, arguing that modern civilization is much older than about 7,000 years. It wasn't until 2005, however, with his book Supernatural, that Hancock established himself as a psychedelic guru with great interest in shamanic substances as ibogaine and ayahuasca, as well as DMT. He continued along this line with his 2010 novel Entangled and his 2013 novel War God: Nights of the Witch, before getting back on track with ancient archeology with his 2017 book Magicians of the Gods.
The thing with Graham Hancock is that his psychedelic adventures in Supernatural are just about the only honest thing he has ever written. His 2010 and 2013 novels also contain far more truth than any of his ancient archeology books. ISGP has a whole article dedicated to Hancock's theories on Ancient Egypt, as mainly promoted in his 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods. Every single one of his theories and proclaimed facts is based on very obvious manipulation, to the point that it is very clear that Hancock is purposely pushing disinformation, alongside John Anthony West and a number of other "alternative Egyptologists". Hancock's belief that the Ark of the Covenant was a piece of anti-gravity high technology alone should make people immediately skeptical of his work.
Graham Hancock's background in foreign policy reporting is discussed in ISGP's Coast to Coast AM article. Among his most notable jobs was journalist at The Economist in 1981-1983, at that time under the chairmanship of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, who headed the news agency from 1972 to 1989. The Economist also employed numerous directors and editors belonging to the Pilgrims Society. Maybe it's all a coincidence, but we've seen these elite connections, including the Pilgrims Society, a million times over by now in this article.
To elaborate on The Economist, MI6 officers Brian Crozier and his protege, Robert Moss, ran The Economist's Foreign Report for many years. Especially Crozier was a pioneer in running private intelligence and operations networks, among them Le Cercle and 6I. Crozier and Moss were pro-fascist and involved in the undermining of labor unions in England, as well as a variety of foreign coups, alongside the CIA. They also cooperated closely with the Israelis and the emerging U.S. neocons. Crozier counted Richard Perle and Rupert Murdoch among his personal friends. And here's another kicker: Robert Moss radically changed his life in 1986 to become a leading dream shaman. Starting in 2005, he became a regular at Coast to Coast AM, alongside Graham Hancock. Again we have to ask: coincidence?
Hancock's ties to the superclass might be a little less obvious than most, but he most certainly has them through The Economist - and later through Reality Sandwich. Most likely because he has been one of the most successful alternative authors in existence, he hasn't had to rely on foundation financing or any superclass patrons.
As he detailed on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Hancock wrote all his ancient archeology books on while suffering from a massive marijuana addiction, an addiction he was only able to kick after taking ibogaine as part of his research for his 2005 book Supernatural. As said, Hancock's work on psychedelics has been his only legitimate work since delving into alternative archeology.
Rockefeller and Soros ally Amber Lyon
Amber Lyon is a former CNN journalist ISGP has dedicated an oversight article to for apparent "liberal CIA" background. After leaving CNN over the network's censorship regarding the oppressive Bahrain regime, Lyon was invited as a guest to the super-disinformative Alex Jones Show. Days later she was also invited to the Joe Rogan Experience podcast of Alex Jones friend Joe Rogan. A year later she also appeared on Coast to Coast AM to talk about the CNN censorship. Interestingly, CNN is just about the most liberal establishment, pro-Third World immigration, pro-"Arab Spring" broadcasts in existence. Amber Lyon defecting over "Arab Spring" censorship at CNN is quite a surprising situation. Ordinarily the two would be on one line with this type of propaganda, were it not for a financial conflict of interest at CNN at that point.
Joe Rogan, a major psychedelics enthusiast who has had many of the major psychedelic gurus on his podcast, inspired Amber Lyon to look into magic mushrooms - which she did. In a subsequent email, Rogan advised her to also look into ayahuasca. Within days Lyon was on her way to Peru for a number of ayahuasca sessions, followed by a trip around the world trying various magic mushrooms.
In March 2014 Lyon was back on the Joe Rogan podcast. Instead of the conversation revolving around CNN censorship regarding the "Arab Spring" and Wikileaks, this time it was all about her psychedelic journeys and her upcoming psychedelic news site, Reset.me.
While her background and evolution seems completely normal, ISGP knows better. The devil is in the details. Extremely bizarre, for example, was Lyon's promotion of alleged U.S.-Iran false flag "whistleblower" Gwenyth Todd during her first interview on the Joe Rogan podcast. Apart from the flaws in Todd's narrative, she sits on the editorial board of Veterans Today, a bizarre top-level international spook network and conspiracy disinformation outfit that works with all enemies of the west, including the Russians, Serbs, the Pakistani ISI (jihadist terrorist "godfather" and ISI chief Hamid Gul), and the Mujahideen. It spreads massive disinformation on 9/11 with a strong anti-Israel bias through authors and documentary producers as Dr. Kevin Barrett, Dr. James Fetzer, and Ken O'Keefe (the latter battled with Israeli commandos during the Free Gaza flotilla incident). It absolutely makes no sense that Lyon would be promoting such an extreme disinformer if she would be a genuinely independent journalist.
There are other anomalies to be found with Amber Lyon that are discussed in ISGP's oversight on her. Most important here is that upon going to through Lyon's Facebook friends in May 2015, ISGP didn't just run into various MAPS employees, the afore-mentioned Daniel Pinchbeck and "liberal CIA" asset and 9/11 no-planer Abby Martin, but also Alexander Soros, the son of George Soros; and Wyatt Rockefeller, a grandson of Laurance Rockefeller. What are the odds?
Abby Martin appeared near the top, followed by Alexander Soros in the top 20. We don't know if Lyon has taken money from Soros or Rockefeller, but once again the support base is clear. Her website, Reset.me, was created by Toi.io, a firm whose biggest and most prominent client is Bilderberg steering committee member Peter Thiel.
We can go on, as we do in Amber Lyon's biography page, but it appears rather obvious at this point that Amber Lyon is not an independent player either.
A person we maybe shouldn't overlook these days is Josh Wickerham, a person who has been interview by Amber Lyon and Joe Rogan. I first ran across Wickerham through his March 2014 Joe Rogan Experience podcast with Dennis McKenna. Notes I made about this session, mainly in relation to Wickerham, read:
- Every five seconds the word "sustainable development" and "NGO" is mentioned.
- Every three seconds it is explained that the "consciousness" of the human race must be raised in order to prevent catastrophic global environmental destruction.
- Climate change is part of this upcoming apocalypse.
- NGOs can arrange ayahuasca business trips for corporations to enhance this "consciousness".
- Wickerham, who sounds like an out-of-touch new age cultist, is explaining (completely incorrectly) that a "plant-based diet" can generate the same "consciousness transformation" as ayahuasca.
- When Terence McKenna's alien mushroom theory is brought up by Rogan, Wickerham tries to make the point that spores could have survived a space trip to earth.
- Literally nothing of substance about ayahuasca or other psychedelics is brought up that would motivate people to go out and take it themselves.
Suspicious of this type of propagandist behavior, I did a quick check of Wickerham. Turns out, back in 2013 he founded the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council (ESC), a group that doesn't at all sound as if he is trying to wrestle control over the dispersion of plant medicines and the information available about them. Fiscal sponsors of the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council have been the Rockefeller-backed MAPS, headed by the earlier-discussed Rick Doblin; and ICEERS, a group provided with $500,000 in funding from George Soros early in 2014. Rick Doblin is a director of the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council, along with Jag Davies of the Soros-created Drug Policy Alliance.
Just as important, Wickerham has been working for NGOs as the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Wide Fund for Nature. As already discussed in relation to Andrew Weil's involvement in the United Nations Association and the World Commission on Global Consciousness & Spirituality, both of these bodies are "liberal CIA" Rockefeller and Rothschild territory. The elite backbone of the WWF for many decades has been the 1001 Club, with names as Prince Bernhard, Prince Philip, Laurance Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, Maurice Strong, the Bechtels, the British and French Rothschilds, and the Thurn und Taxis, Thyssen and Habsburg families. The WWF has received large donations from "liberal CIA" foundations as Packard, Tides and Barack Obama's Joyce Foundation.
When we look at the United Nations, its private $1 billion foundation was founded in 1998 by Ted Turner, with help from directors as Maurice Strong and Emma Rothschild, a half-sister of Lord Jacob Rothschild. All these individuals have been top superclass environmentalists, not to mention raging new agers who allied themselves with Deepak Chopra and the like, for example in Edgar Mitchell's IONS group.
Wickerham also states that "since 2006, I have worked with Jane Goodall and the Jane Goodall Institute." Most will probably only know Goodall for her work with primates in Africa. However, she is a major establishmentarian. Goodall was an Earth Day Council member under Maurice Strong and a co-chairman of the equally new agy and Rockefeller-financed State of the World Forum, largely ran by Coast to Coast AM's Daniel Sheehan. Ted Turner and Maurice Strong were other co-chairmen of the State of the World Forum. Goodall also was a council member of the World Commission on Global Consciousness & Spirituality with various elites as Al Gore and a number of prominent, Coast to Coast AM-affiliated spiritual gurus, not the least of which Andrew Weil.
It looks as if these connections rather well explain Wickerham's cultic, propagandist views on environmentalism and Terence McKenna's alien mushroom theories. As already discussed, this is how this fringe, elite, private United Nations backbone operates.
James Arthur: Rockefeller-published pedophile mushroom expert
Every modern psychedelic expert mentioned above, above from Josh Wickerham, has appeared on Coast to Coast AM. There's another such individual, James Arthur (Dugovic). This person slipped through the cracks, because he has been dead since April 2005.
Not much is known about the background of James Arthur. He was an ordained Catholic priest, studied with Tibetan lamas and was a self-taught expert on psychedelic mushrooms. Reportedly he already was a friend of the famous Gordon Wasson in the late 1970s and held in high esteem by this wealthy J.P. Morgan vice president and fellow mycologist. It is not exactly known what James Arthur did from the 1990s, but in October 1999 he had his first appearance on Coast to Coast AM, followed by the publication of his first book, Mushrooms and Mankind, in 2000. Predictably, the book contained typical Coast to Coast AM disinformation that Ancient Egypt was the remnant of a much earlier, more high tech civilization. An invitation to then Coast to Coast AM clone Rense Radio followed as well. In the 2000-2002 period Arthur would talk here around Christmas about the connection between mushrooms and Christmas. In 2003 two more invitations to Coast to Coast AM followed, where Arthur discussed similar themes.
The Green Earth Foundation, which published this book, was Laurance Rockefeller-financed.There's every indication that James Arthur was making it to the big leagues. Apart from an old connection to Gordon Wasson and regular appearances on Coast to Coast AM and Rense, he was also allowed to write the first chapter of the 2004 book Teonanacatl: Sacred Mushroom of Visions. Some readers may remember from previous chapters that "Teonanacatl" was the Aztec name for the Mexican psychedelic mushroom that Dr. Richard Evans Schultes and Gordon Wasson were pioneering researchers of. Editor of the book was Dr. Ralph Metzner, the old Timothy Leary colleague at Harvard and the Mellon-owned Millbrook estate who came to serve as a mentor to Dr. Dennis McKenna in the Laurance Rockefeller-funded Green Earth Foundation and the equally Laurance Rockefeller-funded Heffter Research Institute. Dr. David Nichols, the founding president of the Heffter Research Institute, contributed a chapter. So did Rick Doblin, the founder of the Rockefeller-dominated MAPS group, contributed chapters to the book. Timothy Leary's old writings were also turned into a chapter. Publisher of the book Teonanacatl: Sacred Mushroom of Visions was Four Trees Press, a division of the Green Earth Foundation, in effect making James Arthur yet another beneficiary of Laurance Rockefeller funding.
In this same 2003-early 2004 period famous marijuana activist Jack Herer was living with James Arthur to produce a new book. At the same time Arthur was working on another book entitled Mushrooms, ayahuasca and DMT. There's every indication we would have heard much more of James Arthur over the years, were it not for the fact that he was arrested on charges of pedophilia in April 2004, over which he killed himself in jail in April 2005. Arthur had a history of pedophile behavior, having been convicted on similar matters in 1991 and 1996. For obvious reasons no one wanted to be affiliated with his name anymore, quickly sending it back into obscurity.
With James Arthur, again we see how the old psychedelic pioneers who did decent research and promoted little to no disinformation, were replaced by psychedelic gurus who mixed genuine research with very disinformative theories. Apart from Arthur's claims about Ancient Egypt, on Coast to Coast AM he claimed that the mushrooms "allowed him to leave his body, even traveling to such distant locations as the Van Allen radiation belt which he described as a gigantic spiritual presence..." The only times I traveled to the stars on psychedelics, they clearly were fictional representations.
Arthur also was a major pusher of the theory that the Christian religion has been inspired by psychedelic mushroom use, most notably by the mildly psychedelic Amanita Muscaria. This was the theme of John Marco Allegro's 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, a book Arthur was a huge fan of. As with all other Coast to Coast AM-pushed theories, it's a ridiculous one. A few random Christian paintings from the Middle Ages depicting mushrooms, do not exactly prove that the Christian religion started out as a mushroom cult.
In addition, considering we all know how "liberal" Zecharia Sitchin was with his widely promoted but completely bogus Sumerian "translations" about the Anunnaki and Nibiru, why should we have faith in Allegro's interpretations on Jesus having been a mushroom? If any of the characters involved in pushing this theory were even remotely credible, it might be worth looking into, but all we have is tiny little club involving a stoner (Jack Herer), a pedophile (James Arthur) and a psychopath (Jan Irvin), all three prone to pushing other disinformation as well.
Some of these paintings most likely don't even show mushrooms. The 1291 Plaincourault Fresco, for example, a favorite of Allegro, Arthur, Herer and Irvin, almost certainly depicts Adam and Eve standing next to an awkwardly drawn tree with fruits, instead of an Amanita Muscaria mushroom. Gordon Wasson was among those who drew this conclusion. In the end, it doesn't really matter, because the painting, as all the others, was produced centuries after the founding of Christianity by individuals without any special kind of inside knowledge.
By the way, glancing over a number of early 2000s presentations by Arthur, he has a tendency to praise the work of Graham Hancock, sees mushroom shapes in doorways, and thinks the towers of Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple were meant to represent pine trees (in relation to Christmas). Yes, all very believable...
NORML: 1970s marijuana legalization sponsored by Playboy, Paley, Carter, etc.
In the previous section we mentioned Jack Herer, an individual seen as the father of the modern hemp movement. To what extent is this true? Smoking marijuana is generally seen as one of the most anti-establishment and rebellious things a teen, or anyone really, can do in society. But is it, really?
The battle for marijuana legalization in the United States largely began in 1971 with the founding of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, better known by its acronym NORML. The group was founded by Keith Stroup. This group hardly was "grassroots", however. Founding money came from the Hugh M. Hefner Foundation - also known as the Playboy Foundation - which continued to be the primary financier of NORML throughout the 1970s, with Hefner allowing Stroup to get laid at the Playboy Mansion.
The Hefner Foundation is considered "liberal CIA" by ISGP, because it doesn't just have a history of financing the psychedelics movement, but has also donated to key "new left" NGOs as People for the American Way, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, all of them also the recipient of Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Soros and other "liberal CIA" foundation money. This is a very tightly organized network in which little to nothing is operating independently. Hefner's most prominent former employee, Pamela Anderson, has been sucked into this network as well. ISGP asked questions about Anderson years ago for her appearance on Coast to Coast AM as an ally of a PETA vice president. Since then she has funded a variety of "liberal CIA" green NGOs and became the girlfriend of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Wikileaks has very deep ties to the very same "liberal CIA" foundation network.
In terms of psychedelics support, it wasn't just Hefner supporting NORML. His number two in charge, Victor Lownes, in the 1960s was a close ally of Michael Hollingshead, the employee of billionaire Pilgrims Society member Huntington Hartford who was part of the Leary group at Harvard, Millbrook, New York City and, eventually, London, where he set up his World Psychedelics Centre. 253 NORML actually ties back to Hollingshead through Jacob Javits, an old friend of Hollingshead at the elite British-American Cultural Exchange (before Hollingshead joined the Leary group) who ended up becoming a director of NORML in the 1970.
Javits hardly was the only establishment representative on NORML's board of directors. In the 1970s the board "included Harvard professors, former attorney general Ramsey Clark and, later, Sens. Phil Hart and Jacob Javits." 254 Not much can be said about Senator Hart, except that he was liberal and that he died in 1976. Ramsey Clark, however, is a first rate "liberal CIA" asset. He's primarily known in alternative media circles as a civil rights activist who opposed the Iraq wars initiated by George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. In early 2005 he called for the impeachment of George W. Bush through a live stream set up by the big foundation-financed Democracy Now! network. Much more telling, however, is the presence of Clark in the 1970s and 1980s on the international advisory council of the Africa-American Institute, which had its CIA financing taken over by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. It has always been a very elite institution, with Clark surrounded by countless superclass Rockefeller agents.
Keith Stroup actually was a friend of close associate of fellow lawyer Ralph Nader by 1968, three years before setting up NORML. Nader has been described at length by ISGP as a "liberal CIA" asset. His U.S. PIRG network has received massive financing from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, while back in 1990 he himself served as special counsel and board member of the Earth Day Network, along with Laurance Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Al Gore, John Kerry and many other elites. Today Nader is a huge fan of George Soros' green "philanthropy" work. There are more ties, all of them listed in Ralph Nader "liberal CIA" biography.
What else? In the 1970s NORML could also count on the support of William Paley's son. William Paley was a close friend of David Rockefeller, a Pilgrims Society member, the owner of CBS, and, as discussed in ISGP's Pilgrims Society article, a known insider to the CIA's Mockingbird program.
Probably more sons of the Eastern Establishment were supporting NORML, because we only know about the Paley connection due to President Jimmy Carter's drug czar, Dr. Peter Bourne, reluctantly attending this party and later being called out on it for personal reasons by Stroup, with the accusation that he had used cocaine here. It ended Bourne's position with the Carter White House, but also caused an enormous backlash against Stroup - who, by the way, was also partying with Chip Carter, the son of President Carter.
It might be important to mention here that Carter was a Rockefeller / Trilateral Commission recruit who was working to legalize marijuana until the economy started to weaken and he came under too much pressure from the right. Dr. Bourne's former classmate and life-long friend, Robert DuPont, of the elite industrial family, had been White House drug czar under Nixon and Ford in the 1973-1977 period. DuPont and Bourne were involved in setting up the first methadone treatment programs. Reagan ended all of the programs.
Clearly the marijuana legalization movement in the 1970s was supported by the liberal superclass. It wasn't just a grassroots movement.
Operating parallel to NORML from about 1973 was a person named Jack Herer, author of the 1985 book The Emperor Has No Clothes. The book spells out in some detail how valuable and versatile the hemp crop is - to be used for paper, oil, gas, clothing, food - and why industrial families as Du Pont and to an extent the Rockefellers suppressed its use. Is the book accurate? I can't vouch for the details, but hemp most certainly is extremely versatile. The hemp polo shirt I bought years ago seemed to be better than cotton and the increasingly popular hemp seeds most certainly are super-healthy. It's an amazing plant we've heard far too little about.
In any case, Herer opened a head shop in Oregon in 1973. From there he soon became a well-known no-holds-barred weed activist, to the point he became known as the "Johnny Appleseed of marijuana". Throughout the 1970s he campaigned alongside NORML, but on occasion criticized the organization for making concessions to the government in order to get legislation passed. In 1980 he founded the Reefer Raiders. In 1985 his book was published. And in 1988 and 1992 he was presidential candidate of the Grassroots Party.
The funny thing is, I've been looking for a long time for establishment or intelligence ties of Jack Herer, but have been unable to find them. Certainly from from the 1990s on, he maintained extremely questionable friendships, which we will discuss later, but nothing out of the ordinary can be found for the 1970s and 1980s. A person named Ed Adair inspired him to write the book The Emperor Has no Clothes. Ed Adair is nobody special. The designer and editor for the book was Chris Conrad, who in 2001 received an award from Soros' Drug Policy Alliance. That's about it. Herer largely wrote the book while staying at the home of Paul Stanford. 255 In the 1990s Stanford became America's largest medical marijuana chain operator. He also became Oregon's premier force in pushing for full legalization of marijuana. While he started attracting some interest from George Soros around 2012, Stanford has always lived modestly and has operated independently from the major Eastern Establishment interests. So again, nothing.
1994: Soros, Rockefeller and allies take over marijuana activism
In 1990 and 1994 Jack Herer and Chris Conrad largely organized the California Hemp Initiative. Bruce Margolin, the executive director of NORML's Los Angeles office since 1973 and a person who in 1971 had gone to India with Richard Alpert / Ram Dass, served as legal counsel of initiative. 256 In 1990 the initiative gathered 75,000 autographs. In 1994 this increased to 200,000. Both initiatives failed to qualify for California's ballot, but they helped educate thousands of people on marijuana.
The same group was involved in California's Proposition 215 of 1996, which successfully passed medical marijuana legislation. However, as the liberal CIA outlet The Nation described, the situation had changed. NORML, Jack Herer and his Grassroots Party friend Dennis Peron, quickly became overshadowed by a much more influential network:
| "[For Prop 215] Dennis Peron ... was joined by marijuana and medical rights activists up and down the state, including California NORML, the Cannabis Action Network and Jack Herer's Help End Marijuana Prohibition, or HEMP. Many of these activists have sought to pass marijuana decriminalization referendums in the past, with no success. Prop 215 would have never made it onto the ballot, either, without the last-minute intercession of four businessmen who coughed up $700,000 to run a paid signature drive. ... "George Soros gave $550,000 to the 215 campaign; Men's Wearhouse CEO George Zimmer donated $300,000; Peter Lewis ... gave $500,000; and Laurance D. Rockefeller threw in $50,000. In addition to supporting both the California and Arizona initiatives, Soros has committed $15 million over a fiver-year period "to support projects that explorer alternatives to existing drug policy," he says. "Uncomfortable with Peron's freewheeling, pot-smoking operation, Soros and the others installed their own professional campaign apparatus." 257 |
There that name is again: Laurance Rockefeller. By this time a younger, more wealthy Clinton ally was making his entrance, however: George Soros. The billionaire Peter Lewis has been among Soros' closest friends, with whom he later set up the elite Democracy Alliance. It's interesting to see Laurance Rockefeller's name here along Soros, because this site has maintained earlier that at least a portion of the conspiracy disinformation pushed by the Rockefellers during the Cold War was taken over by George Soros.
Between 1994 and 2014 George Soros alone spent at least $80 million on marijuana legalization. 258 We can only guess why. Maybe Soros and allies really believe in drug legalization. Their motives, however, have also been dominated by Democrat politics, so most likely drug legalization is considered an important area to permanently wrestle votes from conservative Republicans.
What certainly appears to be the case is that California and other U.S. states to this day wouldn't have legalized or even semi-legalized marijuana if Soros and his wealthy allies had not taken over the battle from seemingly independent operators as Jack Herer, Dennis Peron and Paul Stanford - and even the less independent regional NORML chapters. Herer actually describes the role of George Soros in an updated version of his book The Emperor Has No Clothes:
| "George Soros' Lindesmith Foundation is supporting many of the medical marijuana and relegalization state initiatives currently going on around the United States. "In fact, the Lindesmith Foundation financially supported Dennis Peron's medical marijuana initiative (Proposition 215) in California, that passed in 1996. "In 1997-98, Soros funded medical marijuana initiatives in such states as Washington, Oregon, Washington, D.C., Maine and Colorado, and helped fund the referendum that was successful in stopping Oregon's legislature and governor from re-criminalizing cannabis in June 1997." |
The Lindesmith Center was founded in 1994 by Ethan Nadelmann. In 2000 the Center merged with the Drug Policy Foundation to form the Drug Policy Alliance. To this day Ethan Nadelmann serves as the executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, making him the number one Soros representative on drug-related issues over the past three decades.
Soros' Drug Policy Alliance is actually backed by the elite of the elite. Directors include or have included top superclass members Frank Carlucci, George Shultz and Paul Volcker. Carlucci is a former deputy director of the CIA and defense secretary who became chairman of the Carlyle Group. He has been extremely close to George H. W. Bush. Shultz was Reagan's secretary of state and has had a decades-long association with Bechtel. He and former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker were extremely close of David Rockefeller. Shultz and Volcker also have been long-time Pilgrims Society members - so there that elite society is again.
Other names on the board of the Drug Policy Alliance range from rising superclass member Richard Branson to gurus Deepak Chopra and Ram Dass. Yes, Leary decades-long partner-in-crime has been making influential friends.
Parallel to Soros' Drug Policy Alliance, his Democracy Alliance friend and fellow billionaire Peter Lewis has been running the Marijuana Policy Project since 1995 as an off-shoot to NORML. This group too has poured millions upon millions into marijuana legalization, with Soros being an occasional donor as well. In total, Lewis has donated about $40 million to marijuana legalization over the years, about half of what Soros has donated. Most recently, Joby Pritzker of the billionaire Pritzker family has been serving as financier and chairman of the Marijuana Policy Project, in addition to various marijuana businesses. Joby can also be found on the board of his family's Libra Foundation and Rick Doblin's Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), one of the groups funded by Libra. In turn, Rick Doblin can be found on the board of NORML. Despite that, NORML has been left out in the cold a little, because it lacks a billionaire financier.
The battle for marijuana legalization continues. In 2010 these elites financed Proposition 19. In 2012 it was Initiative 502. In 2016 it was Proposition 64. And the list continues. In most, if not all cases, the same network of billionaires are financing the campaigns and running additional fundraisers.
The ayahuasca lobby: Bronfman, Soros, Rockefeller
The first time I personally heard of Ethan Nadelmann was on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in August 2015. Seeing he was executive director of an outfit called the Drug Policy Alliance and checking the website, I was surprised that during the conversation names as Soros, Carlucci, and Rockefeller besties Shultz and Volcker weren't mentioned even once. After all, all these top superclass members are involved in the Drug Policy Alliance, so the idea that "the government" is against drug legalization is questionable at best.
What was mentioned, however, was something called the 1st World Ayahuasca Conference, held in September 2014 on Ibiza. A check on the website revealed that this conference was organized by the ICEERS Foundation, which in February 2014 had received $500,000 from Soros' Open Society Foundations. Supporters of the event included the Rockefeller-backed MAPS group of Rick Doblin and Soros' Drug Policy Alliance. Higher-listed "co-sponsors" were the Beckley Foundation and the RiverStyx Foundation.
What are these last two groups? The RiverStyx Foundation is a small, obscure $26 million foundation that has helped financed MAPS, Dennis McKenna's Heffter Research Institute, once backed by Laurance Rockefeller; the Drug Policy Alliance, and various marijuana legalization programs. RiverStyx has funded other projects alongside Rockefeller Brothers Fund, so it is easy to see where its loyalties lie.
The Beckley Foundation is a somewhat longer story. It was founded in 1998 by Countess Amanda Feilding. She's a descendant of the Habsburg family and two illegitimate children of King Charles II of England. Her royal heritage might not be the most important aspect of her biography, however. For those readers with good memory, Feilding was the girlfriend of Joey Mellen, the vice president of Michael Hollingshead's World Psychedelic Centre in London in the mid-1960s. Hollingshead, with his own elite ties, had come to London on behalf of the Leary group to spread the LSD revolution here. This didn't really work out, but influential persons were part of the scene. Feilding was right in the middle of it. She, Mellen, and their Dutch guru, Bart Hughes, became infamous for drilling holes in their skulls in an effort to experience permanent psychedelic bliss. One wonders, if any government wanted to discourage use of LSD, users drilling holes in their head might just do the trick.
Feilding faded into obscurity for quite a number of decades, but she clearly kept her ties. LSD inventor Dr. Albert Hofmann was a founding scientific advisory board member of her Beckley Foundation. Dr. David Nichols, Dr. Alexander Shulgin and Dr. Ronald Sandison are some of the other relatively well-known names who have been involved in her foundation. For a number of years at this point the Beckley Foundation has featured a public letter in support of drug policy reform. It has been signed by Jimmy Carter, former Mexican president Vincente Fox, Desmond Tutu, of Edgar Mitchell's scammy IONS group; George Shultz, John Whitehead, Richard Branson, Yoko Ono, Noam Chomsky, John Perry Barlow and others. Once again, we're basically talking about the "liberal CIA" crowd and members of the Rockefeller-allied globalist superclass.
Looking at the speakers of the World Ayahuasca Conference of 2014 we find familiar names as Dennis McKenna, Rick Doblin and Ethan Nadelmann, all three backed by either Rockefeller or Soros. Another speaker was a certain Jeffrey Bronfman. This person can't possibly be related to the Bronfman family? Can he? Well, he is. He's a a descendant of the founder of the Bronfman lineage and a second cousin to family head Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
The Bronfmans are a peculiar family in the sense that they are major funders of the ultra-hawkish, pro-Israel neocon network, with other family members having been involved in the new age, "new left", "liberal CIA" crowd - and that for many decades. As for Israel lobby and neocon ties, the Bronfmans are key in the Mega Group and major funders of the super-neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, headed by former CIA director James Woolsey, the neocon of neocons, and an endless stream of notorious neocons on the board over the years: Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, William Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick and so many others. On the other hand, we can find Bronfman family members in the following locations:
- In the 1970s we had the eccentric environmentalist and anti-war activist Ira Einhorn, who was best friends with... well, everyone: the Esalen Institute and Institute for the Study of Consciousness leadership, the Puharich-Geller couple, psychedelic pioneers as Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Stewart Brand; and countless individuals who ended up on Coast to Coast AM. 259 On top of that, despite his eccentric looks and interests, he was welcomed as a visiting fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and corporate headquarters around the country, including IBM. 260]
Then, in 1977, Einhorn murders his girlfriend after she breaks up with him. Who becomes his lawyer? Senator Arlen Specter. If that name sounds familiar, it's because this is the Yale-educated, Gerald Ford-recommended assistant counsel to the Warren Commission who became one of the first promoters of the "single bullet theory" in the Kennedy assassination. Decades later, he publicly backed the Iraq War since October 2002. The thing is, the Bronfmans were paying for Specter to be Einhorn's lawyer, as well as his bail.
In 1981 Einhorn flees to Ireland to avoid life in jail, where he is able to successfully hide out because Barbara Bronfman (the wife of Charles Bronfman, a brother of Edgar Bronfman Sr. worth several billion dollars, from 1961 to 1982) is providing Einhorn with a "salary" of at least $1,500 monthly in the 1981-1988 period. In 1988, while working with the authorities, Bronfman tips off Einhorn that he was about to be arrested, allowing Einhorn to safely relocate to France under a false identity. Around this time it appears financial ties were cut 261 [260], but Barbara Bronfman remained a life-long friend and supporter of bogus psychedelic researcher Andrija Puharich, who maintained his own ties to Astor and Reynolds elites, as well as apparently the CIA. - Joanie Bronfman, a niece of Edgar Bronfman, Sr., sat on the board of directors of the elite "liberal CIA" Tides Foundation in 2011, at the time it was supporting Occupy Wall Street. By 2015 she had become chairman of Tides. Tides has supported notorious new age disinformers as Daniel Pinchbeck, John Perkins and Laurance Rockefeller and Disclosure Project lawyer Daniel Sheehan.
- Sherry Bronfman, the wife of Edgar Bronfman, Jr. from 1979 to 1991, used to be a trustee the Temple of Understanding, one of the older Rockefeller-linked efforts to unite all global religions within the United Nations. 262
- .... 263
- Jeffrey Bronfman, the second cousin to Edgar Bronfman, Jr., is a lawyer and environmentalist first introduced to ayahuasca (and the Uniao do Vegetal (UdV) religion) when visiting the Amazon to establish a conservation preserve in 1990. He embraced the UDV as a spiritual practice in 1992, and in 1994 he became the religion's first "mestre" (teacher-guide) living outside of Brazil.
From 1999 through its final conclusion in 2010 he served as the lead plaintiff in the UDV's legal action against the government of the United States, securing the legal acceptance of the UDV's religious practice in this country. The small Santa Fe UDV temple community of Bronfman doesn't advertise, doesn't accept new members and prefers not to give any interviews to the media, even asking its members not be interviewed. If you're looking to prevent a clamp down, that's probably best.
One can see why Jeffrey Bronfman was invited to the 2014 World Ayahuasca Conference. Another invitee to the 2014 conference very much stood out to this author: Dutch lawyer Adele van der Plas. In similar fashion and at the same time as Jeffrey Bronfman for the UDV in the United States, in 1999 Van der Plas helped legalize ayahuasca use by the Sante Daime church in the Netherlands by arguing the church's practices fall under religious freedom. We can spent a lot of time discussing the details, but ultimately the religious exception was approved. 264
This approval has led to an interesting situation in the Netherlands, because it means that in order to legally drink ayahuasca, at least all the traditional brews, one has to belong to the Sante Daime church. I went there in 2013, after a first ayahuasca brew did not have any effect on me. I showed up late, but was able to get a good peak at the ayahuasca ceremony held here. People were all dressed in white, standing around a central altar or coffin, chanting and singing their lungs out. Nice people, but it all looked and felt very cultic. I never went back. There's no need either. If this cult can use it, I can use it. It's part of my spiritual worldview, so it's part of my "religion".
More important here is the fact that Adele van der Plas has a questionable past and present. She and her late husband, Pieter Bakker-Schut, another prominent Dutch lawyer, have been defending terrorists (the Rote Armee Fraktion) and heroin cartels (Baybasin), with especially her husband having morally defended both groups. As part of her defense strategy for this Baybasin heroin cartel, Van der Plas has been smearing a top Justice Department official, Joris Demmink, with bogus pedophile charges, turning her into one of the Netherlands top conspiracy disinformers. ISGP has written a very long article about the Demmink affair. Interestingly, while it was possible to proof she's a disinformer with all kinds of ties to (suspected) CIA and/or U.S. security state assets, I never had a clue about Van der Plas' ayahuasca activism. So seeing her appear at the Rockefeller-Soros-Bronfman-linked 2014 World Ayahuasca Conference was just additional evidence that there's something very wrong with her. And that there is something very wrong not just with Dennis McKenna, but also other visitors as Bronfman, Doblin and Nadelmann who do not have a history of pushing disinformation.
In October 2016 a second World Ayahuasca Conference was organized in Brazil. Dennis McKenna and Jeffrey Bronfman once again were among the speakers, with more than ninety percent coming from the region itself. The Soros-funded ICEERS Foundation once again was the main organizer, with Soros' Open Society Foundations listed as one of two "main sponsors". Soros' Drug Policy Alliance, along with MAPS and the RiverStyx Foundation, was listed among "partners". It doesn't appear to be too hard to figure out who has been the main backer of the World Ayahuasca Conferences. Now that Laurance Rockefeller, David Rockefeller and David's son, Dr. Richard Rockefeller, who worked closely with MAPS, are dead, it appears primarily Soros remains. He, and a member of the Bronfman family. And undoubtedly Joby Pritzker if his funds are ever really needed.
These elites funding ayahuasca should be a good thing. The obvious question is what they are looking to get out of it, because so many of the experts they recruit, finance and build up actually are confirmed conspiracy and new age disinformers. In addition, I have found information on ayahuasca and other psychedelics coming from these appointed gurus less than satisfying. Then you look at the Uniao do Vegetal and Sante Daime churches and you have to wonder: is ayahuasca becoming yet another tool in the globalist arsenal to push for new age, sustainable development cultism? Are they trying to control any potential new psychedelic revolution? Are they trying to manage thinking along purely atheist scientific or cultic spiritual lines? Are they trying to turn militant anti-superclass activists into "dropped out" hippies? (It sure did the trick with me.) Or is it all simply based on a personal curiosity? Because one wonders if George Soros himself has ever taken ayahuasca.
Whatever the case, I'm not really complaining for the time being. But what I can also tell you is that if I followed up the advice provided by ayahuasca, I would have taken down ISGP years ago and not bothered with any type of activism anymore. I'm very stubborn though. That's a long story and one day I might just write it down.
As has probably become clear through previous sections, one of the most important alternative media outlet for psychedelic enthusiasts since late 2010 has been the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. While the podcast is about much more than just psychedelics - think MMA, BJJ, physical exercise, nutrition, hunting, stand-up comedy and a bit of science - most leaders of the psychedelic community have been invited to the show over the past few years. Well, there are not that many leaders, but Rogan has invited the following persons to his podcast over the years, often repeatedly:
- Rick Doblin
- Lorenzo Hagerty
- Graham Hancock
- Jan Irvin
- Zach Leary
- Amber Lyon
- Aubrey Marcus
- Dennis McKenna
- Ethan Nadelmann
- Daniel Pinchbeck
- Adam Scorgie
- Josh Wickerham
In addition, on August 31, 2014 the Erowid couple agreed to appear on the podcast at some point in the future through Twitter, while Rick Strassman apparently was planned to appear on November 12, 2015. Both haven't made it so far.
In any case, many of these gurus have already been discussed here, with Adam Scorgie added to the list below for practical reasons:
- Rick Doblin of MAPS and Dennis McKenna of the Heffter Research Institute have both been taking significant amounts of Rockefeller money.
- Graham Hancock once worked for Sir Evelyn de Rothschild at the Pilgrims Society-affiliated The Economist, together with MI6 labor union wrecker Robert Moss, who later became a Coast to Coast AM-pushed dream shaman.
- Amber Lyon is besties with Alexander Soros and Laurance Rockefeller's grandson.
- Daniel Pinchbeck was a protege of the Pilgrims Society-affiliated media mogul Robert Bingham IV, a partner of Soros/Rockefeller ally Ken Jordan, and a major recipient of the "liberal CIA" Tides Foundation.
- Ethan Nadelmann has been a key Soros agent since 1994 and executive director of Soros' Drug Policy Alliance.
- Adam Scorgie is a documentary producer, who, besides Joe Rogan, for his 2014 marijuana activism film The Culture High used as sources "liberal CIA" assets and disinformers as Graham Hancock, 9/11 hologram planes promoter Annie Machon, Cenk Uygur of the Soros-allied The Young Turks and Dr. Charles Nesson, the founder of Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, which is financed by Soros' Open Society, MacArthur and other key foundations.
- Josh Wickerham has a background as a "liberal CIA" green propagandist for the WWF and UN and is the founder of the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council, of which Rick Doblin of MAPS is a director.
Looking at this list and it starts to become clear why Rogan has been completely silent during interviews about George Soros' key involvement in the drug legalization movement. It wasn't until 2017 that he all of a sudden started making occasional awkward, spastic jokes to guests as Jon Ronson and Abby Martin about Alex Jones' claims that Soros is an evil mastermind who "makes the weed too strong." In all the years previous, during interviews with Dennis McKenna, Rick Doblin, or Ethan Nadelmann, Rogan didn't bring up Soros or Rockefeller financing at all, despite having a penchant for conspiracy thinking. That might change after this article gets a little circulation, but certainly in the past he never drew any attention to the elite connections of the psychedelics movement. Doblin actually did talk about it, but Dr. Richard Rockefeller was a very prominent aspect of his MAPS group, much more than merely a financier.
So, who's left of the psychedelic gurus that appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast?
- Lorenzo Hagerty is a former navy officer who became the host of the Psychedelic Salon podcast. He makes available good and often very unique material on the Leary group. I'm not aware of any establishment ties.
- Zach Leary is the son of Timothy Leary. In March 2017 he became the host of the MAPS Podcast. MAPS, of course, has received Rockefeller, Pritzker, Tides, San Francisco Foundation, RiverStyx Foundation and other elite funding.
- Jan Irvin is a psychedelic conspiracy disinformer and full time aggressive nutcase who introduced Joe Rogan and Eddie Bravo to DMT in 2003.
- Aubrey Marcus is a close friend and Onnit business partner of Joe Rogan who has traveled around to take mushrooms, ayahuasca and ibogaine. Refreshingly, Marcus actually has stated he believes the official story of the Egyptian pyramids after an ibogaine trip - which immediately was countered by Joe Rogan with Graham Hancock-produced disinformation. Despite that, Marcus is still drawn to alternative-type history, but this might not be a deliberate effort to disinform at all.
Added to the list of psychedelic guests can be Rogan's own experiences with weed, DMT and mushrooms, followed in recent years with LSD and Salvia. Especially about DMT he has talked at length, including to Russia Today and Opie and Anthony. In fact, one could argue that Rogan, his friend Aubrey Marcus, and maybe Amber Lyon elevated the field of psychedelics in the sense that they have provided really in-depth, personal accounts about using DMT, harmala, mushrooms, ayahuasca, and ibogaine. Certainly when Aubrey Marcus comes back from yet another Latin American country, listeners can be certain that he has some extensive trip reporting to relate to his audience. He certainly inspired me to try ayahuasca again after the first time did nothing. In contrast, Terence McKenna was all philosophy and silly, disinformative theories. Despite that, Rogan is in absolutely awe of the McKenna brothers, having referred to them as "psychedelic royalty".
Despite only being introduced to weed at age 30 and a few years later to mushrooms and DMT, today Rogan is attracted to absolutely anything that is even vaguely related to psychedelic history. Some random examples that come to mind from listening to his podcast:
- He's a major fan of Jimi Hendrix, an old friend of Timothy Leary who was the headliner of Woodstock '69. The Joe Rogan Experience is named after the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the name of Hendrix's band.
- Rogan is a huge of fan of Hunter Thompson, the reporter who abused every drug and psychedelic on the planet and accused Democratic presidential candidate Ed Muskie of being addicted to ibogaine. Thompson started out as a security guard at the Esalen Institute and ended as a major supporter of marijuana legalization. He took far too many traditional drugs though, greatly diminishing his mental faculties from a relatively young age.
- Despite mocking Indian gurus using the "namaste" greeting, Rogan thinks "Ram Dass is the real deal" Ram Dass isn't half bad, but the fact remains that this guru has enjoyed major Mellon and Rockefeller backing over the decades.
- Just after correcting Joey Diaz during a July 15, 2015 podcast that the CIA top most likely never was involved in drug trafficking, he manages to bring up a "rogue" like Howard Marks, a CIA and MI6-linked British cannabis trafficker who used to work with Timothy Leary's Brotherhood of Eternal Love.
- On other occasions Rogan has wholeheartedly agreed that the CIA has been involved in the drug traffic, something ISGP has produced the most detailed article in existence on. Unfortunately, Rogan has a penchant of bringing up disinformer Mike Ruppert, who has been a guest on his podcast, in the same breath. Accusing the CIA of drug trafficking within "liberal CIA" media circles is not unusual though.
- Rogan is extremely passionate about flotation tanks, a field of sensory deprivation and psychedelic adventure brought to fame by John Lilly.
- Rogan often brings up the film The Net about the connections between psychedelics, technology and the Unabomber. On other occasions, Rogan has also zoomed on the prominent psychedelic establishment question whether technology can replace psychedelics.
- Rogan was the narrator in the 2010 documentary about Rick Strassman's book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
All of this is fine, except that Rogan is almost universally attracted to the most ridiculous theories when it comes to psychedelics. He just absolutely adores Terence McKenna's theories about mushrooms being aliens from outer space, having spawned human evolution, and that cows are worshiped in India because psychedelic mushrooms grow on their shit. He can't stop asking random guests about these theories, no matter how unprovable they are. His brother Dennis McKenna has even been forced to admit that psychedelic mushrooms are not nearly as uniquely "extraterrestrial" as his brother Terence promoted them to be.
In addition, Rogan is absolutely enamored with the idea that Christian religion has been inspired by psychedelic mushroom use, most notably by the mildly psychedelic Amanita Muscaria. This was the theme of John Marco Allegro's 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, ideas he was introduced to in early 2003 by meeting with Jack Herer, pedophile Coast to Coast AM guest James Arthur and Jan Irvin. As already explained, it's a ridiculous theory. A few random Christian paintings from the Middle Ages depicting mushrooms, do not exactly prove that the Christian fate started out as a mushroom cult. And Allegro's translations and interpretations of ancient texts are just as questionable as those of Zecharia Sitchin on the Anunnaki and Nibiru, equally pushed by Coast to Coast AM and embraced by Joe Rogan.
Rogan has also frequently brought up the theory of Moses and the burning bush may have involved a psychedelic trip. It's complete speculation, similar to all the disinformation created around other Biblical passages being references to UFOs. Apart from that, can we take anything the Bible says serious?
When it comes to conspiracy, Rogan is completely locked into the Coast to Coast AM disinformation train on the one hand, while more recently beginning to rub shoulders with professional rent-a-skeptics, who always take the opposite extreme. It's a very recognizable pattern. Rogan stimulates debates on bogus issues as 9/11 no plane theories, chemtrails, ancient aliens, Atlantis, flat earth, and whether or not HIV causes AIDS - and then brings in the occasional rent-a-skeptic to debunk these claims. The only purpose here is to stigmatize and discredit conspiracy thinking.
A lot more can be written about the Joe Rogan Experience podcast and conspiracy, but this will be done in a separate article. Among the most peculiar coincidences here is that one of his longest and closest friends, the extremely anti-conspiracy and pro-Wall Street Bryan Callen, has a father who started his career as a CIA banker at Citigroup/Citibank when Pilgrims Society member James Stillman Rockefeller still headed the bank as chairman. The Pilgrim Walter Wriston, later also on Bechtel's board of counselors, was chairman of Citibank/Citicorp in the 1970-1984 period, when Callen was making a career here. Callen's father also had major ties to Saudi superclass member Prince Turki al Faisal, accused of sponsoring the 9/11 hijackers and a number of other Muslim terrorist groups. Turki was involved in a super-shady terrorism and drug trade-linked international group called Far West, Inc. whose U.S. partners included Dick Cheney's KBR Halliburton and the CIA-linked Diligence, LLC security firm. Bizarrely, Rogan then proceeds to bring a former CIA covert operations veteran and Diligence, LLC CEO to his podcast to let everybody know what a good, clueless boy this guy is, certainly on anything related to conspiracy.
These connections also makes one wonder a little bit more about the fact that Joe Rogan appeared on the show of his buddy Alex Jones on 9/11 to talk a little sense in Jones' extreme and very disinformative conspiracy rants. All that could be labeled coincidence, were it for the afore-mentioned ties and the fact that the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, not the least through Rogan's best friend Eddie Bravo, is starting to rival the Alex Jones Show and Coast to Coast AM as a key conveyor of conspiracy disinformation.
More details on Rogan's social network and his podcast will be provided in a separate article, but at the very least we've got it again... a Rockefeller and Pilgrims Society tie.
Jan Irvin: conspiracy disinformer on psychedelic history... with HP ties?
When speaking of conspiracy theory and psychedelics in one breath, there's one name that can't be overlooked these days: Jan Irvin. Irvin became a good friend of militant marijuana activist Jack Herer after meeting him in December 1992 and failing Herer's $10,000 challenge to disprove his points on marijuana. Over the years Herer, Irvin, Andrew Rutajit and serial pedophile Coast to Coast AM guest James Arthur formed a little clique promoting John Marco Allegro's old claims that Christianity and Christ were based on a psychedelic mushroom experience. Already in the James Arthur chapter we explained how flawed this theory is.
On February 23, 2003 Joe Rogan met Jan Irvin and James Arthur during a meeting at Jack Herer's home, during which Allegro's theories were discussed in detail. On occasion Rogan has told the story of this first meeting with Jan Irvin, James Arthur and Jack Herer - without having mentioned Arthur's name. Apparently he was the only one to be freaked out with Arthur's behavior, immediately suspecting he was a pedophile. Irvin and Herer continued to work with Arthur for a year, until Arthur, in April 2004, was arrested on charges of pedophilia and killed himself in prison a year later. Jan Irvin is the one who introduced Arthur and Herer to each other some time in the early 2000s. For much of 2003 and early 2004 Herer lived with Arthur to work on a book, a relationship that strained when Arthur, a former priest and already convicted child molester, started to spent most of his time with the children of a secretary he hired.
Looking at a forum thread opened after Arthur's death and reading the conversation going on between Arthur homosexual boyfriend, the wife of a prison guard at Arthur's prison, Herer's wife and Jan Irvin, one comes across with the distinct impression that this tiny little pro-John Marco Allegro network was parasitic and dysfunctional to the extreme.
It really makes one wonder why on Earth Joe Rogan would hang out with any of these individuals, let alone promote their theories for another 15 years at least. But he did. Some time after this initial February 2003 meeting, Irvin provided Rogan and his close pro-conspiracy and BJJ friend Eddie Bravo with their first (5Meo) DMT trip. Rogan would talk about it for years to come. On July 5, 2011 Rogan invited Jan Irvin to his podcast. A day later Irvin was brought onto the Infowars radio show of Rogan's "alt right" conspiracy disinformation buddy Alex Jones. Despite that, things didn't continue to go smoothly between Rogan and Irvin, who felt insulted that his annoying, irrational rants were cut off way too often by Rogan. A lengthy, public rant of Irvin followed against Rogan, apparently ending their friendship. It's always hard to tell how much of this to take seriously though. Alex Jones and Rense were buddies for a long time, until this fell apart in a most dramatic fashion. Both still promoted and continued to promote no-plane theories and other disinformation, exactly similar to what Rogan and Irvin have been doing - so who really know what happened here.
As for my own encounters with Irvin, I believe I first ran into him over the course of 2015 while laying the foundation for this article and looking at ties between the CIA's MKULTRA project and the psychedelics movement. He's very hard to miss these days in that respect. What Irvin does, however, is create a bunch of smoke and mirrors with silly, easy-to-debunk conspiracy claims.
For example, he claims that Terence McKenna admitted to being a government agent when he joked ""they" recruited me [at] La Chorerra [and since] I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better." Irvin pretends here that he doesn't know McKenna is jokingly referring to the mushrooms he first took at La Chorerra. He has done the same thing with Timothy Leary, who during the February 16, 1979 A Conversation on LSD meet-up stated:
| Timothy Leary: Then there of course was part [audio break] coolness of the Los Angeles cell, whatever you want to call it. ...
Sidney Cohen: Would you mind not calling it a cell? Let's call it a cluster! Timothy Leary: All right. [Room laughs] Our [emphasis:] "undercover agents" in Los Angeles were very cool about [it], and yet they did more in a very laid-back way, and it's every bit as public as some of the other, you know, the buses running around the country [Ken Kesey and the Merry pranksters]... |
See? There's no evidence here whatsoever. Irvin's claims about Gordon Wasson being tied to the CIA and the Morgan bank are considerably more accurate, but they are as old as John Marks' 1979 book The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. And Irvin inserts disinformation here by claiming Wasson was a member of the Pilgrims Society and a chairman of the CFR. Wasson never was a Pilgrim and he only chaired one obscure, low-level meeting at the CFR at one point. It's quite fascinating these synchronicities: ISGP has documented time and time again ties between psychedelic researchers and elite members of the Pilgrims Society - and the only tie Irvin comes up with is invented. Of course, ISGP is responsible for unearthing just about every historical Pilgrims Society membership list and piecing together the story of this group.
Specific quotes on all this are all listed in Jan Irvin's no-planer biography - because Jan Irvin doesn't believe Flight 77 hit the Pentagon on 9/11. He also believes the Illuminati is real and is one of the very few Pizzagate code words pushers and a Holocaust denier. In other words, he's a rather obvious conspiracy disinformer. Much more worrying is that his estranged friend Joe Rogan agrees with Irvin's no-plane and Pizzagate code word theories.
There are two primary reasons here why I close up with Jan Irvin instead of reserving him for a separate article or limiting his exposure to the no-planer list. The first is that Jan Irvin has contacted this author on two occasions, the second time in July 2017. After a massive 48-hour email tirade, Irvin suddenly backed up, denied, blatantly lied, and then left after I asked him why he was working from a Hewlett Packard Company line, while HP doesn't provide internet services to consumers. Seeing non-ISP company names show up in ISGP's visitors' logs only happens when people are visiting from the premises of major corporations. The same goes for government institutes, from international justice departments to high-tech facilities who rather often end up visiting ISGP's JASON Group article. Irvin was very easy to identify, because he was the only American, certainly from California, visiting in a particular period (bless Google.com's blatant censorship for once), visited countless articles, and immediately commented on them as he was reading them. He was caught red-handed, but didn't open up about the connection. I asked a few people who had known Irvin, but they did not have any recent information on him either.
Any Hewlett Packard connection is quite significant, because the multi-billionaire Hewlett Foundation and the multi-billionaire Packard Foundation both belong in the "liberal CIA" corner. They've handed well over hundred million dollars over the years to the environmental movement alone, with other funds disappearing to feminism and pro-Third World immigration causes. Millions have also been provided to the Tides Foundation, which in turn has funded projects of psychedelic gurus as Dennis McKenna, Rick Doblin and Daniel Pinchbeck, not to mention UFO disinformers as Daniel Sheehan and Carol Rosin (the close friend of Timothy Leary). Since the 1970s Michael Murphy and his Esalen Institute have been in partnership with the Packard Foundation in the Big Sur Land Trust. Considering these ties, and the fact that this article is all about unearthing elite "liberal CIA" connections to the psychedelics movement, any connection between Jan Irvin and the Hewlett Packard Company is important to confirm or deny.
A second reason to include Irvin here is because he pretends to be what ISGP is all about: genuine conspiracy research. Irvin contacted ISGP on May 21, 2016 to praise the psychedelics section in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article and proclaim that ISGP has "exposed in one article all we've been laying out on our shows for the last several years." Interesting... because, apart from a high school-type mind map and a few manipulative accusations, he hasn't done anything. He only pretends to have done all this work.
To explain, if readers go to ISGP's The Media's Psywar Manual article and look at the tactics listed for the alternative media, Irvin primarily employs tactic 1: exploit and manipulate through extensive research; tactic 12: behave like a lunatic to scare everyone away; and tactic 18: "Draw somewhat proper conclusions, but based on easy-to-discredit arguments." On the surface, Irvin's claims seem to mirror ISGP's. Like so many ordinary conspiracy-inclined citizens, Irvin too suspects key members of the psychedelics community to be or to have been intelligence assets. In particular, he makes such accusations against Aldous Huxley, Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna. However, he bases these claims on extremely flimsy "evidence". And when anyone calls him out on it, he switches to tactic 12: "Behave like a mentally deranged or highly obnoxious individual." He did so in the wake of his Joe Rogan Experience podcast interview. And he has done so on two occasions with me, including accusations that read: "You're a-typical disinfo. You're a psychopathic fraud. ... You stupid communist shit bag." Thank you, Jan.
In the end, if he will grow bigger, Irvin will end up doing what someone as Alex Jones has done to the entire field of conspiracy theory: discredit everything to the point of not making anything even discussable anymore. A good example here is a 2012 article on Jan Irvin at Daniel Pinchbeck's Reality Sandwich entitled An Outbreak of Fear and Paranoia in the Psychedelic Mushroom Community that warns of Irvin's ideas and with that helps to stigmatize any conspiracy thinking within the psychedelics community. Luckily, Irvin is such an unpleasant individual to deal with or listen to (because of his endless rants, verbal citations, and enormous need to be seen as a scholar), he'll probably never be a major player. He was friends with Coast to Coast AM and Rense regular James Arthur, but has never been invited himself to these shows. He appeared on the Alex Jones Show and Joe Rogan Experience podcast in 2011, on Red Ice Radio in 2012 and the James Corbett Show in 2013, but for the moment it appears that these days he's largely confined to his own GnosticMedia website and podcast. Let's hope he stays there.
Summary list of psychedelics researchers and their elite ties
The following individuals, all of them at one point or another revolving around Leary, have played very important roles in pioneering psychedelic and plant medicine research in the period from the 1930s to the 1960s. As the reader can see, most of them have major establishment connections.
- Dr. Albert Hofmann: The discoverer of LSD in 1943. First to isolate psilocybin from mushroom delivered by Wasson, which his Sandoz corporation began to sell around the world in the late 1950s.
Elite ties: Apparently none. - Dr. Oscar Janiger: Early LSD researcher from California. First American to make, try and distribute DMT in the late 1950s.
Elite ties: Apparently none, except for visiting Macy Foundation conferences with Sidney Cohen. - Dr. Alexander Shulgin: Researcher and creator from the 1950s until about 2010 of hundreds, if not thousands, of different psychedelic substances, much of it described in his books PIHKAL (1991) and TIHKAL (1997). As such, sometimes considered the "godfather of psychedelics". Played a key role in the rise of MDMA/extasy use in the 1970s.
Elite ties: Member of the Bohemian Grove from the late 1950s until his death 2014, for decades alongside people as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, David Rockefeller and conservative elites surrounding Nixon and Reagan. Only in the late 1960s and early 1970s wasn't he a member of what he himself describes as "the Owl Club" in his PIHKAL and TIHKAL books. As for additional evidence, his name appears on a leaked 2008 membership list of the Bohemian Grove.
From 2006 until his death in 2014 Shulgin sat on the U.S. honorary board of the Drug Policy Alliance, surrounded on various boards by names as George Soros, Frank Carlucci, Paul Volcker, George Shultz, Richard Branson and other top elites. Ram Dass / Dr. Richard Alpert sat on the same U.S. honorary board, as did Deepak Chopra from 2013 on. - Gordon Wasson: Brought magic mushrooms to the attention of the world in 1957.
Elite ties: Public relations vice president for Morgan Guaranty Trust, a Pilgrims Society-dominated banking firm. Member of the Century Association, with the Rockefeller brothers, Dulles brothers, and Henry Kissinger. Personal friend of CIA director Allen Dulles. Employed in an MKULTRA project to explore further his magic mushrooms. - Henry Luce and Clare Boothe Luce: LSD enthusiasts who published Wasson's article on magic mushrooms.
Elite ties: Henry Luce was a Pilgrims Society member with the Rockefeller, Mellons and other leading families. His son, Henry Luce III, became a Pilgrims Society president. Clare Boothe Luce was a Dame of Malta. Countless other establishment ties. - Dr. Timothy Leary: Pioneering psilocybin, LSD and DMT research pioneer at Harvard 1960-1963.
Elite ties: Born at West Point, where his mother knew General Douglas MacArthur and General Patton. The Kaiser Hospital he worked at had elite West Coast ties. Recruited to Harvard, which is the number one Pilgrims Society-dominated Eastern Establishment university. He was recruited to Harvard by persons involved with the Ford Foundation. The Weathermen who broke him out of prison had countless "liberal CIA" ties. His girlfriend soon after breaking out of prison, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, was related to the Gianni Agnelli, the prominent Bilderberger. - Dr. Richard Alpert: Leary's closest colleague at Harvard, who later became known as the Hindu guru Ram Dass.
Elite ties: His father, George Alpert, was one of the top Zionist activists of his day. Among his countless positions was a directorship of the Joint Distribution Committee from at least 1944 to at least 1961. He was co-vice chairman in the late 1940s and chairman of the New England Region. Key names of the JDC in this period (and beyond) were Edward Warburg and wife; Abe Bronfman, Samuel Bronfman, the CIA-tied Herbert H. Lehman, later 1001 Club member Harry Oppenheimer and others. The Bronfmans have been linked to the psychedelics community on multiple occasions. At the time of the IFIF founding, the younger Alpert carried out some effective fundraising in establishment circles of New York City and Boston due to his family's connections.
In later years Ram Dass maintained Rockefeller, Soros and other elitist ties through the Esalen Institute, the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, the State of the World Forum, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). His Seva Foundation also counted individuals as Steve Jobs and Larry Brilliant who would grow to be very well-connected. - Dr. Ralph Metzner: Close Harvard colleague of Leary and Alpert who later became a mentor to the now famous McKenna brothers.
Elite ties: Harvard background, which is Eastern Establishment ran by itself. At the Mellon-owned Millbrook estate with Leary. Later at the Laurance Rockefeller-financed Green Earth Foundation and Heffter Research Institute with Dr. Dennis McKenna. - Michael Hollingshead: Harvard colleague of Leary who introduced him to LSD through Aldous Huxley.
Elite ties: At the British-American Cultural Exchange he worked from the office of multibillionaire Pilgrims Society member Huntington Hartford in the years prior to joining Leary at Harvard and then the Mellon-owned Millbrook estate. He maintained countless other Eastern Establishment ties, although many haven't been specified. His LSD-promoting Agora Scientific Trust in New York City and then his World Psychedelic Centre in London were supported by Victor Lownes, the number two man in the Playboy empire. Playboy funded many of the same projects as the big "liberal CIA" foundations. - Aldous Huxley: British moderate Fabian socialist and author who moved to the California where he became part of Oscar Janiger's clique. Early LSD and mescaline adventurer.
Elite ties: Before moving to California in 1937, Huxley and his brother Julian were part of the moderate wing the British Fabian socialists, which the super-elite British Pilgrims Society clique of David and Nancy Astor still tolerated around them. When Huxley became involved with the Timothy Leary group at Harvard in late 1960, Huxley's brother, was setting up the WWF with massive financial and logistical support of western superclass, as represented in the Pilgrims Society and 1001 Club. The Huxley family maintained other establishment ties. - Dr. Humphry Osmond: Coined the term "psychedelic" in 1951 based on his mescaline experiences.
Elite ties: Apparently none. - Dr. Andrew Weil: Involved in the Leary group, got Richard Alpert booted from Harvard in May 1963, and later became a Harvard psychedelic plants investigator.
Elite ties: Scholarship of the super-elite United Nations Association in 1959, the year before he came to Harvard. By the turn of the century a sub-council member of the elite UN-affiliated World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality with Al Gore, the Dalai Lama, the Jordanian royals, etc. By this time he also shared the advisory board of the Rockefeller-backed Center for Contemplative Mind in Society with Richard Alpert and a key representative of the Rockefeller interests. Featured in Time magazine and CNN. Invited to Coast to Coast AM in 2017.
- Dr. Richard Evans Schultes: Harvard's ayahuasca research pioneer.
Elite ties: Apart from Harvard, apparently none. - Allen Ginsberg: Janiger's cousin, and another ayahuasca pioneer.
Elite ties: Apart from Huxley and Burroughs, apparently none. Although... Ginsberg used to serve as the poetry teacher to Greg Palast, who later became a key "liberal CIA" asset and already had top Mossad ties through his family. Apparently Ginsberg inspired Palast to become a journalist.
Also, in March 1971 Ginsberg met CIA director Richard Helms at the Corcocan Gallery in Washington, D.C., where Ginsberg was about to give a lecture. Ginsberg told Helms that he suspected the CIA to be involved in opium smuggling from the Far East. He wagered Helms that if he were right, Helms should spent an hour a day meditating to get him into an "improved mind-consciousness". Helms accepted. A year later, when reports of CIA involvement in opium smuggling came out, partly through Ramparts magazine, Ginsberg sent clippings and photos to Helms at CIA headquarters with the byline "My abuse in your confidence in betting with me may be excused if you sit empty minded peaceful - at least forgiven." - William Burroughs: Another ayahuasca pioneer who participated in the Concord Prison Experiments with Leary, Alpert and others.
Elite ties: Nephew of Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a pioneering public relations agent for the Rockefellers and a member of the elite Pilgrims Society. - Alan Watts: Extremely eloquent Zen Buddhist and psychedelic adventurer who was very close to Leary and Alpert and participated in the Concord Prison Experiments.
Elite ties: Repeated financial support from Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation since 1951, soon after meeting Laurance Rockefeller's favorite mythologist Joseph Campbell. The grants coincided with Watts moving to California in 1951 and then to Leary at Harvard in 1960. Laurance Rockefeller also was deeply involved in the Esalen Institute, which Watts helped set up. The radio station where Watts maintained his show from 1953 to 1973 received major support from the Ford Foundation and other "liberal CIA" foundations. - John Lilly: Isolation tank inventor and mescaline experimenter.
Elite ties: His father, Richard C. Lilly, was president of the Saint Paul branch of the elite Morgan controlled bank First National Bank from at least the 1920s until 1945 and then chairman from 1945 to 1955. John Lilly's younger brother, David M. Lilly, ended up as a governor of the Washington, D.C. Federal Reserve. John Lilly himself studied under top Rockefeller scientist and Pilgrim Detlev Bronk in the mid 1940s at the University of Pennsylvania's Johnson Foundation. Bronk later ran the Population Council with John D. Rockefeller, III with the Richard Coyle Lilly Foundation being among the long-time (minor) financiers of the council.
Last government grant dates to 1968. Teacher at the Esalen Institute, a favorite institute of Laurance Rockefeller. In the 1970s he received financing from the Erickson Educational Foundation, based on a Baton Rouge lead smelting fortune, for his early dolphin research. Reed Erickson - active in Manhattan's elite parapsychology circle - was close to Dr. Jean Houston and one of the first transsexuals in the United States. Erickson also sponsored the (in)famous remote viewer Ingo Swann very early on, as well as the globalist, spiritualist, cultic 1976 book A Course in Miracles. - Captain Al Hubbard: high-level OSS agent who post-World War II was involved in mescaline and LSD sessions with Aldous Huxley, set up a project with Humphry Osmond to change the thinking of world leaders with LSD, and helped supply Janiger's Hollywood clique and later Leary at Harvard with LSD.
Elite ties: As an OSS smuggler and later uranium company executive, Hubbard is said to have had a direct line to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, various elite businessmen and was suspected of high level CIA ties. No names have ever been substantiated, however, except maybe for his own claim to know the pope. - Colonel Andrija Puharich: mushroom researcher of the 1950s who visited the same shaman as Gordon Wasson and had Aldous Huxley observing his experiments at the Round Table Foundation by 1955.
Elite ties: Puharich's Round Table Foundation was financed from its beginnings in 1948 by members of the Astor and Du Pont families, with a number of additional elite, Navy and potentially CIA ties mentioned.
At the same time, Puharich was an Army researcher at Edgewood Arsenal, a site of CIA MKULTRA experimentation. As a result, he is widely assumed to have been CIA.
Puharich went to recruit Uri Geller in Israel in the early 1970s when Geller was a good friend of Israeli army intelligence, Mossad and defense department chiefs and even prime ministers. Brought Geller to the elite Bechtel-ran Stanford Research Institute. Visitor of the Esalen Institute, a favorite institute of Laurance Rockefeller.
From 1980 until his death in January 1995, Puharich lived on the North Carolina-based estate of tobacco heir Richard Reynolds III. In 1994 he was joined here by Elizabeth Rauscher, formerly of the Esalen Institute and the Fundamental Fysiks Group, and her husband. The four of them were working on spiritual issues. - Dr. Stanislav Grof: Czech-born psychiatrist who came to work at the U.S.-based (elite-funded) Henry Phipps Clinic in 1967. In the late 1960s he worked with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert-protege Walter Pahnke in various LSD experiments. After LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Grof started developing a practice called "Holotropic Breathwork" with the intent to mimic psychedelic states through breathing exercises. He would promote that practice for the rest of his life.
Elite ties: Live-in scholar at the Laurance Rockefeller- and Ford Foundation-backed Esalen Institute 1973-1987, an institute filled with psychedelic gurus and new age disinformation pushers. By the 2010s an adjunct faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), whose largest financier has been Laurance Rockefeller. At CIIS Grof also has a scholarship named after him.
In 2015 Grof, sitting alongside Princess Irene of Orange (a daughter of Bilderberg founder Prince Bernhard and sister of Queen Beatrix), was part of a presentation of the Club of Budapest, a new age spin-off of the elite Club of Rome, focused on "promoting ... planetary consciousness..." Mikhail Gorbachev is among those who have been both members of the Club of Rome and Club of Budapest.
Looking back, already in October 2007, Grof was awarded the VISION 97 award of the Foundation of Dagmar and Vaclav Havel, named after former Czech president Vaclav Havel and his wife. Havel too has been a long-time member of both the Club of Rome and Club of Budapest. A good friend of persons as Henry Kissinger, in 2003 Havel was a founding patron of the pro-Iraq War, neocon New Atlantic Initiative.
There are other names, of course, but these individuals are the most important in relation to the early years of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT and the eventual experiments at Harvard under Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in the 1960-1963 period. As for the newer generation of psychedelic promoters and researchers:
- Terence McKenna: The number one psychedelics guru, who has given extensive lectures on anything from marijuana to mushrooms and ayahuasca. Has pushed a variety of questionable and outright disinformative information, most notably that mushrooms are aliens and that 2012 involved some kind of spiritual evolution of the human race.
Elite ties: Involved with the Esalen Institute, a Laurance Rockefeller favorite, and the Laurance Rockefeller-financed Green Earth Foundation. - Dr. Dennis McKenna: Brother of Terence McKenna who aided him in his 2012 theories. These days primarily focused on the science without disinformation.
Elite ties: Board member of the Green Earth Foundation and the Heffter Research Institute, both financed by Laurance Rockefeller. Involved in the Soros, Bronfman and otherwise elitist-backed 1st World Ayahuasca Conference of 2014. The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs conference in 2017, organized by McKenna, involved backing of institutes with financing coming from the Rockefeller family, Soros and the Tides Foundation. - Ethan Nadelmann: Executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance.
Elite ties: The number one Soros agent on drugs and psychedelics activism since 1994. Director of Soros' elite Drug Policy Alliance, sitting on the board with George Soros himself (anno 2012 and such), with other boards of the DPA stacked with names Frank Carlucci, Paul Volcker, George Shultz, Richard Branson and other top elites. - Daniel Pinchbeck: Author on DMT, ayahuasca and ibogaine, who has also pushed 2012, alien abduction and crop circle disinformation.
Elite ties: In the 1990s Pinchbeck was a protege and party boy of newspaper fortune heir Robert Bingham IV, also was a member of a Pilgrims Society family. In the years after, Pinchbeck was aided in his endeavors by Soros/Rockefeller ally Ken Jordan. In 2011 Pinchbeck joined the "creative" board of the Club of Budapest, a new age spin-off of the elite Club of Rome, focused on "promoting ... planetary consciousness", with considerable overlap in board membership with the Club of Rome. Pinchbeck also has been the beneficiary of a major "liberal CIA" Tides Foundation grant. - Rick Doblin Founder and head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Elite ties: Protege of Esalen Institute live-in scholar Stanislav Grof, who eventually became part of the Club of Budapest, a Club of Rome spinoff promoting "planetary consciousness" filled with globalist elites.
MAPS has received major backing from Senator Jay Rockefeller and especially Dr. Richard Rockefeller over the years, in addition to the Libra Foundation of the billionaire Pritzker family, the small Rockefeller-allied RiverStyx Foundation, and the large Levi Strauss-linked San Francisco Foundation. MAPS has cooperated closely with Soros' Open Society Foundations and Drug Policy Alliance.
It might well be that Doblin wasn't accepted by the elite until he received a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 2001. - Jeffrey Bronfman: Member of the powerful Bronfman family and lawyer and prominent member of the Uniao do Vegetal (Union of the Plants) ayahuasca church.
Elite ties: The billions and connections of his own family, members of which have the highest neocon, liberal globalist and "alt-left" "liberal CIA" ties. - Amber Lyon Dissenting CNN journalist who became a psychedelics activist.
Elite ties: Her Facebook in 2015 revealed she was good friends with Jonathan Soros, the son of George Soros; with Wyatt Rockefeller, a grandson of Laurance Rockefeller, also appearing in her friends list.
Lyon's psychedelics news website, Reset.me, was built by Toi.io, a firm whose biggest and most prominent client is Peter Thiel, a billionaire Bilderberg steering committee member from Silicon Valley with long-standing ties to the CIA and DOD through his Palantir firm. While generally considered conservative, Thiel also is a person closely tied to "liberal CIA" activism along the lines of Lyon. A full article on Amber Lyon can be found here. - Josh Wickerham Former United Nations and WWF employee who became a psychedelics activist.
Elite ties: Wickerham's UN and WWF ties by themselves. His Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council is supported by the Soros-funded ICEERS group and the Rockefeller-backed MAPS group. A director of Soros' Drug Policy Alliance sits on the board, along with MAPS' Rick Doblin.
The purpose of this article has been to provide a full history of psychedelic use and psychedelic researchers without overlooking the elite ties seemingly always lurking in the background. This last aspect is probably the most surprising to many readers, because... how many elites and elite foundations and groups have we run into over the course of this article from beginning to end? A lot. Let's see:
- The Luce couple and Time magazine;
- Anheuser Busch;
- Nancy Astor;
- Alice Astor;
- Marcella Du Pont and various (here) unspecified Eastern Establishment friends;
- Paul Mellon and his Bollingen Foundation;
- Laurance Rockefeller;
- the Morgan and then Rockefeller controlled First National Bank;
- General Douglas MacArthur and General George Patton;
- the Weathermen;
- Joanna Harcourt Smith and her ties to Bilderberger Gianni Agnelli, also a best friend of Henry Kissinger;
- top Zionist leader George Alpert;
- pioneering Rockefeller PR chief Ivy Lee
- the board of Morgan Guaranty Trust and the Century Association
- the Ford Foundation;
- Pilgrims Society-dominated Harvard;
- Phillips Exeter Academy with schoolmates whose parents are friends with the Rockefellers;
- Bill Mellon Hitchcock and Peggy Hitchcock;
- Christopher Mellon;
- billionaire Huntington Hartford;
- Robert Bingham IV;
- Robert Reynolds III;
- billionaire George Soros;
- Jonathan Soros;
- billionaire Peter Lewis;
- Reed Erickson;
- a descendant of the Habsburg family and King Charles II of England;
- Jeffrey Bronfman;
- the Tides Foundation, chaired by Joanie Bronfman;
- Dr. Richard Rockefeller;
- Senator Jay Rockefeller;
- the San Francisco Foundation;
- the RiverStyx Foundation;
- the Libra Foundation of the billionaire Pritzker family;
- James Stillman Rockefeller;
- CIA front firm Diligence, LLC;
- the Hewlett Packard Company;
- and maybe a few more that we missed.
Based on all these establishment connections, let's ask a few questions:
- Do you think Henry Luce, or maybe even the CIA, would have published his famous May 1957 article on psychedelic mushrooms if Gordon Wasson had not been a Morgan Guaranty Trust vice president with membership of the Century Association, where the Rockefellers, Dulles brothers and Henry Luce could be found?
- Do you think the Harvard psilocybin project would have been initiated in 1960 without the 1957 article in Time magazine on psychedelic mushrooms? After all, the article served as inspiration for members of the Leary group.
- Do you think Alan Watts would ever have grown to become the famous and charismatic psychedelic guru if he had not entered Laurance Rockefeller's sphere in 1951, hadn't received crucial financing of Paul Mellon's Bollingen Foundation starting that same year, and his radio station hadn't been the recipient of massive Ford Foundation sponsorship?
- Do you think that without the Mellon-Hitchcock donation of the Millbrook estate the Leary group could have played such a key role in the rise of the hippie movement and the association of psychedelics with leading rock musicians of the time?
- Do you think we would have any kind of marijuana legalization today without the $80 million dollar invested by George Soros and the $40 million invested by Peter Lewis in the 1994-2014 period?
- Do you think that MAPS would have been able to carry out any significant trials without the efforts and/or financing of Dr. Richard Rockefeller, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Pritzker family, or foundations as RiverStyx, Tides and San Francisco?
- Do you think the Heffter Research Institute could have been founded or operated without funding from individuals as Laurance Rockefeller and a number of major foundations?
Most readers will probably reply with "no" to most of these questions.
With that, I guess, the purpose of this article has been full-filled: the psychedelics community indeed is, and has always been, dominated by elites. Although their role may often seem insignificant, it does appear as if having establishment and/or intelligence connections is prerequisite in certain sensitive domains as conspiracy and spirituality in order to be able to get a good book publisher, interviews on major mainstream and/or "alternative" media outlets for promotion, and, as result, a listing in the New York Times and Amazon best-sellers lists for additional exposure. Is this always the case? No, but if you do not have any establishment connections, you'd better do something extremely extraordinary - such as inventing LSD - for anyone to pay attention to you.
Readers also shouldn't forget that this article started out as a subsection of ISGP's Coast to Coast AM article. This article revealed how a group involving the CIA, DIA, AFOSI and a number of wealthy businessmen, most notably Laurance Rockefeller, Joe Firmage, Robert Bigelow and Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein, have created a whole bunch of UFO-related myths that have seeped deep into the national and even international consciousness. These myths include the Ellsworth Air Force Base incident, Roswell, Majestic 12, alien abductions, cattle mutilations and crop circles. In this Coast to Coast AM article it is also detailed how George Soros is increasingly linked to the conspiracy disinformation network, with a number of other "liberal CIA" foundations similarly tied to it. In that regard, the psychedelics community is far from the exception. Its elitist ties fit a very familiar pattern. And that pattern is that very little, if anything, gets published or broadcasted that is not approved by one or more factions or groups within the superclass. It's a sad state of affairs, and we haven't fully come up with an explanation yet, but it nevertheless is reality.
Despite the fact that many of the same elites can be found, psychedelics still remain vastly different from the afore-mentioned myth-making in the sense that disinformation is not going to effective as long as access to the substances is maintained. Even if elites as those found in the United Nations Association and the World Commission for Global Consciousness and Spirituality are looking to create a global psychedelics cult based on all kinds of bizarre beliefs, the psychedelics themselves will not aid that effort. People will still benefit in countless different ways, because psychedelics are so completely different from the stereotype that they are only good for "spacing out", or even that they can be used for "mind control". The only "mind control" going on would be that everyone gets brainwashed into finding the most peaceful solutions possible - while maintaining their free will and rational faculties once they exit their trips. We would still have the same class, political and intellectual struggles that we have today, except that they'll be more peaceful with people taking more personal responsibility. Heck, maybe it will even make people more courageous. So as long as elites, however manipulative they are, are working towards making and keeping psychedelics available to the masses, I'm not really complaining.
There are probably readers who are wondering: what about the CIA and its MKULTRA project? The thing is, I hardly ever encountered ties between the very overt psychedelics community and very covert mind control-type research. Dr. John Lilly was surrounded by MKULTRA types during his brain implant and isolation tank research, but refused to cooperate in any secret experiments. There was a loose affiliation between the CIA-linked Dr. Joly West, later of the curious False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and isolation tanks. There was one-time mushroom researcher Colonel Andrija Puharich at the MKULTRA-linked Edgewood Arsenal. There were the Macy Foundations conferences. And there were Dr. Henry Murray's experiments with Ted Kaczynski. That's about it though. CIA and military scientists looking into multiple personalities, hypnosis, and drugs to create mind controlled super-spies and assassins clearly were operating within an entirely different, and much more secret, network. We'll be discussing this network in a different article, if time allows it.
APPENDICES
- Beginning in 1969 the Busch and Rockefeller families have jointly been developing the Williamsburg, Virginia region. 265
- By the 1970s the Busch family showed up in the elite 1001 Club alongside the Bechtels, Mellon, Ford, Rockefellers and Rothschilds.
- Long-time Anheuser Busch managing director 266 and family member Peter M. Flanigan 267 was Nixon's Mr. Fixit, whose influence in big business circles was compared to Kissinger's influence in foreign policy. 268
- Long-time Anheuser Busch director Charles F. Knight also came to serve on the boards of IBM, AT&T, BP, Baxter, Caterpillar and Morgan Stanley. He had been tapped as a member of Cornell's Sphinx Head Society in 1957, along with Colin G. Campbell, the future chair, president and CEO of the Rockefeller-linked Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1987 to 2000.
- At least one director sat on the board of People for the American Way 269, a big foundation-financed (Rockefeller, Ford, Soros) "liberal CIA", "new left" controlled opposition outfit which has also received a degree of financing from the Anheuser Busch fortune. 270
- In the 1980s there were suspicions of the Anheuser Busch family's ties to the P2 Lodge and Banco Ambrosiano scandal, as well as suspicions of its closeness to Opus Dei. 271
- By the early 1990s former CIA director William Webster was serving on the company's board. 272
Appendix B: Timothy Leary's elite ties
Leary's ties to the elite are quite unusual. His parents were closely tied to some of the worst conservative elites, but eventually he manages to receive backing from liberal elites to the chagrin of conservatives. A list:
- His parents were very close to pro-fascist generals Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, both darlings of the American Security Council. May 1, 1976, People magazine, 'Timothy Leary Is Free, Demonstrably in Love and Making Extraterrestrial Plans': "[Leary is] the son of an Army dentist who worked on Gen. Douglas MacArthur's teeth at West Point, he went to the Military Academy himself [but dropped out]."
- Director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation Hospital from 1955 to 1958. The Kaisers were part of the Bechtel clique; so was director Joseph Califano. They were all Bohemian Grove Camp Mandalay, with Kaiser and Bechtel on the National Committee for a Free Asia (today the Asia Foundation), a CIA front. Coincidentally, Leary developed a personality test here, which also came in use by the CIA. It was also his ticket to Harvard. hy 'Flashbacks'. Leary is asked about neurotransmitters and serotonin 11:00 into the interview. (Youtube title: 'Timothy Leary Ph.D - Air date March 1984'): "My father was an Army officer at West Point and on the night I was conceived, my mother danced with General Douglas MacArthur and General Patton, Lieutenant Patton at that time, and off we went from there."
- From 1960 to 1963 Leary was running psychedelic treatment centers at Harvard, which, together with Yale, is the most eastern establishment university in the United States. While Leary appears to have been genuine in his motivations, these experiments still fell under the CIA's MKULTRA umbrella. One psychologists who later managed to get Leary fired, Professor Herbert Kelman, received a small grant of the Human Ecology Fund, a CIA front for MKULTRA research, and became a long-time director of Harvard's elite Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, home to Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington and other elites. In the same period Leary was interacting with seemingly rogue CIA wife and Kennedy mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who kept warning him not to antagonize the CIA elite: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, James Angleton, and the like. Both Kennedy and Meyer died under strange circumstances. Leary later openly questioned these deaths.
- From 1963 to 1967, Leary, together with former Harvard colleagues Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) are picked up by the elite Pilgrims Society-linked Mellon-Hitchcock family and invited to live at the giant 64-room Millbrook estate. Strangely, Herman Kahn, one of the inspirations behind Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, and staff members at the (neo)conservative Hudson Institute, are among the visitors of Millbrook to experiment with psychedelic drugs. 1983, Timothy Leary, 'Flashbacks: An Autobiography', p. 120: "A number of MIT physicists and astronomers were using our drugs to experience multiple realities and relativistic perspectives, as were Herman Kahn and many staff members at the Hudson Institute. We also heard from physiologists around the country who were involved in drug research of their own. Among the most interesting results was Karl Pribram's holographic theory of the brain."
- Just as peculiar, it is associate district attorney G. Gordon Liddy who is regularly raiding the Millbrook mansion. A few years later Liddy is secretly hired by the Nixon administration to undermine the Democrats, resulting in the Watergate affair. Liddy was on the extreme-right of the spectrum and appears to have been a CIA asset. Leary and Liddy went on a speaking tour together in 1982. June 25, 2006, New York Times book review, ''Timothy Leary: A Biography,' by Robert Greenfield; The Nutty Professor': "[The Millbrook estate, near Poughkeepsie, where Vassar College is located, was] the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy. ... G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary went on a joint speaking tour in 1982." Nixon termed Leary "the most dangerous man in America" and made sure he was put in jail.
- In January 1970 Leary was busted out of jail to Algeria by the Weathermen Underground, an anti-Vietnam War terrorist student group along the lines of the Rote Armee Fraktion in Europe. Whether or not the Weathermen were influenced or controlled by the CIA as an ultra-left-wing dissident group remains the question. Leary was eventually smuggled out of Algeria with help from a CIA agent, whom he met through a local Newsweek stringer. While it might be a coincidence, Newsweek was/is owned by the Washington Post, with whom Leary has been intertwined since the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer. 1983, Timothy Leary, 'Flashbacks: An Autobiography', p. 308:
"[In Algeria] a psychiatrist took me to lunch to ask what I knew about mind-control and brainwashing, implying that I could find a good post behind the Iron Curtain, in a Czech or Hungarian Clinic. ... I wasn't interested in a scientific post in a Communist country. All this intrigue sent paranoia indices on a rapid climb. A charming English lady, a stringer for [the Washington Post-owned] Newsweek introduced us to a well-educated Algerian bureaucrat named Ali and his French wife Michelle, who had us over for dinner several times. He made no bones about his connection to the CIA. They were planning to migrate to Canada. I felt the moment had come to confide our hopes to someone. "Look Ali. We want to escape Algeria. How can we get out?" "You have two problems. First you'll have to get some other country to accept you. You can't just go to the airport and jump on a plane. And second the Algerians will have to let you go. Once you accepted that green political asylum card, you gave the Algerian government the right to decide where you'll be most useful." ... [Ali later on:] "Your exit visas will be waiting for you at the airport. I'll arrange it." In our hotel suite I lifted Rosemary up and swung her around in triumph. "Denmark, here we come." "Are you sure we can trust him?" she asked. "He's CIA after all." "He's liberal CIA," I said, "and that's the best mafia you can deal with in the twentieth century."" - Leary later had a son with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, whose name indicates she's from an elite British family. What we know for certain is that she dated the elite Aga Khan (1001 Club) and is the aunt of Arki Busson, whose mentor and close family friend was Gianni Agnelli, known for his involvement in Bilderberg, the 1001 Club, and being one of the closest friends of Henry Kissinger. Sources on Harcourt-Smith and Busson:
- May 30, 2011, Business Insider, 'Meet The Socialite Hippie Who Says Her Sister And Her Financier Son Stole The Family Fortune': "Joanna Harcourt-Smith, an aging hippy and British socialite and hedge fund manager Arki Busson's aunt, has revealed plans to write a "mind-blowing" (as her publisher describes it) memoir about her life. Harcourt-Smith, according to the Daily Mail "was a flower-power teenager in the Sixties, lived with the Rolling Stones in France, cavorted with playboy Gunther Sachs, Salvador Dali and the Aga Khan, before falling in love with the LSD guru Timothy Leary, by whom she has a son, Marlon.""
- July 10, 2008, Daily Mail, 'Why is Uma Thurman feeling so insecure about her engagement to Arpad 'Arki' Busson?': "The following entry [could be read] in the personal columns of The Times last weekend: 'The engagement is announced between Arpad, son of Mr Pascal Busson, of Paris, and Mrs Florence Harcourt-Smith [the sister of Joanna], of South of France, and Uma, daughter of Mr and Mrs Robert A. F. Thurman, of New York.'"
- January 27, 2009, Bloomberg, 'Uma Thurman No Help to Arpad Busson in Madoff Fraud's Nightmare': "Busson began dating supermodel Macpherson in the mid-1990s. The pair broke up in 2005 without marrying, and split custody of their two sons, one of whom counted the late Italian auto tycoon Giovanni Agnelli as godfather."
- May 29, 2005, The Guardian, 'Can this 'venture philanthropist' save our schools?': "Arpad Busson lives a charmed life. Partner of supermodel Elle 'The Body' Macpherson, by whom he has two children, the French-born, London-based financier divides his time between their Notting Hill mansion, a villa in the Bahamas and his offices in exotic locations around the globe. But apart from those who inhabit the rarefied world of the international jet set - Busson socialises with Madonna and Guy Ritchie, while Jemima Khan and Hugh Grant are close friends - few have heard of Busson, or 'Arki' as he is known in his inner circle. ... In his penthouse office in Mayfair's Curzon Street, Busson, giving his first interview to a national newspaper, does not seem short of confidence. ... It is a rare insight into Busson's private life, which is the subject of acute scrutiny. As he has habitually declined to give interviews, myths have stuck to him like limpets. ... [Arki Busson] was steeped in the ways of finance from an early age. His step-grandfather was the ultra-wealthy Hungarian financier Arpad Plesch. Once Italy's richest man, the late head of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli, was a mentor [to Arki]. ... Certainly Ark, which stands for Absolute Return for Kids, does not appears short of business acumen. Its board reads like a Who's Who of the City. Along with Busson there is Stanley Fink and Ian Wace, two of the most powerful - and richest - men in the world of high finance."