A huge benefit of studying at the Harvard Kennedy School was his exposure to second-, third-, and fourth-tier government officials: career apparatchiks characterized as essential members of the Deep State, but rarely recognized beyond Washington, DC.
CIA operations officer John Kenneth Knaus was just the sort of superspy Leonard would never have met outside Harvard. Best remembered as the agent who helped extract the Dalai Lama from Tibet in 1959, Knaus was a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies when Leonard approached following one of Knaus’s lectures. Breaking the ice, Leonard mentioned that he’d once met the CIA’s Robert Rewald3 in Terminal Island.
“Oh, you mean that thing in Hawaii?” Knaus had asked.
“Yes, that thing in Hawaii.”
Pickard quickly explained how he made Rewald’s acquaintance while in prison. Leonard told Knaus that a government misunderstanding over “errant lab equipment” landed him briefly behind bars. He’d been mistakenly found guilty of drug manufacture and did a little federal time. He met several remarkable characters while inside including Akbar Bai and Rewald, but once Leonard walked free, he’d flipped over a new leaf. Voila! He was now a Harvard fellow.
“Knaus nodded somberly,” recalled Pickard, “but with a detectable air of guardedness, for this CIA operations officer had forgotten more secrets than most remember.”
Pickard could tell by the hesitancy in Knaus’s voice and the subtle shift of eyeballs behind his bifocals that he’d switched from chatty to cautious.
“He concluded that his new visitor, presumed at first to be an innocent HKS matriculant, had perhaps a roguish background that, as in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, might shift perspective the closer it was observed. . . .”
Knaus twitched his mustache. “I’ll check with Langley,” he told Leonard.
Knaus wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, Kennedy School adjunct to hold Leonard at arm’s length. If he’d checked with Langley as he said, Leonard heard nothing further about it. He and Knaus never spoke again. From thence forward, Leonard convinced himself to be more circumspect. He might be under government surveillance.
Nonetheless, Leonard used his other newly-developed CIA and State Department contacts to gain further foreign introductions. The Russian head of the MVD4 (Ministry of Internal Affairs) was the first to grant him an audience in Moscow.
“An inroad,” he said. “I kept recordings of those interviews.”
The MVD contact led to others: Major General Alexander Sergeev, chief of MVD’s drug division; Minister of Drugs Eduard Babayan; Vladimir Sorokin, chief chemist for the Russian National Forensics Laboratory. . . .
Pickard became a regular Russophile. The rise of fentanyl was now a cornerstone of his Kennedy School studies. In addition to profiling George Marquardt and surveying hundreds of Boston addicts about their opioid habits, he began conducting similar analyses of strung-out Muscovites.
According to Skinner, he also took an active interest in studying Russian women. He may even have fathered a child with a Russian expat.5 But at the same time Jekyll explored Moscow, Hyde was allegedly cooking acid in the Rockies.
When Skinner testified that he first heard about Pickard’s moveable lab, it was still located in dilapidated quarters on the outskirts of Aspen. Leonard supposedly paid $15,000 a month rent.6 The story Pickard told him was that he originally bought his lab equipment with winnings from a high-stakes poker game. Through his neuro-network, Skinner heard otherwise.
“Leonard somehow got into [Dave Nichols’s] lab through saying he was going to do research work and he synthesized approximately sixty-six grams of LSD,” he said. The street value, according to Skinner: $200,000.
Leonard could clearly afford the astronomical Aspen rent, but one icy winter in the Rockies was quite enough. He also had a standing rule: he moved his lab every other year no matter what. He wasn’t going to wind up another Bruce Michael Young. From the Bernards through Scully and Sand, the biggest danger of getting caught came from remaining in one place too long.
In the fall of 1996, according to Skinner, Pickard began scouting the mountains of northern New Mexico for new digs.
With an introduction from Savinelli, Leonard came across David Haley, a Taos contractor/carpenter.7 The sometime artist was working on a landscape oil when Leonard stopped to admire. He struck up a conversation.
“He indicated he had a degree from Harvard and did work in the field of pharmacology,” Haley recalled from the witness stand.
Pickard identified himself as John Connor8 and his female companion as Edwina Chang.
“I found Edwina to be a very beautiful person and Mr. Connor very knowledgeable and well-traveled,” said Haley.
The conversation turned to Mr. Connor’s need for a writer’s retreat. He didn’t know the territory, but it was apparent that Haley did. Would he be interested in helping lease a quiet out-of-the-way place where Connor could craft his memoirs?
With that, Pickard produced $1,100 in cash—quite enough to convince Haley he was serious, but not so much that it might arouse suspicion. They shook hands, exchanged contact information, and Haley left with purpose and a pocket full of currency.
He also accepted that Mr. Connor could only be reached locally through Box 289 at the Taos Mail Boxes Etc. Connor was new in town, after all, there were no cell phones in those days, and Massachusetts was 2,000 miles away. It turned out later that a John Connor had, indeed, rented that mailbox, using a Visa card and a Georgia driver’s license, but the photo on the license was that of one William Leonard Pickard.
Beginning with Haley and the house in Santa Fe, Pickard’s dual existence began slowly to unravel.
“I visited several times when staying over,” he later admitted. “There were couches and a stereo, nothing else. No LSD. But it makes a good story for the Drug Enforcement Administration, which had no explanation at trial why no evidence of a lab was ever found.”
Innocent
