KABUL, Afghanistan — U.S. officials seized "the most dangerous man in America" at Kabul International Airport after he arrived from an Algerian safehouse run by armed U.S. revolutionaries.

The American citizen was captured after denouncing Washington as "lethal evil" and calling on supporters to "hijack planes" and assassinate police.

It was Jan. 17, 1973 when Dr. Timothy Leary, "high priest" of LSD, landed in this mile-high capital and was immediately arrested.

Today, while warplanes and satellites hunt suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden, the U.S. may look back with nostalgia to 29 years ago and the relatively easy way they captured Dr. Leary in Afghanistan.

Guns, God and an international manhunt formed a paisley-pattered swirl around Dr. Leary's escape during those desperate, madcap years.

The philosophical and absurd world of the late Dr. Leary, who helped pioneer a worldwide psychedelic movement, was no laughing matter for U.S. security forces.

The smirking, showman shaman became a fugitive in 1970 when he escaped jail in San Luis Obispo, California, shortly after being sentenced to six months to ten years for possessing two marijuana cigarettes.

Unlike Mr. bin Laden's suicidal ideology, Dr. Leary favored a "politics of ecstasy" based on neurological pleasure, expanded consciousness and evolution.

"Shoot To Kill, Aim to Live"

He said he was "liberated" from jail by the Weather Underground, a violent U.S. Marxist guerrilla group.

To thank the Weathermen, the traditionally peace-loving Dr. Leary issued a startling "Prisoner of War Statement" trumpeting armed revolution to topple America.

"Shoot to Kill, Aim to Live," became the headline of his manifesto published at the time in the leftist Los Angeles Free Press and elsewhere.

"Listen Americans! Your government is an instrument of totally lethal evil," Dr. Leary's statement said.

"Resist actively, sabotage, jam the computer . . . hijack planes, trash every lethal machine in the land.

"To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act . . . Total war is upon us . . . WARNING: I am armed and should be considered dangerous!"

After graduating from West Point, a U.S. military academy, Dr. Leary became a psychology instructor at Harvard University until he mischievously messed with people's minds and spiritual beliefs.

"We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days," Dr. Leary said while experimenting with LSD at Harvard in the 1960s.

"Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic views of the Universe," Dr. Leary insisted.

While on the run in 1970, Dr. Leary and his third wife, Rosemary, briefly hid out at an armed safehouse hosted by Eldridge Cleaver and other U.S. Black Panther militants in Algiers, capital of Algeria.

Dr. Leary, 49, wanted to achieve solidarity with international radicals.

Mr. Cleaver and the Panthers - wanted back in California for a 1968 gun battle with Oakland cops were shocked at Dr. Leary's diet of hallucinogens.

"To all those who look to Dr. Leary for inspiration or even leadership, we want to say that your god is dead because his mind has been blown by acid," Mr. Cleaver wrote in 1971 after clamping Dr. Leary under house arrest.

Back in Washington, meanwhile, President Richard M. Nixon dubbed Dr. Leary "the most dangerous man in America."

Girlfriend-Spy

After escaping Algeria via Switzerland, a desperate Dr. Leary and new girlfriend Joanna Harcourt-Smith flew to Afghanistan.

Dr. Leary was caught in Kabul on January 17, 1973 when he stepped off a passenger plane.

"At the Kabul airport, the official from the American Embassy grabbed my passport illegally and the Afghan police busted me for not having a passport," Dr. Leary later wrote.

"Even the King of Afghanistan took a dive" that year, he quipped, referring to the July 1973 coup against Afghan King Zahir Shah.

"I felt like a man from the 21st century being boiled in a pot by superstitious savages."

After extradition, U.S. authorities sentenced Dr. Leary to five years for escaping, plus additional jail time for other drug-linked convictions.

From California's Folsom Prison - which he described as "the Black Hole of American society" - Dr. Leary ceased his violent vibes and advised acid-heads to groove with the universe and travel in outer space.

Instead of the U.S. government's CIA, Dr. Leary hoped for a "Cosmic Intelligence Agency to send the extra-planetary rescue ship."

In 1996, LSD enthusiast Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, described how Dr. Leary was lured to Afghanistan and busted: "Imagine being whisked to Algiers, where you are surrounded by fugitive Black Panthers, white-bread revolutionaries and Algerian police.

"Then picture this: a mysterious siren comes swinging to your rescue, sweeps you off your feet and promises to deliver you from your nightmare by marrying you.

"For a honeymoon, she wants you to meet her folks at their estate in Afghanistan. The folks, though, turn out to be four U.S. narcs with cuffs and extradition papers.

"So what I really want to ask Leary is this: 'Do you hanker to wring your wife's treacherous neck?'"

While in jail, Dr. Leary replied to Mr. Kesey: "My new spouse 'The Spy'? I see her a couple times a week. I certainly don't hold it against her.

"She likes this espionage action. It gets her off. Who am I, of all people, to put down somebody else's turn-on?"

In 1976, Dr. Leary was granted parole from Folsom by California Governor Jerry Brown and settled in southern California where he spoke on "cyberculture," space colonization and life extension.

He befriended Hollywood celebrities Winona Ryder, Leonardo DiCaprio, Susan Sarandon and others.

In 1996, at the age 75, he died from prostate cancer and is now best remembered for his favorite subversive slogan: "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

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Richard S. Ehrlich has a Master's Degree in Journalism from Columbia University, and is the co-author of the classic book of epistolary history, "HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" -- Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews.

His web page is located at http://www.oocities.org/asia_correspondent and he may be reached by email: animists *at* yahoo dot com.