This is a supplementary thread to the main one discussing Michael Meier's book WAS JONESTOWN A CIA MEDICAL EXPERIMENT?, which is linked here.
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...#post11038
This should give those interested some further things to discuss. (I'll edit my reprint of the one chapter from the above thread tomorrow to point to the appropriate page here, to avoid duplication).
Meiers condenses - and continues - the narrative in his recent book THE SECOND HOLOCAUST: HOW THE AIDS EPIDEMIC WAS CREATED IN A CIA BLACK OPERATION, which is available on Amazon, linked below. It will be interest to anyone who finds his research here intriguing.
http://www.amazon.com/Second-Holocaust-E...ael+meiers
This reprint below contains the full text of his original book, sans footnotes and bibliography (the former of which largely links to newspaper articles, rather than offering additional commentary ala your average Peter Dale Scott book). A PDF with all relevant footnotes and bibliography will follow in the near future. This initial post is to give those curious about the text a chance to digest the bulk of Meiers' research. There are some sections I disagree with, and others that can be criticized for misguided analysis. The central discussion of Jones and his career however, is compelling and disquieting. I would be interesting in knowing more about Jones' work in Cuba. He was there at quite an important time.
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WAS JONESTOWN A CIA MEDICAL EXPERIMENT?
A REVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE
by Michael Meiers
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgement
Prologue
1 Heil Hitler!
2 Deep Cover
3 From the Cradle to the Company
4 Three Countries, Three Commissions
5 A California Concentration Camp
6 The H' File Homicides
7 Moscone, Milk and Murder
8 Publicity, Provocateuring and Political Power
9 Of Dogs and Monkeys
10 It's a Jungle Out There
11 The Experiment
12 One Cookie
13 The White Night
14 Various Villains and Victims
15 The Phantom Preacher
16 Renegade Faction
Epilogue
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"You have to put fear aside and do what you think is right."
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- Leo Ryan on the eve of his visit to Jonestown.[size=12]
And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
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- John VIII : 32. The unofficial motto of the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Acknowledgement
As the author, I am solely responsible for this work but it might never have been published had it not been for the generous efforts of scores of fellow researchers, reporters, librarians and friends who gathered source material, constructively criticized early drafts of the manuscript and proofread my atrocious spelling. I appreciate your help and trust that you will understand that the omission of your names from this acknowledgement is not intended to downgrade your valuable contributions, only to spare you the pain of any possible reprisal from those people who would suppress the truth about the Jonestown experiment and the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan.
Michael Meiers
June 1988
Prologue
The Kristallnacht or Crystal Night was the name the Nazis gave to the evening of November 9, 1938: the fifteenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's first attempt to overthrow the German government. As in years past, the Nazi Party bosses gathered to celebrate; among them was Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfurer of the SS, who had planned an event to mark the anniversary. Following the beer hall celebrations, Himmler's SS set out to assault the Jewish citizenry. Before the evening was over, 119 synagogues were set on fire, 7,500 Jewish shops were looted or destroyed, 171 Jewish homes were burned, and 20,000 Jews were arrested and sent to newly-constructed labour camps. According to Nazi records, 36 Jews were murdered that evening. Throughout Germany, Himmler's troops inflicted over 25 million marks worth of damage 5 million in broken glass alone, hence the name, the Crystal Night. In the weeks that followed, German Jews were not only denied insurance claims, but were totally ousted from the economy and fined one billion marks "for their abominable crimes".
German Jews had suffered persecution before, but only at the hands of roving bands of "brown shirts" who acted out of their personal predjudices under a government that turned a blind eye to their crimes. The Crystal Night was the first assault to be officially sanctioned by the German government. It was the beginning of the Holocaust. In the six and a half years that followed, over 12 million Jews and other sub-humans were exterminated in the Nazi death camps. Combined with the casualties of World War II, the death toll was a staggering 60 million.
Today, outside Munich, near Dachau, the first and most infamous of the German Nazi death camps, there is a memorial to those who died in the Holocaust. Inscribed on the monument are the foreboding words of American philosopher George Santayana, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it."
--
The White Night was the name the Reverend Jim Jones gave to the evening of November 18, 1978 in which over 900 of his followers died in a mass suicide/murder ritual in Jonestown, Guyana; a community they had carved from the jungles of South America. Sparked by their assassination of U.S Congressman Leo Ryan, the predominantly Black American cultists carried out the final performance of the bizarre White Night they had rehearsed for years. Before the evening was over, 913 former U.S citizens were dead, most from drinking a cyanide-laced concoction.
For years, Jim Jones had warned his congregation that the Nazis had infiltrated the Central Intelligence Agency and other departments of the federal government to stage a second holocaust; this time against the Blacks and Native Americans. He claimed their only chance of survival was under his protection in the safe haven of Jonestown. Jones' warnings were correct, but he neglected to tell his congregation that it was he who was helping to perpetrate the coming ethnic war in America.
Jonestown was a medical field test in mind control designed to evaluate two auspicious behaviour modification drugs on a representative cross-section of Black and Native American citizens. The unwitting human guinea pigs were divided into three test groups. Three hundred received small dosages of drug A on a regular basis, three hundred received drug B and the remaining three hundred acted as the control group and received no drugs at all. Jim Jones then staged the only definitive test of his control; he asked his followers to commit suicide. Those who did so voluntarily were considered under control, those who refused were murdered and the results so noted in the extensive medical records that are still missing to this day.
Jones and several of his top aides were in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the experiment; making the White Night the first U.S. government sanctioned persecution of a native minority in peacetime. The 913 dead are important, but not as important as the yet untold millions who will die if the results of the Jonestown experiment are implemented in society. As the earth's resources steadily deplete, a second holocaust becomes more and more probable but, unlike the first, there will be no goosestepping Nazis, swastikas, concentration camps or gas ovens. People will just drop dead en-masse or be reduced to zombie-like slaves to serve a master race. All that remains of the ultimate experiment that made this grim future possible are photographs of the carnage and one in particular. Surrounded by a field of corpses, over the simple, unadorned throne of Jim Jones hung the following hand-painted wooden sign: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
--
Some say the evil was born in Jim Jones, others say it is inherent in the CIA, still others claim the true source is the Nazis who infiltrated the CIA, and then there are those few who believe it all began with some quasi-religious group founded in the Dark Ages. One might as well say the evil was born with time and will die with time. In order to detail the story within the confines of a book, this work will explore the forty years of ethnic weaponry between the Crystal Night and the White Night.
Eight years have passes since the Jonestown "tragedy" or "mass suicide" or "massacre" or "suicide/murder" or "the greatest crime of the century" no one has really been able to define the event. One author has suggested that it was so unique as to be called "The Event." By now, almost all of the first hand accounts have been published. They are surprisingly consistent in the details of Who? What? When? Where?, but the critical answers to How? and Why? are either misinterpreted, misrepresented or, more commonly, outright omitted. Historic events, like Jonestown, are never understood as they occur, or even within a few years after they occur. It takes time to verify and collate the various eyewitness accounts into a comprehensive overview and to place that overview in the course of history. To date, most reports about Jonestown are autobiographies tainted by the author's defence of his involvement with Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Some are deliberate cover-ups, but most are just subjective and extremely limited in scope. Assuming the intentions of the eyewitness are honest, that he has not been deceived or overly influenced by his emotions and has 100% recall, what he reports is reality, but an extremely limited reality, as he has no knowledge of anything that occurred outside his field of vision. An eyewitness to Jonestown can no more write an accurate history of the event than a soldier in the trenches could write a history of World War I. Such first hand accounts do provide valuable source material, but the definitive history will be a conglomeration of all such accounts; a second-generation book, and that is precisely the intention herein. Although this work reaches entirely different conclusions, it agrees with most of what has been published on the subject of Jonestown.
The secret of the CIA's sponsorship of the Jonestown experiment is really no secret at all. The truth lies in most well-stocked libraries, and in the records of government agencies for any other adventurer who is willing to dedicate six years of intensive digging to discover. The first step in this research work was to collect everything that has been published on the subject. Newspaper articles from both the East and West Coast press were laboriously photocopied from microfilm. Every book about the Peoples Temple was acquired. Many are out of print but obtainable from book finding services, often at ten times the cover price. All related movies, documentaries and video interviews were then taped for reference. U.S government reports (including what little the CIA has released under the Freedom of Information Act) were acquired from the Library of Congress and added to the mass of data. The photo libraries of news agencies provided several thousand photographs, and a wide variety of periodicals provided reprints of articles on the subject. Much of the information referred to other more obscure publications that were purchased from a variety of sources to complete the largest reference library on Jonestown in the world. All of this information was then qualified with particular attention paid to the author's motives and the validity of his sources. Since the Jonestown story crosses the path of many equally important stories of the day, it was necessary to duplicate the above research procedures for these side stories that would become subplots of the Jonestown history. Once all of this information was gathered, it was collated minute by minute, day by day, year by year, until the sum total of all verified facts had been placed in chronological order. This work is intended for those who are not willing to make such an expensive and painstaking commitment in research of the truth.
Nearly everyone I have encountered in my research has urged me not to offer this book for publication. Some say I will be labelled a madman because the American people have been programmed to automatically assume that anyone who speaks of the CIA is paranoid and insane. I disagree. Americans are intelligent and sufficiently aware to know that our national security has been entrusted in part to a very competent agency that is real, effective, achieves noticeable results and often defends their secret activities by labeling their critics as crazy. I have also been warned that Americans do realize the CIA does terrible things but they do not want to know the gory details. Again, I disagree. We have not yet been totally brainwashed into a complacent, dream-like state. We pay taxes to support agencies like the CIA and deserve an accurate accounting of their activities, no matter how disturbing those activities might be. Finally, I have been forewarned that the CIA will try to discredit or even kill me for exposing one of their large-scale crimes against humanity. I agree that there may be some reprisal. The truth hurts, and even though it is not my truth, only the truth, I may suffer some persecution for exposing it.
My motives are both selfless and selfish. Personally, I am appalled that our democracy has deteriorated to the point where a federal agency felt compelled to conduct such a macabre medical experiment on innocent citizens. I feel a sincere responsibility to accurately detail the story of Jonestown and warn of what I see as the strong possibility of a second holocaust. Secondly, I do expect to be compensated for my seven years of work but, if money were my only concern, I could profit far more by using the knowledge I have gained, as opposed to just writing about it.
Though I consider myself to be an excellent researcher, I am only an average writer. This book has been written in plain English. Those fond of high intellectual pursuits will be stimulated and taxed to the limits of their comprehension, not by the pretentious use of flowery language, but by the story itself. The combined genius of Edgar Allen Poe, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Stephen King could not have conjured up a more bizarre, intriguing fiction, but what sets this work apart from theirs is that this story is true.
1. Heil Hitler!
Just because the German Army surrendered, it does not necessarily follow that the Allies won World War II. War, especially world war, is far more than just a military manoeuvre; it also has economic, social, and political ramifications. Certainly, the Allies won a military victory over the Nazis, but that is all that is certain. Within only forty years after World War II, the economy of both Germany and Japan was much stronger than that of the United States, Britain, and Russia, who fared far worse in the wake of what is generally accepted as their victory. This chapter will explore some of the political and social ramifications of the second, and hopefully the last, world war.
Anyone who knows anything about 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century history will recognise this chapter's title as the salutation that opened and closed nearly every communication in Germany's Third Reich, but what does the average American really know about this group that nearly conquered the world? Surprisingly, very little. Volumes have been written on the subject but few have taken the time to read even basic primers like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as such histories are tedious in their detail. Public opinion of the Nazis has been drawn largely from motion pictures, newsreels, documentaries and articles that are too often subjective, one-dimensional propaganda. Since the story of Jonestown has its roots in Nazi Germany, to understand the full impact of the experiment some common misconceptions about the Nazis must first be dispelled.
Contrary to the widely accepted belief, the Nazis were not anti-Semitic, they were pro-Aryan, and there is a distinct difference. The fair-skinned, predominantly blue-eyed, blondes of Nordic descent were heralded as the master race while all others were considered sub-human. The Nazis did murder six million Jews in the Holocaust, but they also murdered an additional six million Slavs, gypsies, intellectuals, drug addicts, criminals, communists, and homosexuals. The only reason that Jews dominated the ranks of the oppressed is that they dominated the sub-human population in Europe. Had the Nazis risen to power in, for example Africa, Blacks and not Jews would have been murdered en masse.
The 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin, is a prime example of the Nazis' attitude towards Blacks. Germany proudly presented its finest Aryan athletes like Luz Long, who carried the honour of the master race but who was repeatedly defeated by the Black American, Jesse Owens. The German press called Owens and other Black athletes "auxiliaries" and "little more than trained baboons". Hitler exemplified the official Nazi position by refusing to congratulate Owens after he won an unprecedented four gold medals in the competition.
Though it is rarely portrayed as one, World War II was a race war, or at least the Nazis perceived it as such. The Allies, on the other hand, were fighting a traditional border war in which geography or nationality dictated whether the citizenry was friend or foe. To the Nazis, the enemy was not the United States or Russia, but the sub-humans, some of whom were in their own country of Germany, others in Europe and others still in the U.S and Russia. Likewise, the Nazis alliance was with the master race living everywhere, not just in Germany. As the German Army conquered more and more of Europe for "Aryan living space", many of the occupied peoples were classified sub-human and sent to the concentration camps, while many of Aryan heritage were rewarded and welcomed into the Third Reich. While the Allies were fighting countries, the Nazis were fighting people, and this basic conceptual difference permitted both sides to win. The Allies won a military victory over Germany, but Germany won a social and political victory over the United States, where their philosophy was embraced by many German-Americans (who today comprise the largest ethnic group in the country).
This story begins in an intra-structure of the Nazi Party known as the Sachutzstaffel, or simply as the SS. The SS was formed in 1926 with 280 charter members whose original function was to guard Adolf Hitler. After two rather ineffective leaders, Hitler appointed Heinrich Himmler, a quiet, mild-mannered poultry farmer and expert genetic engineer, as Reichsfuhrer SS. Under Himmler, the SS grew in numbers and prestige both before and after 1934, when it was made an independent faction of the Nazi Party. Enrolment had increased to 30,000 members recruited from Germany, Austria, Norway, Denmark and France. They were the elite of the master race and the heroes of every aspiring German boy who dreamed of the day that he too could wear the black SS uniform with its stylized twin lightning bolt emblem. The tight-fitting uniform was also cause for young girls to dream.
The SS was so diversified as to defy a simple description. They were not a military unit, per se, though Himmler did establish an armoured division known as the Waffen SS, whose primary function was not to engage in battle, but to follow the German Army and reorganize the conquered countries. They also served as very impressive parade troops. Furthermore, Himmler established an intelligence gathering division as the Security Service of the SS or Sicherheitsdienst (S.D), as the Nazi spy ring was called. Himmler also organized Germany's sixteen police forces into the Gestapo under his command. Another SS division, identified by their skull and cross-bones emblem, was charged with managing the several concentration camps set up in old German factories soon after the SS became a separate entity in 1934. One of the SS tasks was to implement Himmler's plan to purify the Aryan race in the first 125 years of his proposed "Thousand year Reich". Their plan was two-fold; eliminate the sub-humans, and procreate the master race. Himmler would breed the Germans as he had bred chickens on his poultry farm. The SS might best be described as a fraternity whose varied membership that numbered in the hundreds of thousands by the outbreak of World War II, took the following oath,
I swear to thee, Adolf Hitler, loyalty and bravery. I vow to thee and to the superiors whom thou shall appoint, obedience until death.
It was Heinrich Himmler's SS, and not the German people or even the German military, that was solely responsible for the Nazi atrocities.
One of the most bizarre and insightful activities of the SS was to scour the world in search of any and all knowledge of the occult and psychic phenomena. Though Hitler and Himmler's interest in the occult has long been reported, the influence the occult exerted on their careers has never been fully appreciated. Soon after World War I, Hitler joined a number of German occult lodges, most notably the Thule Gesellschaft, a coven that delved into the Black Arts, required its members to abstain from alcohol and meat (to enhance their necromancy rites) and preached a doctrine of Aryan superiority under an ancient Tibetan symbol: the swastika. Obviously, the experience had a profound effect on Hitler. It has been proposed that Hitler intended to appoint himself as God upon conquering the world and this was the source of his obsession with the occult. From African voodoo priests to Himalayan monks, from Christianity to letterology, every religion, sect or cult present in the world as well as in recorded history was closely scrutinized by the SS. They attempted to compile the most comprehensive study of man's spiritual experience, and to a large extent they succeeded.
By 1937, Himmler had bled the German occult lodges for all that they had to teach, so he outlawed them in order to eliminate anyone who possessed even a fraction of his knowledge. Covens, such as the A.A and the O.T.O, were disbanded. The principal figure in both was Aleister Crowley, who regarded the Nazis as "Creatures of Christianity" for their persecution of the Jews. Hitler did report in Mein Kampf that, as a young student in the Benedictine Monastery in Lamback, he dreamed of one day being ordained a priest. To this day, his relationship with the Catholic Church remains a very controversial issue. They never excommunicated him; not even posthumously.
Hitler and Himmler were the foremost authorities on the occult in the world, perhaps even in the history of the world, and the following is presented as an example of the extent of their knowledge. Their basic discovery, or rather rediscovery, was the one dogma common to all religious beliefs - man is an energy force in a physical body. Primitives call it a spirit. Christians call it a soul and portray their saints as having a nimbus or halo about their head. To a Hindu, it is an aura or astral body and their gods and goddesses are depicted as being surrounded by a glowing energy field. Some people in the past and present claim to have the ability to see this rainbow-like aura that surrounds every person, and which attests to his character, as well as his physical and mental state. Regardless of how different cultures view the aura, most agree that it exists and is crucial to life, as the absence of it is the true definition of death. Perhaps Himmler's initial interest in the aura was to develop new techniques to separate body and soul that could kill without bullets or poisons, but his research was to take a different course.
The SS scientists under Himmler determined through modern methods that when a person concentrates on another, a small flare of energy leaves his aura as a solar flare leaves the sun and travels at the speed of light to the person of his thoughts. The recipient then thinks of the sender without realizing that the thought was implanted in his mind. It is commonly known as telepathic communication or extrasensory perception (ESP). Everyone possesses the talent but, like other human attributes, the extent of one's ability varies from individual to individual. It seems strongest between family members or loved ones but, like physical skills, the power of telepathy can be exercised or cultivated to the limits of one's aptitude. The SS conducted many experiments in telepathic communications intended to transmit messages to people as they slept. If the dream message was strong enough, the recipient might subconsciously believe it to be his own thoughts and, once awakened, act accordingly. It is not known how far such experiments progressed in Nazi Germany, but it is known how far the science has progressed since World War II.
Following the war, a new technique, called Kirlian photography, captured the aura on film and, for the first time, scientifically proved its existence. Using the technique, an entire human body was photographed and, in the subsequent study of the picture, an amazing discovery was made. At certain focal points, the aura emitted from the body exactly coincided with ancient Chinese acupuncture charts. Despite present day claims that the effectiveness of acupuncture treatments is not understood, this discovery proved what holistic experts had predicted. Disease is often caused by a blockage of the life-giving force of the aura, and acupuncture needles merely unblock energy paths to permit the aura to flow unrestricted to the affected area. It is the aura and not the needle that cures the acupuncture patient. With this new insight into an ancient science, German researchers experimented with one particular acupuncture treatment that for over 5,000 years was believed to enhance one's psychic powers. According to research from the period, they had arrived at a simple, universally effective method to turn average people into masters of telepathic communication by unblocking the focal points of their auras associated with ESP.
In the 1950's, several experiments were conducted with a telepathic sender and a receiver located a thousand miles apart. The only aspect new to the experiments was the inclusion of highly sensitive monitoring devices that recorded the minute energy flares on an electronic gauge as it left the sender and arrived at the receiver. The experiment only confirmed previous findings, but one unheralded genius came up with a novel idea. The experiment was repeated but, instead of having the sender concentrate on a human receiver, he attempted to send his telepathic message directly to the monitoring equipment. The scientists were amazed when, at the appointed time, a thousand miles from the sender, the needle on the monitoring equipment moved. The machine could not understand the message, only that a message had been received, so the experiment was repeated, but this time, instead of sending a speech or thought pattern, the sender projected a series of energy pulses in Morse code. The gauge registered the dots and dashes of the message and translated them into the written word. If accurate, it was potentially a monumental discovery; the first mind/machine link.
The science, or otherwise, of telepathic communication has also not escaped the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, which funded several studies in parapsychology - in a joint venture with the National Security Agency - in an effort to establish a super-secret national defence system utilizing the "energy influences" of various operatives to jam the directional guidance systems of incoming enemy missiles. Likewise, CIA reports indicate that as early as 1972, the characteristically austere Soviet Union had allocated an annual budget of over $20 million for their research in this field.
Regardless of whether the reader views this account as futuristic fiction or the secret of life, to Heinrich Himmler the science was very serious business. He firmly believed that he had discovered a primeval truth previously mastered only by such historic figures as Jesus Christ. Himmler viewed Christ's powers to cure the sick as no more than the ability to impart his extremely strong aura to upgrade the low energy levels of the afflicted. Likewise, to Himmler, Christ's miraculous power to raise the dead was no more than the ability to cure the ailment that had expelled the spirit, then travel through the astral world to retrieve the spirit and guide it back into the body. The "resurrection", to Himmler, was just the physical embodiment of the astral body. In some quarters, Himmler's assessment of the powers of Jesus Christ was taken seriously. Several studies have gone as far as accusing the Vatican of suppressing psychic research, out of fear that science might provide a logical explanation for what the Vatican would prefer their following to think of as miracles.
Like their spiritual experiments, the Nazis' medical experiments have been grossly underrated. SS scientists, like the notorious doctor-killer, Fritz Fischer, had the free, unrestricted use of human guinea pigs, not just lab animals that only approximated human response. Tremendous strides were made in the areas of genetic engineering and sterilization but the only accomplishment reported was their development of the technique of male sterilization commonly known as a vasectomy operation. Himmler, who had made it illegal for non-Aryans to reproduce, wanted to make it impossible, hence the concentration on techniques of sterilization. Professor Carl Clauberg, director of sterilization at Auschwitz devised an ingenious way to sterilize the sub-humans en masse. Twenty-four specially built counters were installed throughout Germany and Poland. As each of the several thousand daily registrants approached the counter they were unknowingly subjected to an overdose of X-rays. Such experiments encompassed only the half of Himmler's plan concerned with eliminating the sub-humans but there was an equal number of experiments dealing with the procreation of the master race that are rarely reported and almost always misunderstood.
There has been speculation that the Nazis attempted to create the perfect Aryan specimen, artificially in the laboratory using techniques similar in concept to those described in Aldous Huxley's 1932 fictional work, Brave New World, and more recently in Ira Levin's Boys from Brazil. Huxley's work certainly did not escape Himmler's attention as he included his name on the "Special Search List" of those Englishmen slated for kidnapping by the SS. Though they did probably engage in such research, there is no indication that the SS succeeded in synthesizing life in the laboratory as they continued to stock Germany and Austria with naturally-born Aryan children they acquired through the Lebensborn (Fountain of Life) Program.
SS officers, who could prove an ancestry untainted by sub-human blood back to the year 1750, were ordered to stud for the Lebensborn Program. They married only women with the "correct racial features"; fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde, wide-hipped and full breasted. In SS wedding ceremonies they exchanged the following vows, "We stand, we starve, we do our bitter duty." Four sons were expected if the officer's career was to advance. When the program failed to produce the goal of one million male super-babies, polygamy was legalized for the SS. But, even with polygamy, each of the SS officer's wives could be expected to produce only one man-child every two years, in practice it was more like one every three or four years. Himmler realized that time was limited for both the Nazis and Lebensborn Program and that if he was to succeed in reaching his targeted goal of super-babies within the allotted time frame, he would require every Aryan woman in Germany to be pregnant by the SS. He formed The League of German Girls to catalog the racial backgrounds of unwed women and encourage them to have as many illegitimate Aryan children as possible. Himmler launched a major propaganda campaign called "Mutter und Kind" (Mother and Child) in which posters and newsreels heralded the Aryan Madonna as the heroine of Germany for having extended her love for the Fuhrer to his SS and bearing a son with the "correct racial features". The heart of the Lebensborn Program was the network of maternity wards that the SS established throughout Germany to care for the every need of the expectant mothers and their children. While the majority of Germans suffered from shortages of fresh meat and vegetables during the war years, the Lebensborn children received the best of everything. The program had been given top priority; Himmler's super-babies were considered more important than the German Army.
When the Lebensborn Program continued to fall short of Himmler's expectations, he ordered the SS to kidnap Aryan infants from the countries they occupied in Europe and transport them to Lebensborn wards in Germany. Kidnapping foreign-born Aryan children was only logical when one remembers that the Nazis were fighting people and not countries. In 1939, the Waffen SS followed the German Army into Poland to catalog the populace. Also in 1939, Himmler founded the Ahenerbe; an SS society dedicated to the study of "the sphere, spirit, deed and heritage of the Nordic Indo-Germanic race." Under the direction of Dr. Bruno Begor, the Ahenerbe gassed several hundred Polish Jews just to study the racial differences between Aryans and Jews. Otto Ohlendorf was in charge of the mobile killing units that gassed thousands while in transit to mass graves. Many Poles were sent to labor camps like Auschwitz where they worked as slaves for German companies like I.G.Farben at least for about three months until they succumbed to the meagre diet of turnip soup. Though many Poles were executed in the concentration camps, over 200,000 Polish Aryan children were kidnapped and sent to Lebensborn wards where they were given German names and raised as pampered Nazis. Himmler gave the order,
I consider it a good idea that small children of Polish families who are especially desirable from a racial point of view be collected and educated by us in special institutions. The children should be removed under the pretext of their health being endangered.
H.H
Reichsfuhrer SS
The kidnapped children as well as the legitimate and illegitimate children of SS officers were taken from their natural parents and raised in Lebensborn institutions before being sent out into the world for adoption by German families. Obviously, the Lebensborn children must have been indoctrinated in the Nazi philosophy but there has been some speculation that Himmler had developed a means to hypnotize or brainwash them to program their future work in the "Thousand Year Reich". Though such a process has been described only in fiction like Huxley's novel, Himmler must have at least tried to maintain control because not doing so would have been as foolish as allowing the uncontrolled procreation of chickens to the point where they overran the farmhouse. Himmler must have had some technique that justified his taking financial responsibility for groups of children like the 200,000 Poles, while the German economy suffered under the burden of war. These were, after all, Himmler's children, prior to their conception, most were only a twinkle in his eye. He even devised a system to name every last one of them.
Rather than being baptized, Lebensborn children were initiated into the master race in an SS name-giving ceremony. The SS and not the natural parents named the child. Himmler wanted them to have a common identity and there was no better way of doing so than to give them a common name but, aside from being terribly confusing in the ranks, this would have destroyed any anonymity they might require to carry out their work. Himmler resolved his dilemma with an ingenious system that named each child differently, yet the same.
There is some indication that the Nazis did not initiate the Lebensborn Program, only develop it from one started earlier by some unknown entity, but regardless of when it began, the program graduated between one and two million super-babies under Himmler's control, which poses some interesting questions. Where are these people today? Are they still a group? And, if so, has their influence been felt in the world? Perhaps this work will help to answer such questions.
Plain-clothed SS agents, stationed in movie theaters throughout Germany, monitored audience reaction to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' newsreels and documentaries. He so advanced the art of political propaganda that the United States, even with all the talent of Hollywood, could not produce an effective counter-campaign. The propaganda unit of the U.S. army chose instead to concede to the Nazis' superior movie-making ability and used Germany's own film footage to frighten the American people with the strength and determination of their enemy. The propaganda war, or the "reel war" as it has been called, is a simple example of how the United States was developing a pattern of following the Nazis' lead. Actually, the only effective anti-Nazi propaganda the U.S. authored was produced, not during, but after World War II when Hollywood almost universally portrayed the Nazis as stupid, bumbling idiots who were easily deceived and defeated. If the intention was to convince the American public that the Nazis posed no threat to the security of the United States in the post-war years, Hollywood could not have done a better job.
Hitler's strategy to win World War II was surprisingly simple. He was fighting on two major fronts: the Russians to the east and the Americans and British to the West. So very early in the conflict Hitler initiated a plan to infiltrate and misinform his enemies in an effort to create friction, especially between the United States and Russia. The present day cold war was born out of this plan of Hitler's to divide and conquer. Officers of the SS, posing as the German underground, contacted the Americans through Allen Dulles who then headed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Switzerland. The rather elaborate masquerade was intended to convince Dulles that Russia and not Germany was the true enemy of the United States. Likewise, Hitler's top aide, Rudolf Hess staged a spectacular defection to the west to persuade England and America to join forces with Nazi Germany against the Russians. With all the false rhetoric and rumour, it was no surprise that hostility prevailed at the meeting of the Russian and American armies when they converged outside Berlin. The mistrust and misunderstanding increased when Hitler's vast stockpile of gold could not be found. Tons of gold: the German treasury, the treasuries of the countries they had conquered, the confiscated gold of the Holocaust victims, even the jewelry of Helen of Troy was missing from the German museum. The Russians accused General Patton of hoarding the fortune and refusing to share in the spoils of war. Patton accused the Russians of the same but was to die in a suspicious auto accident during his subsequent quest to find the gold and discredit Russian claims. The gold has never been found, giving rise to the theory that it was hidden by the SS and spent covertly to support the fraternity's work after the war.
One of the key figures in the SS's master plan to control the United States was a member of the Great German General Staff, Reinhard Gehlen. General Gehlen, a staunch anti-communist, was one of Hitler's architects of the eastern front invasion and the foremost Nazi intelligence expert on Russia. It has been said that his files on Russia were more extensive than even those kept by the Russians themselves, epitomizing Field Marshall Rommel's quotation, "The first rule of war is to know everything there is to know about your enemy." In April of 1945, four days before Hitler reportedly committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, General Gehlen and a small staff defected with the Russian files to the Bavarian Alps where, at a place called Misery Meadows, they buried the catalogues in fifty metal boxes. Though Gehlen could have easily escaped, he made no attempt to do so. He waited in Misery Meadows for nine days and then travelled down the mountains to surrender. By this time the Americans had come to believe the Nazi propaganda about Russia and were only too happy to welcome Gehlen, his expertise, his files and his network of planted spies in Eastern Europe. Four months later, in August, Gehlen was smuggled into Washington, D.C. disguised as a four star U.S. Army General, befitting his rank in the German Army. He was well-received, being quartered at Fort Hunt, where a butler and several white-coated servants were provided for his comfort.
For the next few weeks, Gehlen met with President Truman and General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the head of the OSS. Ever since President Roosevelt had sent him on a fact-finding tour of Europe just before the war, Donovan had advocated the establishment of a central intelligence group. Donovan was a New York attorney when Roosevelt first sought his services. World War II had elevated him to the rank of General in charge of our somewhat primitive intelligence gathering Office of Strategic Services. It took about a month for Donovan and Gehlen to convince the president to reorganise U.S. intelligence. On September 20, 1945, Truman disbanded the OSS and for four months the United States relied only on military intelligence to formulate foreign policy. On January 22, 1946, Truman established the Central Intelligence Group, under an authority headed by Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as we know it was born of this group on September 18, 1947, under the direction of Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter who had set up the wartime intelligence network in the Pacific for Admiral Chester Nimitz along with Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton. The CIA, designed to a large extent by Reinhard Gehlen, was staffed with former OSS, FBI, SS and SD agents. Yes, half were Americans, half were German Nazis.
With the full support of the U.S. government, the man, who now called himself "Dr. Gehlen", returned to Germany to establish the West German Federal Intelligence Agency or "Gehlen's Organisation" as the CIA called its European spy ring. Initially, the CIA gave Gehlen an annual budget of $600,000 but that was soon increased to $20 million. The CIA spent $3 million just to remodel a former SS housing development for Gehlen's headquarters. Over one thousand agents and their families lived totally within the walled compound that was once the headquarters of Martin Bormann and Rudolf Hess. Gehlen established sixty spy schools that graduated over 7,000 new agents to join the veteran Nazis in the field. It was Gehlen's idea to start Radio Free Europe; a propagandistic news station located only a few miles from his headquarters. Always pleased with Gehlen's work, the agency showed their appreciation by giving him a $1/4 lakeside village in Starnburg, Bavaria to which he retired in 1967 after a series of scandals involving former SS officers in his employ (hence the employ of the CIA) forced his abdication amid a rash of "suicides" among his critics. This former Nazi general, who has been called the "co-founder of the CIA", exerted considerable influence in formulating U.S. foreign policy when one considers that three-fourths of all U.S. intelligence on Russia originates in "Gehlen's organisation".
Many Americans, especially those who lived through World War II, may find it difficult to accept the fact that the U.S. government would be so foolish as to hire Nazis to organize and staff such a critically important federal agency as the CIA, but that is exactly what happened. If Washington was taken in by the Nazis, it occurred not after, but during the war when they began to accept Germany's claims that the Russian communists were the real threat. Following the war, fear of the Russians was all that was needed to prompt Truman to accept Gehlen's well-placed spies who provided a convenient solution to concerns that, whether legitimate or not, had been brought to Washington's attention by the Nazis.
The SS was so far superior to the Americans in their espionage techniques that their inclusion in U.S. intelligence required a complete revamping of the system. So many former SS and SD agents were hired by the CIA that they formed the basic personality of the agency. They all swore allegiance to the United States just as they had all sworn allegiance to Adolf Hitler years earlier. If one is still sceptical as to the extent to which the Nazis infiltrated the CIA, the evidence is easy to confirm. Instead of trying to pierce the security of the CIA and look for agents who are former Nazis, simply review the stories of Nazi war criminals and suspects recently discovered living in America; most, if not all, have a history of working for the CIA. A good example is the 1983 arrest of Klaus Barbie, a notorious SS officer known as "The Butcher of Lyons" for his war crimes against the people of that French city. Following the war, Barbie was hired by the CIA and hidden from the French who had targeted him for prosecution. Barbie worked as a CIA informant in Bolivia where, according to reports, he organized a mercenary force to protect Bolivia's cocaine trade, cocaine that eventually ended up on the streets of the United States. French Nazi-hunters finally located him and he was extradited to stand trial. Though it was nearly forty years too late, the United States apologized to France for having protected Barbie, being one of the few times that the U.S. officially acknowledged that their hiring of Nazis was wrong.
Another Nazi who worked for the CIA and one whose history is more pertinent to this story is Otto Albrecht Alfred von Bolschwing. According to a 1981 newspaper article,
The war over, von Bolschwing made a move crucial to his future success; he became an American spy. "He knocked on the door of the U.S. Army intelligence," a source explained, "and said, I'm experienced, I have a ring operating. If you give me a paycheck, I'll make you very happy.' He was sort of a miniature Reinhard Gehlen."
In March of 1969, von Bolschwing was hired as a consultant by TCI, a high-tech investment firm in Sacramento that planned to capitalize on the latest military technology developed in California's Silicon Valley. TCI was engaged in classified work for the Department of Defence and according to the company's founder, "Ours was going to be a sensitive thing. We all had to have security clearances." A TCI memo written in 1969 reported that its new consultant, "has extremely valuable connections and information in Germany, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Antilles and South America. Mr von Bolschwing's connections in these countries are current." In his first year with TCI, von Bolschwing was appointed president of the firm by its board of directors, one of whom was the oil billionaire, John Paul Getty, Jr. From 1939 until 1942, the FBI had been investigating Getty's father because of his close personal relationship with Adolf Hitler and his illegal practice of selling oil to the Nazis via Mexico. According to the newspaper article that exposed von Bolschwing as a Nazi,
Records and interviews with TCI officials indicate that Helene von Damm, President Reagan's Austrian-born deputy assistant, translated contracts for TCI and invested $1,000 in it while she was then Gov. Reagan's secretary in Sacramento. Von Damm was "too busy" to talk about von Bolschwing, but through her White House secretary said she knew him "socially" in Sacramento "many years ago".
Soon after von Bolschwing assumed control of TCI, several of the company's major stockholders began syndicating their stock and selling it to small investors in the Sacramento area. The trading was eventually found to be illegal and several stockholders (but not von Bolschwing) were prosecuted by the Sacramento District Attorney's Office who referred to the case as "possibly the biggest stock fraud in California history."
Gehlen, Barbie and von Bolschwing are presented here as three prime examples of the thousands of Nazis who infiltrated the CIA and whose post-war activities continued to have detrimental effect on the American people. Von Bolschwing is of particular interest as his business dealings in California blazed a trail that leads directly to Jonestown.
One of TCI's two Silicon Valley subsidiaries, a Sunnyvale Corporation called International Imaging Systems (formerly Stanford Technology) purchased Intercontinental Technology, a Washington D.C. based marketing firm to represent them in the sale of sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment to African and Middle Eastern governments. This was not a new endeavour for International Imaging Systems that, under its former name, had supplied the CIA-backed Shah of Iran. The founder and president of Intercontinental Technology was none other than the notorious CIA arms dealer, Frank Terpil. The New York Times reported that Terpil and his partner, Edmond Wilson, used Intercontinental Technology's Geneva office for payment of former Army Special Forces troops, or Green Berets, he had recruited to train terrorists in Libya, according to several participants in the operation.
The purchase of Terpil's company by von Bolschwing's subsidiary is hard evidence of at least a connection between the two men that went beyond their mutual affiliation with the CIA. It also attests to the widely-held belief that the agency operates front companies in the U.S. despite the fact that such activities were a direct violation of their charter. The connection is important, for Terpil later admitted to a BBC interviewer that, during this period of time, he supplied mercenaries and arms to the early stages of Jonestown, when the jungle camp was used as a CIA training centre. Von Bolschwing provides the first glimpse into a Nazi/CIA/Jonestown connection: a living bridge between the Crystal Night and the White Night.
2 DEEP COVER
This is the story of Lisa Philip Layton, a German Nazi who, along with her family, gave the world the atomic bomb, ICBM missiles, killer satellites, the modern concept of chemical, germ and gas warfare as well as a macabre experiment in ethnic weaponry known as Jonestown. Lisa's family provided the basic outline for the experiment as well as the technology and most of the finances to complete it. One family member was in charge of the Peoples Temple trailblazers, the advance party that carved Jonestown from the dense Guyanese jungle. Others, both men and women, were Jones' top aides and lovers. One was an agent provocateur who feigned a defection from Jonestown in order to entice congressman Leo Ryan to investigate the community while her brother waited with the assassination team that would murder him. No one, not even Jim Jones himself, contributed more to the Jonestown experiment than did the family of Lisa Philip Layton.
Hugo Philip was a wealthy German banker and stockbroker who represented such noteworthy chemical companies as Siemens and Halske, that eventually provided the cyanide used by the Nazis to exterminate millions, and I.G.Farben, whose research labs developed a deadly nerve gas that killed over 6,000 prisoners just in tests and demonstrations of their new weapon. Though his work was in finances, Hugo's love was music and he had earned a reputation as the most accomplished amateur violinist in Hamburg. In June of 1914, he married Anita Lea Heilbut, a wealthy stockbroker's daughter who had been educated in private institutions, including two years at an English boarding school. For four years following her graduation from Hamburg College, Anita worked as a volunteer for, what the family later described as, "an agency helping young girls to find positions." The couple's first child, Lisa, was born in Hamburg on July 14[SUP]th[/SUP], 1915, to provide Hugo with a deferment from World War I. A second child, Eva, was born soon after.
World War I and the resulting Treaty of Versailles totally devastated the German economy. The currency was devalued to the point where the average family's net worth would not even buy a loaf of bread. The poor were so desperate that they stripped the wallpaper from their homes in order to eat the paste that had been made with a mixture of flour and water. As Germany starved, Lisa and her younger sister Eva were raised in lavish luxury. They attended Lichtwarckschule, an expensive private school that taught sociology to their students in perpetual field trips throughout Europe. When not in school, Lisa and Eva travelled with their mother to various health spas in Southern Germany where they resided for extended periods of time. The family also vacationed regularly in the Austrian Alps and in resorts on the Baltic Coast.
In 1927, Hugo commissioned the noted architectural firm of Block and Hochfeld to design and build the most ultra-modern house in Hamburg. The new home was a showplace that boasted then-unheard-of luxuries like a sunken bathtub, shower stalls and built-in closets, cabinets and furniture. Hugo helped to design the music room, the humidity controlled vaults for his tobacco and the special cabinets to store his art collection. He possessed sufficient wealth to be the patron of several aspiring German artists. The family moved into their new residence along with several live-in servants and an English governess for the children. They were definitely the elite of German society as Adolf Hitler assumed power.
By 1931, Lisa and Eva had left Lichtwarckschule. Eva went on to Austria to complete her training as a pediatric nurse in Himmler's Lebensborn Program. Very little has been recorded of Lisa's activities between 1931 and April 23[SUP]rd[/SUP], 1938, when the American consulate in Hamburg issued her a visa to the United States, but like her sister, Lisa was in the service of Hitler's Germany.
Hitler was preparing for World War II and it was determined that the Philip family could best serve the Third Reich under deep cover in the United States. The first family member to feign expatriation to the U.S. was Hugo's cousin, the eminent physician, Dr. James Franck. Dr. Franck was well known as the foremost authority on the yet undeveloped science of nuclear weapons. His early work in defining the laws of physics governing the impact of electrons on the atom earned him a world-wide reputation and the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925. Dr. Franck had continued his research but without much success. If he was to develop the nuclear bomb, he required the resources and technology of the United States and this means deceiving the U.S. government, but they needed a reason to justify his defection from Germany, so Franck provided one. In 1933, Heinrich Himmler outlawed the hiring of all non-Aryans in government-funded organizations. Rather than discharge the non-Aryans on his staff at Gottingen, Dr. Franck resigned his position to publish one of the few objections to the new German law. Despite the fact that Franck was Aryan (he was not dismissed from his post, only ordered to dismiss the non-Aryans on his staff) and despite the fact that nothing in the book-burning mentality of Nazi Germany was published without the approval of the Nazi Party, a few weeks after his rebuttal, the U.S. government welcomed him with full citizenship and a top secret classification for his continued work on the atomic bomb.
Expatriating the other members of the Philip family would be more difficult as they could offer only wealth to the United States and none of the scientific expertise of Dr. Franck. Their best chance of being accepted was a two level cover. A fake family history was developed to convince U.S. officials that the Philips were Jewish and would be persecuted if they remained in Germany. They claimed to be descendants of Jewish shepherds who emigrated from Northern Africa to Spain in the Middle Ages, only to be forced to flee to Germany several centuries later by the Spanish Inquisition. Their claim to a Jewish heritage was quite flimsy as the family had never attended a synagogue or even celebrated Jewish holidays, which even by Nazi standards, would be the criteria that determined who lived and who died. On the contrary, the Philips were famous for entertaining their Aryan friends during the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter. In order to deceive the U.S. officials, Hugo joined a Jewish organization, but in fact he only paid the dues, never attended the meetings and allowed his membership to expire as soon as the American Consulate read his name on the list of Jewish members. The family's Jewish defence was very flimsy, as stated, and perhaps deliberately so, as the Americans saw through the sham to what they thought was the true reason for the defection, as planted evidence on a second lower level indicated that the entire family was homosexual. Homosexuals were second only to Jews in the numbers killed in the Holocaust and Washington officials believed that the Philips had developed a false Jewish identity in order to conceal the shameful truth. The naïve bureaucrats were apparently oblivious to the fact that homosexuality is not a matter of heredity, nor did their investigation probe any further than the secret they thought they had discovered. The Philips were granted asylum.
Lisa Philip sailed for New York aboard the S.S. Manhattan on May 6[SUP]th[/SUP], 1938. In her possession was a passport stamped "Juden", a change of clothes and what the family later described as "many documents from her youth in Germany." She was met in New York by her sponsor, later identified as Bernhardt Berlin, and a group of German friends who had preceded her, including her old boyfriend, Franz Werner. Lisa went to Philadelphia to live in the home Berlin operated as a safe house where she would be introduced to life in America. Little is known of the Berlin family except that they were extremely bigoted, as evidenced by a letter Lisa wrote to her parents shortly after her arrival in the U.S. in which she said, "By the way, they (the Berlins) have named me Li or Lis because Lisa they say is like a Negro named Liza. You have to address your letters to Li, Lis, or Liesel." Lisa remained in Philadelphia until late 1939 when she accepted a position as governess in the home of Reverend Galen Russell, a minister in the Congregational Church in Chappaqua, New York. Her family would later recount the time that Lisa spent with the Russells,
She and the minister's wife, Buddy Russell, shared an interest in gymnastics and massage. Continuing the same bent that she had developed in Germany, Lisa exercised in the privacy of the Russell's garden joined by Mrs. Russell.
Once safely in the United States, there was no further need for Lisa to continue her masquerade as a Jew. In the land of total religious freedom, she worshipped in the Russell's Congregational Church and later joined the Quakers. Judaism would not be an issue in Lisa's life for the next thirty years until the Reverend Jim Jones announced, much to the shock of her husband, children and close friends, that Lisa was Jewish. Apparently, she had never given them a reason for her immigration from Nazi Germany. But now, thirty years later, her work in the Peoples Temple would bring public attention, and her association with the Nazi Party might be uncovered so it was necessary to revive her old Jewish cover. Jim Jones claimed to know all about Lisa's life in Germany and her feigned expatriation to the United States. He teased her about admitting that she was a "Jewish Nigger", as he phrased it. For years, it would be their little private joke.
Lisa's sister, Eva, soon followed her to the U.S., where she reportedly lived with sponsors in Houston, Texas. Nothing has been recorded of Eva's subsequent life nor is there any indication that Lisa even corresponded with her sister. Eva Philip disappeared from this story or, more precisely, set out to live one of her own.
Despite the relative ease in which Lisa and Eva were able to secure passports, sponsors, and visas, Hugo and Anita Philip remained in Germany because, according to family reports, they were denied an entry visa to the United States. Actually, with their children safe in the U.S., Hugo and Anita had the freedom of mobility to complete their assignment in Europe. Before they were allowed to leave Europe for America, the Philips were obliged to help other Nazis escape. They sold their futuristic home in Hamburg and moved into a large house in Merano, Italy, just over the Austrian border where, according to a family report, "they intended to take in boarders." The Philip boarding house in the Italian Alps was a way station in a series of safe houses known as the "Rat Run", which ran from Germany, through Austria and Italy, and on to America. A day's journey north of them was the adjacent link in the Rat Run chain; a Catholic hospital in Lienz, Austria. Hugo would rendezvous with a group of Nazis who had spent the night in the hospital and guide them through the unpatrolled mountain trails surrounding the Brenner Pass and into Italy, where they would hide in his boarding house. Hugo was well suited for this work as, among his other talents, he was an accomplished mountain climber. He would return to climb those mountains in Northern Italy every year until 1967 when, at age 85, his health prohibited it. South of Merano were the ports of Genoa and Rome where the Vatican helped the Nazis to secure false documents for their steamship voyage to America.
The Catholic Church helped Nazi war criminals and spies to escape to America. As incredible as that statement might first appear, it is true. Even today, some forty years later, the Vatican is still trying to justify their actions. Recently, a former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor, John Loftus, announced that his investigation had disclosed that "the Vatican was unwittingly duped by U.S. intelligence agencies" who hid the Nazis' true identities from the Church because they needed their knowledge and contacts in Eastern Europe. Though this theory is based in fact, the truth is much more basic and simple. It has been said that the Catholic Church would help any Catholic in trouble. In the fundamental conflict between the predominantly Catholic Germans and the European Jews, it is obvious which side the Vatican would favour.
Any doubts as to whether Hugo and Anita were working for the Nazis are certainly dispelled when one considers what happened next. At a time when Germany's borders were closed, Hugo and Anita returned to Hamburg to retrieve their furniture and other possessions. Not only were they permitted to enter and depart Germany but they were allowed to remove a considerable amount of wealth from Hitler's control. The Nazis made no attempt to impede the Philips from taking a small fortune in art, antiques, and first editions; even the family's Steinway piano was shipped to Italy. The Philips remained in Northern Italy for well over a year while they worked on the Rat Run and liquidated their assets in preparation for their own exodus.
In September of 1938, the Italian government ordered all aliens to leave the country within six months. With their powerful connections, the Philips were allowed to remain in Italy for over a year after the decree when, in September of 1939, they appeared at a check point on the Italian-Austrian border to begin their feigned defection to the United States.
According to their cover story, the Philips were denied not only entry into Austria but also re-entry into Italy. Since they carried German passports, they were ordered onto an Austrian train bound for Germany and presumably the death camps. Thirty miles into the trip, a conductor discovered the Philips supposedly unconscious next to an empty bottle of poison. It was good theatre. The train stopped at Lienz and the Philips were taken to the Catholic hospital there. They were traveling back up the Rat Run. They remained at the hospital for several weeks and, according to their cover, were befriended by a supervising physician who made excuses to the SS officers who inquired daily about the Philips' ability to continue their journey to the death camps.
Actually, it was a pleasant reunion of old colleagues. Hugo and the doctor reportedly shared an interest in music and played duets together. Hugo had retained a priceless violin, hand crafted by Stradivari's student, Guadagnini. The only business of their days in Lienz was the daily briefings and debriefings by the SS.
The Philips continued on their way back up the Rat Run to Vienna where, according to family reports, they were helped by "Aryan friends", Leo and Asta Duke and Walter and Helen Kalcher. The Dukes were another link in the Rat Run and had delivered a group of Nazis to the Philip's boarding house in Italy only a few months earlier. The Kalchers, described as friends of Anita's sister, were experts in protecting the property transfers of the Germans they helped to secure false passports and even housed in their home. Part of their cover story was that the Philips had lost the family fortune and relied on charity from the Dukes, the Kalchers, the Vienna Gildemeister Committee and the American Society of Friends' refugee committee, but in truth the family's wealth was intact, much of it having been buried in the Italian Alps.
During their four month stay in Vienna, Nazi officials continued to visit the Philips on a regular basis, reportedly to inquire as to why it was taking them so long to get American Visas. Despite the fact that immigration quotas had long been filled by vast numbers of Austrians fleeing the Holocaust, the Philips were issued the necessary exit and entry visas for their voyage to America. It helped that their daughters were already in the U.S. and their cousin was a top secret government scientist but, in all probability, the Philips paid for their papers by bribing the Austrian officials and enticing the Americans either with their gross wealth or perhaps with the secret formula for nerve gas that Hugo had carried with him ever since he had pirated it from I.G. Farben. In any event, they telegrammed Lisa, "Leave Genova by Contesavoia 20 March (1940). Inform everybody. Hurray. Hugo and Anita Philip." The Philips split up on the docks. Hugo is said to have gone to Cambridge, Massachusetts to explore a possible position, while Anita followed Lisa back to Philadelphia to work at the Kingsley Settlement House that, in all probability, was an "end-of-the-line" safe house in the Rat Run.
By mid 1940, the family's efforts were concentrated on the campus of Pennsylvania State College. Continuing her interest in massage, Lisa had accepted a position as physical therapist in the University's hospital. Her uncle, Dr. James Franck, was a physics professor there and her former German boyfriend, Franz Werner, was one of his students. Together, Dr. Franck and Werner recognized the potential of a promising young scientist, Laurence Layton, and Werner befriended the young man. Layton was the president of the Graduate Club of Pennsylvania State College and, in the pursuit of his doctoral degree, Professor Franck required that he be proficient in German. Franz Werner, who was still dating Lisa Philip at the time, suggested that she would be an excellent German tutor. Lisa agreed and, to everyone's surprise, Franz Werner encouraged Laurence to date Lisa and thus begin the romance.
Laurence Laird Layton was born on March 8[SUP]th[/SUP], 1914 in the coal-mining town of Boomer, West Virginia, the first child of John Wister Layton and Eva Huddleston Nutter Layton. Laurence's father, John, was a self-taught electrical engineer who reportedly patterned his life after Thomas Edison. John was employed by the largest coal-mining company in West Virginia and had several patented inventions to his credit; most notably the electric circuit breaker that seventy years later is still the industry standard. Between his salary from the coal company and the products he developed in his home laboratory, John was able to provide his family with a standard of living higher than most in West Virginia. The Laytons were the first family in Boomer to have electrical appliances like ceiling fans and automatic clothes washers. This was a far cry from the luxuries of Lisa's early life in Germany, but Laurence and the other Layton children grew up amid all the wealth that part of the world had to offer. Laurence's mother, Eva, was descended from the Huddleston family, who had the dubious distinction of being the aristocracy of West Virginia. Her family had owned Southern plantations with thousands of cultivated acres and hundreds of Black slaves to provide for them. The Civil War changed all that and the family lost everything but their pride. Eva Layton was overly preoccupied with family heritage, ancestry and, what she called, "blood lines". Even the family's own description of Eva leaves the impression that she was self-righteous, sanctimonious and extremely prejudiced. So concerned was she about blood lines that she married into her own family; her husband John was a cousin. Laurence grew up with his mother's bigoted attitudes and his father's interest in science; a deadly combination that would dictate the balance of his life.
When Laurence was about eight years old, his father was killed in a mining accident and Eva moved the children into her father's house. Sheldon Thomas Nutter would have a lasting influence on young Laurence. Nutter had married the niece of John Boomer Huddleston, the town's namesake, whose family had owned the surrounding land since 1765. During the Civil War, the family estate house was used as a headquarters by General Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. When the Mark A. Hanna Coal Company began operations in Boomer in 1902, Sheldon "Tom" Nutter was the logical choice to head the organization. He proceeded to build a company town with eight hundred company owned houses, a company store, a company school, a company municipal government and even a company church that he headed as a part-time Methodist minister. Young Laurence, who had been born a Quaker, was raised a Methodist by his strong-willed grandfather.
About six years later, Eva remarried and moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania with her new husband, Charles Chandler, and three of her children. Laurence was left to care for his ailing grandfather.
In 1932, Laurence enrolled at New River State College where he majored in mathematics, chemistry and physics. He was so brilliant that he completed a year long course in differential calculus in only two weeks. For some unexplained reason, Laurence left college in his sophomore year to live with his mother and step-father in Scranton where he remained for a year and a half. His only activity in Scranton was his work in the local Young People's Socialist League, a group of Jewish immigrants, who elected Laurence, a gentile, as president of their organization. It is conceivable that Laurence had been sent to spy on the socialist's activities by the federal government that eventually would employ him for life. Laurence returned to New River State College as a sophomore with a paid teaching position and a grant. It was then he met the first woman in his life, a young poet, Constance Jeffries, but the two soon went their separate ways. Laurence graduated with honors in mathematics and pursued a masters degree at West Virginia University where he invented a molecular still. Two weeks after Laurence's photo appeared in the newspapers along with an article about the brilliant young scientist, Constance Jeffries committed suicide. Laurence later recalled,
I had the guilty feeling that she had read this article and then committed suicide. We had separated. We both had gone away to school, and she had become a nurse, while I was still a graduate student. When I got this newspaper clipping that she was dead I went into mourning. I always had the feeling that whenever I was involved with women there were personal disasters.
Laurence was one of only three in his class of forty to pass the examination for a masters degree in chemistry. Several universities offered him a full scholarship but he chose to continue his studies at Pennsylvania State as the school had a reputation as the leader in the field of chemistry. But it was Laurence's reputation as a brilliant scientist and inventor that preceded his arrival at Penn State and targeted him by Dr. Franck and Lisa Philip.
Laurence was never really interested in Lisa. According to family reports he was never really interested in any women, but that did not deter Lisa, who set out to marry him. Lisa's beauty has been compared to that of the Austrian actress, Heddy Lamarr. She was intelligent and popular and she could have dated any man on campus but she chose to pursue one who was not the least bit interested in her. She courted him for a few months. She said they should get married. Franz Werner and Dr. Franck said they should get married, but still Laurence was not interested. Several things about Lisa bothered him. She was too aggressive, domineering and arrogant. He would later recall,
We would take walks, and I noticed that she would step on the ants. My God, what do you do that for?' I asked. She said, It's strange but in Germany I learned to hate weak things. I can't help myself.' Things like this shocked me.
When all else had failed, Lisa resorted to her secret weapon, or rather Laurence's secret weakness. She threatened to commit suicide if Laurence would not marry her, knowing full well that this would stir his guilt feelings about the death of Constance Jeffries. Laurence was not about to have yet another woman's death on his conscience, so he succumbed to Lisa's ultimatum. The two had been attending Quaker meetings together but the Quakers required a six month engagement before sanctioning a marriage. Lisa refused to wait that long so they were married by the campus Methodist minister on October 18, 1941. They had known each other only six months.
Seven weeks after their wedding, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States was thrust into World War II and Laurence was likely to be drafted. Lisa arranged a deferment for her husband when her uncle, Dr. Franck, offered Laurence a top-secret appointment on the Manhattan Project. Dr. Franck had since accepted a professorship in physics at the University of Chicago where he was secretly developing the atomic bomb. Laurence joined the project, was issued a student deferment to complete his studies at Penn State, and was assigned his first full-time job working for Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. He remained at Kodak for about a year, during which time he perfected his molecular still technology that utilized thermal diffusion to purify uranium isotopes for Kodak's Manhattan Project laboratory in Kingsport, Tennessee. On December 2, 1942, the nuclear age was born when Dr. Franck and his colleagues, using Dr. Layton's purified uranium, set off the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction under the grandstands of the University of Chicago's football stadium. The world would never be the same. Without the combined efforts of Lisa's uncle and husband, the Manhattan Project might have failed, or at least its success would have been severely delayed.
It was Adolf Hitler who first conceived the atomic bomb, and it was his German scientists, like Dr. Franck, who made his dream a reality. It was no coincidence that those scientists announced they were ready to explode the first atomic bomb only days after Germany surrendered in May of 1945; they were ensuring that the ultimate weapon would not be used against their fatherland. The first atomic explosion occurred in June. In August, the Japanese sub-humans' were the first atomic victims. Such was the control that the Nazis exerted in the U.S. After the war, Dr. Franck led a contingent of nuclear scientists to petition the government to consider the atomic bomb, not as just a larger explosive, but as a political tool; a threat to maintain world control. On the surface the Franck Report, published in 1946, appears to be a plea not to explode another bomb from the scientists who felt guilty for having invented it, but actually it was the beginning of the Cold War. German scientists not only made the first atomic bomb for the U.S., they also made the atomic policy.
The Layton's first child was born in Rochester on November 13, 1942. Thomas Nutter Layton was named for Laurence's recently deceased grandfather and had been conceived on the eightieth anniversary of the patriarch's birth. Dr. Layton satisfied the requirements of his national security deferment, completed his work with Kodak and moved the family to the Washington, D.C. suburb of College Park, where he sat out the remainder of the war as a chemistry professor at the University of Maryland.
The couple's second child, Annalisa Laird Layton, was born in Maryland on September 9, 1944. According to family reports, Annalisa was named for Lisa's old German Aryan friend, Annalisa Schmidt, who had been killed in a British bombing raid while walking in the woods outside Hamburg. Ever since she had left Germany, Lisa corresponded regularly with Annalisa. Later, the family went so far as to publish some of their letters, but no one seems to be conscious of how terribly suspicious their correspondence was. Annalisa was a good German who enjoyed all the freedoms afforded a Nazi, including freedom to correspond, but there was no postal service between the two warring countries; absolutely no communications were permitted, so it follows that Lisa and Annalisa corresponded covertly. Overall, it was a breach of U.S. national security for the wife and niece of two of the most important top secret nuclear scientists to correspond with the enemy.
The Layton's third child was born on January 11[SUP]th[/SUP], 1946 in Maryland. Laurence John or Laurency or Larry, as the family nicknamed him, was named for his father. Larry was an unwanted child. He was ignored, estranged, and maladjusted, which accounted for the psychomatic illnesses that plagued him as a youth. It is really no surprise that Larry would be the first Layton sacrificed to Jim Jones, but it is rather ironic that he also be the last for, as of this writing (1986), he stands alone as the only person ever to be tried in U.S. courts for the conspiracy to murder Congressman Leo Ryan.
In 1946, following the end of World War II, the Laytons moved to Baltimore where Laurence had accepted a position at Johns Hopkins University as a researcher and professor of biochemistry. He had been hired by the department head, Reginald Archibald of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, to develop a procedure for diagnosing cartilaginous cancer. Dr. Layton's findings were considered to be major medical discoveries and his subsequent report, published in the medical journals in 1951, brought him a professional prestige he had not known since his invention of the molecular still. He was invited to lecture at universities in England, Switzerland, and Germany. Lisa stayed home with the children while Dr. Layton toured Europe. While in Germany, he received a letter from the U.S. Army offering him a position as Chief of Chemical Warfare at double the salary he was then earning. Dr. Layton accepted the Army's offer.
In the fall of 1951, Dr. Layton arrived at the U.S. Army's Chemical Warfare Division at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. His first four months at Dugway were a transition period in which he headed the Biochemistry Department, after which he was appointed chief of the entire Chemical Warfare Division. His duties included directing the research and development of chemical weapons and deployment systems conducted by the five departments in his charge.
The Dugway Proving Grounds are as desolate a place as any on earth. For miles in all directions there is nothing but the hard packed salt of a prehistoric lake bed. Under the direction of Dr. Layton, scientists in the analytical, biological, organic, and physical chemistry departments developed chemical and germ weapons that were then tested on the Lake Bonneville salt flats. The chemical agents were dropped from airplanes or observation towers onto a grid patterned target area containing chemical monitoring devices and tethered farm animals. Following the tests, autopsies were performed on the animals and their bodies were buried in mass graves. Dr. Layton personally developed new techniques to evaluate the extent to which an animal had been killed. "Dead" was not sufficient for the doctor. He needed to know "how dead".
Many of the experiments performed at Dugway under Dr. Layton's direction had to do with nerve gas; the same deadly weapon that his father-in-law's company had developed in Nazi Germany. Of his work at Dugway, Dr. Layton would later write,
"You can blow people to bits with bombs, you can shoot them with shells, you can atomize them with atomic bombs, that's considered moral, but the same people think there's something terrible about poisoning the air and letting people breathe it. Anything having to do with gas warfare, chemical warfare, has this taint of horror on it, even if you only make people vomit. It's all right to kill somebody in war, but it's not all right to make him vomit, or make him silly. Actually, it's one of the most humane types of warfare, if you want to compare it to other types. I'm not apologizing for chemical warfare. I'm just saying that the prejudice against chemical weapons in favour of conventional and atomic weapons is absurd."
Dr. Layton's defence of chemical warfare was itself absurd, as the intention is not to make people "vomit" or "silly" but to kill them.
On May 10[SUP]th[/SUP], 1952, two months after Dr. Layton accepted the position of Chief of Chemical Warfare, his mother-in-law, Anita Philip, died from injuries suffered in a fall from a window of a New York City apartment house. The police determined that Anita's death was a suicide when they discovered the following note written in German:
My friends, know that I, free and proper, am a good American. But I was a gossip and have been entangled in a network of intrigue. I no longer have the strength to free myself from it. Forget me not my beloved children and family. And you, Hugo, forgive me. Live well. All of you loved mankind so well.
According to the family, Anita's suicide note is roughly translated from German, but the essence of the message remains. Reportedly, she killed herself because someone suspected her of not being a "good American" which, in the context of her life, meant a Nazi. She admitted to being "entangled in a network of intrigue" which concisely depicts her involvement in the organization of expatriated Nazi spies. According to the Layton family, Anita's suicide was a result of an increasing paranoia she suffered since her Quaker friends in New York informed her that she was being investigated by U.S. intelligence agents. She reportedly did not know that the reason for the investigation was Dr. Layton's top secret appointment as Chief of Chemical Warfare. She rationalized the probe as a personal attack, reminiscent of the alleged persecution she suffered in Europe and, in her resulting despondency, she killed herself rather than suffer the ordeal a second time. Though this rationale is plausible, it does not take into account two very important facts. Certainly, Dr. Layton would have forewarned his family of the standard security check required in such a case. Also, this was not the first time that Anita had been investigated by the federal government. The first time was when she applied to enter the country, the second when her cousin and son-in-law were appointed to the Manhattan Project. So, not only should Anita have been acquainted with such standard procedures, but the federal government should have been well acquainted with Anita.
Throughout this story there are several deaths termed suicide that were likely, in fact, murder, and Anita's demise may well be another example. It is possible that in their investigation, the federal government discovered that Anita was a Nazi spy and killed her because of it; staging a fake suicide. It is also possible that the Nazis killed her as she had served her purpose. Because of her obvious involvement with the Nazis, she was a threat to the cover of her daughter, whose assignment with the Chief of Chemical Warfare became far more important than any service Anita might have provided them. There is a third possibility that also permeates this story. Someone could have been killed and falsely identified as Anita, giving her the freedom to continue her work under deep cover. There remains an ironic postscript to the reports of Anita's death. Though she had been educated in an English boarding school and was well versed in the English language, Anita wrote her last words a defence that she was a "good American" in German.
Following Anita's death, her husband, Hugo, returned to Germany where he resided for the rest of his life in luxury. He could even afford to send Lisa considerable amounts of money that, according to the family, she deposited in secret bank accounts and eventually contributed to Jim Jones and the Jonestown experiment.
Within a week of Anita's death, Laurence and Lisa Layton conceived their fourth and last child. Deborah June Huddleston Layton was born in February of 1953. Such accurate records of conception were easily maintained by the Laytons as they did not sleep together and viewed sex only as a means to produce children. Not only did they believe in reincarnation, but they attempted to engineer it in the creation of children in the likeness of deceased relatives and friends. With the exception of Larry, each of the Layton children were identified with a past life.
Dr. Layton's contributions to chemical warfare remain top secret but, according to one published government report, he "was responsible for the publication of ten classified reports on research aspects of chemical warfare agents, and more than 100 reports on chemical warfare systems." This ten to one ratio is important to understand as it accurately reflects the essence of his work at Dugway. The chemical toxins that had been developed by the Army were state-of-the-art, requiring little need for improvement, but the chemical deployment systems were so ineffective as to jeopardize the entire concept of chemical warfare. Basically, no matter how lethal the agent was, the wind just blew it away. Dr. Layton and his staff joked that their work was actually meteorological warfare, but this was no joking matter to the Army. Within a month of Dr. Layton's arrival at Dugway, the Army exploded a chemical bomb in the Presidio and tracked the presumably harmless gas as the ocean breeze carried it through downtown San Francisco. The gas failed to penetrate the buildings and the wind simply blew it away. The Army then exploded a similar bomb in the New York City subway hoping to avoid the wind effect. Again, the test failed. The gas did not evenly disperse in the tunnels, and besides, an actual chemical war would not provide such large concentrations of people underground.
The unpredictable effect of weather on chemical weapon deployment was an overwhelming problem that would take Dr. Layton two years to solve with a very simple answer; chemical weapons were good, but airborne deployment was bad. He recommended that the Army concentrate on developing new systems to introduce chemical agents into a society. There were many alternatives. One could poison the water supply, the food source or even the glue on the back of a country's postage stamps. He had solved the Army's long-standing problems with the deployment of chemical weapons and his work at Dugway was complete.
According to the family, Dr. Layton was then approached by "a friend from Washington, D.C." who arranged for his appointment as associate director of research and development at the Naval Powder Factory (later named the Propellant Facility) in Indian Head, Maryland. It was the Navy's turn to utilize his genius. After two years in the desolation of Dugway, the family was happy to return to Maryland where, for the next four years, Dr. Layton worked at arming the Navy's intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Vanguard Satellites. As in Dugway, his work was classified top secret.
In July of 1957, the Laytons moved to Berkeley, California where, after two years with the Army and four years with the Navy, Dr. Layton accepted a position as research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Western Regional Research Laboratory. Even at the Department of Agriculture, Dr. Layton's work was military in nature as his first assignment was to ascertain whether chickens and other farm animals could be safely eaten after being exposed to nuclear radiation; a study in post-nuclear war survival. According to an article in the New York Times,
In 1961, he (Dr. Layton) published a paper that outlined, for the first time, an effective way to use laboratory monkeys to test human food allergies; previously such research could be done only on humans.
Dr. Layton's process of substituting laboratory monkeys for human test scientists would be his last published contribution to science as, ironically, his next project would be a top secret, unpublished experiment that utilized human test subjects in place of lab animals an experiment in ethnic weaponry known as Jonestown.
Dr. Layton's warfare work had been very profitable, permitting him to purchase a luxurious home in the Berkeley hills that the family called "the mansion". He enjoyed referring to himself as the only non-millionaire on millionaire's row. The neighbourhood, the elite of Berkeley, included a number of Nobel laureates, intellectuals, university professors, and even the retired Navy Admiral, Chester Nimitz. Admiral Nimitz was well aware of Dr. Layton's contributions to the Navy and befriended his new neighbour and especially his young daughter, Deborah, who looked to the admiral as a surrogate grandfather. The two were often seen walking hand-in-hand on the Admiral's afternoon constitutional. Berkeley was good to the Laytons who lived comfortably nested between money and social prestige.
Reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Layton lived in constant fear of the nuclear monster he had helped to create. Reacting to an article in the January 1962 issue of Esquire Magazine, entitled "Nine Places to Hide", he proposed to move his family to Christchurch, New Zealand, one of the locations cited in the study as being safe from the effects of a nuclear war. On October 24, 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, he wrote to Tom and Annalisa who were then attending school in Davis, California.
With the world situation in such a critical (explosive) phase, I am most uneasy about my children. I think you and Tom are probably safer from direct blast effects than are Laurence and Debbie, however the fallout effects should certainly affect Davis and points East and up the main valleys of the rivers. I prefer that you both stay out of the cities until the crisis has passed. Do not come to Berkeley until we all agree that you should. I suppose the only relatively safe area of California is north and west.
According to the article in Esquire, the safe area north and west in California was the city of Eureka; one of the "Nine Places to Hide". The safe zone extended from Eureka southeast to Ukiah. Even in the early 1960's, the lives of Dr. Layton and the Reverend Jim Jones were congruous as Jones' reactions to that same magazine article prompted him to move his family to Belo, Horizonte, Brazil, one of the other nine safe places. Upon his return to the U.S., Jones moved his congregation to Ukiah to begin the odyssey.
The 1960's saw the Layton children grow up and, one at a time, leave their Berkeley home. Tom and Annalisa enrolled at the University of California at Davis where, following in the family tradition, they would become prominent scientists in their chosen fields of study. Larry also attended Davis but his performance was regarded as below the standards set by the other Layton scientists. By 1966, all but Deborah had left home and with her new-found freedom, Lisa decided to take her first job since her marriage to Laurence.
Though she had little work experience, Lisa offered one qualification that set her apart from other middle-aged housewives seeking employment. She had passed at least three separate investigations and was cleared by the federal government for top secret work. She was assigned to the library of the University of California at Berkeley where she was placed in charge of the radical leftists and Third World newspapers and periodicals. In the 1960's, the U.C. Berkeley campus was the center of revolutionary activity in the United States and the university's library possessed the most comprehensive collection of leftist literature in the country. Lisa's job was to discern the published information and pass anything she considered important on to the Central Intelligence Agency. Not only did she provide the CIA with current publications that were primarily a protest against the CIA and the military-industrial complex, but she also provided lists of those Berkeley radicals who requested such publications.
Sometime between 1963 and 1965, the CIA presented Dr. Layton with a very serious problem that threatened the internal security of the United States. In every major city in the country, Black citizens were demonstrating and rioting for their civil rights and there was also a strong possibility of a modern day Indian uprising. The racial unrest in the Black and Native American communities was by no means under control, and the CIA was compelled to explore any and all possible solutions. The agency hoped that their most distinguished chemical scientist might provide a pharmaceutical solution to the violence.
The CIA had developed several ethnic behaviour modification drugs in their MK ULTRA project but none had been adequately tested outside the laboratory. Dr. Layton was assigned the task of designing a large scale field test to evaluate the two most promising drugs to alter the behaviour of Blacks and Native Americans.
Of course, Dr. Layton could not be directly involved in the experiment because his career, especially as the Army's Chief of Chemical Warfare, would certainly expose the government's sponsorship of the field test. Very few people in the CIA were privy to the experiment, as it had been classified at the highest security level. Dr. Layton had to know and, as the agency usually deals not with individuals, but with entire families (for security reasons), it was decided that instead of bringing others into the experiment, it would be best to have Dr. Layton's wife and children administer the project with the help of a figurehead scapegoat named Jim Jones.
Dr. Layton had never heard of Jim Jones until the agency introduced him as one of their MK ULTRA experts in the behaviour modification of Blacks. Jones had just returned from a successful assignment in South America where he had incited Blacks to riot in British Guiana. The racial violence that ensued eventually toppled the government and the CIA-backed politician, Forbes Burnham, assumed control of the country as Prime Minister. Jones' expertise in coercing Blacks to riot was invaluable in the experiment designed to subjugate them. Jones had worked under the cover of a self-ordained minister and missionary, but this monumental undertaking required a more orthodox disguise so, a few weeks after his return to the United States, he was officially ordained a minister. The Reverend Jim Jones immediately initiated plans to move his church to Ukiah, California where he would join the Layton family.
In an effort to simplify the very complicated involvement of the Layton family in the Jonestown experiment, the balance of this chapter will vary from chronological order and consider the contributions of each of the family members individually.
Larry Layton
As a student at Berkeley High in the early 1960's, Larry was president of the Young Democrats and editor of their newsletter, The Liberal. Following the lead of his older brother and sister, Larry enrolled at the University of California at Davis, where he majored in sociology and co-habitated with Carolyn Moore, the daughter of John Moore, the Methodist minister on campus. The Reverend Moore was an outspoken proponent of Jim Jones up to and even after the massacre in Jonestown. He was close to both the Laytons and Jim Jones, and provided a buffer by which Dr. Layton could remain "once removed" from the experiment.
Larry and Carolyn were married in July of 1967. Both families attended the ceremonies conducted by Reverend Moore. Dr. Layton gave the newlyweds some money and a car and loaded them his Volkswagen bus when they moved into the married student housing complex in Davis. Larry and Carolyn complemented each other. He was quiet and passive while she was aggressive and outspoken with "a slight arrogance". Carolyn made all the decisions, and one of the first was that the couple should move to Ukiah and join Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple, which they did immediately after Larry's graduation in 1968.
It was the height of the Vietnam War and without his student deferment, Larry would probably be drafted into the Army. Like his father and his maternal grandfather before him, Larry avoided military service during war time; Jim Jones would help. According to a statement Larry later issued from a jail cell in Guyana,
The draft was on my heels, so I really was looking for a happy existence and this, after graduation, led me and Carolyn, whom I loved very deeply, to head to Ukiah in search of Utopia.
Larry had been denied several appeals for a conscientious objector status based on his affiliation with the pacifist Quakers. Jim Jones offered to dictate a letter for Larry "guaranteed to result in C.O status". With his help, Larry received a deferment and was ordered to perform alternative service at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital where Peoples Temple medical technicians trained. Larry worked at his volunteer job, attended Temple services and helped to build the new Redwood Valley Temple building. His financial support came from his father and, like other top Temple aides, Larry donated 25% of his income to Jim Jones. Even at this early stage, Dr. Layton was indirectly supporting the experiment.
There are conflicting reports as to why Larry and Carolyn were divorced but all agree it was because Jim Jones had sex with one of them. According to the family's account, Jones announced the divorce at a Temple meeting, much to Larry's surprise. He arranged the property settlement right then and there, the papers were signed and Larry was ordered to Reno, Nevada to establish residency and file for the divorce. Before he left the meeting, Jones asked him to choose his next wife from those in attendance. Larry chose Karen Tow and a few months later, they were married.
Carolyn became one of Jones' favourite mistresses, eventually bearing his child whom they named Kimo (Hawaiian for Jim). Jones arranged for Carolyn to marry Temple aide Michael Prokes, so the child would be considered legitimate. According to the Layton family, Carolyn's affair with Jim Jones was known only by the Moores and a few top aides who made excuses for their absence to the others.
Temple members didn't see much of Jones either during that period. They thought he was working on some revolutionary venture, while he was actually at the Moore home with Carolyn… Carolyn introduced Jones to her parents, John and Barbara Moore, and they all became quite friendly. The Moores moved from Davis to Berkeley, and Jones began spending much of his time at their house. He flattered them by sharing inside information about the socialist goals of his church, and soon they regarded him as a virtual son-in-law.
Jones was busy building an empire and must have had a good reason to spend "much of his time" at the Moore's home. True, he did confide "inside information" about his true goals, but by no means were they socialistic in nature, as Jones was a fascist. The Moores had moved to Berkeley to facilitate their communications with the Layton family, and much of the information Jones passed to the Moores was in turn passed on to Dr. Layton. The Reverend Moore acted as a mediator or messenger, which allowed Dr. Layton to remain at a safe distance from Jones and the experiment. It is rather strange that John and Barbara Moore would regard Jones as a "virtual son-in-law" when their daughter was married to Mike Prokes, and the Reverend Jones was married to his wife, Marceline. Not only did Reverend Moore accept the father of his illegitimate grandson, but he went to great lengths to proclaim his "good works" to the local press. He eventually visited Jonestown and returned with glowing reports of the project. He would remain one of Jones' foremost supporters even after the carnage. Reverend Moore's actions seem absurd.
In time, Larry and Karen Layton were divorced and, once again, Jones was blamed for the break-up. According to an article in the New York Times, "friends of Larry Layton recall that Mr. Jones took both Carolyn and Karen from him after having the women watch him force Larry to submit to a homosexual act".
In response to Dr. Layton's prompting, Larry enrolled at Santa Rosa Junior College where he studied to become an X-ray technician. The Santa Rosa campus, like Mendocino State Hospital, was a training ground for Temple technicians bound for the experiment in Jonestown. Larry lived in a Temple-operated dormitory and, in addition to his individual studies, he met once a week with the other Temple students for their class in military tactics and guerrilla warfare. Eventually, Larry was sent to Jonestown with the Temple's newly purchased X-ray machine that would be used to plot the escape of his mother, Lisa.
As Congressman Leo Ryan left Jonestown with several "defectors" for the return trip to the U.S., Larry left a huddle with Jones to announce that he, too, wanted to leave the jungle community. The others were sceptical of his intentions as Larry was considered one of Jones' most trusted aides, but Ryan consented to the request. When the group arrived at the Port Kaituma airstrip, Larry quickly boarded one of the two planes to either plant his revolver or locate one that had already been planted there. He then disembarked the plane and submitted to a pat-search that the others had convinced Ryan was a good idea for security reasons. Larry again boarded the plane and retrieved the gun from its hiding place. Just then a tractor carrying Temple gunmen approached the planes, and the assassins opened fire on the crowd of people still milling about the aircraft. Larry shot Temple defectors Monica Bagby and Vernon Gosney, he missed the pilot, then reportedly turned to shoot another defector, Dale Parks his .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver misfired and Parks wrestled the weapon from him. Congressman Ryan was killed in the assault. Larry was immediately arrested for attempted murder by the Guyanese authorities. Though there were several members of the airstrip death squad, Larry was singled out to stand trial. He would remain incarcerated until his appearance in a Guyanese court on May 5[SUP]th[/SUP], 1980, over seventeen months after the incident at the airstrip.
Larry was tried in Guyana for the attempted murder of Bagby and Gosney, but not for the murder of Congressman Ryan, as Ryan was on official Congressional business and his murder fell under U.S. jurisdiction. The defence presented little or no argument. No witnesses were called. Larry took the stand once but only broke down in tears and said nothing in his defence. The prosecution witness, Vern Gosney, testified that Larry had shot both him and Monica Bagby (who was too frightened to attend the trial). Despite the eyewitness testimony, the jury found Larry not guilty as charged on May 23[SUP]rd[/SUP], 1980.
Following his acquittal, Larry remained in Guyanese custody for an additional six months before being extradited to the U.S. to face charges of conspiring to murder Ryan. Bureaucratic red tape was the only reason given for the long delay.
In August of 1981, Larry Layton, charged with conspiring to assassinate Congressman Ryan, went on trial in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco. From the very beginning it would appear that the scales of justice were tipped in his favour. Nearly three years had passed since the Jonestown massacre and the incident was only a bad memory that both the public and the public prosecutor would rather just forget. There was little interest in prosecuting Larry, especially since the prosecutor had a past relationship with the Peoples Temple. Following the massacre, the government placed U.S. Attorney William Hunter in charge of investigating the Peoples Temple. Hunter had a close personal relationship with Temple attorney Tim Stoen ever since they both worked as assistant district attorneys in San Francisco to cover-up the 1975 election fraud perpetrated by Jim Jones. When Hunter was promoted to U.S. Attorney, he offered Stoen the position of Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney. When this scandalous conflict of interest was disclosed, Hunter stepped down but appointed one of his employees, Robert Dordero, to prosecute Layton.
Dordero called twenty-one witnesses to the stand, most of whom testified that Larry Layton was a member of the Temple assassination squad that killed Congressman Ryan. An FBI ballistics expert confirmed that the bullets removed from Bagby and Gosney matched those that were test-fired from Layton's revolver. A top Guyanese detective, identified only as "Jugmohan", presented a confession that Layton had signed in Guyana just four days after the incident in which he said,
I, Larry Layton, take full responsibility for all deaths and injuries that took place at the Port Kaituma airstrip… I felt that these people were working in conjunction with the CIA to smear the People's Temple.
Defence attorney Tony Tamburello countered by admitting that his client probably did attempt to murder Bagby and Gosney but that he had nothing to do with the murder of Congressman Ryan. Tamburello added, "Mr. Layton is not on trial in this country for shooting anybody. Our presentation to the jury will be he is not on trial for anything other than conspiracy." Since Layton had already been acquitted of shooting Bagby and Gosney in Guynese court, he could not be retried on the same charges so his confession in U.S. court was a safe statement. According to newspaper reports of the proceedings,
Defense Attorney Tony Tamburello said Layton is a government "scapegoat". "The State Department is responsible for a monumental tragedy, and what they are trying to do now is blame one individual and divert attention from their own responsibility", he said.
Tamburello contended that his client had been drugged into participating, that he looked "spaced out and was mumbling of a CIA conspiracy" during the attack at the airstrip.
Dick Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Guyana who witnessed the attack at the airstrip, testified for the prosecution. According to the newspaper accounts of the trial,
Out of the presence of the jury, defence lawyer Tony Tamburello said he wanted to find out whether Dwyer was actually a CIA operative in Guyana. Chief U.S. District Judge Robert F. Peckham asked what the relevance of such an inquiry would be to Layton's trial, and Tamburello said he wanted to show that Dwyer's testimony was "tainted by bias he wants Larry Layton convicted to take the responsibility of Jonestown off the State Department and the CIA". Citing recent appellate court decisions, the judge refused to allow that line of questioning. Outside the courtroom, Dwyer, a foreign service officer since 1957, was asked whether he was indeed a CIA agent. Dwyer replied, "I can neither confirm nor deny the allegation".
In a prepared statement read to the press outside the courtroom, Tamburello said,
We believe, in fact, Mr. Dwyer is biased and has a motive for saying what he's saying… because it takes the heat away from the State Department, and particularly the CIA.
Despite the fact that the judge had disallowed such references, even the prosecution witnesses continued to allude to the agency's involvement in Jonestown. Dale Parks, who had wrestled the revolver from Layton at the airstrip, testified that Layton falsely accused him of shooting Bagby and Gosney and had told Dale's father that Dale was "part of a CIA plot to destroy Jim Jones". Speaking as a researcher who, at the time of the Layton trial, was already investigating the CIA's secret sponsorship of the Jonestown experiment, I was shocked that the agency would even be a subject in the court proceedings. In retrospect it was Layton's best defence a good offence. He was threatening to tell the truth and expose Jonestown as a CIA operation unless the agency came to his aid. Meanwhile, the government prosecutors, unable to deny the hard evidence of CIA involvement, were put on the defensive and forced to cover-up the story by admitting to the CIA's presence in Jonestown but implying that their intention was to investigate or even persecute Jones.
Not only was the threat to the CIA Layton's best defence; it was his only one. Tamburello rested his case without calling a single witness to the stand. Again, not even Larry would testify on his own behalf.
From the outside, the outcome of the trial would seem to be a foregone conclusion. The prosecution had presented hard evidence, ballistic reports, eyewitness testimony and even a signed confession while the defence presented no evidence, actually no case other than vague references that implicated the CIA in the murders of Guyana. But, when the jury returned, they were deadlocked, 11 to 1 in favour of acquittal on all charges. Judge Peckham declared a mistrial and, according to a local newspaper report,
…released Layton on a personal recognizance bond signed by the defendant's father, a retired germ warfare scientist who lives in the East Bay.
In response to the mistrial, the local press reported,
Survivors of the carnage insist the real story has yet to be told. They maintain there must be an epilogue, one that would include an investigation of the government's involvement at Jonestown…
[FONT=Verdana]Press reports also claimed that "independent investigators" had taken the survivors' the
3. From the Cradle to the Company
Lynetta Putnam was born on April 16[SUP]th[/SUP], 1902 in a small settlement on the Wabash River in Southwestern Indiana, though this cannot be confirmed as all records of her birth have been lost. Little is known of Lynetta's early life. Reports are vague and sometimes contradictory but it is known she was a breed apart from others of her generation. As her contemporaries enjoyed the frivolity of the Roaring Twenties, Lynetta pursued a college degree with a headstrong aggression that was her predominant trait. She attended Jonesboro Agricultural College in Arkansas, followed by two years at Lockyear Business college. Though she was better educated than most men of her time, Lynetta abandoned plans for a career in business for a short-lived stay in the field of anthropology. Not content to be an "armchair anthropologist" and determined to prove she was as capable as any male counterpart, she aspired to study primitive Black African tribes. She worked hard and her dream came true when, still in her mid-twenties, she travelled to a tiny African village. Had she pursued this career, Lynetta may have reached the prominence of Margaret Mead or one of her other, more successful colleagues; but Lynetta had yet another calling. As she lay sleeping in an African hut, a recurring dream beckoned her to return to the United States. In the dream, her deceased mother advised her to marry as she was destined to bear a son; a messiah who would right the wrongs of the world. Perhaps the dream was only a manifestation of some deep fear that she was growing too old to bear children but, regardless, Lynetta left Africa and returned to Indiana to marry a most unlikely mate, James Thurmond Jones, a semi-invalid, sixteen years her senior. He was forty-three, she was twenty-seven.
James T. Jones, a resident of the east Indiana hamlet of Crete, came from a family of Quakers. While serving in France during World War I, he was a casualty of chemical warfare. Mustard gas had scarred his lungs for life. He worked, when he was able, on farm, road and railroad crews but he spent most of his time alone in his house or at the local Veteran's Administration Hospital, as even the slightest exertion would leave him breathless. By most accounts, he was an uneducated, ill-mannered, bad tempered loner and a known member of the Ku Klux Klan. His position in the KKK may have been of some significance as the organization's national headquarters was only seventy miles away in Indianapolis.
So the aggressive, well-educated anthropologist gave up her work in Africa to marry and help support a semi-invalid pensioner sixteen years her senior, whose only interest in society was his involvement in the racist Ku Klux Klan. It would appear that the marriage was a terrible mismatch. Actually, James and Lynetta shared only two things in common; their interest in the Black race and their only son, born May 13[SUP]th[/SUP], 1931, James Warren Jones. It would seem that the child's destiny was set at birth.
Crete, Indiana was no more than six dilapidated farmhouses surrounding a grain elevator owned by Lynetta's foster grandfather and surrogate father, Lewis Parker. The newlyweds farmed a small plot of land that was probably a gift from Parker whom Lynetta described as being "generous to a fault". Unfortunately, the produce they grew and James' disabled veteran's pension were not sufficient to support the family. It was the height of the Depression, Parker lost his extensive grain holdings and could no longer help support his granddaughter. Lynetta was forced to get a job but the nearest employment opportunities were five miles west in the small town of Lynn. James' father was also in Lynn, as was the nearest school system; a consideration as "Little Jim" approached school age. James sold the land and the Joneses moved to Lynn, where the local townspeople met a not-so-typical family. No one in Lynn nor in the remaining residents of Crete would remember Lynetta's pregnancy, or the event that was later described as the birth of the anti-Christ.
In Lynn, Big Jim spent most of his days in the pool hall or at home, listening to the Cincinnati Reds game on the radio or just sleeping. His nights were a mixture of KKK business and his duties as "Night Marshall"; a title that, along with a gun, had been bestowed on him by the town fathers. Almost everyone avoided Big Jim. Lynetta was never accepted by the local women. She was the bread-winner in her family, not the bread-baker. She was too aggressive, too rough, nearly masculine in her dress and manner. She enjoyed taunting the neighbour wives by rolling her own cigarettes and defiantly puffing as she passed the appalled spectators. Above all, she was known for her foul disposition and abusive language. Lynetta could swear better than any man in town. Little Jim was different too. His head of thick blue-black hair stood out in a community populated by blond Germans, most of whom worked in the town's predominant industry; casketmaking. There was talk that Lynetta was part American Indian, or that the child's true father was a Black man. One surviving account contends that Lynetta was married, not at age twenty-seven, but at age twenty-nine. She turned twenty-nine one month before delivering Little Jim. Though just small town gossip, the accusations might have been serious in Lynn where it was the unwritten law that Blacks, Indians and Catholics were not welcomed. To this day, that part of the country is still extremely racist. A common sight along the highway are billboards proclaiming the righteousness of the Ku Klux Klan and the popular slogan, "Nigger don't let the sun set on you here". When the sun did set, it was the night marshall's job to enforce the unwritten law. Big Jim did his duty, and Little Jim was twelve years old before he even saw a Black person.
Little Jim completed his first eleven years of education at the Washington Township School where his teachers remember him as a bright but devilish organizer with a foul mouth, no doubt inherited from his mother. Lynetta's example was not all bad. She had taught little Jim not only how to read, but to read. By the third grade he was signing out books from the library that were intended for high school students. He was rarely seen without a book in his hand and it was not just for show. Even in grammar school, it was said that he was more knowledgeable than some of his teachers. Medicine, psychology and Nazi Germany were his favourite subjects. Though his IQ score was well above average at 120, Jim's grades were not outstanding. School work bored him, while the world he discovered in books urged him on to bigger things. Even at this early age, he was more of an adult than a child.
Lynetta had worked in a variety of odd jobs before settling on a position in an auto/aircraft engine assembly plant twenty miles south in Richmond. Since she was gone for most of the day and Big Jim was absolutely no help, Little Jim was sent to a neighbour woman who babysat the child after school. It has been said that Jim was raised as a Methodist, but neither Lynetta nor Big Jim attended any church. It was the neighbour woman, Mrs. Myrtle Kennedy, who instilled a fiery religious belief in the boy, or at least that is what Jim would say about his "second mother". Actually, Jim was never intrigued by Mrs. Kennedy's Bible stories as much as he was intrigued with the power religion exerted over her. He wondered why she donated her time to teach Bible classes at the Methodist Church, or why her husband gave up his weekends to help maintain the church properly. Jim learned his lessons, but he learned more about people than he did about the Bible. During this period he began to indiscriminately tour the local churches. He could be seen with the Methodists or the Quakers or the Nazarenes, or the Disciples of Christ or the Pentecostalists. The wife of the local Pentecostal minister befriended Little Jim and he was often seen at her home, reading the Bible and practicing what she saw as his tremendous talent as a preacher. Jim's childhood was spent studying religion from every possible angle.
Little Jim conducted his first "pretend church" in the loft of a carriage house in his back yard. He would gather together the neighbourhood children and officiate at services that were a combination science fair and revival. Jim sat, like a judge, in the only chair while the others gathered round the table to examine a slide in his microscope or the chicken to which he had tried to graft a duck's leg. Sometimes he preached from the Bible, sometimes he helped them with their homework or conducted funerals for their deceased pets, some of which he had killed just to create the services in which he would be in charge. A neighbour, at the time, later recalled Little Jim's "pretend church",
He would preach a good sermon. I remember working about two hundred feet from the Jones place. He would have about ten youngsters in there, and he would put them through their paces… line them up and make them march. He'd hit them with a stick and they'd scream and cry. I used to say, What's wrong with those other kids, putting up with it?' But they'd come back to play with him the next day. He had some kind of magnetism. I told my wife, You know he's either going to do a lot of good or he's going to end up like Hitler'.
Hitler could hardly have escaped the attention of the German population of Lynn in the late thirties, nor could he be a stranger to the impressionable young boy who studied Nazi Germany before the war. Little Jim often mimicked Hitler, slicking his hair to one side and awaiting the "Heil, Hitler" password that would admit a playmate into the loft. Other times, he wore a white, hooded robe, like his father's KKK outfit but, unlike his father, Little Jim would parade in his costume during the light of day. There has never been any evidence to suggest a local Nazi Party influence on either Big or Little Jim, but there is no doubt that Little Jim embraced the Nazi philosophy, at least from a distance. It was more than just play. He studied and understood the Nazis. Understanding world politics, even having an interest in the subject is extremely rare for a little boy, and though he was an adult in many ways, Little Jim was only just a boy.
The Joneses never had much money. There was only Big Jim's pension and Lynetta's pay from the factory that had since shifted operations to fill defence contracts during World War II. Between the two incomes they were able to raise Little Jim, whose childhood was at least indirectly funded by the War Department. Big Jim's brother, Bill, tried to help. He lived with the Joneses until he reportedly fell to his death from the G Street Bridge in Richmond. Years later, Lynetta would claim that Uncle Bill had been murdered.
Soon after the war, toward the end of Jim's junior year in high school, Lynetta and Big Jim separated. They never had much of a marriage. They had always slept in separate beds, some said due to Big Jim's coughing spells, but moreover theirs was but a marriage of convenience held together and perhaps even prompted by the sake of the child Jim. Now that he was close to finishing school and capable of earning a living, there was no further need for the charade. Big Jim moved into a room at the Waldon Hotel in Lynn where he died three years later. Lynetta and son moved to Richmond where Jim enrolled as a senior at Richmond High School and accepted a full time position as an orderly at Reid Memorial Mental Hospital. After a year as both a full time student and orderly, Jim graduated in mid-semester, and the announcement in the Richmond High School Year Book attests to his interest in medicine, "Jim's six syllable medical vocabulary astounds us all". While working at Reid Memorial, Jim met Marceline Baldwin, a nurse four years older than he, who had graduated from a federally-funded program to work at the hospital. Marceline and her roommate, Evelyn Eadler, were often seen in the company of young Jones in Richmond's coffee shops and movie theatres. On June 12[SUP]th[/SUP], 1949, soon after his graduation, Jim and Marceline were married in a double ceremony with Marceline's sister and her groom. Evelyn Eadler was the maid of honor. The bride's father, Walter Baldwin, was a respected Republican city council member and the wedding, held at the Methodist church where he was known as an elder, was attended by the mayor and the city fathers of Richmond. Immediately following the ceremony, without so much as a honeymoon evening, the newlyweds moved to Bloomington where Jim had enrolled in Indiana University as a business major. He had been rooming with a student who later remembered him as "maladjusted"; an embarrassment who was generally ignored by the other students. Jim continued his studies while Marceline supported the couple, working nights in surgery in the hospital across the street from their one room apartment. She spent her days taking care of their home and studying for her credentials in nursing education. After completing three semesters on the Bloomington campus, Jones decided to change his major to the social services and move to Indianapolis to pursue a law degree. This was a critical point in Jim's (or any other young man's) life, when thoughts of the future encouraged him to set a course. Instead of concentrating on one of his interests, Jim decided to pursue them all in a unique career. He would combine his interest in science, medicine, religion, business, social services and law to become a faith healing preacher. There were many such evangelists, but none who were as intelligent, talented or knowledgeable as Jim Jones. It will never be known whether the sum total of his interests and experience dictated his career choice, or the career choice had guided him through the various experiences on the way to a pre-determined goal. It suffices to say he was perfect for the job. Jones saw more than just the Cadillacs, flashy clothes, power, money, religious groupies and the other benefits of the occupation. With his background in science and medicine, he knew what experts have since discovered; the power of the emotions and spirit to heal the body. Jones was well ahead of the times as this holistic approach to medicine would not be accepted until years later through the combined efforts of scientists and evangelists, such as President Carter's sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton. Most of Jones's faith healings were faked stage shows but that should not discount his desire and ability to study the subject from a scientific point of view.
Ronnie Baldwin, Marceline's ten-year-old cousin, came to live with the Joneses in their small apartment behind the Shriner's Temple in Indianapolis. Ronnie had been remanded to a foster care home after the untimely death of his father. His mother, it was said, was "incapable" of caring for the boy. Ronnie would remain with the Joneses for about a year, during which time Jim used the boy to create the image that he was a family man, which helped to dispel some of the suspicion associated with being the only White face in a Black crowd. Since Marceline supported the family, Jim was free to attend classes, lectures and church services. He attended Black church services with young Ronnie who, after a year of being dragged from one Black church to another, was only too glad to move back with his mother. Jones studied the various techniques of Black ministers and preachers while attending Butler University part time. It would take him ten years to earn a bachelor's degree in education.
Jones helped supplement Marceline's income by working part time as a night watchman. Like his father, he carried a revolver, and like his father he carried it to enforce law and order which, considering the place and time, carried with it an extreme prejudice against communists and Blacks. On one occasion, he and Ronnie, hand-in-hand, attended a lecture on communism that he promptly left after being told the meeting was under surveillance by the FBI. It was the McCarthy Era and there were many such communist witchhunts, especially in right-wing, KKK country like Indianapolis. Considering his later work, the incident raises a question as to whether Jones was afraid of being spied on, or afraid of being exposed as a spy. The incident, which occurred in 1952, may well be the first recorded report of Jim Jones' work for government intelligence.
In June of 1952, Jones officially entered the ministry when he accepted a position as student pastor at Somerset Methodist Church in a poor, White neighbourhood of Indianapolis. He studied for the Methodist ministry and preached a doctrine of racial equality that alienated the exclusively White congregation but attracted new Black parishioners to the services. He had met many Black church-goers while touring the Negro houses of worship with young Ronnie. He invited all to come and hear him preach at Somerset. Many did and the conservative church elders asked Jones to resign. He did.
Meanwhile, Jones had been establishing a name for himself at church conventions in Columbus and Detroit. Even under the scrutiny of fellow preachers, he stole the show. He was a spell-binding orator with a particular talent to "discern"; a popular revivalist's trick. Jones would call out the names of various people in the audience and discern some secret about them. He would reveal their phone number or some physical complaint or past illness. The subject would step forward and the young preacher would pray for them and, with a slap on the forehead, they would "fall out"; a phenomenon that is a combination of emotional overload and a severe blow to the head. Some would rise immediately, brush themselves off, and return to their pew, while others would lie on the floor for hours, quietly or in convulsions.
Following the theatrics, the collection plate would be passed through the faithful. All the ministry know that discerning is a hoax, but they admired Jones' skill, his style of showmanship and extraordinary memory, to say nothing of the professional detective work it required to gain the discerned information without the subject's knowledge. Jones was great. He could repeat social security, insurance policy and driver's license numbers for dozens of people, all from memory. Never once in his career did he speak from notes. Perhaps his success was due in part to his access to government files.
While researching the discerned information, occasionally, Jones would discover that the subject had recently complained of some ailment. A prime example was the elderly, somewhat feeble Black woman who had complained to a doctor about a sore throat. The information may have come from the doctor's office, or the pharmacy, or from Marceline at the local hospital, but in any event, Jones would call out her name during the services and discern something that impressed the congregation. He would then claim that through the divine intervention of the Holy Spirit he had a revelation that she had cancer of the throat. Religious fanaticism aside, the subject would tend to believe him, especially in the wake of her recent complaint and his uncanny knowledge of information contained in the most personal files. She would come forward and Jones or Marceline or some other Caucasian aide would force their fingers down the subject's throat until she choked and gagged. Through slight of hand they would emerge from the clutch with the "cancer"; a spoiled chicken liver dripping with blood from a concealed capsule. It was all very authentic, even the blood was real, having been drawn from Jones or an aide prior to the show. Cancer passings were common practice. In addition to throat cancer, there was a rectal passing as well but, like the violence in a Greek play, it was performed off stage and left to the audience's imagination.
Jones worked his Black congregation into such a fury that each healing was an outburst of emotion that electrified the air. Of course the collection plate was circulated immediately. The money was counted in a back room while things calmed down on stage. An aide would whisper the total to Jones in the pulpit who would select another subject, pass another cancer and pass another collection plate. The series would continue, sometimes for several hours, until the total donations equalled the estimated total contents of their pockets.
Many of the faith healings were performed on and by the preacher's assistants in disguise, especially when Jones took his show on the road to Ohio where the locals were less likely to recognize the accomplice. The most convincing healings were those in which the subject was an innocent believer. Their spontaneous emotion was far more effective than anything that could be staged.
After being forced out of Somerset Methodist in 1954, Jones rented an abandoned church building in a poor neighbourhood of Indianapolis. He dubbed his first business the "Community Unity" and, as the name implies, it was more of a social services office than a church. He had conducted services in the loft as a child and in borrowed churches, on street corners and in backyards since, but now he had a pulpit of his own. The Community Unity defies description. Even though some worshipped there on Sunday, it was not a church, it was not recognized by any denomination nor was Jones an ordained minister; he would not be for another eight years. The Community Unity defies description.
No one would argue with the fact that Jones was a brilliant religious showman, whose talent in the pulpit could have been successful with any demographic, but Jones never tried to recruit wealthy Caucasians; he wanted an exclusively Black congregation. By almost all accounts, his congregation was both Black and White (and later Native American) but this multi-racial image is simply not true. His organization resembled the caste system of ancient Egypt. The capstone at the peak of the pyramid was the pharaoh, everything and everyone else existed to support him. The next lower level consisted of a group of priests, physicians and merchants who carried out the pharaoh's will and knew some of the state secrets. Below them was a larger group of slaves who comprised the broad foundation for this social structure modelled after the design of the pyramids. Jones, of course, was the pharaoh. Below him was a group of several dozen trusted aides; the middle management, the spies who collected the "discerned" information and the medical technicians who drew the blood and prepared the rancid chicken livers for the phony faith healings. They were all Caucasian. Below them was the largest group; the congregation, and they were all Black. Jones did use his White lieutenants to his advantage but the primary purpose of his work was to extort money from the Blacks. Everyone admired him; the Blacks for his self-proclaimed divinity, and the Whites for his ability to convince the Blacks of his divinity and fleece their pockets at the same time. Everyone admired him, and many of these early recruits would follow him across two continents to the bitter end.
One such early recruit was the Caucasian assistant pastor Jack Beam, an employee of a local pharmaceutical company. Beam was a tough, abrasive personality. He was Jones' second-in-command, bodyguard, strongarm man and assistant in the faith healings. In the technique of interrogation known as "good cop, bad cop", Beam was the bad cop; the threat of violence if the manipulated subject did not comply with the wishes of the good cop Jim Jones. Beam provided Jones with the ability to intimidate any Black parishioner who stepped out of line or strayed from the flock without tarnishing his own benevolent image. Virginia Morningstar later summarized the Blacks' generally accepted impressions of Beam, "I always felt as if he (Beam) was a hit man… I never felt he was legitimate".
Most of the early followers were recruited from other churches. Jones would target a desirable congregation and arrange to bring a contingent of his followers to their services. As was the custom, Jones would give a guest sermon and the hosting minister would reciprocate the following Sunday when he would escort some of his congregation to services at the Community Unity. Many visiting parishioners left their previous church to return to the Community Unity which attests to Jones' superior talents. Many others were drawn to Jones through his weekly broadcasts on radio WPFB in Middletown, Ohio. During this period, he often looked east to Ohio for new followers. Perhaps it was the larger Black population or the predominant German population or the federal jurisdiction over his interstate business that made Ohio attractive, but regardless, it shows how Jones was reaching out for a select congregation rather than broadening his ministry in order to attract more local Indianapolis residents. In 1954 and 1955, Jones toured the small towns between Cincinnati and Columbus with a traveling revival show held in local Pentecostal churches or under the circusy atmosphere of a rented tent. He recruited a strong following in Xenia, Dayton and Hamilton and many followed him back across the state line to Indianapolis.
Jones rarely, if ever, mentioned the word "God", except in later years when he cursed what he called the "Impotent Sky God". His sermons were more apt to quote the newspaper than the Bible. His was a ministry of current events; a down-to-earth religion; more concerned with pleasing the federal government's requirements to receive financial support than pleasing God for some afterlife reward. The Community Unity, like his subsequent churches, was more political and social than religious. Even according to Jones' own account it was not a church but a "movement". Meanwhile, the Jones household grew as fast as the congregation. A middle-aged woman named Esther Mueller moved in to help Marceline with the housework. She would cook and clean and remain their personal maid until her death in Guyana. An eighteen-year-old blonde girl, described only as "Goldie", was another addition to the family. Her relationship with Jim and Marceline has never been established beyond one report that the couple was helping her to start a career in nursing. In 1954, the Joneses adopted a pretty nine-year-old girl named Agnes whose mother had unexplainably given up her daughter to the young preacher and his wife.
By 1956, Jones had amassed sufficient funds to purchase a modest church building on Fifteenth and North New Jersey Streets in an inner-city neighbourhood of Indianapolis. He named his new headquarters the "Wings of Deliverance". Of course, Sunday was his busy day. At 8 AM he would broadcast a short sermon on radio WOWO in Fort Wayne. The regular service at the Wings of Deliverance was 10:45 AM. The miracle service, which included the faith healings, was scheduled for 2:30 PM. The evangelistic service was held at 7:45 PM, followed by an evening sermon broadcast on WIBC in Indianapolis. The different services allowed Jones to reach more people than his little church could hold, while the individual theme of each performance enabled him to attract and please a variety of believers.
Shortly after the Wings of Deliverance opened its doors, Jones organized a huge, five day religious convention that was held in an Indianapolis hall in June of 1956. Headlining the bill was the popular Southern author and faith healing evangelist, the Reverend Bill Branham, and, of course, the aspiring young preacher Jim Jones, who sacrificed top billing for the sizable crowds that Branham would attract. The event was widely publicized and drew some eleven thousand to the opening ceremonies. As usual, Jones stole the show and the new parishioners he recruited into his flock were exceeded only by the dollars he put into his pocket. It was at this convention in the summer of 1956 that the Wings of Deliverance became the Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church, and the odyssey began.
Jones preached an anti-communism doctrine that reflected the philosophy of the McCarthy Era in general, and the KKK and the American Nazi Party in particular. Though in retrospect it might seem a bit absurd, Jones' stated campaign was to fight communism through communalism. He made reference to the communal lifestyle of Christ's apostles, and quoted such passages from the Bible as, "And they sold their possessions and goods and imparted them to every man as every man had need". He established Jim/Lu/Mar, an Indiana corporation for profit owned by Jim, his mother, and his wife. The corporation's charter states that its purpose was to receive donations of real estate. Like many others, Esther Mueller donated her home and possessions in exchange for Jones' promise to provide her needs for life. Esther alone contributed $27,000; a considerable sum in 1950 dollars.
So much money flowed into the Peoples Temple that, within a year, Jones purchased a second, more impressive church building on Tenth and North Delaware Streets in a nicer neighbourhood of Indianapolis. The massive front steps, the three-storey façade, the stained glass window and uptown address was a quantum leap forward in the young preacher's career, especially since he did it all on his own, without help from any established denomination. The new Peoples Temple seated 400 and the adjacent brick parsonage was large enough to one day house forty. Jones had purchased the property from Rabbi Maurice Davis for fifty thousand dollars. He took possession of the building with a small down payment and a promise to pay the balance, interest-free, in one year's time. He did so 364 days later. Jones would purchase two other church properties in his career. Both the Peoples Temple in San Francisco and Los Angeles were, like the first in Indianapolis, former Jewish synagogues. This defies all probable odds and leaves one to wonder what made former synagogues so attractive to Jones. Perhaps it was the church-like atmosphere, but with geometric designs in the stained glass instead of portrayals of Christian Saints. Jones liked the eternal flame that was left by the previous tenants. He kept it lit in place of the traditional Christian cross. The Peoples Temple was not a Christian religion. There is convincing evidence that it was not even a religion, but it is unclear why Jones was attracted to former Jewish temples; an interesting pattern for a closet racist whose favourite subject was Nazi Germany.
In mid 1958, Jones set out to help the federal government solve a very serious problem. During the Korean War, American servicemen had fathered many children who had been abandoned both by their fathers (who returned to the States) and their mothers, many of whom were prostitutes. The illegitimate children had been remanded to special orphanages in Seoul. The government of South Korea expressed its discontent to Washington over the burden of supporting their children, and warned the U.S. that the racially-mixed orphans would never be accepted in Korean society as Korean racial prejudices are extreme by American standards. They would probably die from neglect in the orphanage unless the U.S. took them in. The scenario would be repeated twenty years later in the wake of the Vietnam War, but this was the first time Washington had to deal with it and individual adoption seemed the only solution. From his pulpit at the Peoples Temple, Jones encouraged his congregation to adopt these war babies and, to set a good example, he and Marceline travelled to the West Coast in October of 1958, to adopt two orphans sent from Seoul to California. The newest additions to the Jones family were four-year-old Stephanie, and two-year-old Chioke who they renamed Lew Eric. During this, their first trip to California, Marceline conceived their only child. In May of the following year, Marceline was eight months pregnant and stayed behind as Jim, Stephanie and a contingent of supporters travelled to Cincinnatti for one of their exchange services. On the way back home, Jones rode in one car, which young Stephanie rode in another car with Mable Stewart, the Temple's nursing home supervisor, and four of her workers. All six would die in a car crash of undetermined cause. Jones would lament over the deaths for years to come. He would recall a premonition he had received earlier that evening which prompted him to lead the Cincinnati congregation in a chorus of,
On up the road
Far in the distance
I saw a light shining in the night…
Then I knew…
Biographers would later claim that Jones sabotaged the car to silence Mable Stewart and her assistants who had been questioning the untimely deaths of several senior parishioners Jones had placed in their care. The death of young Stephanie exempted Jones from any suspicion and , if he did actually sabotage the car, that was probably the reason he wanted his daughter to ride with Mable Stewart. Jones, if only in later years, was capable of murder. Three weeks after the accident, on June 1[SUP]st[/SUP], 1959, Marceline gave birth to Stephan Gandhi Jones, named for Stephanie and the East Indian leader. Within the year, the Joneses would adopt another child; a Black baby boy about Stephanie's age who they named James Warren Jones Jr. Later they adopted Suzanne, another Korean War orphan and Tim Tupper, a blue-eyed blond who completed what Jones proudly called his "Rainbow Family".
Once he had attracted a sizeable Black congregation, Jones knew that he had to do something spectacular to keep them in the fold, and that nothing could bind a group together like the threat of a common enemy. Since none existed, he created one. Temple members began receiving late night phone calls and anonymous letters that warned the parishioners that their affiliation with the racially-integrated Peoples Temple had put them at odds with the powerful Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. Several Temple services were interrupted while Jones emptied the building after allegedly receiving a bomb threat. All the threats were staged to create the image that some unseen "bad people" were threatening the "good people", led by Jim Jones (who went so far as to paint swastikas and racial insults on the homes of his Black followers). The fake threats served to blind the Black congregation together under the leadership of their new hero, but the overall effect was to disguise what was essentially a Caucasian experiment in the control of Blacks.
By 1960, the Temple's social programs exceeded those offered by the city of Indianapolis. Jones had opened a free soup kitchen that served one hundred meals a day to the city's destitute. He established a youth center to educate and entertain idle teenagers and several nursing care homes for the elderly; at least those who had a house to donate and a pension to support them. The social programs provided good publicity and implied the Temple's sense of social conscience and wholesome community spirit, when in reality the programs were profit-making businesses. Jones allocated only $25 a week to the soup kitchen. Temple volunteers gleaned over-ripened, stale and discarded food from local businesses, turning the losses of local grocers into tax-deductible, charitable contributions. All food stores, restaurants included, throw away everything from bones and meat scraps to dented cans and bruised produce. The Temple offered the businessman a grossly inflated tax deduction for what would have been his loss. A good example might be a grocer who was stuck with a hundred dollars worth of bananas that had spoiled. The Temple allowed him to turn a hundred dollar loss into a five hundred dollar tax deduction while they used the free bananas to make pudding for the soup kitchen and the nursing homes that received most of the donated food. Meanwhile, Jones used the inflated needs of the free soup kitchen to exact hundreds of dollars from anyone who pitied the poor. The youth centre often provided able-bodied slave labourers, but the most profitable program was the nursing home business. Elderly victims, hand-picked by Jones, would donate their houses, savings and pensions to Jim/Lu/Mar in exchange for the companionship, security and attention they needed in their later years. The major advantage to Jones was that most of the money was paid in advance for the long-term services that never equalled the cost and continued only as long as the patient lived. Many residents of Temple nursing homes would die prematurely under suspicious circumstances. Twenty-four such seniors lived in Jones' home that had been partially converted into a care facility managed by Marceline's parents. Walter Baldwin had taken an early retirement from politics to live with his daughter and son-in-law and run their business as the Joneses were getting ready to leave Indianapolis. The Baldwins would be semi-involved in the Peoples Temple for the next eighteen years until, on the final day, they departed Jonestown as Congressman Ryan arrived.
It is easy to view Jones as a showman, a trickster and a crook but, despite his often brutal extortion tactics, he was not interested in personal financial gain. He never spent the money on himself. He did buy a used black limousine, but that was expected, especially at funeral services. His clothes were old, he had no expensive habits like drinking or smoking, he led an austere life and reinvested all the profits into the Temple and his growing household. Jones did not desire money; he wanted power. In the end, his personal reward was not money but a bountiful sex life.
News of Jones' alleged good work spread and, in 1960, the Peoples Temple was accepted into the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ denomination; a distinction they would enjoy until the end. The affiliation with the Disciples of Christ would provide some capital and the much needed security of a well-established tax-exempt status.
By all accounts, Jones was truly brilliant. He was extremely intelligent, well-read, and highly skilled in perception and deception. Everyone respected his abilities. To the Blacks he was a White messiah whose miracles were evidence of his alleged close relationship with God. He was equally admired by his Caucasian assistants, not for his demi-divinity, but for this talent to attract, organize, control and deceive Black people; a rare ability for a White man. Sometime prior to 1960, Jones' work caught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. Always on the lookout for talented people to recruit, the federal agency recognized Jones' power over Blacks and offered to help in his career in exchange for his services rendered. He may not have had a choice but, in any event, Jim Jones joined the CIA.
4 Three Countries, Three Commissions
In his first few years with the CIA, Jim Jones played a role in at least three of the agency's international projects; the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the racial revolution in British Guana and the military coup d'etat in Brazil.
During World War II, Fidel Castro was working as an actor in Hollywood, rehearsing his future part in world politics. He had about two dozen supporters back in Cuba who were looking to the United States for aid and assistance in overthrowing the progressively oppressive government of Fulgencio Batista. Castro returned to Cuba with the money and training he needed. Batista fled or abdicated there is little difference. Castro assumed power as Premier and soon returned to the U.S., not to Hollywood as an aspiring actor, but to Washington, D.C. as a head of state. Much to nearly everyone's surprise, he did not ask for any U.S. support. He could have received millions of dollars to use as he saw fit. It was there for the asking; but Castro had a much different relationship with the controlling powers in the U.S. government. He was about to embark on one of the major world plays of the century; a CIA plot to deceive the Russians.
Cuba's economy was based on tourism and sugar cane. Castro nationalized the resort hotels and casinos and opened the luxurious facilities to Cuba's common man. He seized all foreign business interests, most of which were owned by Americans with reputed connections to organized crime. He then signed a contract to supply sugar to the Soviet Union. By 1959, the CIA was spreading rumours that Castro was a Communist.
Thousands of Cubans opposed Castro's rule, and many fled the country to reorganize in Nicaragua and Florida to plot his overthrow. The CIA immediately moved in to take control of the situation by offering "U.S. support" to their cause. The CIA established an anti-Castro radio station on Swan Island in the Western Caribbean. Few listeners paid any attention to the broadcasts until Castro identified the station as a CIA operation. Swan Island is little more than a pile of bird droppings and a few palm trees that survived a recent hurricane. The island is claimed by Honduras and an American, Sumner Smith, who leased the property to station manager Horton H. Heath. Radio Swan encouraged the Cuban rebels and directed them into the hands of CIA operatives like Bernard Barker and Howard Hunt who established a string of safe houses from Miami to Key West where expatriated Cubans were trained and armed for a planned invasion of their homeland.
Reagardless of the CIA's true motives for their part in what would be the Bay of Pigs invasion, it was to their advantage to recruit as many of Castro's enemies as possible, and therein lay a problem, as many had remained in Cuba. To complete the ranks of the invasion force it became necessary to send agent into Cuba to ferret out these people and convince them to join forces with their fellow Cubans under the direction and protection of the CIA. Such an extremely sensitive mission required a very special agent. They needed a man with no prior history with the agency, one with not only a cover to explain his presence in Cuba but his recruitment of Cubans to return to the United States. Above all, he must be a master of persuasion. The chosen candidate for the task was Jim Jones.
In 1960, Jones, along with his wife Marceline, flew to Cuba for his first international assignment with the CIA. First he met and was photographed with Fidel Castro, after which Castro took the Joneses on a tour of the interior to inspect the wreckage of a downed U.S. plane that Castro claimed was sent by the CIA to firebomb Cuba's sugarcane fields. After photographing the plane and the charred remains of the pilot, Jones returned to Havana to set up headquarters in a resort hotel. According to his cover, Jones was a missionary who wanted to recruit forty Cuban families to return to Indianapolis with him in exchange for money and support. One example of his success was a Black man who, after thirteen hours of briefing, agreed to leave his home and join the Peoples Temple in Indiana. He moved into the parsonage where he lived until just prior to the scheduled invasion when he "disappeared", presumably to join the Cuban force in Miami.
Immediately following his inauguration as President in January of 1961, John F. Kennedy was briefed by CIA director Allen Dulles on the agency's plan to invade Cuba. Kennedy was not told everything, only what he needed to know to decide whether to authorize or cancel the project. Dulles explained that this was a legacy from a previous administration that could not be disbanded without considerable embarrassment, even violence, as this group of Cubans was actually a well-trained and equipped foreign army on U.S. soil. President Kennedy reluctantly agreed to Dulles' invasion plans and was quoted as saying, "If we have to get rid of these men, it is much better to dump them in Cuba than in the United States, especially if that is where they want to go".
In April of 1961, a flotilla of 1,500 Cuban exiles set sail from Florida for the return to their homeland and the overthrow of Castro's government. Grossly misinformed by the CIA and spurred on by Radio Swan, the ragged fleet landed at the Bay of Pigs, directly into an ambush set by 100,000 Cuban troops. The invasion was doomed to fail from the start. It was a deliberate suicide mission.
The CIA, which is typically silent about their covert operations, was quick to admit their sponsorship of the anti-Castro Cubans and their obvious failure at the Bay of Pigs. The agency then proceeded to circulate absurd rumours concerning their aborted plans to assassinate Castro by such exotic means as poisoned cigars, exploding seashells and fountain pen/hypodermics loaded with lethal bacteria. They even let leak a plan to discredit Castro and break his charismatic hold on Cuba by dusting him with thallium salts to make his beard fall out. Seriously, if the CIA really wanted to kill Castro, they had ample opportunity to do so. A bullet would have sufficed. The wild stories they circulated were just that; wild stories, intended to create the public opinion that Castro was an enemy of the CIA.
Understanding the complexity of this and other CIA operations is as simple as separating the reality from the rhetoric. Basically, what the agency does is what they want to do; what they say they do is exactly 180 degrees from the truth and any information they leak to the public is intended to disguise their true motives. Speaking as an independent researcher who has the greatest admiration for the accomplishments of the CIA, the national security of the United States has been entrusted to a very competent organization that never fails to achieve its goals and the Bay of Pigs invasion was no exception.
In the late 1950's the CIA recognized that the Soviets were seeking a military foothold in the Western hemisphere, and rather than allow the inevitable to occur uncontested, they took control of the situation and offered the Russians Cuba on a silver platter. Russia is ninety miles from the northwest corner of the U.S and could not resist the overtures of Castro, whose country is ninety miles from the southeast corner of the U.S. Cuba was the perfect site for the military base they planned. They did not realise that it was too perfect and fell into one of the greatest deceits of the twentieth century. The CIA had fooled the Russians into putting all their efforts into Cuba, therefore defusing and controlling the situation while gaining direct access to Russia's military technology. It was a brilliantly staged plan. The entire world (including the Russians, the Americans and even President Kennedy) truly believed that Castro was the enemy of the United States. Everyone was dealing in rumor and rhetoric, and no-one could see the reality. The CIA had put Castro into power and then, with the help of agents like Jim Jones, had rounded up all his enemies and sent them and their cause to the grave at the Bay of Pigs. Fidel Castro owes his success to the CIA, which sheds a new light on President Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis and the reported Cuban connection to his assassination.
Jim Jones' position in the preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion was middle management at best, but nonetheless important as it establishes his early association with the CIA that would enable this self-proclaimed preacher from Indianapolis to be received as a visiting dignitary by foreign heads of state. It was also the basis upon which he would build a reputation as an authority on U.S./Cuban relations. He maintained communications with Castro and later revisited Cuba several times. He would advise future presidents on dealings with Cuba, establish a U.S./Cuban trading company and, on one occasion, be the primary suspect in a crime that created a major international incident between the two countries.
Jones returned to Indianapolis to what must have been a very crowded house. There was Jones, his wife, their eight children, the Baldwins, two dozen nursing home patients, various Cuban exiles and even his mother Lynetta at least forty people all under the same roof. Lynetta had since found employment more suited to her personality; she was a correctional officer at the Indiana Women's Prison where she guarded the predominantly Black inmates.
The CIA does not pay its operatives very much money but they do help to insure their financial security, as a disgruntled agent in need of money is a prime target for hire by a foreign power. In Cuba, Jones had proved his worth; he was a member of the team and so entitled to certain benefits. Soon after he returned to Indianapolis from his Cuban trip, Jones was appointed Director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission by Superior Court Judge Mercer Mance. The job opening was not advertised and Jones was the only applicant. Previously, the position had been filled by a volunteer who worked without pay, but Judge Mance elected to elevate the part-time job to a $7,000 a year salaried position; a salary first given to Jim Jones. Aside from a few well-publicized token efforts to integrate restaurants and movie theatres in Indianapolis, Jones' performance as Director of the Human Rights Commission was mediocre, at best. He did little more than secure the job and prevent someone else from being effective.
By May of 1961, Jones had a large interracial family, his own church, a wide following, public recognition as a humanitarian and a private reputation as one of the few Caucasians able to rally the support of Blacks. He had all this as he turned thirty years old. The CIA was so pleased with the young preacher's test mission in Cuba that, immediately following the Bay of Pigs invasion, they assigned him a second and third task. He was allowed to complete college and received a bachelors degree in education from Butler University in June, after which he was to go to South America and aid in the overthrow of two governments. The assignment required that he first travel to Hawaii to meet with a group of U.S. mercenaries headquartered there. The trip to Hawaii would be mostly business; briefings primarily, but it was also a respite and somewhat of a reward in recognition of his service in Cuba before he would once again risk his life for the CIA. The South American assignments required that he be absent from Indianapolis for two years and, in order to gracefully exit from his position in the community, Jones staged a media manipulation. He informed the Indianapolis News that he was once again under attack from an unseen enemy. Columnist William Wildhack reported on August 11, 1961,
The Rev. James W. Jones expected some unpleasant experiences when he agreed to serve as director of the city's Human Rights Commission. He was not wrong. Nearly every mail brought letters reviling him. Then he was harassed by telephone both at the office and at home… He has become the victim of a letter-writing campaign. His name is forged to letters making insulting statements about minority groups. The letters are mailed to Negroes and others known to be interested in the problem of racial relations… He is bewildered, not knowing how to fight this form of vilification.
Bewildered he was not. He had written the letters himself and faked the phone calls. As usual, his plan was brilliant and timely. Before the ink of Wildhack's story had dried, Jones was lounging on the beach in Hawaii. He had left Indianapolis and the newspaper article to explain why. He had left his Peoples Temple and their community projects in the hands of his assistants. He had left his position as head of the Human Rights Commission, only to lose the post through neglect. He had left everything he had worked so hard to achieve in order to pursue something he called, "The Big Time." In Hawaii he signed over Power of Attorney to his mother in anticipation of a possibly dangerous mission. Once rested and rehearsed, Jones, Marceline, their rainbow family, bodyguard Jack Beam and wife Rheaviana flew from Hawaii to Georgetown, British Guiana where they would contact other CIA operatives who were gathering for the planned revolt.
The "failure" of the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion had deceived President Kennedy into thinking Cuba was hopelessly lost to the Communists. Believing there was nothing more he could do about Castro, Kennedy directed an intense effort to avert yet another Communist take-over in the Western Hemisphere. From CIA reports, he learned of the Communists' plans to control the neighboring South American countries of British Guiana and Brazil. Of the two, it would first appear that Brazil should warrant most of Kennedy's attention due to its larger size and importance to the United States, but such was not the case. Intelligence reports did indicate that Brazil's president, Joao Goulart, was demanding constitutional changes that would transform his country into a Communistic state but the CIA believed there was an equally strong right wing faction in the Brazilian military to counter Goulart's efforts. So precariously were the Brazilian political scales balanced between the leftist government and the rightist military that the CIA could affect a military coup with only a slight push. Protecting Brazil from a Communist take-over would be relatively easy; it was British Guiana that presented the real problem as there was no right wing faction to counterbalance the Communist government of Cheddi Jagan's People's Progressive Party that had assumed power in September of 1961. British Guiana was so important to Kennedy that he personally manned the British Guiana desk at the U.S. State Department. According to syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, who would later record Kennedy's activities in his column dated March 17, 1964:
The United States permitted Cuba to go communist purely through default and diplomatic bungling. The problem now is to look ahead and make sure we don't make the same mistake again...In British Guiana, President Kennedy did look ahead.
In October of 1961, one month after he was elected Prime Minister, Jagan and his American wife Janet were invited to Washington where they met with Kennedy and various representatives of the British government. Since Guiana was a British colony at the time, all CIA activities had to first be cleared with British Intelligence. Following their meeting, Kennedy and England's Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, along with the intelligence organizations of both countries, agreed that they could not work with Jagan and immediately set out to support his only political opponent, the right wing racist, Forbes Burnham.
While Cheddi Jagan was meeting in Washington , Jim Jones arrived in British Guiana with the task of overthrowing his government. He wasted no time. On October 21, 1961, the Guiana Graphic published a photo of Jones and his family over the headline: "Church Blamed in Reds Rise." In the article that, followed, Jones blamed the affluent Guianese clergy for bleeding the wealth from the people which made communism appear attractive to them. The article served to help attract the anti-communist faction to a new hero, Jim Jones, whose assignment was to organize and aid their cause. Jones proceeded to recruit and train a group of Black Guianese rowdies who were to incite race riots and labor strikes intended to cripple Jagan's government. With his rainbow family and doctrine of racial integration, Jones had the perfect disguise for his work as an instigator of race riots. His Peoples Temple provided the necessary missionary cover as well as an excellent conduit to filter money from the U.S. to the Guianese rebels. Anonymous donations, given to his Indianapolis church, were forwarded to Jones, who distributed the money as he saw fit to finance the planned civil disturbances. He had told his Indianapolis congregation that his purpose in South America was to feed the poor. He did open his home to feed and house a number of Guianese but most of the recipients were the dissidents he had been instructed to organize.
Jones' immediate supervisor in the coup was Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Georgetown. Jones reported to Welch, who in turn reported directly to President Kennedy. It was Welch who introduced Jones to the CIA's candidate, Forbes Burnham, immediately upon his arrival in Georgetown.
In February of 1962, Jones' rebels began their reign of terror by inciting race riots and labor strikes. Prime Minister Jagan was forced to declare a state of emergency and call in British troops to quell the disturbances. It was the beginning of the end of Jagan's administration. The February riots also marked the successful completion of Jones' work in British Guiana.
In May of 1962, Kennedy invited Burnham to Washington to meet with U.S. and British representatives to finalize their plans for him to assume power in Guiana. Arthur Schlesinger wrote in a letter to Kennedy, "An independent British Guiana under Burnham (if Burnham will commit himself to a multiracial policy) would cause us many fewer problems than an independent British Guiana under Jagan." In the summer of 1963, Kennedy met with British Prime Minister Macmillan to schedule Jagan's final demise. Under the pretext of continued riots, strikes and other civil disturbances, Macmillan suspended Guiana's constitution in October. Jagan's government fell; making way for Burnham who, within a year, rose to power with a coalition government. In 1966, Burnham declared his country's independence from England and British Guiana became Guyana. Burnham never forgot the debt he owed to Jim Jones and soon after Guyana's independence day, he traveled to Ukiah, California to visit the preacher who had helped destroy his political opposition. The Sunday Times (London) reported on April 16, 1967, that the CIA's activities in Guiana were undertaken with the full knowledge and cooperation of Prime Minister Macmillan and British Intelligence. The article contained the following synopsis,
As coups go, it was not expensive: over five years, the CIA paid out over $ 250 000. For the colony, British Guiana, the result was about 170 dead, untold hundred wounded, roughly 10 million pounds worth of damage to the economy and a legacy of racial bitterness.
Though the CIA's involvement in British Guiana is common knowledge, due in part to the more relaxed security of their English partners, Jim Jones' work for the agency is not, only three people knew: Burnham, Kennedy and Welch. Burnham owes more than just his political success to Jim Jones and the CIA as they guided him from total obscurity to a position as one of the ten richest Black men in the world. Burnham would never disclose the secret. It died with him in 1985 when he succumbed to undisclosed complications during throat surgery. President Kennedy's secret was assassinated with him, leaving Richard Welch as the only government official who might detail Jones' work for the agency in British Guiana. Welch was later transferred to the post of CIA station chief in Athens, Greece where, far away from any Guianese implications, in late December 1975, as Jones once again rose to prominence in Guyana, he too, was assassinated. Though the murder remains unsolved, a terrorist group called the November 17 Movement claimed responsibility.
The only other person who may have known of Jone's CIA work in South America was his old friend and agency operative Dan Mitrione. Born in Italy, Mitrione immigrated to the United States and joined the Richmond, Indiana police force in 1945. He first met Jim Jones in 1947 or 48. A cop on the beat (in what was then a small town of about 30,000) could not have overlooked the antics of a street corner preacher. In 1955, Mitrione became Richmond's police chief. In 1957, he joined the FBI and in 1960 he joined the CIA who sent him to Brazil under the State Department's, International Cooperation Administration; the fore-runner of the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione's job in Brazil was to train the military regime's police force in counterinsurgency tactics, interrogation and torture under the cover of a "Public Safety Adviser." He worked basically with the same faction as did Jones in organizing a vigilante police Death Squad which killed hundreds of "undesirables" without arrest or trial. In 1969, after seven years in Brazil and two in Washington, D.C., Mitrione was sent to Uruguay to help that country's oppressive, corrupt regime eliminate a group of middle-class professionals known as the Tupamaros. The Tumpamaros' only crime was to steal incriminating documents from government offices and send this proof of government corruption to the courts. Under Mitrione's direction, Uruguayan police imprisoned, tortured and killed hundreds of suspected members of Tupamaros to protect the interests of the Uruguayan, and presumably, the United States governments. When Mitrione stepped up the violence so did the Tupamaros and on July 31 1970, they kidnapped him and held him as ransom for the release of 150 of their group held in Uruguayan prisons. The government refused and sometime in early August, Mitrione was killed. Uruguay then suspended the human rights clause in its constitution and Mitrione's Death Squad (with additional help from the CIA) exterminated the popular Tupamaros movement. Back in the United States, the White House eulogized the fallen agent as a "defenseless human being" and singer Frank Sinatra hosted a fund-raising benefit for his family. Dan Mitrione probably knew of Jones' work in Brazil, he may even have been the one who recruited Jones Into the CIA, but like the other witnesses, he was killed prior to the establishment of Jonestown.
Jones left Guiana for Brazil in February 1962 after reading a magazine article that would have a curious and profound effect on the rest of his life. The article, entitled "Nine Places to Hide," appeared in the January 1962 issue of Esquire, a conservative men's magazine published for distribution in the United Sates, England, and apparently Guyana. Esquire's managing editor, Harold Hayes, capitalizing on the then current bombshelter mentality, elected to include this guide to the nine places on earth most likely to survive a nuclear world war. Using a complex formula that took into account proximity to military and civilian targets, prevailing weather patterns, availability of radiation-free food and potential for post-war economic recovery, the article identified the following safe places: Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Eureka, California; Guadalajara, Mexico; Christchurch, New Zealand; the central valley of Chile; Mendoza, Argentina; Cork, Ireland; Melbourne, Australia and Tananarive, Madagascar. According to the article, many people had already relocated to these safe places in anticipation of World War III. The recent industrial development of Cork, Ireland was attributed to prosperous German businesses that had established branch operations in Cork "as insurance of company survival in the event of nuclear war." Jones reacted to the Esquire article as if it were a coded order from President Kennedy whose portrait graced the magazine's cover and there is some indication that that is exactly what it was. One clue was that the article closed by mentioning John Foster Dulles whose brother, Allen Dulles, was then Director of the CIA. Esquire magazine had a reputation as a mouthpiece for U.S. government propaganda ever since World War II and it is entirely possible that they were printing coded communications for intelligence operatives in the field, who would only need to understand the cipher and subscribe to Esquire to receive their orders. In any event, Jones immediately moved his family to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, to begin the second half of his South American mission.
The rainbow family checked into a hotel room in the heart of Belo Horizonte where Jones was contacted by an American missionary, Ed Malmin. The Reverend Malmin and his family had been working in Brazil's western frontier for four years and had only recently moved to Belo Horizonte, perhaps in response to the Esquire article. Malmin welcomed his colleague to Brazil and helped him get settled into an upper class three bedroom house that Jones had rented in a suburban community called San Antonio. Jones' assignment in Brazil was to funnel money and advice to the dissident right-wing faction of the Brazilian military and to assure them that, after their planned coup d'etat, the United States government would recognize and aid their new regime. Unlike the English speaking Guianese, Brazilians speak Portuguese which presented an obstacle as Jones spoke only English. Malmin offered the services of his daughter, Bonnie, who had been working as a secretary/interpreter for another American missionary. Bonnie moved in with the Joneses. She would live in their house for about six months.
Bonnie Malmin was a beautiful, sixteen-year-old, buxom blonde, who later reported, "...my secret idol had always been movie star Brigitte Bardot; I had done my best to copy her saucy image...always thinking about my appearance and trying to be sexy."[52] Bonnie's Aryan features set her apart from the dark-skinned Brazilian population, making her an object of desire to the military officers that she and Jones met with regularly. Jones was concerned that Bonnie might get pregnant. She assured him she would not but, "Nevertheless, Jim provided me with a male contraceptive to carry in my purse just in case. 'I believe you,' he said, 'but please promise me that you'll carry this in your purse wherever you go.'"[53]
To his congregation back in Indianapolis, Jones was a missionary trying to establish an orphanage in South America but he had no such religious cover in Brazil. According to Bonnie, religion was not even a subject in the Jones household. They had no Bible or other religious publications; they said no prayers --not even grace before meals. Jones did place a classified ad in a local journal inviting people to come to his home for "spiritual guidance" but that was as close as he came to the traditional role of a missionary. According to neighbors, the Jones home was a beehive of activity both day and night. As in Guiana, most of the recipients of Jones' hospitality were the locals he was organizing to overthrow the government. He had taken a job as an investment salesman to help explain his financial dealings with the Brazilians. Each morning he would leave his house dressed in a suit; briefcase in hand. He returned in the late evening and never discussed his day's business. He was often seen in the company of a Brazilian woman who neighbors suspected was his housekeeper though his housekeeper was a much younger, local girl. He once visited the office of his employer, who later described his briefcase as being full of money -- it probably was. According to Bonnie Malmin,
From time to time Jim met with government officials, learning as much as he could about the country and its systems, trying to determine whether this would be a safe haven from the imminent nuclear horror. He spent his days reading and thinking, often sitting cross legged on the bare floor of the living room pouring over the newspaper and calling to me to translate: "Bonnie -- tell me what this says. What does this headline say? Read this article to me." He was most attentive, of course, to anything about military hardware.[54]
It would appear that all was going well with Jones and his Brazilian operation, but such was not the case. Perhaps the operation was too complex for him to control or maybe it was because the Brazilian city-dwellers were far more sophisticated than the Guianese natives he had last worked with, but in any event, Jones made an awful mistake and was exposed in print as a CIA operative. A local newspaper reporter accused him of filtering money to military officers to finance a coup. In a published article, Jones refuted the charges by telling the reporter that his money came from his pension as a retired U.S. military officer. In one breath he attempted to explain the source of his income and the reason he preferred to associate with the Brazilian armed forces. Jones had never served in the armed forces and his lie backfired. The newspaper printed that, despite the claims of the "flamboyant American," -- "We all know he's CIA."
Panic struck the Jones household. Bonnie Milmin reportedly attempted suicide but was rescued by her bodyguard. Plans were made to hide her at the ranch of a wealthy Brazilian banker until the danger had passed but, in the end, no place in Brazil was safe for Bonnie and she was shipped off to the United States where she enrolled in the Bethany Fellowship Missionary Training Center in Minneapolis. By her account, she would not see Jim Jones for another eight years.
Meanwhile, the Jones family fled the scandal and moved into a seventh floor apartment on the prestigious Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro where Jones had accepted his first teaching position at the University of Sao Fernando. With his political activities greatly curtailed, he would sit out the balance of the Brazilian operation in relative seclusion, teaching and studying at the university.
The Jones family would reside on the Copacabana for about fourteen months which in itself contradicts Bonnie Malmin's contention that they lived a meager , rather Spartan life style in Brazil. Jones had sufficient resources to support himself, his family, various aides and servants and even some locals. Poor missionaries do not carry briefcases full of money nor do they take extended vacations on the expensive Copacabana Beach. To add to the paradox, Jones would appear to possess more personal wealth after his stay in Brazil than he had prior to leaving on the South American trip. One account claims that he would return to the United States with over one hundred thousand dollars in cash; the money he needed to start his California church. If anything suffered financially, it was his Indianapolis Temple. In his absence membership dropped from over two thousand to only seventy-five and the church was reduced to near financial ruin. Despite the troubles back home, Jones was not about to leave Brazil. His assignment was not yet completed and besides, he was enjoying a well-deserved vacation. As an alternative to the dilemma of his need to be in two places at once, he sent Bonnie's father to Indianapolis after Rev. Malmin agreed to take over the Peoples Temple and repair some of the damage of neglect. In Indianapolis, Malmin arranged for a windfall of contributions from the Disciples of Christ to sustain his new pastorate until Jones returned. Also at about this time, Jones sent his bodyguard, Jack Beam, back to the States. Beam was ordered, not to Indiana, but to California where he would meet with the displaced Temple assistant pastor, Ross Case, to locate a site for the new Temple headquarters within the "safe zone" of Eureka.
While living in Brazil, Jones received his life assignment with the CIA's multi-million dollar MK ULTRA program. The MK ULTRA program was a series of studies in mind control (behavior modification) and obscure techniques of assassination that the agency had begun in the late 1940's from knowledge they had received from their Nazi German scientists. There were approximately 150 different MK ULTRA experiments being conducted in secret laboratories scattered throughout the world. Among the subjects studied were hypnosis, sensory and sleep deprivation, electroshock, ESP, lobotomy, subliminal projection, sleep teaching, and methods to artificially induce cancer and heart failure. Every conceivable mind-altering drug was investigated and some new ones were developed. It was an MK ULTRA lab in Switzerland that first synthesized Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (the mind opening drug LSD) in their quest for better ways to extort information from captured foreign agents. The CIA left no stone unturned in their search for knowledge on how to control human behavior. They even conducted studies in psychic phenomenon, parapsychology, and occult sciences like witchcraft and other Black Arts.
By the time Jim Jones was brought into the program, MK ULTRA was fifteen years old and many of the laboratories had since filed their final reports with the agency before disbanding. The experiments, conducted in university research departments, mental hospitals, and prison medical clinics, represented the most authoritative source of information on their assigned subjects within the limits of a laboratory environment. The agency had compiled a library containing data that needed to be collated into a comprehensive science of behavior modification. The task was assigned to Jim Jones, who would require another fifteen years to complete his findings in a major field test known as Jonestown.
While in Rio, Jones was briefed on MK ULTRA and took advantage of the locale to study voodoo and the African religion, Macumba, as well as the faith-healing preacher, David Martins de Miranda, who exhibited extraordinary control over his followers who referred to their leader as "The Envoy of the Messiah." This modern-day John the Baptist imparted much of his knowledge to the aspiring Jim Jones.
In October of 1963, Britain suspended the constitution of Guiana and the leftist government toppled.
In November of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, reputedly by Lee Harvey Oswald.
In December of 1963, the first of several military coups destroyed any hold the Communists might have had on the Brazilian government. Jones' work in South America was completed and he returned to Indianapolis.
Jones would later confide to one of his Temple aides that, while he was in Brazil, he killed a man by smothering him with a pillow as he slept. Though this particular murder cannot be confirmed, what can be confirmed is that in his life, Jones was capable of murder. In the last days of Jonestown, he attempted to disguise his work in Brazil by dictating the following account to his chronicler,
You know, I didn't just hand out food in Brazil, I'd given assistance to various people, underground people, given them tangible help so they could defend themselves, defend their lives, and I preached communism openly. Questions were asked at the places I visited, and AID officials questioned one Brazilian family extensively about my activities. AID must've played a significant role in CIA activities. I got out of there just in time, I remember leaving the airport wondering wondering whether I wouldn't, get in trouble for what I was doing revolutionary-wise there when I got back to the United States.
The account, conveniently survived the carnage in Jonestown to stand as the autobiography of Jones' Brazilian trip. Unable to deny his involvement in the political struggle in Brazil, Jones elected to use one of CIA's standard covers and admit to his involvement but, at the same time, imply that he was working for the Communists who opposed the CIA. Jones was well aware that the best way to disguise a lie is to include it within an extraordinary revelation of the truth. He would use the technique many times in his public career.
Though there is no documented evidence that Jim Jones ever met Lee Harvey Oswald, the two men shared several things in common. As a U.S. Marine, Oswald had a CIA security clearance for his work at the U-2 spy plane base in Atsugi, Japan. Atsugi Naval Air Base was the CIA's Far East headquarters and the site of one of their MK ULTRA labs. Oswald was a test subject. He learned to speak Russian from sleep teaching recordings. Eventually, he left the Marines with a hardship discharge due to his mother's failing health. Without apparent means of support, he then purchased a ticket on a luxury steamship bound for Russia where he would live and work for about thirty months. While in Minsk, Oswald was hospitalized for three weeks during which time he met and married Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova; the daughter (some say niece) of Colonel Ilya Vasilyevich Prusakova, a high ranking officer in the KGB (the Russian equivalent of the CIA). Oswald returned to the United States and, along with his Russian bride, settled in Dallas, Texas. His military discharge was changed to dishonorable but, at about the same time, the State Department granted him a large loan. Oswald associated with members of the China Lobby (a known CIA front operation) and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He applied for a passport and, despite his suspicious past, he received his visa in an unprecedented 24 hours. He then traveled to Mexico City where he was accompanied by two CIA agents assigned to him by their station chief Howard Hunt. Oswald was involved with a variety of characters, a few of whom are described in the following published article.
...Lee and Marina settled in Texas and soon took up with an odd assortment of friends, none more unusual than George De Mohrenschildt. Born a Russian count before the revolution, De Mohrenschildt thrived in a world of political shadows, appearing at various times to be working for Polish intelligence, the Nazis, the French Resistance, the British, the Americans, the Rockefellers -- a man of many masks. By 1962, he was calling himself a geologist and a friend to the Oswalds. In April 1963, Oswald moved to New Orleans, where his social circle--in view of his alleged Marxist sympathies--was even stranger than in Dallas. There he met Carlos Bringuier, an anti-Castro Cuban exile with CIA connections. Oswald first sought to work for Bringuier, then appeared to be working against him. Eventually, the two engaged in a well-publicized street brawl and then a debate about Cuba on New Orleans radio. Joining Oswald and Bringuier in the debate was Ed Butler, a right-wing propagandist for the Information Council for the Americas (INCA), a group that later sold LP's of the debate as part of its anti-communist crusade. The president of INCA was Dr. Alton Ochsner, described as a consultant to the air force on "the medical side of subversive matters." The directorships of Bringuier's anti-Castro group and Ochsner's INCA included the owners of the Reily Coffee Company, where Oswald, the man being denounced by both organizations as a communist, had recently been on the payroll.
By far the strangest bird to intersect Oswald's orbit was David Ferrie. Eccentric in behavior belief and appearance, Ferrie had been an Eastern Airlines pilot until he was arrested for a "crime against nature" with a sixteen-year-old boy. He was a priest in the Orthodox Old Catholic Church, a bizarre sect engaging in animal sacrifice and occult rituals. Ferrie had no hair on his body... and made a striking, if note shocking impression...Although the Oswald- Ferrie relationship, is well-proved, it is unclear when it began. The House Assassinations Committee suggested that the two young men may have met as early as 1956 in New Orleans, when young Lee was a cadet in a Civil Air Patrol headed by Ferrie. By the time of the 1963 radio debate, Oswald and Ferrie were well acquainted. A right-winger who hated Kennedy, Ferrie was active in paramilitary operations against Castro and claimed to have flown in the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Ferrie was also a hypnotist and fancied himself a biochemist. He claimed to have created drugs that caused cancer (something the CIA was also secretly developing) or caused heart attacks indistinguishable from natural death (another CIA endeavor), as well as aphrodisiacs and amnesia-inducing drugs... Many attributed his hairless condition to a chemistry experiment gone awry.[55]
Over twenty years later, researchers are left to wonder if Oswald was a "Manchurian Candidate," brainwashed by the CIA or the KGB to assassinate President Kennedy. Much has been published on Oswald's possible involvement in a conspiracy and the reality of the events occurring after the assassination underscores and even confirms the theory. George De Mohrenschildt, intelligence agent and friend of Oswald, died from an "apparent suicide" two hours after being interviewed by Edward Epstein for his book entitled, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. In a like manner, David Ferrie was murdered so soon after being interviewed by an investigative reporter, that the coroner placed the approximate time of death, not after , but during the interview. These two deaths were not the exception, but the rule. Of the thirty-one eyewitnesses to Kennedy's assassination who stepped forward to testify, eighteen were dead within three years -- six from gunfire, three from car accidents, three from heart attacks, two from suicides, one from a slit throat, one from a karate chop to the neck and two from reported natural causes. The Sunday Times (London) later reported that the mathematical odds of such deaths occurring without there being a conspiracy were one hundred thousand trillion to one.
The life of Lee Harvey Oswald has never been cross-referenced with the life of Jim Jones and, though the connection is purely speculative, it is curious to note the number of things shared in common by these two men who had such a profound effect on Kennedy's last days. Both Jones and Oswald had been cleared for top-secret work with the CIA. Though Jones was an experimenter and Oswald was a subject, both were involved in the agency's MK ULTRA program. Both men shared an expertise in the politics of Cuba and U.S. Cuban relations; long accepted as the reason Kennedy was killed. Finally, there is the case of attorney Mark Lane. Lane was legal counsel to Oswald's wife, Marina, following the assassination and later emerged as the foremost authority in the country on the CIA conspiracy to kill Kennedy. His book, Rush to Judgment, contradicted the findings of Allen Dulles, Gerald Ford and others on the Warren Commission who insisted that Oswald had acted alone. So convincing was his evidence that Lane succeeded in petitioning the government for a second official investigation; the House Select Committee on Assassinations scheduled their hearing for November 1978. As Lane prepared his testimony and supportive witnesses, he was contacted by Terri Buford of the Peoples Temple. Buford asked Lane to Jim Jones whom she claimed was being represent harassed by the CIA. Encouraged by a large retainer and the promise that Jones had information about the CIA that would be valuable in his research, Lane accepted the case and traveled to Jonestown in September 1978, to meet his new client. Upon his return to the United States in October, Lane announced in a press conference that, he was favorably impressed with Jonestown and agreed to represent the Temple in a lawsuit they were initiating against various federal agencies, including the CIA. In November, Jones refused to allow Congressman Ryan's party to enter Jonestown until Mark Lane was present. Following Ryan's visit, Lane was in Jonestown as the massacre began. He was allowed to escape into the jungle. Only days later, he stood before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, still shaken from the experience in Jonestown. He was upset and disorganized. Actually, Lane had been totally discredited by his association with Jim Jones. Terri Buford who reputedly defected from Jonestown only three weeks before the massacre, moved into Lane's Memphis home to help him write an account of his experience entitled The Strongest Poison. Attesting to Lane's investigative abilities, the book is well referenced and detailed, but Buford's influence served to suppress the truth. If Lane's career as an expert on CIA conspiracies was not already ruined, the media assault that followed certainly finished him. He was accused of, among other things, traveling to Switzerland with Buford to empty the Temple's bank accounts in her name. Whether Lane was duped or purchased does not really matter, the end result was the same. Jones had silenced the foremost critic of the CIA, while at the same time using that person to file a suit against the CIA to disassociate himself with the agency in those last few critical months of Jonestown. Ironically, Jones had used Lane to help masquerade his activities as well as the agency's activities.
Jim Jones and Lee Harvey Oswald. At best, it is only a side story and not significant, only thought-provoking. Jones probably never met Oswald but the two had enough in common to say that they prescribed to the same circles of interest, which adds some credence to Jones' claim that, while in Brazil, he accurately predicted the assassination of President Kennedy.
Jones returned to Indianapolis around Christmas of 1963 to resume control of his Peoples Temple from Ed Malmin. Malmin would remain with the Temple for about a two month transition period, after which he ordained Jones a minister in the service of the Disciples of Christ. It would be Jones' only religious title, one that he would maintain in good standing until the bitter cyanide end. His affiliation with the Disciples of Christ (that probably began when he studied for his teaching credentials at their Butler University) would help to legitimize his Peoples Temple. The Disciples of Christ boast a national membership of nearly two million, including such noteworthy people as presidents Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan and FBI directors J. Edgar Hoover and Clarence Kelly. The Peoples Temple was the largest single contributor to the Disciples of Christ, having donated over one million dollars to the organization.
Following Jones' ordination on February 16, 1964, Ed Malmin totally dropped from the story, never to reappear. All of his actions can be justified, save one: How could this minister offer Jim Jones his teenage daughter? There is a plausible answer. First, Ed Malmin was not as he appeared to be. He had grown up on the West Side of Chicago during the Roaring Twenties as a tough, street-wise delinquent, whose gang members called him, "Halfpint," due in part to his small, (5'-7", 140 lb.) frame, and in part to the bootlegged whiskey flask he always carried in his hip. What he lacked in size, Halfpint made up in determination and a rowdy spirit that, combined with his admiration for the local Chicago gangsters, soon found him committed to a juvenile home for his racketeering. Eventually, he escaped from the home and traveled as a hobo around the country to emerge from this rather dubious background as a graduate of Aimee Semple McPherson's Los Angeles Theological Seminary and the Assemblies of God School, the Right Reverend Ed Malmin. Jones claimed that Ed Malmin, himself, had sexually molested his daughter, Bonnie, who never voiced any objection to Jones' allegations. But was she his daughter? An earlier doctor's report had confirmed that Malmin's wife, Judy, could not bear children. Her pregnancy and the birth of Bonnie was a "surprise" to everyone. Bonnie Malmin may well have been adopted.
According to the announcement in the Indianapolis Star, Jones planned to "represent the church in Brazil following his ordination," but such was not the case. He remained in Indianapolis where he liquidated the assets of his Temple and his congregation for their move to the only "safe place" in the United States: Eureka, California. Jones' scouts had relayed an article that had appeared in the Humboldt Standard (Eureka) that, in response to the Esquire article, further defined their safe zone as a corridor extending from Eureka to Ukiah. Jones selected Ukiah and sent dossiers of his followers to the scouts who were to locate suitable housing and employment for the pilgrims.
Approximately one hundred and fifty Temple members migrated the two thousand miles to Ukiah in the spring and summer of 1965. Jones would follow, but not before issuing his farewell address to Indianapolis. After one of his Sunday morning broadcasts on WIBC radio, Jones informed Indianapolis News reporter William Wildhack that, once again, he was under attack by the KKK and the Nazis, who objected to a political comment he had aired on a previous program. Wildhack reported on April 17, 1965;
The Rev. Mr. Jones has taken a prominent role here in the struggle for racial equality. He served as executive of the mayor's Human Rights Commission and he has adopted children of Negro, Korean and Japanese ancestry. He says some nasty remarks were made on the phone concerning his views on racial matters, but these seem secondary to the attacks on his theological views. One of the favorite tricks of the anonymous callers was to get one of the children on the phone and say: Did you know your father was an anti-Christ, a devil? During this period, the radio station received harassing telephone calls, a fact confirmed by an employee involved. So, worried about the possible effect on his children and to save the station the embarrassment, the Rev. Mr. Jones voluntarily stopped his broadcasts.
Good-bye Indiana. Hello, California
Before continuing on with Jones' career in California, it is best to complete the story of Bonnie Malmin while her contributions to Jones' Brazilian mission are still fresh in the reader's mind. In her second year of missionary training, she became Mrs. Bonnie Burnham when she married a tall, dark-haired student from Upstate New York whom she would identify only by his surname. In 1966, following another year of training and a year's internship in a small rural church in Western New York State, Bonnie Burnham and her husband left on a mission to Brazil where they reportedly worked in an orphanage in Sao Paulo. While in Brazil, Bonnie gave birth to two children. Stephan, the first, was named for Jones' natural son and Stephany, the younger, was named for Jones' adopted daughter who had been killed years earlier in an auto accident. Bonnie's Stephany also died, soon after birth. Though it had been years since Bonnie had seen Jim Jones, the naming of her children after his attests to the strong influence he still exerted on her life.
The Burnhams returned to the United States in 1970 and, after a brief stay in Costa Mesa, California (where Bonnie had grown up) they moved to Ukiah to join the Peoples Temple. They lived with Jones and his family until they acquired jobs and a place of their own. Burnham reportedly worked at the local Masonite factory with several other Temple members. Bonnie worked as secretary and legal aide to Temple attorneys Gene Chaiken and Tim Stoen, and also assisted Jones in Temple services. She would follow the preacher as he walked among his congregation. She carried a tray that held a comb for his hair, a towel to wipe the perspiration from his forehead and a bottle of drinking water. It was Bonnie's responsibility to be certain the water had not been poisoned. As with all top Temple aides, the Burnhams contributed 25% of their income to Jones. Bonnie also helped to perpetuate Jones' propaganda, as evidenced by the following testimony she gave to the congregation,
Until Black people are accepted without racism and bigotry in the United States, I will remain ashamed of Norwegian heritage and blond hair. Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour of the week in America. Only in Peoples Temple do you find a real, living Christ-like example of what Jesus talked about, and I'm proud to be a part of it.[56]
Actually, there was considerable truth to Bonnie's statement but nowhere was that truth more evident than in the Peoples Temple where Bonnie and others of the exclusively Caucasian hierarchy ruled the predominantly Black congregation.
According to Bonnie, the Burnhams did not have a monogamous marriage,
we decided to give each other permission to have affairs without letting that disturb our other reasons for staying together...If he found somebody he was interested in, he was free to check her out, and the same went for me.[57]
Around September of 1972, Bonnie Picketed the San Francisco Examiner with Jones after the paper's religion columnist, Reverend Lester Kinsolving, penned a series of articles damning the Peoples Temple. After the demonstration, Jones asked Bonnie to seduce Kinsolving, gain his confidence and find out how much he knew about the Peoples Temple. According to Bonnie, she answered, "Sure, Jim -- if you think it'll do any good"[58]
And then there was the time that Jones announced in a meeting of the Temple's Planning Commission that the CIA had given him a video recording of one of Bonnie's sexual encounters. Bonnie contended that Jones had set up the affair and denied any knowledge that her performance had been taped. Clearly, Jones did arrange and tape Bonnie's sexual relationships. Such standard procedures in the Temple were usually used to blackmail the Temple member's unknowing partner.
Sometime during 1974, Bonnie left her husband and the Peoples Temple and moved to Santa Cruz, California, where she found employment as an insurance salesperson. She divorced the mysterious Mr. Burnham. It is odd that she never mentioned his first name, odder still that he is not mentioned in any other account of the Peoples Temple. It is almost as if the intention was to allow him to remain anonymous, perhaps for good reason. The Burnhams' relationship had all the earmarks of a marriage of convenience, something that permeates the history of the Temple's hierarchy. During Bonnie's stay in Ukiah, Guyana's Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, visited his old friend, Jim Jones, in the Temple. There remains only one vague reference to their secret meeting from Ukiah reporter Kathy Hunter, who interviewed Burnham during his stay. Could Bonnie's husband have been related to the Prime Minister?
In Santa Cruz, Bonnie dated several men (most noteworthy, a parapsychologist) and her promiscuity earned her the nickname, the "Blonde Bomber." For the next three years, Marceline Jones would spend weekends with Bonnie in Santa Cruz. It was her retreat. Bonnie also visited the Joneses in Ukiah and occasionally attended Temple services in San Francisco, where her only responsibility was to escort Mayor George Moscone.
In June of 1978, Bonnie married one Hank Thielmann to begin the last act of her play. Soon after the wedding, she was contacted by former Temple attorney and reputed defector, Tim Stoen, who offered her $1,200 from an unnamed donor to join the Concerned Relatives on Congressman Ryan's inspection tour of Jonestown. She agreed and became the only Concerned Relative who did not have a family member in Guyana.
During the trip to Guyana, Bonnie gravitated to the company of Tim Stoen and Congressman Ryan and was one of only two Concerned Relatives who accompanied Ryan to a dinner at the U.S. Ambassador's home. While the group waited in Georgetown for permission to enter Jonestown, Bonnie disassociated herself from their efforts and set out on her own to get an appointment with Jones. She radioed her request from the Temple's Georgetown office. Jones' affirmative reply came only minutes after the Congressman's plane left for the jungle interior. Bonnie would remain safe in Georgetown during the massacre. Her last words to Ryan were a warning,
Leo, promise me you won't spend the night in Jonestown. You don't know how Jim Jones' mind works. There's nothing he won't do to stop you. I know you're getting a late start in the day, but if you stay overnight, he could send some naked woman into your room and then flash the picture all across the States -- he'll do anything.[59]
Bonnie knew firsthand how Jones' mind worked as many a time she had been the "naked woman" in the picture.
Soon after news of the massacre reached Georgetown, Bonnie left Guyana with Tim Stoen on a U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane sent by Stoen's brother to rescue them. She appeared again in South San Francisco at the funeral of Congressman Ryan. For reasons of security, the church selected for the services was rather small, too small to hold the hundreds of mourners who waited on the front lawn as secret service men searched the building for possible Temple assassins or explosives. Only a selected few were allowed to enter the church. After a private word with the secret service agent in charge, Bonnie was among them. She waited on the front steps and grabbed George Moscone's arm as he passed. They entered together. In the vestibule, she whispered to the mayor that, if he remained silent, she and others would come to his aid and testify that he, too, had been duped by Jones. She gave him a hug and a polite kiss on the cheek. Moscone took his assigned seat in the middle of the group on the right, while Bonnie continued to her assigned seat in the second row on the left, amid the congressional delegation she had been sent to spy on. According to a local newspaper article, 'I don't understand it', the mayor reportedly confided to friends, 'but I'm scared.' He did not mention that he was frightened of anything or anyone in particular, only that recent events -- especially the murder of his longtime friend, Congressman Leo Ryan in Guyana -- were troubling him. At Ryan's funeral in South San Francisco last Wednesday, a woman stranger gripped Moscone's arm as he was entering the church and said something to the effect that she was going in with him. 'It was a harmless thing, but it scared the daylights out of him,' a friend of the mayor said yesterday.[60]
Bonnie was no "stranger" to Moscone, nor was their encounter a "harmless thing." Certainly, Moscone had not forgotten his personal Temple "escort" but, due to what appears to be the true nature of their relationship, it is no surprise that he denied knowing her. Nor is it surprising that he was frightened by their encounter, he had every reason to be. Bonnie's was the "kiss of death;" Moscone had exactly five days live before he, too, was assassinated.
Following the eulogy given by Joe Holsinger, Ryan's longtime friend and foremost advocate of the theory that Jonestown was a CIA MK ULTRA experiment, the group left for the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno. According to Bonnie, "I rode to the cemetery on one of the buses reserved for congressmen, thanks to having received a pass while sitting in their row."[61]
Ryan was buried with full military honors, next to the grave of Admiral Chester Nimitz, rather ironic as Nimitz was a friend and neighbor of the family of Ryan's co-assassin. Chip Carter, the President's son, presented a flag to Ryan's mother. Later that day, a private reception was held at the San Francisco Hilton hotel. Somehow, Bonnie managed to be invited upstairs to the suite reserved for Ryan's family where she met and spoke with all thirty-five relatives. As with the congressmen Bonnie's task was to ascertain whether any of Ryan's relatives were suspicious of a conspiracy in the death. She was still working for Jim Jones.
Bonnie then set out to defend her association with Jones by writing a book about her experiences in the Peoples Temple. The "Blonde Bomber" took a week's vacation at the Cenacle Retreat House in Warrenville, Illinois where, along with professional writer Dean Merrill, she outlined The Broken God that was published in January, only two months after the demise of Jonestown. The religious retreat was the appropriate theatrical backdrop for her work which repeatedly quoted the Bible to explain the events of her life and her reactions to them. As far as the book could stretch the truth, it portrayed Bonnie as an innocent, religious woman who desired sympathy for her ordeal in the Temple. The Broken Go d is sufficiently accurate in detail to be used as a reference in this chapter but, like other firsthand accounts, the book omits the important aspects of the story.
[COLOR=#1A1A1A][FONT=Verdana]Jones often claimed to be the reincarnation of various historic figures, including the Egyptian Pharaoh, Ikhnaton. Marceline Jones was supposed to have been Ikhnaton's wife, Nefertiti, and Bonnie one of their six daughters. She fancied herself as the one who married Ikhnaton's nephew and successor, the famous Tutankhamen. The Joneses were close to Bonnie, who was one of the few people to witness the public career from beginning to end. Her total contribution to the efforts of Jim Jone...
V. A CALIFORNIA CONCENTRATION CAMP
About a hundred miles north of San Francisco lies a patchwork quilt of small horse farms and rolling vineyards known as Mendocino County. The county is known, internationally, for its production of fine wine grapes and nationally for its production of high-quality marijuana: the county's leading cash crop. Most of the region's sparse population is concentrated in the cultivated flat lands between the Coastal and Mayacamas mountain ranges in an area the native Pomo Indians named "Deep Valley" or Ukiah. Ukiah, the county seat, was a sleepy rural community of 10,000 in 1965 when the Reverend Jim Jones and his followers arrived in the heat of midsummer. The Peoples Temple would remain headquartered in the Ukiah area for the next nine years, during which time they would infiltrate every aspect of county government, sway political elections, purchase a sizable portion of the real estate and businesses and, in short, become the ultimate power in Mendocino County; the only safe place in the United States.
The Temple's advance team had primed the local press for the pilgrims' arrival. George Hunter, the managing editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal and his reporter wife Kathy were offered gifts intended to produce the favorable press coverage necessary if the Caucasian locals were to tolerate what would be their only Black neighbors. Kathy Hunter wrote the front page article that introduced the Peoples Temple to Ukiah in the July 26, 1965 edition of the Ukiah Daily Journal
Represented in the group and indicative of the substantial background of the membership are nurses, teachers, a pilot, a traffic engineer, an electronics man, salespeople and private businessmen. One of the newcomers has already purchased an apartment house, another has bought a Ukiah motel, and still another is negotiating the purchase of a rest home here.
Far from being a closed, tightly knit group living in a communal existence, members of the church live their own lives as part of the community as a whole, held together only by their belief that all men-- white, black, yellow, or red--are one brotherhood.[62]
As early as February of 1965, the Temple's advance team had initiated negotiations to purchase the Evangelical Free Church on the corner of Bush and Henry streets in Ukiah. Jones would hold services in the building until November of 1965 when he withdrew his offer to purchase what was the only available church in town. The Temple reportedly broke off negotiations when their Indiana corporations lost their licenses because they failed to file the required annual reports. Actually, they had formed a new corporation, "The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ of Redwood Valley" that could have easily purchased the church. The stated purpose of the new corporation, chartered on November 26, 1965, was to "further the word of God" but apparently not at the Evangelical Free Church building. Jones abandoned his first California headquarters after occupying it for five months, presumably rent-free.
Jones next acquired the free use of a classroom at the Ridgewood Range, a religious colony located about ten miles north of Ukiah. The Peoples Temple met in that classroom for about two years until late 1967 when the Christ's Church of the Golden Rule, who owned the building, ordered the Temple off their property, reportedly fearing that Jones was trying to take over their church. The Temple then met in a 4-H exhibition barn at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds until early 1968 when Jones moved the services to the house he had purchased for his family in Redwood Valley, a remote village about seven miles outside Ukiah. The group first met in Jones' two-car garage under conditions so crowded as to discourage outsiders from dropping in on Temple services. Ukiah is primarily middle-class conservative Caucasians. Even though the locals could have provided sizable contributions, Jones did not recruit or even want their membership as they had no place in the experiment. There were Caucasian management personnel but few, if any, were from Mendocino County. Just about all of Jones' White lieutenants were hand-picked from Indiana and other parts of California. The only Blacks in Ukiah were those who Jones had brought from Indiana. Their numbers would increase as Jones succeeded in recruiting Blacks from the Oakland ghettos to relocate in Ukiah, live in Temple-owned housing, sign up for welfare with a Temple aide in the county office and provide the labor, the money and the subjects for the experiment being planned. Temple aide Edith Parks described the period when Jones was turning away the locals who were sampling the services of his new church in a letter to Virginia Morningstar, dated April 26, 1968 which began "burn this." Thankfully, she did not.
... All work at something. They have to, rent is $90-$125 for small houses and groceries are so high. Most of them pay 25 percent tithes. It will take care of them all later some way. Jim is turning them away from church. 85 for Easter. 35 last Sunday. People are awakening and are worried but he says it is too risky! He sends them back to their own churches and tells them to pray and work where they are. There isn't time to re-educate new ones, even those who have been taught far ahead of our "type" of religion.
A few have even been allowed to come and they jumped in with both feet. You don't have to teach them anything. They know & they know who he is & what he is here for. He knows every thought, act or deed. In the message Sunday he said everything that is to happen in the future has been seen & met for all who will meet conditions they must. He knows just what will happen to each one, even how they will die ...
It will happen yet, right here, too. If only I could write it all but the American people have already been conditioned to go the way they are going and acting, so they will think we need the laws t at will be put through Congress, each one taking away more of our rights! Just watch who is for them! Reagan is a full-fledged fascist.[63]
Edith Parks' letter was indicative of the prevailing attitude of the Temple's Caucasian aides. She was more political than religious and strangely cryptic in her communications. Why was it "too risky" to allow just anyone to join? Why was there not enough "time to re-educate new ones?" Had the life expectancy of the Peoples Temple been set as early as 1968? Probably. By describing those who were allowed to join as knowing the truth about Jones and his mission, she reveals the extent of her own knowledge. Note her use of the third person "they". "They" must work. "They" pay tithes. Jones knew how "they" would die. Edith Parks and her family had joined the Peoples Temple in its early stages in Indianapolis and would play an important role in the final hours of Jonestown. Even though she was a lifetime member, she did not include herself in the ranks of the Black congregation. This "us and them" attitude, though contrary to the Temple's public doctrine of racial integration, was the true relationship between the Caucasian hierarchy and the Black Parishioners.
Temple membership doubled to three hundred in the first three years in Ukiah but by 1968 they still had no permanent headquarters other than the cramped quarters of Jones' two-car garage. The church in town would first appear the logical solution but, even though it was affordable and accommodating, Jones let the deal fall through as the property was too public. Anyone in town might wander in off the streets. Likewise the exhibition barn at the fairgrounds was much too public. The Ridgewood Range provided the private classroom setting Jones needed to indoctrinate his Caucasian lieutenants but it would not serve as the Black church they were planning.
So it was with three hundred people in his garage that Jones set out to build his first California church in the summer of 1968. The first step was to submit a building permit to construct a forty-one foot swimming pool next to his Redwood Valley home. Immediately upon completion of the pool, a second permit was issued to build a roof over the pool with the stated purpose of creating a youth center. When the roof was finished in October, Jones applied for and received a third permit to enclose the structure as a church. Possibly the only church in America built over a swimming pool. The word "church" is really not appropriate. There were no crosses or statues or pictures of deities or saints. The redwood structure was rustic and modern and not at all like a church. Only a star-shaped stained glass window, which was more Satanic than Christian, gave the impression that this was a house of worship. The rural setting of Jones' estate provided the privacy required to conduct his business in secret and stands as an example of the Temple's introverted personality. It was a closed group that did not attempt to recruit or even mingle with the locals. Though the location of the Redwood Valley Temple is understandably desirable, the roundabout method of construction used to build a church over a swimming pool is without apparent reason. The indoor pool was used for recreation, quasi-baptisms and occasionally punishment, but its role as the focal point of the Redwood Valley Temple has never been fully understood.
As in Indiana, Jones used the threat of an unseen enemy to bind his congregation together and, in this case, provide a logical reason for his plans to fence and fortify the Temple compound. In May of 1968, he placed a half-page ad in the UDJ to answer allegations and threats he said were generated by the local John Birch Society after he had led his people in a march to protest the Vietnam War. Since the Ku Klux Klan was not active in Northern California, Jones selected the John Birch Society as representative of the White supremacists who opposed the alleged socialistic politics of the Temple. Actually, Jones was close friends with Walter Heady, the society's local president. Heady often visited the Temple and was even allowed to address the congregation and present films. Jones often consulted Heady on political matters and the two men would maintain communication for years to come. Kathy Hunter, reporter, wife of the editor and co-owner of the Ukiah Daily Journal, reciprocated for the half-page ad by penning an article which appeared in the paper's June 3, 1968 edition under the headline, "Local Group Suffers Terror in the Night."
A telephone rings in the middle of the night, but when it is answered the only sound is someone's breathing on the other end--then the click of a receiver. Or it rings and, in a measured voice--all the more chilling because of its utter lack of emotion--comes the threat:
'Get out of town if you don't want to get blown out of your classroom window.' Besides his duties to his parish and his many community services, Jones also teaches in Anderson Valley and Ukiah.[64]
Temple members continually complained to the authorities about night riders who shot out windows and threw dead dogs onto the Temple grounds. All the attacks were staged. The dogs were among the unfortunate strays gathered by the Temple's animal shelter. Not content with the public's acceptance of persecution, Jones arranged two attempts on his life during his 1968 campaign to publicly justify his ever increasing militarism.
Bill Bush was a professional hair dresser who had recently moved to Ukiah to open a beauty shop with his partner Jim Barnes. Bush also donated his services at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital where he worked with many members of the Peoples Temple. He lived with his common law wife Beverly and their son Billy in the first floor apartment of a duplex house. His partner, Jim Barnes lived upstairs with his children and Temple member Jerry Livingston. According to the accepted story, Livingston seduced Bush's wife who, along with young Billy, was spending most of her time at the Peoples Temple. There is speculation that Livingston had actually seduced Jim Barnes but, in any event, one Sunday morning Bill Bush arrived at the Temple's front steps, mad as hell at the loss of his lover. He demanded that Jones allow him to see his son. Jones frustrated Bush at first by refusing to answer, then teased him to the point where Bush lost his temper and a scuffle ensued. Don Sly, the Temple's swimming Instructor and knife expert, intervened and produced a knife he claimed to have wrestled from Bush. Ten years later Don Sly would once again be called upon to stage a phony knife attack, this time against Congressman Ryan.
Even though Bush was probably innocent, the following morning he was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon after the police had received dozens of depositions from Temple members attesting to what they termed was attempted murder. The crime was front-page news in the Ukiah Daily Journal but as soon as the alleged threat against Jones had been established, he dropped all charges and Bush was released after paying a misdemeanor fine.
Another staged death threat occurred during one of the Temple's evening services when Jones stepped out into the parking lot for a breath of fresh air. There were several witnesses standing nearby when a shot rang out. Jones grabbed his stomach, blood spurted from between his fingers and he fell to the pavement. Only bodyguard Jack Beam was allowed to attend to the fallen leader who lay so still as to suggest to those in view that he was dead. All at once Jones rose to his feet and presumably back from the dead. "I'm not ready. I'm not ready," he proclaimed to the bewildered witnesses. A few minutes later he returned inside to address a tumultuous congregation. He wore a clean shirt and waved the bloody one, challenging anyone to analyze the blood he claimed was his. It probably was. It was common practice for Temple nurses to draw real human blood to use in their fake faith healings. The next day, the bloody shirt was put on display in a glass case installed near the podium as a constant reminder of both the unseen enemy and Jones' supernatural powers. The Temple's special effects department had prepared the blood-filled plastic bag that hung like a long necklace under his shirt. When the unidentified gunman fired the shot from his hiding place, Jones simply slapped the bag to break it and release the blood.
Throughout his career, all the phony death threats against Jones were contrived to strengthen his hold on the congregation and to give public the impression that he was either persecuted or paranoid, which would help to explain the otherwise unexplainable end he had planned for the Peoples Temple. The two assaults in the summer of 1968 also served to explain to the locals why Jones was fortifying the Temple compound. A chain-link fence, complete with barbed wire, was installed around the perimeter and a guard tower built by the front gate. Armed guards patrolled the fence with German shepherds twenty-four hours a day. Mrs. Vera Rupe was one of the first neighbors to notice the security guards who made no attempt to conceal their weapons as they paced the fence or drilled in the parking lot. She and her husband filed a complaint with the police charging the Temple with possession of illegal submachine guns and harassment. They claimed the guards spied on them with binoculars and the searchlights on the tower kept them awake at night. Jones had powerful allies in the sheriff's office who not only ignored the complaint, but issued no less than six concealed weapon permits to Temple guards. The armed guards, barbed wire, searchlights and attack dogs made the compound look like a concentration camp and in many respects it was. The fortifications were intended not only to keep people out but also to keep people in.
Through his connections in government Jones arranged to be appointed to several positions of power in Mendocino. He first approached the superintendent of the Anderson Valley School District located in Boonville some fifty miles southwest of Redwood Valley. A deal was struck in which Jones would enroll sixteen Temple children in the school district in exchange for a position teaching social studies to sixth graders in Boonville. The district received thousands more in state aid and Jones received a paying job that was more important to his plans than has been previously recognized. The meager salary Jones received from his teaching job could not have justified the cost of transporting sixteen children one hundred miles a day. He had several other reasons for teaching in Boonville. The Temple students were inner-city Blacks whose presence in the Ukiah School District was unique and disruptive. Jones defused a potentially difficult situation in his own back yard by transporting the Blacks fifty miles away in what might be the ultimate in forced busing. Mike Cartmell was the Caucasian leader of the displaced students and his instructions were to make certain that the Temple students did not socialize with the exclusively White Boonville children. It was segregation and not integration that would keep the peace in Boonville. Jones taught there for about two years until June of 1969 when he resigned and withdrew the Temple children. One report claims that he had a homosexual relationship with one of his students during this period. Jones counseled the boy after having been apparently responsible for his parents' divorce. The two would spend weekends in San Francisco where Jones demanded a minister's discount on the hotel room he registered under "The Rev. Jim Jones and Son." Though there were no eyewitnesses to such activities, what really matters here is not how Jones recruited his sixth graders but that he was recruiting them. The timetable was perfect. Some eight years later, as Jones was moving his Temple to South America, his sixth graders had just graduated from Santa Rosa Junior college. They went on to join the ranks of the guards and medical staff of the experiment.
Sixth graders are of particular interest to the CIA for it is at this level of education that the federal government studies every student in the country in the only mandatory national examination: the I.Q. test. Many argue its validity but nevertheless the federal government has required the I.Q. test for decades. It was originally developed in the early nineteen hundreds as a means [TAR not true?] to evaluate the mental capacity of immigrants from southern Europe. The U.S.government was afraid that Italians would dilute the human stock of America and so they developed this entrance exam to exclude what they perceived as the mentally deficient. Unlike most tests that measure one's ability to regurgitate information, the I.Q. test measures one's potential to learn. It is a logical progression, designed to evaluate not what a person knows, but his ability to ascertain and solve problem situations common to all languages and cultures. At home point in time the federal government required school systems to administer the test to sixth graders and forward the forms to Washington where they are now computer corrected. The students and even their schools are often denied access to the test results. The I.Q. test is not given to further the education of the student or to help the schools. The I.Q. test is given to further the interests of the agencies of the federal government, like the CIA, whose business it is to track the talented.
A hundred miles was a long way to travel each day; could there have been a specific attraction in Boonville? Boonville is the only community in the United States to have developed its own language. Years earlier, this remote town had invented "Boontling" a truly American language that served to bind the community together as well as confuse and deceive outsiders. Boonville has a national reputation for keeping to itself yet the Rev. Jim Jones broke the barriers and even recruited from its ranks. Perhaps it was he who was being tested under difficult circumstances; a test he apparently passed. In the end, Jones did retain the services of some of his sixth grade class. Some came to Jones because the CIA had assigned them. Some came because they were duped and some came because they were brainwashed in a painstakingly slow process that began in the sixth grade.
Jones used the same scenario to get a job teaching American history and government in Ukiah's fledgling adult education program. The evening classes were closed to all but the Temple hierarchy and remains as an example of how Jones used an existing system to his own ends. He would have taught his class anyway. With the arrangement, he received the free use of a classroom and even a salary for his efforts. Rather than draw from the CIA's labor pool, Jones would maintain ultimate security and actually create some of the operatives that would aid him in the experiment.
In 1967, Superior Court Judge Robert Winslow appointed Jones foreman of the Mendocino County Grand Jury. The following year, he was appointed to the Juvenile Justice Commission, an advisory board to the courts. Between the two positions he had the ability to bring charges for or against anyone in the county, especially considering his close relationship with Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen.
In May of 1967, Jones formed the Legal Services Foundation of Mendocino County, a nonprofit group offering free legal services to the needy, most of whom were his followers who needed the services of an attorney to petition the courts for welfare support, to transfer property, or to settle a divorce or child custody case. In August, Marceline Jones resigned her seat on the foundation's board of directors to make way for her husband to be appointed vice president. Also in August, the foundation acquired the free use of an office in Ukiah and their first directing attorney, the former Assistant District Attorney Tim Stoen. Tim Stoen always played an important role in the Peoples Temple as Jones' second-in-command and the Temple's legal counsel. Some say he remains so to this day, but must believe Stoen's claims that he defected from the Temple in 1976. However, back in April of 1969, Tim Stoen was on a mission for Jim Jones when he left the Legal Services Foundation to accept a position with the Legal Aid Society of Alameda County where he was assigned to the West Oakland Black ghetto. Stoen counseled Blacks who were on welfare and in trouble with the law; the perfect demographic for the experiment. Many were offered a fresh start in the country atmosphere of Redwood Valley. A Temple aide in the Mendocino County Welfare Department would register the recipient who would sign over his check to the Peoples Temple in exchange for the housing, food and camaraderie he enjoyed under its care. His time was then free to work as a volunteer in whatever project the Temple had undertaken. The test persons themselves would provide the money and the labor for the experiment in which they would die.
There was always something to do in the political department. Temple members wrote letters in support of or in opposition to nearly every political issue of the day in the local, state and national arenas. Temple aides had infiltrated every county government office. Many of the elected officials owed their positions to Jones who controlled sixteen percent of the votes in Mendocino.
The Temple paid cash for the only shopping center in Redwood Valley and opened "Valley Enterprises" where propaganda was created and printed for public relations, recruitment and donations. The center also housed the Temple's bus garage as Jones had purchased eleven used Greyhound buses to transport his people. "More Things" on State Street in Ukiah was another Temple business that sold the personal Temple possessions members who donated, not only of the Temple household articles and jewelry, but also their labor as sales clerks. "Relics and Things" was opened in 1976 on School and Henry Streets as a last-ditch effort to divest the congregation of any personal wealth before transporting them off to Guyana.
Patty Cartmell the head of Jones' intelligence operations founded the "Ukiah Answering Service;" operations, home-operated business that employed seven Temple members to monitor the phone messages of the county's professionals and the radio communications of the sheriff's department. It was one of Cartmell's more overt intelligence operations. The Temple also operated a number of convalescent homes and a forty acre foster care ranch for boys that added many Social Security and welfare checks to its income. Over fifty of the Temple's seniors were convinced to cash in their life-insurance policies and donate the money to the Temple. Aides sold photographs Jones as talismans. According to Birdie Marable, "I made $80 to $100 a meeting." The mailings from Valley Enterprises were generating about 800 per day in donations mailed to the Temple. At least thirty-two expensive real estate properties were donated, the Temple, greatly adding to its wealth. One such San Francisco apartment house was in turn sold for $127,000. Jessie Boyd, an elderly Black member, gave twenty-five percent of her meager income to the Temple and still she was forced to bake and contribute seven or eight cakes a week. Later she recalled,
I bought all the fixings myself, and the church would take it over to the Safeway or Albertson's and sell each one for five dollars. I can't tell you how much I may have given in little bits of cash.[65]
Other elderly women sewed quilts that the Temple sold for about fifty dollars each. Temple children, unskilled and underage, were taken to San Francisco and dropped off on a busy corner to beg for donations. At the end of the day, a bus would pick up the kids and the money canisters for the ride back to Redwood Valley. To avoid punishment, the child had to provide at least five dollars for every hour spent on the streets. The money, in small and large increments, continued to flow into the Temple at many times the rate necessary to offset its six hundred thousand dollar annual budget. Tim Stoen was concerned that bank or government officials might become suspicious and investigate the origin of such large sums of cash so he advised Jones to open no less than fifteen bank accounts to evenly distribute the wealth. He was quoted as saying,
"I told him to move the money around. It was stacking up and was going to cause big trouble."[66]
Members who worked in the private or public sector outside the Temple were required to donate between five and fifteen percent of their income. Jones raised this figure to twenty-five percent to help pay for a stockpile of food, medicine, weapons and ammunition he said they would need to survive the winter of the post-nuclear war he predicted was close at hand. He told the congregation that he had located the perfect site for their bomb shelter; a cave in the hills a few miles away. Perhaps some expressed skepticism about its existence but, in any event, Jones led a contingent of his followers to inspect the site. After a long walk, the group came upon a depression in the earth, surrounded by a fence and warning signs. At the center of the depression was a small hole in the ground, just large enough for a man to enter. An aide was lowered down into the hole but after one hundred and fifty feet of rope, he never found the bottom of what was apparently a bottomless pit. Jones still insisted that all would be safe in the cave but he neglected to tell his Black congregation the local lore about the grotto. It seems that many years earlier, a Black man had reportedly raped a White woman in a nearby stagecoach station and a group of White vigilants threw the accused down the hole to his certain death. Ever since that day, the cave was known to the locals as the "Nigger Hole." Jim Jones had an unusual sense of humor.
In exchange for their donations of money and labor, the Temple provided its members with at least the bare essentials of food and housing. Members lived in Temple communes that were no more than overcrowded tenement houses. Each was charged rent that when totaled and weighed against expenses, netted the Temple an additional eight to ten thousand dollars a month. The Temple also operated dormitories at Santa Rosa Junior college where as many as twenty-five Caucasian members were packed into a cardboard-partitioned, single family house. Student board at Santa Rosa added another twenty-eight thousand dollars to the coffer every year.
Feeding his flock was a monumental task that Jones lessened by milking government poverty programs. Each member applied for and received government food rations thanks in no small part to the Temple aides who had infiltrated such government funded programs. The surplus powdered milk incident is a prime example.
On March 5, 1971, Mrs. Eunice Mock, supervisor of the Mendocino County surplus commodities program, and a colleague were driving along a county road near Redwood Valley when they spotted two open pick-up trucks loaded with between fifty and eighty cases of USDA powdered milk. Mrs. Mock was the sole distributor of such commodities in Mendocino County and, since she had no knowledge of such a substantial order, she suspected fraud and followed the trucks until they pulled over to the side of the road. One of the truck drivers, Temple member James Bogue, approached Mock's car to ask why she was following them. When she asked about the cases of milk that were clearly stamped "USDA", Bogue said that it was for the poor and none of her business. She copied down the license numbers and drove off to file a complaint with the authorities who discovered that one of the trucks was registered to the Peoples Temple. When confronted, Bogue said that the milk was not from Mendocino but was intended for the county's poor and that he was "incensed with the idea that the church was involved." His rebuttal did not satisfy the Department of Agriculture that dispatched two fraud investigators to speak with Jones in Redwood Valley. Jones denied that the truck was owned by the Temple. He also denied any knowledge of the milk in question and avoided further questioning by grabbing his chest as if in pain and retiring to his parsonage where he phoned Tim Stoen for help. Stoen was in the middle of an important county Board of Supervisors meeting but left abruptly when he received the message. He arrived at the Temple and immediately questioned the rights of the investigators and defended Bogue, Jones and the Temple.
Reports vary slightly from one account to the next but apparently both the investigators and the Board of Supervisors questioned the priorities of the Assistant District Attorney who said that his church came first and the county second. He proved his point by having County Supervisor Al Barbero Phone San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein to enlist her help in stopping the investigation. Feinstein was called because the powdered milk had originated in a San Francisco warehouse operated by the Community Health Alliance, a nonprofit, government-funded organization headed by Temple member Peter Holmes. Obviously, Holmes had been using his position to steal food from the government to feed the Peoples Temple; a practice that would have continued had it not been for the chance encounter with Mrs. Mock. As it was, the Temple returned the milk to San Francisco and the USDA continued its investigation for several weeks after which the Department of Health seized control of the warehouse and Peter Holmes resigned. No charges were ever filed. Neither the theft nor the Temple's involvement was ever reported in the news.
Aside from the donations it received from the outside and the tithes it received from its members inside, the Temple was financed almost exclusively by agencies of the federal government through tax-funded jobs, poverty programs and giveaways. Many members were employed at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital or in the school system or the welfare office, all under the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Under the Department of Justice, there were Temple members in law enforcement, in the grand jury and the district attorney's office. Black members contributed their government checks from the Social Security Administration and the welfare division of HEW. The USDA provided food and the California Highway Patrol provided inexpensive, high- powered police cruisers that Jones purchased at auction and issued to his aides as company cars. Though they removed the CHP emblem from the car doors, they neglected, possibly intentionally, to repaint the familiar "black and whites."
Throughout his career, Jones received millions of dollars from the federal government, millions he used to finance the experiment in Jonestown. In the end, even the tractor that transported the assassins to the site of congressman Ryan's murder was "U.S. government surplus." Had Jones only mastered the system and taken advantage of its bureaucratic inefficiencies, or did he have inside help? A phone call from the Washington D.C. headquarters of a government agency to its state or local office, asking them to cooperate with the Peoples Temple, would have been sufficient for Jones to perpetrate the massive fraud. To this day, no federal agency has ever expressed any remorse or responsibility for financing Jonestown or even any embarrassment at having been duped into doing so.
April 4, 1968 was a turning point. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. created a void in the Black leadership; a void Jim Jones rushed to fill. As stated, there were few, if any, Blacks in Mendocino County so Jones looked south to the ghettos of Oakland and San Francisco for his victims. Tim Stoen and other trusted aides had already been planted in key government positions in the Bay Area when Jones set out to recruit the Black subjects for the experiment. He held services in San Francisco and Oakland inner-city school auditoriums, churches, meeting halls and theaters attracting as many Black welfare recipients as possible. From the outside, Jones' rainbow family and multiracial Peoples Temple appeared to be the cutting edge of the integration movement but, from the inside, both the old and new Black recruits were segregated from the Caucasian leadership. This obvious inequality would be recognized and recorded only once when, a few years later in 1976, eight Black members would send a letter of resignation to Jim Jones, in which they complained,
You said that the revolutionary focal point at present is in black people.... There is no potential in the white population according to you. Yet, where is the black leadership, where is the black staff and black attitude? Black people are being tapped for money, practically nothing else. How can there be sound trust from black people if there's only white nit-picking staff, hungrily taking advantage to castrate black men? Staff creates so much guilt that it breaks the black spirit of revolution (if the blacks have any). There's no revolutionary teaching taught the way it used to be. At one time you told us to read, yet now staff comes in to steal books from those who have them. All the staff concerns itself with is sex, sex, sex. What about socialism? How does 99 1/2 percent of People's Temple manage to know zero about socialism?[67]
Sex was just about the only reward that Jones and his aides received for their efforts. Caucasian aides enjoyed a higher standard of living than did the Black congregation but the Temple never paid in cash, only services and a prolific sex life was the favored remuneration. Sex was a common topic of Temple services as Jones was continually bragging about his superhuman abilities. His female aides gave absurd testimony as to the pleasures of Jones' "divine penis," but his sexual exploits were not confined to women as he had homosexual relationships with many of his male assistants who were then blackmailed into slavery. Jones was so promiscuous as to require an appointment secretary just to schedule his affairs. Patty Cartmell and later Carolyn Layton, who Jones jokingly referred to as his "fucking secretary," would telephone a member to ask, "Father hates to do this but he has this tremendous urge and could you please...?" All of the chosen were Caucasian.
Despite its interracial image, mixed marriages were not permitted in the Temple and there is no evidence to even suggest that Jones or his White aides ever had sex with a black member. There is not a single case of a mulatto child being born to a Temple member.
All sexual relationships had to first be approved by the Temple's Relationship Committee, giving Jones additional control over the congregation that was often denied sex, even between married couples. Members who stepped out of line were often humiliated by requiring them to elaborate on their sexual experiences or strip naked and copulate in front of the entire congregation. Steve Addison, who was accused of having sex without prior approval was once called to the podium and ordered to perform cunnilingus on an overweight woman in the midst of her menstrual period. As Addison dropped to his knees to accept his punishment, Jones shouted, "Piss! Piss!" and the woman urinated in his face. "Throw up! Throw up!" he yelled, and the woman forced her fingers down her throat until she vomited on his head.
Sex was also used to reward and blackmail politicians both in California and later in Guyana where Jones would provide a number of Temple women to government officials who were then shown photographs of their encounter and reminded that if they refused to co-operate with the Temple their public careers would be ruined.
Jones claimed to be the only true heterosexual in the Temple and often called for a show of hands of all homosexuals. If a member did not raise his hand, he would be ridiculed for dishonesty. If he did raise his hand, he ran the risk of being singled out for praise. The subject was impossible to avoid. Many members were forced to sign confessions attesting to homosexuality or child molesting that were later used to blackmail the signatory.
The Peoples Temple was not a religion. Jim Jones did not believe in God who he said was powerless to effect any change on the earth. He claimed the Bible was "dotted through and through with fabrications, inconsistencies and incongruities which insult the normal intelligence of readers." He would throw the Bible on the floor, step on it, tear out the pages and talk about using them for toilet paper. Once he burned a Bible during a service just to show that there would be no reprisal from the "Impotent Sky God." He called it the "Black Book" which may be the only time in his public career that Jones used the word "black" in a derogatory manner as he went so far as to change "blackmail" to "whitemail and "black market" to "white market" so as not to offend his congregation. Temple services had many of the trappings of a church, there was organ music and gospel singing but that is about as far as it went. Jones' sermons were mainly political, taking stories from the newspaper to prove his point that the Blacks were losing their rights as citizens. The Peoples Temple was not a church, but a social experiment disguised as a church.
In 1970, Jones' old friend Prime Minister Forbes Burnham left the British Commonwealth, established diplomatic relations with Cuba and so lost all U.S. aid. It was a critical year for Guyana and the prime minister called for help from his old CIA buddy. Jones first flew to Cuba, where he met with Fidel Castro after which he continued on to Georgetown, Guyana for his meeting with Burnham. What was accomplished on this trip is uncertain.
Jones was not the only Temple member who traveled. His fleet of eleven used Greyhound buses carried the congregation on weekly trips to San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles where in a single weekend the Temple might receive as much as twenty thousand dollars in donations. As a show of strength, Jones always took his Redwood Valley congregation on such tours. The buses were said to have been overcrowded, with people riding in the overhead storage racks and down below in the baggage compartment. Members complained that the air conditioners and toilets did not work and that they were driven too long without food or rest. Jones had a special bus with air conditioning, a working bath and a private, bulletproof compartment. Each summer, members were given the opportunity to take a cross-country vacation and many boarded the Temple buses bound for national parks, monuments and other points of interest; sites never seen by these inner-city Blacks. The Temple's advance team arranged to rent auditoriums and leaf-letted the major cities to herald the group's arrival. Jones put on his usual show with its many collections all across the country.
Such a trip was expected to net one to two hundred thousand dollars. The 1973 cross country trip was the most noteworthy. The buses stopped in Washington, D.C. where the Temple called on congressmen and succeeded in getting a description of the Peoples Temple entered in the congressional hearings. But the highlight of the trip was the publicity Jones received when his Temple buses unloaded hundreds of members on the steps of the Capitol to pick up the litter around the grounds. The Washington Post recorded the publicity stunt in their editorial page, dated August 18, 1973 in which was written,
The hands-down winners of any-body's tourist-of-the-year award have got to be the 660 wonderful members of the Peoples Temple... this spirited group of travelers fanned out from their 13 buses and spent about an hour cleaning up the [Capitol] grounds.
In addition to the summer vacations and the revival tours, the Temple buses also carried members to the voting polls and anywhere else Jones wanted to demonstrate his power. When a group of reporters in Fresno were tried for refusing to divulge their sources, Jones sent hundreds to rally in support of the "Fresno Four" as he called them. It was ironic that this manipulator of the media would defend the freedom of the press, but irony was his trademark. In 1976, the buses arrived at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge where members disembarked to stage a demonstration in support of the proposed anti-suicide fences. Over the years, about six hundred people have jumped to their death from the bridge, two-thirds the number who would commit mass suicide in Jonestown; the same people who donated their energies in a public demonstration acknowledging the government's responsibility to help avert suicide.
In spite of all of his questionable and outright illegal activities in private, Jones enjoyed respectable reputation in public. In 1975 he was chosen one of "The 100 Outstanding Clergyman in America" by the Foundation for Religion in American Life. In 1976, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner named him "Humanitarian of the Year" but the most impressive title came in January of 1977, when Jones was given the "Martin Luther King Humanitarian Award." He must have had a good laugh about that.
VI THE "H" FILE HOMICIDES
Jim Jones once boasted to his son-in-law and heir apparent, Michael Cartmell, that the Peoples Temple was shielded from any serious investigation or prosecution simply by the nature of the Temple's activities; activities that were so outrageously bizarre that no one outside the organization would ever believe them. In the six years between 1970 and 1976, Jones ordered the execution of six Temple members in a brutal series of murders that eventually led to the involvement and subsequent death of Leo Ryan; the only U.S. Congressman ever to be assassinated. Nowhere was Jones' security system more apparent or successful than in the "H" file homicides.
This story begins in the Temple's top secret file room where detailed dossiers were maintained on everyone who came in contact with the organization. Patty Cartmell, Michael's mother and long-time aide to Jones was the organizational genius in charge of the sophisticated intelligence gathering and intricate filing system that rivaled the latest techniques of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Within the files, there was an information envelope on each of the members of the Temple. The contents of the envelopes disappeared when Jones moved his headquarters to San Francisco. All that remains are a few envelope labels, printed forms containing the member's photo, name, address, membership number and other such data, as well as a list of those documents the member had signed. There were five documents in all. The "information sheet" was basically the subject's autobiography. The "financial release" was a living will bequeathing all worldly possessions to the Peoples Temple. The "resignation" was just that, a resignation from the Temple so, if the member was ever implicated in any wrong-doing, Jones could date the document and disassociate himself from the accused. The two remaining documents, the "blank statement" and the "sheet of paper" are the subject of this chapter.
Before a member could be promoted to a position of trust within the Temple, Jones required that he or she sign a self-confession statement as a test of loyalty. The three basic confessions, dictated by Jones and signed by the member, attested to child molestation, homosexual acts or conspiracy to assassinate public officials. It wasn't long before the signer realized his confession might be used to blackmail him into Jones' service. This fear helped to blind the subject to the true danger, the "sheet of paper." Jones required his top aides to sign the lower right-hand corner of a blank sheet of paper. It appeared harmless enough in comparison with the self-confession letter, but it was deadly. Once the signed sheet of paper was on file, Jones would manipulate the aide into a situation where he at least appeared to be responsible for a capital crime. Jones would then retrieve that blank statement, type in a confession to that crime and provide the aide with a photocopy. Mere suspicion was never sufficient to warrant an indictment but suspicion along with a signed confession would certainly result in an indictment and conviction. In this manner, Jones was able to blackmail or "whitemail," as he called it, his other wise wavering followers into a life of slavish devotion; for if they ever fell from his good graces, he would provide the authorities with their signed confession to a crime they were already suspected of, and the result would certainly be a prison sentence. This was the Temple's baptism by blackmail.
The blackmailed aides would become the Temple hierarchy, the ruling elite and, for the most part, the only survivors of the massacre in Jonestown. Jones called them his "Angels;" an appropriate name as those outside the group assumed it was in reference to Jones' divinity, while those unfortunates inside the group knew it was an allusion to the angel of death. Though 80% of the Temple membership was Black, nearly 100% of the Angels were Caucasian. Their numbers are not known, but by 1978, Jones referred to them as "The One Hundred."
Inside each information envelope was the complete life story of the subject, including medical and career history, psychological profile, lists of relatives, associates and friends as well as personal preferences and habits. No agency of the federal government, not even all of them combined, had a more copious intelligence bank than did the Peoples Temple. The data was divided into two basic classifications: "direct" and "indirect." Direct data was any intelligence received firsthand from the subject either voluntarily provided in his signed information sheet, or inadvertently provided in idle conversations with Cartmell's intelligence agents. Indirect data was any intelligence gathered without the subject's knowledge. Patty Cartmell and her assistants were skilled in burglary techniques and much information was gained through illegally entering a subject's home. More predominant, though less spectacular than breaking and entering, was the disabled car routine. Typically, two of Cartmell's female spies would knock on the subject's door, claim their car had broken down and ask to use the telephone. While in the house, they would make mental notes of the surroundings. One would ask to use the bathroom and, while locked inside, photograph the contents of the medicine cabinet. Later, the photo would be used to identify any prescription drugs and the doctor who prescribed them, so that a more detailed medical history could be acquired from the subject's physician. Other indirect data was gathered through surveillance, conversations with neighbors and distant relatives, as well as periodic studies in the contents of a subject's garbage can. In the early morning hours, Cartmell and her team would take garbage that had been set out near the street for removal back to the Temple or a motel room where it was spread out on a long table, closely examined, analyzed and inventoried. Reports were so detailed that it was not sufficient to note, say, an empty box of cookies. Cartmell's spies were expected to indicate the brand name of the cookies, the manufacturer's name and address, the list of ingredients, the price and the retail outlet where the product had been purchased. A typed garbage inventory, titled "indirect-garb " along with any personal correspondence and bills were then filed in the subject's information envelope. Old telephone bills were of particular interest as they provided an accurate accounting of every long-distance phone call the subject had placed in the previous month.
On one occasion, Patty Cartmell was arrested for her clandestine intelligence gathering. Cartmell, an obese White woman, was disguised in plain dress and black stage make-up when the police caught her snooping around a house in a Black Los Angeles neighborhood. She later gave this account:
Jack (Beam) and I were doing a stop/by on a house in Los Angeles. Jack was in the car and I was in the yard. The cops came, and Jack, the yellow-bellied coward, took off, leaving me holding the bag. I was arrested and taken in.... I didn't know what to do so I called Tim [Temple attorney, Tim Stoen] and told him I'd been arrested.[68]
According to Temple aide, Terry Buford:
Stoen said that Jim came up with this brilliant idea that Patty should be told to say she was having an affair with a man and had put on this disguise; she was meeting him in a black neighborhood, and she didn't want her husband to find out. Stoen said the story was so incredible that the police believed it and released Patty.[69]
In addition to the information envelopes on Temple members, Patty Cartmell had amassed a very impressive file on California's politicians and public figures. The subject of one such study was Leo Ryan, whose Temple file was larger than most, as Jones' superiors had expressed particular interest in the career of this aspiring young Assemblyman. In 1968, Cartmell presented her completed file on Ryan to Jones for his review.
Leo J. Ryan was born on May 5, 1925 in Lincoln, Nebraska; the son of a newspaperman from whom he inherited a compelling interest in investigative journalism. After serving in the Navy during World War journalism. Ryan graduated from Creighton University in 1951 with a masters degree in Elizabethan Drama. Like many other navy veterans who first experienced California during the war, Ryan returned to the San Francisco Bay Area where he settled in the small community of South San Francisco and accepted a position teaching English at the local high school. Eventually, he would be appointed principal and superintendent of the South San Francisco High School. His first involvement in politics came in the mid-50's when he campaigned against the McCarthy Era communist witch-hunt and was elected to the city council where he served from 1956 until 1962. His career in municipal government was uneventful. Perhaps city politics was too small an arena for his abilities, but, in any event, Ryan longed for a more important and challenging role in government. He found his opportunity in late 1960 when John Kennedy was elected president.
Ryan arranged for the South San Francisco Marching Band to perform at Kennedy's inauguration ceremony in Washington in early 1961, as token reprentatives of the new president's West Coast supporters. Ryan planned every aspect of the trip with his old friend and drinking buddy, Robert "Sammy" Houston. Sammy Houston, a descendant of the famous Texas general, was an Associated Press photographer whose son, Bob was a student of Ryan's and spokesperson for the high school's marching band. Bob had grown up in the adjacent community of San Bruno where he counted Ryan's children among his playmates who affectionately referred to this intelligent young man as "the professor." Leo Ryan, together with Sammy and Bob Houston and the school band, set out for the scheduled performance in Washington. Hotel rooms were at a premium during the inauguration so Ryan and Sammy Houston shared a room which gave them time together to put the finishing touches on their plan.
On inauguration day, Sammy shot some great photographs. One was of his son shaking hands with President Kennedy -- a memento Bob would cherish until his death in 1976. But the most important photo and, in retrospect, the sole purpose for the trip to Washington, was of Leo Ryan conducting the band as they marched past the reviewing stand and President Kennedy. The following day, through Houston's connections with the Associated Press, the photograph with Ryan in the foreground and Kennedy in the background appeared on the front page of nearly every newspaper in Northern California. Sammy Houston's photo had made Leo Ryan famous overnight. Immediately upon his return to California, Ryan began to campaign for the office of mayor of South San Francisco, a position he was elected to in 1962. Also in 1962, Ryan was elected to the California Assembly. His political career had advanced from city councilman to state assemblyman in a few short months and he owed it all to Sammy Houston. It is important to note, as did Jim Jones in his evaluation of Ryan's file, that the Washington episode was staged from the start. Ryan was the school's principal and the faculty chaperone on the trip, but he had no musical training and no business conducting the band; especially in its brief moment in the limelight. Ryan's expertise lay, not in music, but in theatrics and his theatrics in Washington earned him a seat in the California Assembly.
Ryan's political career depended largely on staged publicity events intended to generate public awareness, support and votes. His colleagues viewed the theatrics as little more than cheap grand-standing but their criticism stemmed, not from distaste of his tactics, but from envy of his success. Ryan was a loner, a self-made man, an individual who rose to political importance without the aid of, or the debt to, an existing power structure. His singular attitude was best described in the inscription on a picture of a sailboat hung in his Sacramento office; ; "I know which way the wind is blowing but I must set my own course." Ryan was a member of the California Assembly and eventually the U.S. Congress, but in a larger sense he never really joined these legislative bodies. He remained an individual who marched to his own tune; something that would further alienate him from his fellow legislators.
Ryan quickly gained a reputation in the California Assembly as a formidable investigator who personally looked into every major issue of the day. Joe Holsinger, Ryan's chief aide, would later recall:
Leo believed that more legislators should go check things out, rather than take someone's word for them. He felt it was his duty to check out the problems of the people he represented.[70]
In 1965, following the race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Ryan moved into the home of a local Black family and worked, under an assumed name, as a substitute teacher at the predominantly Black Jefferson High School where he studied, firsthand, the cause of the social unrest. In 1970, when prison reform was a major issue in California, Ryan, again under an assumed name, was transported in handcuffs to the maximum security section of Folsom Prison, where he was interned for a week to study the issue of prison reform from the inside. He later wrote a play about his Folsom Prison experience, entitled "A Small Piece of Sky," but it was never produced. Also in 1970, Ryan was proclaimed "Man of the Year" by the International Wildlife Foundation for his trip to Newfoundland where he chained himself to baby seals to protest their slaughter.
Following each of his adventures, Ryan would receive excellent press coverage that helped keep him in the public eye and in office. Jones, who was also an expert in media manipulation, recognized Ryan's tactics for what they were and found within those tactics his one weakness. Ryan clearly owed his political career to the Houstons and Jones knew that to control the rebel assemblyman he needed only to control Bob Houston, and this he set out to do in 1968.
Patty Cartmell provided Jones with an updated file on Bob Houston. Bob had continued his education at the University of California at Berkeley where he was student director of the school's marching band. He had married and he and his wife Phyllis had two daughters, Patricia and Judy Lynn. Jones surmised that recruiting Bob Houston was an easy matter of simply giving him what he wanted. Since his graduation from Berkeley there was a void in Bob's life, there were no more bands for him to conduct and he had lost his one love, music. Temple recruiters first contacted Phyllis and, when they had generated sufficient interest for her to approach her husband about joining the Peoples Temple, Jim Jones was well prepared. He offered Bob the position of music director of the Temple's very professional band and chorus. Bob accepted. Knowing that he shared his father's interest in photography, Jones also him staff photographer and appointed assistant pastor, just to add to the honor he bestowed upon him. In time, Jones' hold on Bob Houston would increase to a death grip, but it suffices to say that by 1969 Houston was a lifetime member of the Peoples Temple. His dossier was placed in an information envelope and filed under "H." Thus began a masterplan that would require eight years to conclude. A few months later, Jones ordered the first of the "H" file homicides.
VICTIM NUMBER ONE
Maxine Bernice Harpe
Died: March 28, 1970
Hung by the neck
Maxine Harpe grew up in the small Northern California town of Willits where she married her high school sweetheart, had three children and settled down to a quiet life in Talmadge, that is until 1969, when Jim Jones targeted her for assassination. In a little more than a year, Jones and his aides would destroy Maxine's marriage, family, career, and love affair. They would steal her children and her life savings and drive her to the brink of suicide.
Temple strongarm man and Mendocino County Welfare worker, Jim Randolph, initiated a love affair with Maxine intended to break up her marriage and bring her into the congregation. Every relationship pursued by Jim Randolph, or any other Temple member, required the prior approval of the Temple's Relationship Committee and Jim Jones, who not only issued binding judgments on proposed relationships, but also proposed many himself. Maxine quickly fell in love with Randolph; attesting to Jones' ability to pair villain with victim. Spurred by Randolph's encouragement, Maxine left her husband and moved into a Temple communal house with her three children and Temple member Mary Candoo. During this difficult transition period, Maxine was counseled and encouraged by her welfare caseworker, Linda Sharon Amos, a high ranking Temple aide who claimed to have once been a member of Charles Manson 's gang. Amos helped Maxine secure a job as a dental assistant at the Mendocino State Mental Hospital in Talmadge.
Linda Amos and Jim Randolph were only two of the estimated fifty Temple members who had infiltrated government agencies in Mendocino County, but their function in the Welfare Department was one of particular importance to Jim Jones. Together with their colleagues, Amos and Randolph were able to license several Temple operated foster care homes and protect several additional homes that were unlicensed and illegal.
Jones convinced his congregation that their children would have a richer life experience living apart from their parents. Families were disbanded and a the children, who were now eligible for welfare assistance, were placed in Temple foster homes. The children's welfare support checks were signed over to the Temple and provided a substantial portion of Jones' government subsidy. The Temple welfare activities were not restricted to simple fraud; many Black children were taken from the ghettos of San Francisco and Oakland using tactics that bordered on kidnapping.
The illegal use of the Mendocino County Welfare Department appeared to escape the attention of the Department director Dennis Denny. Though it was impossible to ignore the Temple foster care homes and to ignore the the Temple welfare case workers, Denny never seemed to make the connection. Carrie Minkler was one of the few case workers in the Welfare Department who was not a member of the Peoples Temple. Ms. Minkler, now retired, recalls working with Amos, Randolph and other Temple members:
"You didn't open your mouth. You didn't mention the Peoples Temple in our department. Even the walls had ears. There wasn't anything that went on in our office that Jim Jones didn't know the next day...Peoples Temple workers went through other workers' case files. The CIA could have used them. The atmosphere was really tense."
It didn't take long to surround Maxine. She had a Temple lover, a Temple house with a Temple roommate, a Temple social worker, a Temple job with Temple co-workers, even the attorney representing her in the divorce case was Temple attorney Tim Stoen. The Temple was also Maxine's religion and recreation. By March of 1970, every aspect of her life depended upon the Peoples Temple as Jim Jones pulled the plug on her life support system.
Three weeks before her death, Maxine received a check for $2,493.81; her share of the divorce settlement. She signed the check over to Randolph, who deposited $2,000.00 in his personal checking account and $493.81 in his savings account, as per Jones' instructions. Once her life savings were safely in Temple hands, everything bad happened to Maxine at once.
Jones ordered Randolph to end his relationship with Maxine and she was heartbroken. She was fired from her job. She had no means of support; Randolph had all her money and wouldn't give it back. She went to Linda Amos for financial assistance from the Welfare Department, but Amos not only denied her request but, in addition, judged her a "mental depressant" and threatened to place her children in a Temple foster care home as she was unfit to be a parent. Her roommate, Mary Candoo, would certainly parrot Amos' accusations.
Maxine realized she was under siege by a well organized attacker and sought help from her attorney, Tim Stoen, but, of course, her protest fell on deaf ears. She then turned to the one man who seemed to be at the center of her problem. She confronted Jones the day before her death. Jones was furious and thoroughly humiliated Maxine in front of Randolph and other Temple members who remember him saying, "Why don't you just kill yourself? Get it over with!.... At least Judas had the guts to kill himself. Others recall Jones predicting, "That bitch (Maxine) is going to die," just one day before she did.
Everywhere she turned, Maxine felt an ever increasing hostility. After the March 27th confrontation with Jones, she was so afraid the Temple would take a more physical approach to their harassment that she made a special request to bring home a houseful of Temple children, whose presence, she hoped, would discourage a physical assault. She was wrong.
On March 28th at 1:30 AM, one of the children spending the night at Maxine's house wandered into the garage to find Maxine dead; hung by an electrical extension cord from the roof rafters. A hastily scribbled suicide note on a torn grocery bag instructed the children to phone the Temple in Redwood Valley and wait in the house until they arrived.
Jim Jones, Jim Randolph, Patty Cartmell and Jack Beam arrived at Maxine's house sometime before dawn. Jones waited outside in the car while the others put on surgical gloves and entered the house to remove any evidence of Maxine's involvement with the People's Temple. They untied the body, lowered it to the garage floor and disrobed it to remove a red prayer cloth that belted the waist. Temple members often wore these blessed prayer cloths in concealed places on their person. The body was then redressed and rehung, carefully re-staging the scene for the police investigator. The aides then ransacked the house to locate and remove anything that might associate Maxine with the Temple. They completed their work at approximately 8:30 AM, instructed the children to phone the police, and left.
Jones was safe in his Redwood Valley parsonage at 8:57 AM when Deputy Sheriff-Coroner, Bruce Cochran, arrived at the death scene in Talmadge. Twenty minutes later, Randolph, Cartmell and Beam returned to the house and informed Deputy Cochran that the children had phoned them but that they really didn't know why as they had never met the dead woman. Cartmell convinced Deputy Cochran that she should remove the children from such a gruesome scene, and consequently, he never got the opportunity to question the only eyewitnesses. One of the children, nine year old Tommy Ijames, would later recall the event:
The children called the church before they called the police, and they came very early in the morning. They came in there and took all the pictures of Jim Jones out...(prayer) cloths they took from her, pulled her down off the (rafter) and took them off her waist, anything that had to do with the church... Jim (Jones), he stayed in the car and didn't come out... They pulled her down and they took the clothes off her... They were taking all the... little pamphlets of Jim Jones, and then (after the coroner arrived) they acted like they didn't know her...."
The Temple death squad had left Maxine's house twenty minutes before the coroner arrived and returned just twenty minutes after he arrived. They allowed him enough time to assume that he was the first adult on the scene, but not enough time to question the children, who were quickly transported away. Such impeccable timing was typical of Temple operations. Like the other agencies in Mendocino County, Jones had spies in the Sheriff's office who informed him of their every move.
Deputy Cochran's subsequent investigation proceeded exactly as Jones had planned. It was Cochran's job to be suspicious and he was. There was the unusual placement of a trunk under Maxine's feet and the unexplained presence of children and adults, all of whom were members of the Peoples Temple. But eventually his investigation was to center on Maxine's financial transactions just prior to her death. Cochran contacted Jim Randolph's boss, Welfare Director, Dennis Denny, questioning the legality of a welfare worker depositing a welfare recipient' check in his personal account; especially when that same welfare worker was present at the scene of the recipient's apparent suicide just three weeks later.
Denny defended Randolph's actions and assured Cochran that there was no reason to suspect foul play or improper conduct, but Cochran was not satisfied. He pressured Randolph for a deposition regarding his role in Maxine's finances and reluctantly he complied. In a sworn statement, Randolph told the police that a few weeks after receiving the money, he transferred $2,000.00from his savings account to Temple treasurer, Eva Pugh, to set up a trust fund for Maxine's children. He held the remaining $493.81 until three days after Maxine's death when he added that to the fund as well. If Randolph's statement is to be believed it would seem that he helped establish a fund for Maxine's children before her death. Randolph completed the deposition but refused to sign it until Assistant District Attorney and Peoples Temple attorney Tim Stoen had the opportunity to review the statement. Randolph stalled, Stoen stalled, and the statement was never signed.
It was Tim Stoen who finally convinced Cochran to drop the investigation when he informed him that he (Stoen) was co-trustee of the children's fund, along with, of all people, Cochran's boss, Sheriff Reno Bartolmei. Also, to disguise their true involvement, the Peoples Temple had contributed an additional $470.00 to the fund, that together with the initial money and the accumulated bank interest, totaled $3,000.00 for the three children. Linda Amos, Maxine's welfare case worker, buttressed Stoen's statements with her volunteered testimony as to Maxine's depressed state of mind just prior to what certainly must have been her suicide. Cochran's investigation quickly lost momentum. Maxine's death was declared a suicide. The case was closed and, despite future pleas from ex-Temple members and the press, it was never reopened.
Richard Taylor, a local Baptist minister who knew Maxine Harpe, was not satisfied with the superficial investigation into what he believed as murder. Aware that the Temple controlled most of Mendocino County, Taylor presented his arguments in a long letter he sent to the state attorney general's office in which he asked the state to investigate Jim Jones' role in Maxine Harpe's death. Taylor was invited to present his evidence to a deputy in the attorney general's office but when he appeared to testify in Sacramento, his notes on Jones were confiscated and he was told that there would be no investigation due to "insufficient evidence."
Immediately upon his return to Ukiah, Taylor and his wife were deluged with threatening phone calls that they believed "originated from the People's Temple." Intimidated and frightened, the minister dropped all attempts to prove that Jim Jones had ordered Maxine Harpe's death.
Randolph may have avoided signing a statement for the police but he did not avoid signing a blank statement for Jim Jones. It wasn't long before he realized his mistake when Jones presented him with a copy of his previously signed blank statement which was now a typed confession to the murder of Maxine Harpe. Only then did he understand why Jones had instructed him to deposit Maxine's money in his personal bank account and why he insisted Randolph be present at the scene of the crime. The police already suspected him, and their suspicion, along with the signed confession, would certainly convict him of murder; especially since the foreman of the Mendocino Grand Jury, who would bring down the indictment, was none other than Jim Jones. Randolph was promoted to the Angels and his only way out was a lifetime sentence in prison. To further implicate him in Maxine's death, Jones called him in front of a closed meeting of the Temple's Planning Commission and, with a dozen witnesses present, he accused Randolph of killing Maxine. He shouted, "You know you did it (killed Maxine)!" But for all of Jones's badgering, Randolph said nothing in his own defense.
Rumors of the Temple's involvement in the death of Maxine Harpe continued to circulate in the press. Two and a half years later, Lester Kinsolving penned a series of articles in the San Francisco Examiner, in which he accused Temple attorney Tim Stoen of wrongdoing in his counseling of Maxine just prior to her alleged suicide. Stoen refuted the charges in a statement that appeared in the Ukiah Daily Journal, dated September 21, 1972, in which he said:
"The woman referred to (who was not, incidentally, a member of my church) was somebody I did not know, had never talked with, and certainly had never counseled."
Stoen could not have forgotten that he represented Maxine in her divorce or that he was a custodian of the fund for her children or was instrumental in suppressing the coroner's investigation into her death. He must have felt extremely threatened to publicly report such a blatant, bold-faced lie.
Jones profited from Maxine's death in several ways. He gained a new Angel; a competent, intelligent slave, Jim Randolph. He received the $3,000.00 trust fund and the three children who, following their mother's funeral, were placed in Temple foster homes and enrolled in the welfare system. Their welfare support checks were signed over to the Temple that profited at least $10,000.00 from overcharging the welfare system and under-caring for the children.
In 1977, a special prosecution unit of the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, looking into allegations of illegal activities in the Peoples Temple, cited what their subsequent report termed "Welfare Diversion," but rather than pursue the investigation, the DA's office referred the matter to the city's Department of Social Services and the City Comptroller's Office with the recommendation that any evidence that surfaced should be submitted to the DA's welfare fraud expert, Don Didler. Didler, following the lead of Mendocino County's Welfare Director, Dennis Denny, did absolutely nothing. Together, Didler and Denny were very effective in protecting the Temple's federal welfare subsidy.
In retrospect, Maxine Harpe's story was a study in microcosm of the events that would occur some eight years later in Jonestown, Guyana. In both cases, the victims were systematically stripped of all self-esteem and lured into a total dependence on Jim Jones, who, at the proper time, denied them everything. Suicide appeared to be the best, if not the only, alternative. It will never be known whether Maxine's death was a suicide or a murder. She may or may not have actually wrapped the wire around her neck, just as the residents of Jonestown may or may not have voluntarily taken poison; regardless, there is no doubt that Jim Jones killed them all.
The Maxine Harpe death is but one of a half-dozen unsolved killings connected to People's Temple during its California phase.
In the final analysis, the most important aspect of Maxine's death was the reason Jones had singled her out for assassination in the first place. The episode played an important part in his master plan, as Maxine Harpe's identification envelope was the first in the Peoples Temple "H" file.
VICTIM NUMBER TWO
Rory Hithe
Died: November 8, 1973
Shot to death during an argument
Rory Hithe was a member of the Peoples Temple and an official of the Western Addition Project Area Committee; a neighborhood action group in a section of San Francisco that Jim Jones had targeted for political infiltration and control. During a heated argument about San Francisco's anti-poverty politics, Rory Hithe was shot and killed by Temple guard Chris Lewis, in full view of a room of witnesses; most of whom were also members of the Peoples Temple.
Jim Jones had ordered Lewis to kill Rory Hithe, whose death, like Maxine Harpe's, was a Peoples Temple affair. The motive for the killing is unclear. It has been suggested that Hithe's death resulted from a conflict with Jones over Western Addition neighborhood politics, but this theory does not take into account that, at the time, Jones was powerful enough to replace Hithe on the Committee with another follower who was in closer agreement. Murder for neighborhood politics was not warranted. There had to be another motive. In November of 1973, Rory Hithe's Temple information envelope was the next dossier filed under "H."
Perhaps more interesting than the story of Rory Hithe, is the story of his assassin, Chris Lewis. There is no doubt that Lewis killed Hithe there is only the question of whether or not it was in self-defense. The fact that a loaded gun was within reach during the argument, in itself suggests premeditation. Lewis was arrested and charged with murder and assault. Hithe's sister, also a Temple member, was wounded in the attack, hence the assault charge.
Chris Lewis joined the Peoples Temple in 1969 after Jones allegedly cured him of heroin addiction. He was a tough, ghetto-wise brawler who had served time in prison for burglary and grand theft. His primary function in the Temple was to train Cartmell's agents in techniques of breaking and entering and to act as liaison with San Francisco's underworld fencing operations. Jones encouraged his congregation to donate not only their property and money, but also their personal possessions to the Temple, which needed to liquidate the furniture, clothing and jewelry they acquired. Throughout their history, the Temple operated no less than six thrift shops, first in Ukiah, then in San Francisco and eventually in Guyana. The Temple stores were very profitable. The clerks were volunteers, the merchandise was donated and the business was a tax exempt charity. Nearly every dollar taken in was pure profit. But the stores could not sell all the items the Temple acquired. A $10,000 diamond ring, for example, not only looks out of place in the window of a thrift shop and would probably never sell, it might raise questions as to its origin Also many of the donated items had been previously stolen and might be listed on police hot sheets. An expensive typewriter, with the serial numbers ground away, could not be offered to the public. Cartmell's agents conducted many burglaries, primarily intended to gather information, but, on occasion, they would steal an expensive item just to disguise the true nature of the break-in. All of this questionable merchandise had to be liquidated and fencing was the most expedient alternative. With his underworld connections, Chris Lewis was just the man for the job.
Jones called a special meeting of the Temple Planning Commission to discuss Lewis' arrest. Witnesses recall him saying:
I have always allowed Chris certain latitude in his actions and his living situation, because he has contacts that are very helpful in some areas of my work, areas that few of you are aware of. I cannot allow him to go to jail. We need to maintain his contacts. And more important, I do not fully trust Chris. If he were left in jail it is very probable that he would tell everything he knows about our group. His testimony would be harmful to our welfare. It is imperative that we keep him out of jail at all costs.[77]
Jim Jones and his attorney, Tim Stoen, immediately went to work on Lewis' defense. Jones paid the $20,000 fee to hire famed San Francisco criminal lawyer James Martin MacInnis to represent Lewis. He later told the Planning Commission that the total cost for defending Lewis was $36,000. Perhaps he was exaggerating or perhaps he used the extra money to buy the court. In any event, Lewis was acquitted of all charges on the grounds that he had killed Rory Hithe in self-defense.
Lewis was released from jail but was not free, as he soon found out when Jones presented him with his signed blank statement that now read as a confession to murder and perjury. Once blackmailed, the newest member of the Angels of Death could then be trusted and Jones appointed Lewis to his elite staff of personal bodyguards.
Jones informed him that he had discovered, through his connections with the Mafia in San Francisco, that there was an open contract out on Lewis's life. If this was true, it was probably a result of a Temple activity as Lewis worked exclusively for Jim Jones. Jones hid Lewis and his wife, Dorothy, in a Redwood Valley trailer owned by Temple photographer Elmer Mertle and his wife, Deanna (a.k.a. Al and Jeannie Mills). After only one month in the trailer, Lewis complained to Jones that, "The country life may be okay for some folks, but for a city dude like me it's worse than prison."[78] Jones then moved the Lewises out of California until it was safe for Chris to return to his duties in San Francisco.
Lewis was always considered to be one of Jones' favorite aides but, on one occasion, he was called in front of the Planning Commission in Redwood Valley and reprimanded for an incident with the San Francisco police. Jones said:
I understand that you were picked up by a policeman for speeding, and you later bragged to Gene [presumably Temple attorney, Eugene Chaikin] that you used a phony name on the ticket. What are you trying to do to this church, Chris?
Lewis defended himself:
It's true that I used a phony name. In some of the work I do in San Francisco, it's necessary for me to use different names, but they're all legal. I go to the Driver's License Bureau and make a statement that my real name is Chris Lewis but I am using a different name, and they issue me a driver's license with the name I choose. It's very legitimate, and can't get me or the church into difficulty.[79]
In spite of his eloquent defense, Jones punished Lewis by ordering him to disrobe in front of the congregation and swim an unreported, but presumably punishing, number of laps in the Temple's indoor swimming pool.
In late 1977, Lewis once again got into trouble with the authorities when a San Francisco policeman stopped his car on a traffic violation and discovered a loaded handgun under his front seat. Possession of a firearm by a convicted felon is illegal, and according to his last attorney, Steve Alkind, Lewis faced an almost certain jail term. While out on bail, Lewis and his wife traveled to Guyana to seek Jones' help in raising money for his defense.
The Lewises were received as long-lost friends in Guyana. Jones assured them that, when the need arose, he would provide the capital that would, once again, pay for Chris' acquittal. But in truth, Jones had no intention of helping Lewis again. Jonestown and the Peoples Temple were scheduled for destruction in less than a year and, though Lewis was still valuable to Jones, his usefulness would soon be outlived, and did not warrant an additional investment. Lewis may have sensed this as he did not want to leave the jungle sanctuary. Jones had to convince him that it was in everyone's best interest that he return to San Francisco and face the charges. As a last resort, Jones literally pushed the Lewises out of Jonestown by hosting a farewell party in their honor. It was a gala banquet with music and dancing, and the following morning, after everyone had said their goodbyes, the Lewises felt compelled to return to San Francisco where Chris worked harder than ever, as Jones had promised him that income he generated for the Temple would help finance his defense.
Eventually, Lewis needed to pay his attorney, so in early December, he radioed Jonestown for the money. He was told that Jones was not available at the moment, but would return his call as soon as possible. Jones never radioed back. Lewis tried again and again, but each time he failed to contact his patron.
On December 10, 1977, just a few days after his last radio message to Jonestown, Chris Lewis was murdered outside the Temple's thrift shop in the Hunter's Point section of San Francisco. Two gunmen simultaneously fired two shots each into Lewis's back and ran. The police found Lewis dead with four holes in his back and $1,000 cash in his pocket. The gunmen were never identified and the murder remains unsolved.
When news of Lewis's death reached Jonestown, Jones staged quite a show of grief. He blamed the enemies of the Peoples Temple and went so far as to circulate rumors that he had a difficult time restraining Lewis's Temple friends from taking revenge on the outsiders who had murdered him. While Jones shed his crocodile tears, his wife, Marceline, was using Lewis's death to threaten Wade and Mabel Medlock,, two uncooperative Temple members. The Medlocks, an elderly Black couple, had signed their Los Angeles properties over to the Temple but they refused repeated requests that they move to Guyana. Two weeks after Lewis was murdered, Marceline Jones ordered the Medlocks to move to Jonestown and once again they refused. Marceline responded, "What happened to Chris Lewis will happen to You.[80] The threat was repeated a few days later in a phone call from Temple assistant pastor, Hugh Fortsyn, who warned, "You know what happened to Chris Lewis? You better watch it."[81]
On May 25, 1978, the Medlocks filed a formal complaint with the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, charging the Peoples Temple with extorting $135,000 worth of real estate from them. They insisted that they had signed the papers under duress in the presence of Jim Jones and Temple guard, Jim McElvane. They also reported hearing a rumor that it was Jim McElvane and Jim Crokes who had murdered Chris Lewis. There is no indication that the police even tried to question McElvane, Crokes or anyone else in the Temple regarding Lewis's death.
Jim Jones had previously perfected the "two man assassination technique." The two assassins of Chris Lewis had, on the count of three, both fired two bullets so that neither man could ever be certain which one fired the fatal shot -- they were equally responsible. As they later discovered, Jim Jones could then blackmail two new Angels for one murder. In this case, two Jims for one crime.
The story of Chris Lewis took place as a direct or indirect result of one incident, the killing of Rory Hithe; a murder without apparent motive until one considers the Temple's "H" file.
VICTIM NUMBER THREE
Truth Hart
Died: July 16, 1974
Congestive Heart Failure
Truth Hart had traded all her worldly possessions for the right to live out her later years in Heaven with God. "Heaven" was the communal estate of the Peace Mission in Philadelphia. "God" was the Black preacher, George Baker, who was self-ordained "Father Divine" in 1919. Father Divine had become one of the foremost authorities on not only shepherding a Negro flock, but on shearing them as well. Through extortion, he was able to build his Peace Mission into a multi-million dollar business. His contributions to the science of mind control may well earn Father Divine a place in history as the "Father of the Twentieth Century Cult Figures in America."
Starting in the late 1950's, Jones made periodic pilgrimages to Philadelphia to seek the advice of his mentor in building a Negro church empire. In 1965, as Jones prepared to move to California, much to the surprise of the Peace Mission followers, Father Divine died. Jones seized the opportunity to steal as many sheep from the mission flock as possible. Temple workers began an intense letter-writing campaign, intended to convince the Peace Missioners that Jim Jones had inherited their deceased leader's divinity. Jones made several attempts to persuade Divine's widow - an attractive blue-eyed blonde in her late thirties - to name him heir to the Peace Mission's throne, but Mother Divine considered Jones' request an insult to her late husband's memory. She would not be moved.
Most of Divine's followers were elderly Black women. Though they may have had a moderate income from Social Security, financially speaking, their inclusion in the Peoples Temple would be more of a liability than an asset. They did offer Jones something he needed; Black bodies without a will of their own. In July of 1971, Jones and two hundred and sixty Temple members arrived at the Peace Mission's headquarters in Philadelphia in a determined effort to convert the congregation. Temple aide Grace Grech Stoen later recalled her role in canvassing the Mission's neighborhood with an open invitation to anyone in range of her loudspeaker:
...I was really good, too... We went around to the Divine Mission from one of their churches or hotels and gave a speech saying, 'If you want to go, the busses will be leaving at such-and-such a time,' and talking about Jim Jones's work and stuff like that.[82]
The Temple assault team had limited success in convincing the Peace Missioners to board the Temple busses for their new "heaven" in California. At least fifteen new recruits did accept the invitation and among them were Truth Hart and her friend, Mary Love.
As outlined elsewhere, one of Jones' life goals was to perfect techniques of assassination that mimicked disease or natural cause. (His and the CIA's) two main areas of study were induced cancer and induced t heart failure.
Truth Hart would fall victim to both. Truth was received with some degree of importance in Redwood Valley as Jones assigned her to live in the luxurious showplace home of attorney Tim Stoen and his wife, Grace who later recalled Truth as, "a little weird woman" who would get especially excited about certain foods. "Food was very precious to her."[83]
Soon after her arrival at the Stoen's house, Truth contracted intestinal cancer, a disease that even the medical novice can see might have been a direct result of something she had eaten, or, in Truth's case, something she had been given to eat. Once the cancer was confirmed, Truth was cured, not by the faith healing powers of Jim Jones, but by surgery. After the operattion she was assigned to Birdie Marable's rest operation, home; a Temple operated facility in Ukiah where she fully recovered only to succumb to the second half of the experiment.
Jones asked Temple nurse Faith Freestone Worley if there was a drug that could induce a fatal heart attack. Faith identified Phytonadione, the generic name for vitamin K1, commonly referred to by its trade name, Mephyton. Phytonadione is used to treat a deficiency of Prothrombin; a natural chemical that permits the blood to clot. An overdose might produce blood clots that would eventually lodge in the heart and trigger a massive coronary; but there were problems. The drug does not accumulate in the body so one massive dosage was necessary. Also, it had only been effective in killing subjects with pre-existing heart conditions; healthy subjects often survived the ordeal.
Faith was ordered to develop a catalyst that, when added to Phytonadione, would produce a pulmonary embolism pill (or "PEP," as they code named it), that would have a 100% kill rate. With his extensive medical knowledge and reference resources, Jones certainly did not need Faith to develop the PEP, but her involvement was calculated to set her up for blackmail. During one closed meeting on the subject, Jones allowed Faith to see him write "Phytonadione" and "Truth Hart" on a small slip of paper before he dramatically burned it. She was also allowed to overhear a rumor that the drug she had recommended was being given to Truth without her knowledge. Faith soon realized that she was being implicated in a plot to kill Truth Hart. Truth Hart was deeply religious and venerated the Bible. Jones used her faith to alienate her to the point where she wanted to leave the Temple. He would single her out and preface the profanity, obscenity and blasphemy in his sermons with: "Close your ears, Truth, here comes another one."[84] Truth's only response was; "I don't see how you can bring such terrible things out of your mouth."[85] What begins as innocent teasing, escalated to a full scale attack. Jones succeeded in making Truth feel so uncomfortable that she expressed a desire to leave the Temple. It was "H" file victims express their important that the discontent with the Temple just prior to their death as Jones would later use the deaths as an example to the congregation of what would happen to them if they also decided to leave the Peoples Temple and the protection of the "Father." A few days before Truth's death, Faith Worley, Sally Stapleton and other aides heard Jones predict: "That woman (Truth) will die soon.[86]
Birdie Marable, entrusted with the care of Truth's life, presented an obstacle to her death. The Temple's fleet of Greyhound busses were about to depart on their annual cross-country trip and Jones insisted that Birdie join the vacation party. At first she declined but later she accepted when Jones and others convinced her that she needed a vacation and that everything would be fine at the rest home, as Mary Love would assume responsibilities in her absence.
On the evening of July 15th, 1974, Mary Love treated her old friend, Truth, to a condemned prisoner's last meal; an exquisite gourmet dinner laced with a massive dosage of PEP. Mary monitored Truth's condition throughout the night. Come morning, Truth was very weak but still alive. The PEP had not been as effective as Jones had hoped. Mary had been well prepared with a contingency plan. She started tormenting Truth; pinching her and forcing her to take alternately hot and cold baths to put an undue strain on her heart. She then placed her back in bed, gave her a final pill, and Truth Hart, age 66, died immediately.
Temple nurse Judith Ijames reported the death at 11 AM on July 16th. Mary Love was quick to point out to the investigating coroner that Truth had died of a heart attack. She also reported that she had been concerned about Truth's deteriorating condition and was phoning a local physician when she heard Truth call out. Mary then dropped the phone and ran to her room, but was too late; Truth Hart had died. An autopsy was performed but no tests were made for toxins in Truth's stomach or bloodstream. Based upon the autopsy report and Mary Love's statements, the coroner determined the cause of death was "congestive heart failure due to rheumatic heart disease." The death certificate was signed by Sheriff Reno Bartolmei, the same man listed as custodian of the fund for Maxine Harpe's children.
Birdie Marable was informed of Truth's death during her bus trip. She was so upset at the news that she phoned Jim Jones, who would only say, It's better this way, Birdie."[87] The Temple bus was Birdie's only way back to California so she remained with the tour, but immediately upon her return she resigned from the Temple and her position at the rest home to begin a campaign to expose the Temple's mistreatment of senior citizens placed in their care. She reported several incriminating incidents to the Ukiah Daily Journal but, like everything else in Mendocino County, Jones controlled the press and Temple spies who worked at the newspaper suppressed Birdie's story.
Birdie Marable was not the only one who threatened to incriminate the Temple in Truth Hart's death. Janie Brown and Ella Mae Hoskins, two elderly residents of Birdie's rest home, had actually witnessed the events of July 16th. At first they were afraid to speak out, lest they suffer the fate of their friend, but six months later, Janie Brown (the braver of the two) could no longer remain silent. During an open Temple meeting, Jones warned his congregation that what happened to Truth would happen to them if they wanted to leave the Temple. Janie, in a fit of anger, stood up and shouted at the pulpit, "I don't care what anybody says about Truth Hart, I know what really happened.[88] A few days later, on January 29, 1975, Janie Brown died. Her death was not reported to the authorities. Neither the sheriff nor the coroner signed the death certificate. No cause of death was listed. The Temple would continue to collect Janie Brown's Welfare and Social Security benefits for years to come.
Ella Mae Hoskins remained silent until October 14, 1975, when Birdie Marable convinced her to make a statement to the police to document what she had witnessed. The sheriff's department refused to take Ella Mae's statement but finally gave in five weeks later when Birdie and others staged a protest demonstration outside the sheriff's office demanding that action be taken. Ella Mae swore in an interview with investigator Jan Kespohl on November 21, 1975, that on the morning in question, Mary Love (who had since changed her name to Mary Black.)
...was pinching Truth and hurting her. She made Truth get up and take a bath and Truth was awful sick. Then Mary Black gave Truth a pill, and I was standing at the doorway watching. She then gave Truth some water to drink and went back into the kitchen, and Truth was dead before Mary got back into the kitchen.[89]
Despite the rather incriminating evidence, the sheriff's department refused to reopen the investigation into Truth Hart's death. No one, not even Mary Black, was questioned. As far as the sheriff was concerned, the case was closed and regardless of any new evidence, the case would remain closed.
In spite of her open criticism of the Peoples Temple and her inevitable inclusion in the Temple's "H" file, Ella Mae Hoskins survived. She even survived the mass death in Jonestown, as Jones never invited her to move to Guyana. Following the carnage, Ella Mae was interviewed by Doug Wead, contributing author of People's Temple - People's Tomb, who asked her about Truth's death, "Was this just a family legend that grew with time or were the residents of the home immediately suspicious of the death?" Ella Mae, then over eighty years old, responded in a clear voice, "We all believed it was murder immediately!"[90]
In the final analysis, Jones had been very selective in casting the characters in this stage play. Truth Hart was the perfect guinea pig for his experiments with the Pulmonary Embolism Pill. She had no next of kin, no one to mourn her passing or claim her body. Not even Jones, who had spent much time and money to recruit, relocate and support Truth in life, would have anything to do with her in death. She was buried, at the county's expense, in potter's field and quickly forgotten by all but a few. Of course, Jones blackmailed Faith Worley and Mary Love, presenting them with a photocopy of their signed confessions to the murder of Truth Hart. Faith, who could now be trusted, was promoted into the ranks of the Angels. For the duration, she was a top aide, Jones' personal nurse, and the Temple's expert on poisons. Four years and four months later, Faith was once again called upon to lend her expertise to the cause when Jones ordered her to help Dr. Larry Schacht prepare and distribute the Fla-Vor-Aid cyanide Valium mixture that killed most of the nine hundred victims in Jonestown. The first to form a line in front of Faith and her vat of poison were the mothers holding babies. Faith used squeeze bottles to squirt the poison directly down the infants' throats so they could not spit out the bitter tasting potion. The next in line were the adults who volunteered to die. Faith handed each a paper cup of death. Many residents resisted only to be wrestled to the ground and dragged, kicking and screaming, to the feet of Faith who injected them with a hypodermic needle. Others tried to run but were shot by the outer ring of guards surrounding the pavilion, and were carried, some dead, some half-dead, to Faith, who injected them as well. By legal definition, Faith Worley murdered most of the Jonestown victims. The guards were the only accomplices and Jones, who, at the time was broadcasting encouraging remarks on the public address system, might not have even been prosecuted. Faith murdered Jonestown. Her body was never accurately identified in the aftermath, her passport was not among those found there. Faith Worley's fate has yet to be determined.
Jones was also very clever to have selected Mary Love as a co-assassin. If something had gone wrong, if the police believed Ella Mae Hoskin's statement, Jones could always have taken the position that Mary Love did kill Truth, but that it stemmed from a long-term animosity that had its roots in the Peace Mission in Philadelphia. When Mary was presented with a copy of her signed confession, she attempted to outwit Jones by changing her name from Mary Love to Mary Black. She discovered, as did others who tried a similar defense, that this tactic simply did not work. She was blackmailed for life.
There was another excellent rationale for selecting the major characters of this play, as will be evident later in this chapter, but despite the apparently logical casting, it is extremely uncanny that Grace, Faith and Love killed Truth.
VICTIM NUMBER FOUR
John William Head
Died: October 19, 1975
Multiple head lacerations suffered in a fall
John Head was a twenty-two year old resident of Redwood Valley whose encounter with the Peoples Temple was both short and sad. John was being treated for depression by the Temple staff at the Mendocino State Hospital in Talmadge, a few miles south of Redwood Valley. It may have been an administrator, a physician, a nurse, a dentist, a barber or even a cleaning woman who first befriended John; it does not matter. Somehow his life was condensed into a manila envelope and presented to Jim Jones.
John told his new Temple friend that he had recently received a $10,000 insurance settlement from a motorcycle accident in which he was the innocent victim. His new friend convinced John to use the money to invest in silver. John purchased $10,000 worth of silver bullion from the Shamaz Trading Company in Ukiah and stored his "nest egg" in safety deposit boxes at the local branch of the Bank of America. If it were not for John's silver, he might be alive today.
His new friend also persuaded John to quit his job at a masonite factory in Ukiah. After several months of unemployment, John was faced with the reality that he needed to liquidate some of his silver nest egg to support himself. He was exactly where Jim Jones wanted him to be -- everything was precisely on schedule.
Harold Cordell was a charter member of the Peoples Temple, having joined forces with Jim Jones in 1953. He was a high ranking Temple guard and strongarm man who chauffeured Jones in his bulletproof bus. He was also a volunteer deputy sheriff and had been issued a concealed weapons permit by Sheriff Reno Bartolmei. Cordell was a mean, tough, dangerous man who had very little trouble controlling John Head.
[COLOR=#1A1A1A][FONT=Verdana]On September 27th, 1975, Cordell and an unidentified Temple guard, escorted the heavily sedated John Head arm-in-arm into the Bank of America to withdraw his silver. Cordell had persuaded John that...
VII MOSCONE, MILK AND MURDER
"In a tight race like the ones George (Moscone) or (Joseph) Freitas or (Richard) Hongisto had, forget it without Jones. "[112]
-Assemblyman Willie Brown
"They are well dressed, polite, and they're also registered to vote. Everybody talks about the labor unions and their power, but Jones turns out the troops".[113]
-A Moscone campaign official
The Reverend Jim Jones was the predominant force behind the political careers of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk during the last three years of their lives. Their assassinations, coming only nine days after the Jonestown massacre, suggests that Jones had engineered their deaths just as he had helped engineer their lives. This chapter is submitted as evidence that he did.
GEORGE R. MOSCONE
Moscone's rise to political power in San Francisco began on April 14, 1975, in a meeting between Lawrence Leguennac, the registrar of voters, and Thomas Mellon, the city's chief administrative officer. At the time, Moscone was the majority leader in the State Senate, but, as he phrased it, "Sacramento is boring as hell and ever since my childhood I've wanted to be the mayor of the world's greatest city." Reportedly, a deal between Moscone and other high-ranking Democrats, had been struck in which several politicians would shift offices to the betterment of all. Moscone needed more than just the assurance of a politician that he would be elected mayor. Help came from Lawrence Leguennac in the form of his revised procedure for voter registration. Under the pretext of a poor voter turn-out in the previous election, Leguennac and Mellon redesigned and relaxed voter requirements for the upcoming 1975 mayoral elections. Under the new system, an unprecedented number of registrars were deputized and issued an even larger number of voter registration books. Each registration had a duplicate yellow copy that was given to the voter to present at the polling places. The yellow copy was supposed to be compared to the original and confiscated at the polls to prevent citizens from voting more than once.
Moscone entrusted his campaign to Don Bradley, who had successfully managed the California campaigns of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Bradley later recalled what happened next.
...there was a meeting here in my office with Jim Jones, Prokes (Temple aide Michael Prokes), Moscone and myself. We requested help in securing volunteers and they said they could... They did the work in tough areas, fairly rough areas (like) the Tenderloin and south of Market. [114]
The marriage of Moscone and Jones produced what may well be the largest voter fraud scheme in California's history.
Moscone was one of five candidates in the November election. Some of his opponents, most notably Dianne Feinstein and John Barbagelata, were backed by the city's powerful real estate developers. It was a close race; too close, as no one received a clear majority and a run-off election between the two front-runners, Moscone and Barbagelata, was scheduled for the following month. Temple political propagandist Richard Tropp enlisted his troops to write as many as fifty letters each in support of Moscone and in protest of the need for a run-off election. Despite the efforts of the Peoples Temple, the December election was held on schedule.
Everyone in Jones' congregation was registered to vote; it was a requirement. Many had registered at Temple operated communes, indicating that Temple personnel had been deputized as registrars. Over one hundred and sixty Temple volunteers worked at Moscones campaign headquarters. Several hundred more canvassed the Tenderloin, Filmore, South of Market and the Western Addition areas of the city.
On the morning of the December election, Jones had over 800 of his followers rounded up and transported to the polls in the Temple's fleet of Greyhound buses. Each had been instructed to vote for Moscone, just as they had been instructed to vote for Moscone, District Attorney Joseph Freitas and Sheriff Richard Hongisto in the regular election a month earlier.
On election day, officials at the polling places neglected to confiscate the voters' duplicate yellow registration forms. As John Barbagelata said, lamenting over his loss, "You could have run around to twelve hundred precincts and voted twelve hundred times."[115] And that is exactly what the eight hundred Peoples Temple voters did. Their ballot box stuffing made the differences as Moscone won by only a slim margin, but Jones had miscalculated the voter turn-out for the run-off election and, in the final analysis, there were more votes cast than there were registered voters. Barbagelata claimed voter fraud and called for Moscone to run again in a special midterm election. Jim Jones contributed $500 to the committee opposing the proposal. He also contributed $250 to help pay for Moscone's inaugural expenses. The following month Barbagelata received a box of candy in the mail that concealed a bomb that, by chance, did not explode. After the incident, Jones offered him the protection of Temple bodyguards, but Barbagelata refused. Barbagelata continued to protest the election and, in June of 1976, he chaired a special committee of city supervisors who conducted public allegations of voter fraud. The committee discovered forged and printed signatures, as well as non-existent addresses and other irregularities on vote registration forms, all from the south of Market, Filmore and Western Addition districts where the major influence was the Peoples Temple. Barbagelata never realized the Temple's involvement, only that some major force had masterminded the fraud.
His committee submitted their findings to District Attorney Joseph Freitas who formed a special election crimes unit to investigate the allegations. Freitas hired none other than Temple attorney Tim Stoen to head the investigation. He later insisted that he did not know the assistant district attorney from Mendocino County had an affiliation with the Peoples Temple or that the Peoples Temple had played any part in the election fraud. Freitas was quoted as saying, "I didn't know Tim was a member of the Peoples Temple until after he came to work, and anyone who says it was a political pay-off is a liar "[116] a strong statement from a man who was often seen at the services of the Peoples Temple and who owed his political position to the election fixing of Jim Jones. Of course, Tim Stoen found no substantial evidence of voter fraud and the Peoples Temple was never mentioned in his reports.
As further evidence of fraud in the 1975 elections, over four hundred voter registration books were issued but never recovered. Those books that were recovered were locked in three vaults in City Hall. In December of 1978, Federal and State agencies requested the files as evidence in their investigation of the Peoples Temple and Tim Stoen. It was then that even the remaining books were discovered missing. Every list of voters in the 1975 elections has vanished without a trace.
Jones received his political pay-off only days after the election, when Moscone appointed Temple aide Michael Prokes to the committee that would screen potential candidates for the one hundred commission vacancies in Moscone's new administration. Over the next several months, Prokes succeeded in placing trusted Temple aides in key positions in city government.
In March of 1976, Moscone announced he was appointing Jim Jones to the post of Human Rights Commissioner the same
title bestowed upon him in Indianapolis, fifteen years earlier. On the day that Jones was to be sworn into office, he slipped, unannounced, through a side door to the mayor's office and, after a fifteen minute meeting with Moscone, emerged to tell the awaiting press that he would not accept the post but would be appointed to a different position.
On October 18, 1976, Moscone submitted the name of Jim Jones for a seat on the San Francisco Housing Authority, a $14 million a year agency that manages the city's low income housing units. When it appeared that city supervisors might not approve the appointment, Moscone enlisted the help of Assemblyman Willie Brown, who introduced legislation in Sacramento giving the mayor the power to appoint members of the Housing Authority without confirmation from the Board of Supervisors. Eventually, the supervisors did confirm Jones' appointment as well as that of Temple aide Carolyn Moore Layton, who also received a job with the Housing Authority. By January 24, 1977, Moscone had cleared the way for Jones to be elected Chairman of the Housing Authority. As chairman of the city agency that controlled low income housing, Jones was in an excellent position to arrange for government-funded apartments for his congregation. The Peoples Temple had since shifted its center from Mendocino County to San Francisco, where Jones saw to it that most of his agency's $14 million budget benefitted his followers.
Throughout 1976, Mayor Moscone, D.A. Freitas, Sheriff Hongisto and Assemblyman Willie Brown were often seen at Peoples Temple services where they were received as honored guests. On September 25, 1976, Jones hosted his own testimonial, twenty-dollar-a-plate dinner at the Geary Street Temple in San Francisco. Seated at the head table were Moscone, Brown, Freitas, California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and State Senator Milton Marks. Also present were the full range of political activists from Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis on the left to Walter Heady, chairman of the John Birch Society, on the right. Each took turns to praise the work of Jim Jones and to present their tributes , awards and honors. Senator Marks presented Jones with a plaque bearing a resolution commending the Peoples Temple that he had managed to get passed by the State Senate. Such was Jones' political power in San Francisco.
In September, 1976, Rosalyn Carter visited San Francisco to officially open the presidential campaign headquarters of her husband, Jimmy Carter and his running mate, Walter Mondale. Fearing a poor turn-out for the ceremony, Mrs. Carter contacted Jim Jones, who provided six-hundred of the eight hundred who attended her rally. Jones, who shared the speaker's podium, received a roaring ovation from the crowd while Mrs. Carter was received politely but coldly. He was showing off, as was his security staff who followed in the every footstep of Mrs. Carter's Secret Service escorts as they secured the area for her public appearance.
That evening, Jones met privately with Rosalyn Carter in the restaurant of the posh Stanford Hotel in the city's Nob Hill district. Presumably they discussed U.S. relations with Cuba. Ever since his involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion, Jones had a reputation with the CIA as an expert on Cuba. Days later, Mrs. Carter phoned Jones to thank him for his help and the two began an exchange of written correspondence that continued well into 1977.
In the first week of October, less than a month after his meeting with Rosalyn Carter, Jones traveled to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. Soon after he returned to San Francisco, he was debriefed by Walter Mondale. Mondale was on the campaign trail and not scheduled to visit San Francisco, but apparently his business with Jones was sufficiently important to interrupt his tour, for his chartered jet was diverted to the San Francisco Airport. Mondale never left the airport runway. and few people realized he was even in the city. Jim Jones and Mayor George Moscone were invited to join him in the surveillance-free interior of his jet for a private meeting. Jones later reported they discussed "U.S. relations with Carribean countries," a deliberately vague reference to Cuba. Actually Mondale offered Jones an ambassadorship to Guyana, but later "complications" arose. As soon as Mondale left San Francisco, Jones began to make arrangements for another trip to Cuba where, in December of 1976, he once again met with Fidel Castro. There was definitely something transpiring between the new Carter administration and Castro's Cuba, and Jim Jones provided the conduit for the discussions. If true to form, Jones would not have been content to be just a messenger, but would have wanted to engineer this new relationship and probably did. One of the first letters the new First Lady wrote on White House stationery was to Jim Jones.
April 12, 1977
Dear Jim,
Thank you for your letter. I enjoyed being with you during the campaign -- and do hope you can meet Ruth (Carter
Stapleton) soon. Your comments about Cuba are helpful. I hope your suggestions can be acted on in the near future.
Sincerely,
Rosalyn Carter
As if his political rewards were not sufficient, Jones hosted one last testimonial to himself before he permanently left San Francisco for Jonestown. The occasion was the forty-eighth anniversary of the birth of civil rights advocate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The January 15th event at the Peoples Temple was the largest interracial celebration ever held in the city. To no one's surprise, Jones received the Martin Luther King Humanitarian of the Year Award. Governor Jerry Brown gave a speech, as did Ben Brown, the head of President Carter's transition team. Mayor Moscone also attended, having long since established the relationship with Jim Jones that helped to legitimize both their public careers. Jones was also named "Humanitarian of the Year" by the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.
In July 1977, New West Magazine published a damning expose of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. Under threat of political siege, Jones retreated to Guyana and his experimental community of Jonestown. Following his departure from the United States, the exposes continued to increase in intensity. The San Francisco Examiner, dated August 7, 1977, carried the following front page headline: "Rev. Jones: The Power Broker; Political Maneuvering of a Preacher Man". The Examiner's political columnist, Bill Barnes, was hot on the trail of Jim Jones when supervisor Quentin Kopp requested that the District Attorney's office conduct an official investigation into the Peoples Temple. Mayor Moscone and D.A. Freitas vetoed all such requests. Freitas later claimed to have opened his own investigation but did not reveal its existence until after the massacre in Jonestown, leading critics to claim he announced his investigation only to cover-up his own complacency in his personal dealings with Jones.
On August 2 1977, Jones contacted Mayor Moscone via radio-telephone from Guyana to formally resign his position as Director of San Francisco's Housing Authority. Moscone would continue to publicly defend his friend, even though he suspected, as did everyone else that neither Jones nor his political influence would ever return to San Francisco.
Moscone continued out on an ever-thinning limb to support Jones right up to the point he received news of the massacre, when, according to witnesses, he broke down in tears and vomited. Moscone realized he was in serious trouble. The newspapers were full of stories of reported Temple hit squad Jones had sent to San Francisco to kill his enemies. Though Moscone was a friend, he was still afraid for his life. The incident with Bonnie Theilmann at Ryan's funeral "scared the daylights out of him" and left him alone in the church pew to ponder, not Ryan's fate, but his own.
On November 23, 1978, the day after Ryan's funeral the city desk of the San Francisco Chronicle received an anonymous phone call from a man who said that his brother "was just back from Guyana and that the mayor should be warned to have someone with him at all times."[117] When asked his brother's identity, the caller replied, "If I told you that I wouldn't see tomorrow. Just please tell the mayor to take care of himself." The Chronicle informed the police, who informed Moscone, who reacted to what he considered a serious threat to his life, by employing bodyguards round- the-clock. Late-night, anonymous phone calls to the mayor's home confirmed reports that the Peoples Temple was planning to murder him.
Overall Moscone followed Bonnie Theilmann's advice and said little or nothing about Jones or Jonestown. It had been a difficult week for the mayor. It began with the news that his foremost political supporter, confidant and appointee had lured hundreds of San Franciscans to their deaths. Wednesday, he attended the funeral of his friend Congressman Ryan. Thursday, the police informed him of the assassination threat by the Peoples Temple. All week long the San Francisco newspapers brandished headlines about an alleged Temple "hit squad" in California. By Friday, Moscone had been physically, mentally and emotionally drained but, with one last burst of energy, he took a stand on Jonestown. He sent a telegram to President Carter requesting the cost that Washington underwrite of shipping the remains of the Jonestown victims back to their native California. Little did he know that his telegram, that at least implied some federal responsibility for cleaning up the atrocity, would be his last official act as mayor. "Thank God it's Friday," he must have thought while leaving City Hall for a well-deserved weekend at home.
The police and bodyguards, who were just an invasion of privacy earlier in the weak, proved beneficial in keeping the many visitors at Bay. They turned people away at the front door and fielded calls about the Peoples Temple which permitted Moscone to spend a relatively quiet weekend with his family. Early Monday morning, the mayor and his bodyguard arrived at City Hall. About two hours later, Mayor George Moscone was assassinated, as was City Supervisor Harvey Milk.
HARVEY BERNARD MILK
Harvey Milk was born May 22, 1930 to a Jewish family living in Woodmere, New York. His grandfather, Morris Milch, had emigrated to the New York City area from Lithuania years earlier and Americanized the family surname. At the time of Harvey Milk's birth , there existed a strong movement for homosexual rights in Germany that had its beginnings in the 1880's. By the time Milk was seven years old, the movement had suffered a major setback when Heinrich Himmler ordered all German homosexuals to be rounded-up, labeled with pink triangles and sent to the level 3 death camps. Over three hundred thousand homosexuals died in the Nazi gas chambers, making their group second only to the Jews in the number of people exterminated in the Holocaust. As a child, Milk had no idea that he would lead the next movement for gay rights in the Western World; a campaign that, at least for Milk, would end as did its predecessor.
Harvey Milk was a clown, inside and out. His nose, ears, and feet were extremely large. Awkward and unattractive, Milk hid his feelings of inadequacy behind a mask of humor. His quick wit would serve him well in his later years in politics, but in high school, it served to hide the fact that Harvey Milk was a homosexual.
Milk would later recount only two incidents in his childhood. The first occurred in 1943, when his parents sat him down to explain how the brave jews and homosexuals in Europe resisted the Nazis, against all odds of winning, because something that evil had to be opposed. The second incident happened in August of 1947 following his graduation from high school, when Milk was arrested along with other homosexual men who congregated in Central Park. He was charged with indecent exposure for his bare chested sunbathing.
Milk went on to study math and history at the "poor man's Yale", as his classmates called Alban State College. Immediately after his graduation in 1951, Milk followed in the family tradition and enlisted in the Navy. His father had been a submarine crewman during World War II and his mother, Minerva Milk, was one of the first woman to volunteer as a Navy "yeomanette" in 1918. Milk was Chief Petty Office on board the U.S.S. Kittiwake, an aircraft carrier stationed in the Pacific that saw some service in the Korean conflict. He would later tell his voters that the Navy dishonorably discharged him when they discovered his homosexuality but this was not true.
After the Navy, Milk returned to New York, where he met Scott Smith, who would become his companion, lover, business partner, campaign manager and, in the end, executor of his estate. American society's view of homosexuals was undergoing drastic changes at the time. During World War II, U.S. opposition to Nazi Germany prompted an alliance with homosexuals who fled from all around the world to the sanctuaries of New York City and San Francisco. But following the war, the U.S. government, spurred by the McCarthy era witch-hunt, began a systematic persecution of homosexuals that reflected the prejudiced attitudes of Nazi Germany. In only a few years time, the United States was beginning to profess the very ideology they ad gone to war to oppose. Homosexuals were dismissed from the military and various U.S. government agencies by the thousands. So many were fired from the Central Intelligence Agency that they remained as a group, relocated en masse to Sausalito, and occupied a sizable neighborhood in that San Francisco Bay Area community.
Eventually, Harvey Milk and Scott Smith moved from New York to the more tolerant San Francisco but found much the same anti-gay sentiment in California, where homosexuality was "an act against nature" and a punishable felony. Even in liberal California, a restaurant or bar could have its liquor license revoked simply for serving a drink to a known homosexual. But all things considered, San Francisco was a far better environment than New York City and the two transplants moved into the city's gay neighborhood of Castro Street, where they established Castro Camera. Their mall shop soon became a focal point in the area and Harvey Milk's involvement in business and civic action groups earned him the unofficial title of the "Mayor of Castro Street."
Aspiring to be the first self-avowed homosexual to be elected to public office, Milk campaigned for a seat on the city's Board of Supervisors in the 1973 election with a promise to shift the control of the city from the powerful real estate developers to neighborhood groups who would have compassion for people and not just a passion for profit. Milk lost the election due to his inexperience, lack of financial resources and shabby, longhaired appearance. His campaign did serve to organize a new gay political force that was well prepared for a more important issue that was developing in the state capitol. San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown had been trying for years to strike the 1872 "crimes against nature" statute from the California law books. The legislature had repeatedly defeated his reform bill and then Governor Ronald Reagan had vowed to veto the bill even if it as passed by the Senate and Assembly. But, by 1975, Ronald Reagan was no longer governor and Willie Brown's reform bill was, once again, revived. Brown argued his case before the Assembly while his close Majority Leader George Moscone, political ally, presented the bill to his colleagues in the Senate. Moscone's motives were obvious. He planned to run for mayor of San Francisco in the fall elections and his efforts to reform the laws governing homosexuals would certainly secure the substantial gay vote in the city. The final Senate vote on the issue was a twenty to twenty tie. Moscone convinced the legislators to invoke a a rarely used rule a and sequester the Senate chamber until a decision could be reached. State Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally flew from Denver to Sacramento to cast the first tie-breaking vote from a lieutenant governor in decades. The reform bill passed and California, as Dymally phrased it, was "one step farther from 1984."
Harvey Milk's political supporters contributed to the promotion and eventual passage of the homosexual reform bill. Milk, who had since cut his hair and dressed in a suit he purchased second-hand from a local dry cleaner, was more presentable to the major political figures he encountered during the campaign. Each of the three key men in Sacramento who were largely responsible for the success of the bill, Willie Brown, George Moscone and Mervyn Dymally, had more than Harvey Milk's politics in common; each had a close personal relationship with Jim Jones. State Assemblyman Willie Brown would become one of Jones' foremost proponents. Mayor George Moscone owed his election, later that same year, to the work of Jones. Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally was often seen at the Peoples Temple for both public and private meetings with Jones. Dymally even visited Jonestown on two different occasions. Judging from Harvey Milk's new circle of political friends, it was almost a foregone conclusion that eventually he would encounter Jim Jones.
Milk ran for the Board of Supervisors again in the 1975 election. He had expanded his base of power to include an unlikely group of supporters: labor unions. Milk and his campaign manager, Scott Smith , had been very instrumental in organizing gays to march with Cesar Chavez's pro-union farm workers. They also succeeded in persuading local gay bars to ban Coors Beer after the Adolph Coors Company prevented their employees from organizing a labor union and the unions called for a boycott of their product nationwide.
Milk's foremost labor supporter was Stan Smith, the secretary treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council. Even with the support of the gays. Milk lost the election, and the labor unions, finishing seventh. All six incumbents were reelected to the board.
Following the election, newly-inaugurated Mayor Moscone, impressed with Milk's nearly successful campaign, appointed him to the city's Board of Permit Appeals, the powerful court that had the ultimate say in matters concerning all permits issued by the city. For one who aspired to political office, Milk remained a board commissioner for only a brief
five weeks before he defied Moscone, who fired him when he announced he would run in the 1976 election for the post of State Assemblyman from the 16th District.
Substantiated reports circulating in the news media described a political deal that had been struck between State Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy, George Moscone, Willie Brown and other prominent California Democrats a year earlier. The deal was complicated, but basically it involved the shifting of several Democrats from one office to
another. Moscone got to be mayor of San Francisco, while his vacant Senate seat was filled by Leo McCarthy's old law partner, John Foran. Foran's vacated Assembly seat was to be filled by McCarthy aide Art Agnos. Milk wanted to be a city supervisor, not an assemblyman, but his resentment of what he considered backroom power brokering politics compelled him to oppose Agnos and the political machine that backed him.
"Milk vs. The Machine" was the campaign slogan that threatened the status quo of California Politics. Milk was not opposing Art Agnos but the power brokers who backed him, and largest of these was the Reverend Jim Jones. Like Moscone, Agnos supported the Peoples Temple and, in turn, they supported him and set out to insure his election to office. Knowing this, Milk was surprised to receive a telephone call from Jim Jones.
That was the Reverend Jim Jones on the telephone. He apologized for not knowing I was running and said that he did not mean to back Art Agnos as much as he was doing. He told me that he will make it up to me by sending us some volunteers.
An aide asked Milk, "He's helping Agnos and now backing you?"
Of course not, Jones is backing Agnos and giving him a lot of workers, but he wants to cover his ass, so he'll send us some volunteers too... Make sure you're always nice to the Peoples Temple. If they ask you to do something, do it, and then send them a note thanking them for asking you to do it. They're weird and they're dangerous, and you don't want to be on their bad side.[119]
A few days later, Temple aide Sharon Amos phoned Milk to request that he send 30,000 copies of his campaign literature to her office for distribution by the hundreds of Temple workers that Jones had promised. Milk should have suspected a conspiracy to harm his campaign as soon as Amos, who was supposedly offering him workers, required that his assistants deliver the literature to the Temple. He naively believed Jones' promise to canvass the city in his name and, though 30,000 copies was all he had or could afford, Milk sent all of his printed campaign literature to the Temple. Sharon Amos accepted the delivery and unceremoniously dumped the entire lot into the trash.
The race was close. Early polls' showed Milk in the lead but he was losing ground to Agnos' well-financed campaign. Milk had lost most of his union supporters, retaining only the endorsements of the Laborers, Fire Fighters and Teamsters. He also lost some of his gay supporters, who preferred to elect gay sympathizers rather than gays to public office. State Senator Milton Marks was one of the few politicians to publicly back Milk's bid for the Assembly.
As election day drew nearer, Milk received an increasing number of death threats. Naturally these threats concerned him especially since he was opposing "The Machine." In the last days of his campaign, Milk's father died unexpectedly and he returned to New York for the funeral. The expended trip expended what little time, energy, and money he had held in reserve for the final critical days of his campaign. Early election returns gave Milk the lead but the tide turned when late returns were tallied from the Black neighborhood precincts controlled by Jones. Milk lost by 3,600 of the 33,000 votes cast. Art Agnos, "The Machine", and Jim Jones won.
On election day, voters also approved a measure calling for district, not city-wide, election of San Francisco's supervisors in 1977. This was a victory for Harvey Milk, not only because he advocated neighborhood control of City Hall but because the Gay Castro District would certainly elect a gay supervisor to the board and the "Mayor of Castro Street" was the undisputed candidate for the position.
The 1977 election was Milk's fourth campaign and third attempt at a seat on the Board of Supervisors. "Make Mine Milk" was the Madison Avenue slogan he copied from the American Dairy Association. Finally, Harvey Milk was elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors due, in no small part, to the fact that Jones had fled the country the previous July and exerted little influence on the November elections. Jones' parting statement to the San Francisco press was a rebuttal to recent media criticism in which he listed several dozen prominent supporters of the Peoples Temple. Without his permission and much to his dismay, Harvey Milk's name appeared on the published list. Four campaigns in five years had taken its toll on Milk's personal life. Scott Smith had moved out sometime between races and Milk found a new lover, Jack Lira, who moved into his apartment.
Though Milk made an honest attempt to fairly represent his entire constituency, he recognized his responsibility to present a good image as the country's first openly gay elected official. He took every opportunity to encourage homosexuals throughout the U.S. to "come out of their closet" and assert their rights. He worked hard to revive the gay rights movement that Heinrich Himmler had killed in Nazi Germany. Now, in 1978, there was a new fascist threat, or perhaps just a rebirth of the old. The year saw a rash of anti-gay legislation, introduced nationwide, by born-again Christian fundamentalists. Milk viewed these religious fanatics as the "New Nazis" and the most serious threat to human rights in the United States. In California, Senator John Briggs had succeeded in getting his Proposition 6 (The Briggs Initiative) on the November ballot. The measure called for a ban on the hiring of homosexual teachers in California, a controversial issue that Milk endeavored to defeat. With 6 pending, the annual Gay Proposition Freedom Day Parade took on the critical task of rallying opposition to the measure. As the event drew nearer, Milk, who was slated as a guest speaker, received more death threats in the Castro Camera mail; "You get the first bullet the minute you stand at the microphone.[120] Milk filed the typed postcard with the rest of his death threat collection and left for the Civic Center to address the largest gathering of people San Francisco had seen in a decade. Over 375,000 crowded in the open-air plaza to hear Milk say,
My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you. I want to recruit you for the fight to preserve democracy from the John Briggs and Anita Bryants who are trying to constitutionalize bigotry. We are not going to allow that to happen. We are not going to sit back in silence as 300,000 of our gay sisters and brothers did in Nazi Germany. We are not going to allow our rights to be taken away and then march with bowed heads into the gas chamber...[121]
To conclude his rather dramatic oration, Milk proposed a gay rights march on Washington, D.C. for July 4th , 1979.
Milk worked double-time through the summer and fall, both in City Hall and on the campaign trail to defeat Proposition 6. He publicly debated John Briggs several times. The following is typical of his rebuttals:
John Briggs knows that every one of his statements has been repudiated by facts. Yet he never stops making wild inflammatory remarks that, to anyone who knows the facts, sounds as if it were the KKK talking about blacks or Hitler about Jews.[122]
Milk spoke the truth. By election day the only notable organizations to publicly endorse Proposition 6 were the Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff's Association.
Considering that Harvey Milk and Jim Jones were at opposite ends of the political spectrum in San Francisco, it is interesting to note the striking similarities between the two men, their philosophies and rhetoric. Milk, the first self-proclaimed homosexual to be elected to public office, utilized much of his media attention to warn of a Nazi-like
take-over in the United States by right-wing, Christian fundamentalists a category that roughly describes Jim Jones. In the privacy of closed Temple meetings, Jones preached that most people were homosexual and that he was the only true heterosexual in the Peoples Temple, but in truth he was bisexual, having had sexual relations with both the men and women in the Temple hierarchy. The rhetoric of Jim Jones was also very much concerned with a Nazi coup in the United States, in which Blacks would be rounded-up and forced into concentration camps as were the Jews and homosexuals in Nazi Germany. According to Jones, the New Nazis were planning to activate the abandoned World War II Japanese detention centers as New-Dachau, New Auschwitz and New Treblinka. His warnings are a grim reminder of what could and did happen in the United States. The basic difference that set the two men at odds was that Milk was exactly what he professed to be but Jones was exactly 180 degrees opposite from his public image. Though both men were prominent advocates of the theory that the Nazis posed a threat to minorities in the United States, Milk was sincere, while Jones, though honest in his presentation of the problem, neglected to tell his congregation that he, himself, was the greatest threat to their well-being.
By the fall of 1978, Jim Jones' influence had been absent from San Francisco politics for over a year and Harvey Milk's career blossomed. Part of Milk's popularity stemmed from the national recognition he received for his public debates with Senator John Briggs and his proposed gay rights march on Washington. Art Agnos capsulized Harvey Milk's political potential "He's going to run for mayor. You know what? I think he can win. That guy (Milk) will one day be the mayor of San Francesco."[123] Things had gone well for Milk that fall day and he didn't mind being detained an extra forty-five minutes at City Hall for a committee meeting. He arrived home late at 8 P.M., entered his apartment and called to Jack Lira, but there was no answer, only a puzzle. Starting at the front door there was a trail of voter registration forms that Milk followed through every room in the apartment. The trail grew progressively messier with crumpled anti-Briggs literature and empty Coors beer cans until it ended at a black velvet curtain hung from the rafters of an enclosed back porch. A note pinned to the curtain read, "You've always loved the circus, Harvey. What do you think of my last act?"[124] Behind the curtain hung the lifeless body of Jack Lira. A paperback book, entitled Holocaust, had been nailed to the beam that secured the rope noose. Milk cut the rope, lowered Lira's body to the floor and ran a few doors down the street to a firehouse, but the rescuers who followed him back to the apartment were unable to revive Lira; he had been dead for about forty-five minutes.
The police treated the death as a routine suicide. The story was front-page news but short-lived to the relief of Milk. For the next few days, Milk and Scott Smith, who had come to his aid, found notes, presumed to have been written by Lira, hidden throughout the apartment, in drawers, between the pages of books and magazines and even sewn in the seams of Milk's clothes. A large note, taped prominently on the kitchen wall read, "Beware the Ides of November."[125] Milk thought it was a reference to the November elections and the Briggs Initiative. He had no way of knowing that it foretold his own death. Nor did he seem to connect the death threats with Lira's suicide. If Milk suspected foul play in the death of Lira or in the untimely death of his father two years earlier, he did not state so publicly.
Milk's City Hall office was deluged with sympathy cards and letters, the most notable was a set of fifty letters from Jonestown. Temple aide Sharon Amos wrote, "I hope you will be able to visit us here in Jonestown. Believe it or not, it is a tremendously sophisticated community, though it is in a Jungle.[126] The remaining forty-nine letters from Jonestown, many identical word-for-word, all expressed the Temples' sorrow at Milk's loss and extended an invitation for him to visit them in Guyana. Jonestown was on a predetermined schedule of self-destruction and Milk was being invited to attend the final days if not the final day of the community. Milk declined the invitations, and aborted what appears to be an attempt by Jones to lure him to his death along with Congressman Ryan.
Two weeks after Lira's funeral, Milk met William Wigardt, a recent arrival on Castro Street who was half Milk's age. The two decided to live together. Suspicious Lira's of death, Milk warned his new lover as he unpacked, "You've got to remember, Bill, you're in the direct line of fire. If I get killed, you can be killed too. Somebody could walk through the door and blow both our brains out.[127]
Proposition 6 was defeated and Harvey Milk reveled in his success, at least the two weeks between the elections and the news of the Jonestown tragedy. The reports had a profound effect on Milk, who made no public statements but spent his final nine days unemotionally settling unfinished business in his life. He knew he was about to be killed. He revised his taped political will to read, in part, "Let the bullet that rip through my brain smash every closet door in the country."[128] Milk turned in his leased car, he knew he wouldn't need a car where he was going. He placed a sign in the window of Castro Camera, "Going out of business December 1st." He also arranged to borrow several thousand dollars from Carl Carlson (an airline pilot friend of his). The intention was to consolidate his debts. Carlson wanted to discuss Milk's plans to run for mayor of San Francisco in 1979, but Milk would only say, "I'm not going to be around then. Let's talk about today."[129]
On the morning of November 27th, 1978, Milk was waiting in his City Hall office for Carl Carlson to escort him to his bank for the agreed loan. Carlson was late and when he did finally arrive, Milk was interrupted by a phone call. Following the call, their departure was further delayed while Carlson used Milk's typewriter to type something, perhaps their loan agreement. They were just about ready to leave when former City Supervisor Dan White leaned into Milk's office and asked to speak with him privately. Milk and White walked to White's former, yet still unoccupied, office across the hall. White closed the door behind them. Carlson was still waiting in Milk's office, when he heard the five shots. He looked out just in time to be the only witness to Dan White leaving the murder scene. He rushed to the door of White's old office where he was joined by Dianne Feinstein. Together they discovered the body of Harvey Milk.
That evening over 40,000 mourners marched in a totally silent candle-light procession from Castro Street to City Hall in remembrance of the fallen supervisor. Milk's brother, Robert, flew from New York to San Francisco where he and his wife were guests in the home of Senator Milton Marks.
The services were held in the San Francisco Opera House. Robert Milk sat in the front row, flanked by Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally on one side and Acting Mayor Dianne Feinstein and a White House representative on the other. The Reverend Bill Barcus presided. "Tradition would expect me to tell you Harvey's gone to heaven. Harvey was going much more interested in going to Washington."[130] A former campaign aid read a poem that Milk had written earlier in the month, just for the occasion:
I can be killed with ease
I can be cut right down
But I cannot fall back into my closet
I have grown
I am not by myself
I am too many
I am all of us. [131]
Only the governor and lieutenant governor failed to rise for the standing ovation that followed.
As per Milk's final instructions, his body was cremated and about two dozen of his closest friends, including Scott Smith, Carl Carlson and William Weigardt gathered on the deck of the "Lady Frie," a 102 foot antique schooner, for the voyage under the Golden Gate Bridge and out to sea for the burial. The small box containing Milk's ashes was wrapped in the comic strip, "Doonesbury," a politically oriented cartoon exemplifying Milk's light-hearted treatment of a very serious political world. Enshrining the ashes was a neatly wrapped assortment of bubble bath, representing his homosexuality and several packs of grape Kool-Aid representing his killer, Jim Jones.
Once out to sea, the whiskey flasks were emptied and the marijuana cigarettes smoked. It was time. The ashes, the bubble bath and the Kool-Aid were spread on the waters of the Pacific Ocean and Harvey Milk was gone.
Milk was not a stranger to direct physical threats, but it was this unspoken threat, sparked by the news of the Jonestown tragedy that motivated him to finalize the business of his life. Milk firmly believed that Jim Jones was plotting to murder him. His final statement was not the "No! No!" that he reportedly screamed when he saw Dan White's revolver, but a summation of his actions in the last week of his life. Though his assassin approached from an unexpected angle, Milk's theory that Jones would kill him holds up well under close scrutiny. For months after the assassination, his sentiments were echoed in the predominant graffiti on Castro Street, "Who Killed Harvey Milk?"
Daniel James White
Dan White was born into a large Irish Catholic family that moved to an area of San Francisco located about two miles south of the Castro Street District. This ultra-conservative Catholic neighborhood produced most of the City's police and firemen; Dan White would become both. Despite the liberal, even radical, influence of San Francisco, White remained the stereotyped image of a conservative, clean-cut, All-American boy. Fiercely competitive and so serious minded as to totally lack a sense of humor, White would be elected captain of the Woodrow Wilson High School baseball and football teams. According to a probation report, White used his skill as a Golden Gloves amateur boxer, on at least one occasion, to assault Black teenagers who were integrating the student body of his high school in the early 1960's. Even at this early age, Dan White was a self-appointed spokesman for his race; he had every intention of living up to his surname.
Following his high school graduation White enlisted in the Army on the last day of 1964. As a paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Division, he was sent to Vietnam in July of 1965. Though he spent much of his tour of duty in the relative peace of Saigon his service in Vietnam earned him a promotion to sergeant and three medals. He was honorably discharged from Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 1967.
White returned to San Francisco where, after an unsuccessful short stay at City College he joined the San Francisco Police Department and arranged to be assigned to the Ingleside Station in his old neighborhood. He was a tough police officer who exemplified the rigid behavior pattern that psychiatrists recognize as an occupational hazard of police work, a condition they describe as the "Wyatt Earp Syndrome. Twice, White received a "Captain's Commendation;" in both cases for his capture of suspected felons after a dangerous high-speed car chase. Regardless of his motivations, White often risked his own life in the pursuit of his work, first in the army, then as a policeman, later as a fireman then possibly later still as a politician. White was a policeman's policeman, voted most valuable player in.the 1971 law enforcement softball tournament, coached by his St. Elizabeth grammar schoolmate, homicide inspector Frank Falzon. Falzon and White were also the shortstop and second baseman respectively on the state championship police baseball team. It was Falzon who would later book White for the murder of Moscone and Milk.
Dan White lived more comfortably than his salary should have allowed. He sold his $8,000 Jaguar sports car and purchased a $15,000 Porsche that he drove daily over the Golden Gate Bridge from his new home, a fashionable houseboat in Sausalito. Things had never been better in White's life, which makes the unexplained happenings in 1972 all the more suspicious. White was granted a leave of absence from the police department. He gave up his houseboat, sold his car and even gave away some of his personal possessions to embark on a cross-country hitchhiking trip that since has been referred to as White's "missing year." During 1972, White traveled alone and had little or no communication with his family or friends in San Francisco; no one really knew where he was. There are no records of his trip. He never bought a travel ticket or used a credit card. According to White, he followed in the footsteps of his hero, author Jack London, and visited Alaska where he said he worked for a time as a security guard. He returned to San Francisco but, for some unknown reason, did not resume his position in the police force. Instead he became a fireman assigned to the Moscow Street fire station.
Conspiratorialists have theorized that White spent his missing year in an MK ULTRA assassin training school. The project, which was largely under the control of Jim Jones, could have programmed White as it has been accused of programming Lee Harvey Oswald and others. "Programming" is a strong word. Actually, the process might well have been as simple as planting a hypnotic suggestion, that when triggered by a predetermined code word or phrase, would render the subject in a trance. He would then walk through the assassination, someone else would fire the fatal shot but he would remain as the scapegoat who couldn't honestly remember what had happened during the killing. Certainly, if White was involved in the MK ULTRA project, it will remain a closely guarded secret for decades to come, but it would explain why White, who might have been honed to a hair trigger, could no longer be trusted in uniform with a gun. Six years later, Moscone and Milk would be murdered.
Dan White married Mary Ann Burns, a fireman's daughter, and the newlyweds purchased a $70,000 home that they intended to pay for with his salary as a fireman and her salary as a schoolteacher.
A co-worker, Michael Mulesky, later recalled his association with Dan White. "You could always depend on him. He never really got excited or nervous."[132] Mulesky's opinion was unique as every other person who knew Dan White viewed him as impulsive, ill tempered, and childish. Though he often threw embarassing tantrums when he didn't get his way, White's service record in the fire department was unblemished. In 1977, he was cited for heroism after saving two children from a burning house. Four days before Moscone and Milk were killed, White was scheduled to receive a second award for rescuing a mother and child from a high- rise fire but was too busy to attend the presentation. Following White's arrest, Fire Chief Andrew Casper said, "The man still deserves the award and, we'll do it discreetly and as best we can.[133]
The 1977 elections marked a distinct shift in power from the wealthy real estate developers, who had controlled the city-wide election of supervisors to the neighborhood groups, who could now select local leaders in district elections. Under the new system, the real estate developers were able to maintain a slim majority on the Board of Supervisors but they lost some of their political power base with the election of such local advocates as Harvey Milk. The 1977 elections changed little as the wealthy conservatives still remained in power through their supported candidates like Dianne Feinstein and their puppet, Dan White.
"Unite and Fight for Dan White" was the slogan of what might best be termed an angry campaign for a seat on the Board of Supervisors. White's campaign literature best describes his politics:
I am not going to be forced out of San Francisco by splinter groups of radicals, social deviates and incorrigibles. You must realize there are
thousands upon thousands of frustrated angry people such as yourselves waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate the malignancies which blight our beautiful city.[134]
White would later privately confide to board colleague Harvey Milk that his comments on "social deviates and incorrigibles" referred to drug addicts but the voters in his ultra-conservative District 8 took him to mean the gays who had taken over the Castro Street District, only two miles from their neighborhood.
Most of White's campaign supporters were police and fire personnel, who canvassed District 8 door-to-door. White reportedly bullied his opponents in the election, even hiring youth gangs to disrupt their rallies. On one occasion a group of Nazis, in full dress uniform complete with "Unite and Fight for Dan White" buttons, posed a threatening appearance at a district meeting. When White's opponent asked him to have the Nazis removed from the meeting, "Gentle Dan," (as the Nazis called him) refused. White's intimidation tactics were successful. He won the election.
During the formal inauguration, each new board member made an introductory statement. White used his time to pay tribute to his Irish grandmother. The impression was that of an athlete, who after scoring the winning goal, looks into the television cameras to say, "Hi Mom!" In Harvey Milk's introduction, he said, "A true function of politics is not just to pass laws, but to give hope." In a harsh response that would set the tone for their political relationship, Supervisor Dianne Feinstein said, "Hope is fine, but you can't live on hope. The name of the game is six votes.[135]
Six votes was the majority on the Board of Supervisors and Feinstein quickly established that she and her real estate supporters had control when she was elected Board President by a 6 to 5 vote. White voted for Feinstein, while Milk voted against her. In the coming year, most of the major issues confronting the board were decided by a six to five vote in favor of Feinstein and White. Dianne Feinstein was a product of "old city politics." A conservative with the facade of a liberal, she earned a reputation with the press as a "limousine liberal." Harvey Milk's opinion of Feinstein was not as kind, he called her "The Wicked Witch of the West."
Like the other newly elected supervisors, Dan White hosted post-campaign fund-raising dinners to help defray expenses. Labor leader Stan Smith attended one such benefit. A huge American flag hung from a balcony overhead. The theme from "Rocky," a powerfully dramatic piece of music, heralded the appearance of White, who marched in a stiff, military manner back and forth on the balcony. Smith's dinner companion made the comment,
I'm not sure whether he thinks he's George Patton or Adolph Hitler, but he sure makes me nervous... There's something wrong with that man.
He's wound up too tight. Something is wrong.[136]
Her first impression of Dan White was reinforced when she had the opportunity to speak with him personally, "He responded like he was programmed. He was like a spring ready to go off.[137]
Intelligence was not one of Dan White's attributes. It has been said that he could be easily manipulated by anyone whose argument included the words, "God" and "country." White was a puppet of the real estate developers who first suggested that he run for office and Dianne Feinstein who secured her sixth vote by befriending the political novice as his mother mentor. White was so naive that he was not aware the city charter prohibited elected officials from holding municipal jobs. Much to his surprise, he was told to resign his $18,000 a year job as a fireman. His wife was pregnant with their first child and not working. White soon realized that he could not support his family on the meager $9,600 a year salary paid a city supervisor. He needed financial help and Dianne Feinstein came to his aid and sealed his fate.
Feinstein introduced White to one of her real estate developer friends, Warren Simmons, who was planning a shopping complex on Fisherman's Wharf, the city's most popular tourist attraction. The development, dubbed, "Pier 39," was very controversial from the start. The local news media, in article after article, accused city officials of using their public offices to favor the privately owned development with gifts of city-owned building materials and scandalously low tax assessments. On the Board of Supervisors, it was Dan White who lead the fight for lower business tax assessments in general that, in retrospect, benefitted Pier 39 and Warren Simmons. Press accusations escalated when several city supervisors, commissioners and other officials received lucrative business concessions in the Pier 39 development. Dan White's reward was a small shop that he saw as a way out of his financial difficulties. His new business sold baked potatoes, French fried potatoes, and fried potato skins to the thousands of tourists that passed by every day. A very popular and conceivably profitable hors d'oeuvre, White's stock in trade prompted him to name his shop, "The Hot Potato" but considering the trouble it got him into with the FBI, he might have more aptly named it, "The Proverbial Hot Potato."
In the November 1978 election, the only district in San Francisco to approve Briggs Proposition 6 was White's conservative District 8. In what would become the ultimate irony, White also supported Briggs' successful Proposition 7 calling for an automatic death penalty for anyone who killed a public official in the course of his duty. Moscone and Milk presented the foremost opposition to the bill but, despite their efforts, it passed into law. The first person tried under the new law would be Dan White.
On November 10, 1978, White submitted a letter of resignation to the mayor, citing financial difficulties in supporting his family on a supervisor's salary. His new business needed his attention and, as evidenced by his action, was more profitable than his job at City Hall. Moscone accepted White's resignation effective immediately. On November 15, 1978, the afternoon that Congressman Leo Ran arrived in Georgetown, Guyana on his congressional investigation into Jonestown, Dan White emerged from a meeting with the Police Officers Association and the Coldwell Banker real estate firm to announce that he wanted his job back. He denied reports that the police department had pressured him to reconsider his resignation, but did say, "A few people from real estate firms have talked to me"[138] Mayor Moscone returned White's letter of resignation and told reporters, "As far as I am concerned, Dan White is the supervisor from District 8... A man has a right to"[139] change his mind. Moscone soon reversed his decision to reinstate White. Some say it was due to pressure from Supervisor Harvey Milk, who reminded Moscone that, if a liberal were to be appointed to serve the balance of White's term in office, Dianne Feinstein and the conservatives would lose their majority on the board. The newspapers reported that it was San Francisco's Chief Deputy Attorney, Tom Toomey, who spearheaded opposition to White's reappointment. Toomey called for a one week delay while his office reviewed the legal question of reinstatement. During that same week delay, San Francisco received news of Jonestown. The death toll increased with each progressive day until the grand total was reached on the same day that Tom Toomey presented the Mayor with twelve page legal report that read, in part,
San Francisco city charter does not provide for the withdrawal of a resignation once accomplished. As long as there is a legal
uncertainty, we don't think White should vote on the board.[140]
Based on the city attorney's report, Mayor Moscone announced to the press, "I want to make it clear I no longer feel duty-bound to appoint Dan White. This will be a three-year appointment and I want someone with roots in District 8."[141]. Moscone also said he would announce his decision the following Monday, November 27, 1978, at 10 A.M. Through it all, the only board member to publicly support White's request for reappointment was Dianne Feinstein. She was trying to was protect her sixth vote.
[FONT=Verdana]On Sunday evening at about 7:30 P.M., Mary Ann White returned home from an unexplained trip to Nebraska to find her hu...
VIII PUBLICITY, PROVOCATEURING AND POLITICAL POWER
If Jim Jones had his way history would remember him as a psychopathic communist whose drug-induced paranoia triggered the mass suicide of his followers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has studied Jones knows that he projected an image to the public that was almost exactly opposite reality and that unravelling the cloaks of illusion that surrounded him might well be compared to viewing the dance of the seven veils. As each veil is removed another is exposed; a veil on top of a veil, on top of a veil... To date, many of Jones false covers have been exposed but, unlike the dance of the seven veils, researchers have had no prior indication of the number of covers that surrounded Jones and have fallen short of revealing his bare essence; that is, until now.
In the last year and a half of his public career and especially in the last six months, Jones went out of his way to give the impression that he was a communist. Temple aide Deborah Layton courted the Russian and Cuban embassies in Guyana; she volunteered her help in planning their local May Day celebration and arranged for their officials to attend social events in Jonestown. Despite the fact that Jonestown had the finest medical facilities in Guyana, Jones insisted on retaining a doctor from the Russian embassy as his personal physician. Russian language classes were compulsory for Jonestown residents as Jones claimed the group might one day immigrate to the U.S.S.R. "What about Russia?" was the main objection presented by a Jonestown woman on the tape recording of the final White Night. What about Russia, indeed. Jones began the deceit in San Francisco when he befriended Angela Davis, a prominent figure in the American Communist Party. He continued the cover in Guyana, when he persuaded the Russian News Agency TASS to publish an article about Jonestown. In the rubble of the aftermath, several taped sermons and Jones' dictated memoirs were found to contain claims that the preacher was a Communist since his work in the Brazilian coup d'etat fifteen years earlier. And then there was the matter of Mike Prokes, a high ranking Temple aide whom Jones sent to the Russian Embassy on the day of the final White Night with $30,000 that supposedly represented the Temple's wealth being returned to its sponsors. Considering the Temple's $50 million net worth and the millions in cash in Jonestown, $30,000 can only be seen as a token gesture intended to give the impression that Jones was somehow affiliated with the Russians. To dispel one of his outermost covers, Jones was not a Communist. Actually, judging from the politicians and governments he supported as well as the "government" he created in the Peoples Temple, Jones was a fascist.
Another, perhaps more effective, cover was that Jones was an insane drug addict, an image that even today permeates public opinion. It was based largely on his attempt to provide a logical explanation to what he knew would be viewed as the very illogical demise of his followers.
Jonestown was a pharmaceutical field test so there was a disproportionately large amount of drugs in the community, but the drugs were intended for the human guinea pigs and not Jones, whose heightened awareness of the potential dangers prompted him to abstain from tobacco, alcohol and even moderate drugs like aspirin. Though he would often make reference to his imaginary drug habit, the only pills he took were vitamin and sugar pills.
Jones' insanity plea was a well-organized illusion that began in San Francisco when a Temple aide, who had been instructed to locate some papers, happened upon a psychiatrist's report stating Jones was a psychopath, found hidden behind a couch, The report, was a fake. Jones would never have agreed to a psychological evaluation nor would he have treated such a discrediting piece of evidence so carelessly. The aide eventually defected from the Temple to present her discovery to the public which was exactly the predetermined result that Jones desired. As Jonestown neared its finale, he tape-recorded several of his long-winded sermons; recordings that survived the carnage as evidence that the ranting and raving preacher was a madman. He also performed crazed dances with live snakes for video cameras. The film of these little stage performances also conveniently survived the carnage, as did several witnesses who claimed Jones continually warned that there was a CIA agent behind every tree surrounding the jungle community. Actually, Jones was quite knowledgeable in the field of psychology and along with the professional staff of psychologists employed in Jonestown, he was able to create a medically accurate picture of a deranged drug addict, a self-created image that survives today as most Americans think of him as just another "crazy Californian."
The Temple's California corporate charter clearly states in Article 10:
No substantial part of the activities of this
corporation shall consist of carrying on
propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence
legislation, and the corporation shall not
participate or intervene in any political
campaign on behalf of any candidate for public
office.
Article 10 was a joke for, as with the other images Jones projected to the public, the truth was exactly the opposite. The Peoples Temple was an army of political campaign workers that swayed and even fixed elections, advised politicians on pending legislation, proposed appointments and controlled virtually every political arena they entered. They were careful not to run any Temple members for public office but scores were appointed to strategic positions in government by politicians indebted to the Temple for their campaign efforts. The Peoples Temple exerted a considerable and often underrated political influence on a local, state, national and even international level.
Internationally, Jones was renowned in certain circles of the CIA as the agency's foremost authority on the politics of the Caribbean which, in the broad sense envisioned by President Kennedy, included the South American country of Guyana. His early assignments in Cuba, Guyana (then British Guiana) and Brazil established Jones as a right-wing conservative for his support of the Brazilian military coup, his opposition to the left-wing government of Cheddi Jagan in Guyana and his organization of anti-Castro Cubans. His cover varied from one of a socialist to one of a communist, depending on what the situation required, but the results of his activities always benefitted the fascist faction and were generally within the reported objectives of the CIA.
The political history of the capital city of St. George's, Grenada, bears a striking resemblance to that of Georgetown Guyana. The Caribbean countries, both former British possessions, gained their independence within eight years of each other. Both experienced communist control before a brief period o CIA-sponsored coups installed governments that were sympathetic to, if not controlled by, the United States. Also, more pertinent to this story, both governments in the course of their evolution were largely influenced by one particular CIA operative: Jim Jones.
Eighty miles off the coast of Venezuela lies the tiny nation of Grenada, a volcanic island paradise discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1498. Centuries of exploitation from the Spanish, the British and the French have exterminated the native Carib peoples and transformed the island into a spice producing, health and pleasure resort with the perfect climate, lush tropical flora, exceptional bathing beaches and hot springs. Grenada became a British possession in 1783 during the period immediately following the American revolution when England sought to secure as many colonies as possible in the New World following their loss of the United States. It was also during this period that Britain annexed British Guiana (Guyana). For nearly two centuries, Grenada remained a British possession until February 7, 1974, when the island gained its independence under a government headed by Prime Minister Eric Gairy, an unlikely statesman. Gairy was a street corner eccentric, a Rosicrucian who experimented with astral projection and soul travel , practiced a form of witchcraft called "Obeah" and counted the Reverend Jim Jones among his friends.
On May 7, 1977, Jones, his wife Marceline , attorney Tim Stoen and several Temple aides travelled to Grenada to meet with Prime Minister Gairy and to deposit one million dollars in the cash-poor Grenada banks. Jones also initiated negotiations to purchase the Grenada Holiday Inn; the largest hotel on the island. Less than a month later, Gairy traveled to the United States to meet, not with officials in Washington, but with Jim Jones in San Francisco where he was photographed in the Peoples Temple with Jones , San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally. Jones introduced Gairy to his congregation as "the valiant black leader arrested fifty-one times for resisting colonialism , internationally respected and recognized for his achievements."[151] If Gairy was arrested for resisting colonialism, it was by the British which presents a paradox as he then flew to London to receive an award from Queen Elizabeth. Sir Eric Gairy then set out on a peculiar campaign to discredit himself. Three weeks later he opened the United Nations general assembly with a plea for an international investigation into flying saucers. Rumors began to circulate that Gairy had recruited a secret police force from Grenada's prison to torture and kill his political opponents. In any event, the oppressive government of this staunch anti-socialist was overthrown on March 13, 1979 by a rebel insurrection headed by a London-educated lawyer, Maurice Bishop. Gairy was in New York at the time. Within a few months, Prime Minister Bishop announced that Russia and Cuba had agreed to provide physical and financial assistance to build the one thing Grenada needed the most -- a military jetport.
For the next four years, from five hundred to one thousand Cubans labored to construct a 10,000 foot airstrip bridging two peninsulas in the southwest corner of the island while a comparable number of CIA operatives under the cover of medical students, operatives, monitored their progress from the True Blue campus of St. George's Medical College located at the end of the George runway. One of the American leaders was John Pfister, a West agent Point graduate, a foreign service and a U.S. consul in Laos during the Vietnam War. Then in his late thirties, Pfister, whom Newsweek called a "mystery man" and whose colleagues nicknamed "Field Marshal Von Fritz," found it difficult to maintain the image of a medical student, but under that cover he succeeded in establishing a network of agents and at least three radio-equipped command centers on the island.
By mid-October of 1983, the Cubans had completed 95% of the project. Pfister informed his superiors in the U.S. that the airport would soon be operational and that it was time to begin "Operation Urgent Fury;" the code name for the CIA's planned coup. On October 13, Prime Minister Bishop was placed under house arrest. Six days later he was freed by several thousand supporters who carried him to a rally at Fort Rupert where he was shot and killed by an unknown assassin. President Reagan, citing the ensuing civil disturbance as a threat to the safety of the seven hundred American "medical students," ordered an invasion of Grenada. U.S . troops parachuted onto the airport and established headquarters on the True Blue campus. Pfister's ham radio operators guided the invasion force on their conquering march across the island. Operation Urgent Fury was such a success that the entire island was taken with the loss of only nineteen American lives, and some of those deaths were accidental. President Reagan had banned any news coverage of the operation so the only reports were from the American military and the "medical students" whom they had rescued.
Contrary to Reagan's claim, the invasion of Grenada was not prompted by the assassination of Bishop and the civil unrest that followed, but by the Cubans' near completion of the military jetport. The CIA wanted the strategically located jetport for relaying supplies to underground forces they supported in Central and South America. They did not want the Cubans to control it but were pleased to allow them to build it. The first planes to land were U.S. C141 transports. The CIA wrote Grenada's history; a history that ended in a U.S. military take-over but that began with the involvement of Jim Jones. Though the federal government never openly joined Jones in his support of Prime Minister Eric Gairy, they certainly opposed Gairy's political opponents. Ironically, in the end, the occupying U.S. Marines in Grenada set up their headquarters in the Holiday Inn; the same Holiday Inn that just a few years earlier Jones had offered to purchase, presumably for the CIA station that was eventually established on the True Blue campus. In the aftermath of Jonestown, over twenty thousand dollars of Temple funds remained unclaimed in a Grenada bank.
Ninety miles south of Grenada lies the capital city of Port of Spain, Trinidad, another focal point in Jones' work in Caribbean politics. The Temple's ocean-going ships, that reportedly smuggled everything from drugs to guns, often called on the Port of Spain. California's Lieutenant Governor, Mervyn Dymally, one of Jones' foremost political allies, was a native of Trinidad as was Shiva Naipaul, an Oxford graduate who authored a well written book on Jonestown published in England under the title Black and White. Though interesting in its approach to the the subject, Naipaul's book fails to expose Jones' affiliation with the CIA.
The one country outside the Caribbean that received the most attention from Jones was Chile. Chile had been listed as one of the "Nine Places to Hide" in the 1962 Esquire article that had such a profound effect on Jones career. The article reported:
The Central Valley of Chile, from the modern
capital city of Santiago south to Concepcion, is
as fertile and attractive as the central valley
of California ...where it is possible to grow
any animal or vegetable one might want and to
vary it with the rich seafood brought north by the Humboldt
Current from the radiation-free waters of the
Antarctic.., there would be friendly and
predominantly European neighbors.[152]
Regardless of any speculation that the Esquire article was some sort of coded message for CIA operatives, agency personnel did migrate to the South American country where they would later be instrumental in he murder of Chilean president Salvador Allende and the Nazi-like regime that assumed power. Chile was one of the sites Jones considered for his South American community, but the plan was abandoned early on as Jones' reputation as a left-wing humanitarian was more valuable to the agency in that he could befriend the deposed Chilean government and insure their silence regarding the CIA's plot to overthrow them. Central to Jones' work as an agent provocateur to the exiled Chileans was Laura Allende who, in response to Jones' invitation, visited the San Francisco Peoples Temple where he introduced her to the congregation,
I have seen sainted people, people that are
living epistles. And I think Laura Allende is
in that category. You see other people making
sacrifices, as she is, and you say to yourself ,
'What less can I do?'[153]
Other exiled Chilean officials, like the former Minister of Finance, were also guests of the San Francisco Temple, which boasted an active role in the Chilean refugee movement. Top Temple aide and political paralegal Jann Gurvich housed at least one such refugee and eventually relinquished her California apartment to the Chilean when she left the country for Jonestown. Somehow, Jones managed to obtain copies of Chilean torture films allegedly taken by the CIA during interrogations conducted in a ship anchored off the coast of Chile. Though the films have not survived, Jones required his congregation to critique the macabre movies and some of their reports, describing the torture of two women, have survived. One victim, who was pregnant, was given a Caesarean section without anesthetic while her husband was forced to watch the painful death of his wife and child. The other victim was repeatedly raped by a team of trained police dogs. Jones used the torture films as evidence of the true nature of the CIA, a terror tactic intended to frighten his congregation into remaining under his "protection" in the Peoples Temple. Jones' relationship with the exiled Chilean government undoubtedly provided the CIA with valuable information and helped to suppress stories of the agency's involvement in their overthrow
On a national level, Jones was very close to the Oval Office. He first worked in the Eisenhower administration planning the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he was number two man in President Kennedy's British Guiana operation and boasted that Lyndon Johnson was a member of the Disciples of Christ, the denomination that had ordained him a minister. He worked for the election of Richard Nixon and counselled him on a Supreme Court appointment. He advised Carter and Mondale on U.S. Cuban relations and provided over 10% of their campaign volunteers in California.
Statewide, in California, Jones worked closely with then Governor Ronald Reagan and his successor Jerry Brown. Brown often attended services at the Peoples Temple as did Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, who visited Jonestown on two separate occasions. California Assemblyman Willie Brown, Art Agnos and Senator Milton Marks were also supportive of Jones' work. In San Francisco, Jones directed the massive voter fraud that resulted in the election of Mayor George Moscone, Sheriff Richard Hongisto and District Attorney Joe Freitas. He also had at least a working relationship with City Supervisor Dianne Feinstein and City Manager Thomas Mellon.
Jones claimed that the Peoples Temple had helped every political prisoner in the United States. His statements are only partially true. He did have a relationship with nearly every political activist in the country but his intention was not to help them but to spy on their activities. With his left-wing humanitarian image, Jones was in the perfect position to play the role of an agent provocateur to the radical element in the country. Among the many domestic political activists courted by Jones were Angela Davis (head of the U.S. Communist Party), Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, Cesar Chavez, (leader of the United Farm Workers) and Dick Gregory, to mention just a few .
Since Jones' work in the agency was primarily concerned with the control of Black and Native Americans, it was only logical that he would infiltrate their existing organizations to learn as much as possible about their leaders, plans, and aspirations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) was an obvious objective. Jones, his adopted son, Johnny, and several Temple aides were elected to the board of directors of the NAACP as the Peoples Temple controlled several hundred of the two thousand member votes in the local San Francisco chapter. Eventually, Jones would exert such a tremendous influence on the NAACP that the Black membership began to question the motives of this Caucasian leader of their organization. Jones' control of the NAACP would wane but remain sufficient for him to be recommended for the distinguished "Martin Luther King Humanitarian of the Year" award in 1977.
The Black Muslims' Temple was several doors down the street from the Peoples Temple in San Francisco and Jones often took the opportunity to escort a Temple contingent to the Muslim services and they reciprocated. He had so gained their trust as to be invited to give the keynote address to the 20,000 who attended the Muslims' Spiritual Jubilee held in Los Angeles in 1976. Of the several dozen dignitaries on the stage of the Los Angeles Convention Center, Jones' was the only white face.
Certainly the Black Panther Party did not escape Jones' attention. The complicated and often confusing story begins, for lack of a better place, with a California conspiratorialist writer named Donald Freed. Freed had co-authored a book entitled Executive Action with the country's foremost authority on CIA assassinations, Memphis attorney Mark Lane. Freed was also the leader of "Friends of the Black Panthers," a Caucasian group of intellectuals who sympathized with what, despite public opinion, was a very valuable organization. When the co-founder of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, was wrongly accused of crimes in California and fled in exile to Cuba, it was Donald Freed who recommended that he retain attorney Charles Garry as counsel. Charles Garry, who represented Johnny Spain, a Black Panther defendant in the San Quentin Six trial, encouraged Newton to remain in Cuba, something that eventually would have totally discredited Newton. Political paralegal and Temple spy Jann Gurvich worked in Garry's office to keep a finger on the pulse of the story. About this time, Jim Jones entered the story when he travelled to Havana, Cuba , for the express purpose of meeting with Huey Newton. What transpired is not known, but upon his return, Jones would criticize Newton in what may or may not have been intended as "private meetings with his top aides. Jones also recruited Newton's nephew, Stanley Clayton, into the Peoples Temple probably as a bargaining chip. Newton would ignore Garry's advice and return to the U.S. to face charges of which he was acquitted. Garry went on to represent Jim Jones, along with Donald Freed and Mark Lane, whom Jones hired to sue the CIA and other federal agencies for their alleged harassment of the Peoples Temple. Jones obviously used his attorneys to give the impression he was opposed to the CIA. There were as many agents provocateur (under the COINTELPRO project--a federal government attempt to discredit and destroy organizations like the Black Panthers) as there were legitimate workers in the Black Panthers and researchers in the CIA conspiracy field. It is very difficult to assess who was working for whom but, in the final analysis, there were only four people who were allowed to overtly escape Jonestown after the mass suicide had begun; Charles Garry in the company of Mark Lane, and Stanley Clayton in the company of Odell Rhodes, a Special Forces Green Beret who was once the majordomo of what was then President Kennedy's military pet project. What Jones was trying to accomplish with the Black Panthers is not known. It suffices to say that he courted a close relationship with the Black Panthers to monitor their activities for the CIA.
Another target of Jones' work as an agent provocateur was Dennis Banks, leader of the American Indian Movement (AIM). After having played a major role in the 1973 Indian uprising in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, Banks had fled to California where he fought extradition to South Dakota and what he believed would be certain death. His fears were not unfounded as his co-defendant, Russell Means, who surrendered to the authorities, had been the victim of a near-fatal knife attack in a South Dakota prison.
Dennis Banks was in deep trouble. His California sanctuary was in question, his children were forced into hiding on a reservation in Oklahoma and his wife, Ka-mook, and the couple's newborn child had been imprisoned in Oregon. In addition to all this, he was being plagued with a rash of informants and spies, provocateurs from the Treasury department and particularly from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Amidst this, the most critical period in Banks' life, entered the one man with the power to resolve all his problems at once: Jim Jones.
Jones introduced himself as a clergyman who had encouraged American Indians into his fold. They knew him as a man who often boasted of a Cherokee ancestry on his mother's side of the family. Though his facial features resembled the classic Native American, Jones' claims of Indian heritage have never been accepted outside the Peoples Temple. Characteristically, he said whatever was required for a particular situation, in this case to gain a representative sampling of Native Americans and the confidence of their national leader, Dennis Banks. Jones assured Banks that through his connections in Sacramento he could arrange to stay any attempts to extradite him to South Dakota. He also paid the $19,500 bail to free Banks' wife and child and arranged for the entire family to be reunited in California where, in an address to the Peoples Temple, the Indian leader expressed his appreciation. "A week ago, my wife was behind an iron door, my children in Oklahoma. You, in your love, have moved the iron door."[154] Banks honestly felt indebted to Jones but he began to question the motives of this self-appointed Caucasian patron of the Indian cause. Perhaps it was Jones'
unexpected generosity or his many questions about AIM or the fact that the Treasury Department had stopped their harassment as soon as Banks had aligned himself with Jones but, nevertheless, Banks' suspicions threatened to expose Jones' work with the federal government. The possibility that Banks might discover that Jones was a CIA operative forced the agency to classify him in the negative. Whether he lived or died depended largely on David Conn, a Treasury agent (according to a sworn statement signed by Banks and corroborated by others including Conn's ex-wife, Donna , who once said of the couple's employment with the Treasury Department, "We both have high priority numbers." David Conn was employed as a surveyor at the Chevron Oil Refinery in the San Francisco East Bay. He counted Temple members Elmer Mertle, Grace Stoen and Michael Prokes among his friends.
In May of 1977, as Jim Jones prepared his final departure to Jonestown, David Conn arranged a meeting with Dennis Banks in the El Cerrito home of Indian leader Lehman Brightman, presumably to discuss his possible extradition to South Dakota. At the meeting, Conn would speak of little besides Jim Jones. He claimed to be part of an interagency investigation into the Temple's shipment of weapons to Guyana. At other times, he claimed to have been investigating the Peoples Temple for "personal" reasons since about 1970. Banks couldn't understand what Jim Jones had to do with his possible extradition, except that he had promised to stay any attempts, that is until Conn strongly suggested that if he wanted immunity from extradition he first must issue a public statement condemning Jones and his Peoples Temple. Conn insisted that Banks meet that very evening with another Treasury agent he identified only as "Jim." Banks refused. The next day, Conn phoned to try and persuade Banks to attend a meeting with the Treasury Department. Banks wanted to bring his lawyer. Conn insisted he come alone. Again Banks refused out of fear he would be kidnapped and released perhaps unharmed but in South Dakota.
Jones proceeded to tell Banks and others that Patty Cartmell's Temple intelligence agents had gained access to the crawl space under the home of David Conn's ex-wife to overhear the plans of the Treasury agents. Banks fell for the deceit. He had been purposely manipulated into believing that he and Jim Jones shared a common enemy in the U.S. Treasury Department. Though he probably doesn't realize it, Banks' acceptance saved his life for, if of the charade he continued to question Jones' true motives, he would have had to have been killed either before or during the White Night in Jonestown.
By early September, Jones had taken his last leave of the United States. Banks was left without a patron and, due to Conn's proposal, on the horns of a dilemma. He took the only honorable way out and signed a sworn statement on September 6, 1977, attesting to what he believed was the Treasury Department's attempt to blackmail him into discrediting Jones.
With the help of Larry Lee Litke, an attorney for Alameda County, David Conn went, on to co-author a book about the Peoples Temple, entitled The Cult That Died. Though the work is interesting and rather accurate in its account of Jones' career, it fails to expose his employment with the CIA or the true nature of the Jonestown massacre.
In his public career, Jones played the role of a communist sympathizer, a socialist, a left-wing liberal Democrat, and a humanitarian who championed the cause of the Black and Native American people. But in reality, for the twenty-five years prior to his rise in San Francisco, Jones was a registered Republican whose ultra-conservative, right-wing politics were reflective of the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazi Party and are best evidenced by the fascist form of his Peoples Temple. The politics of Jim Jones are those of the son of a mid-western, Bible-belt marshall and Ku Klux Klan member. Those were his true political roots, which surfaced only occasionally, as with his close relationship with the head of the John Birch Society in California.
It is difficult to grasp Jones' political maneuvering as most of the crucial exchanges occurred in private, unreported meetings. But the number of important political leaders who accepted him as a virtual head of state attests to a power that was obviously disproportionate to his ministry. Jones' political clout stemmed not from his Peoples Temple but from his employer: The Central Intelligence Agency.
IX OF DOGS AND MONKEYS
The public life of Jim Jones began, progressed and ended with his manipulation of dogs and monkeys. Throughout his career, Jones surrounded himself with a variety of animals. These were the pet mascots for his preliminary experiments in behaviour modification that helped him to develop his tremendous power to manipulate people. Over the years, these animals provided their master with money, recruits, favorable publicity and security guards for his Peoples Temple. They helped maintain the fallacy that Jones was a humanitarian who suffered constant attacks from racist enemies. In the final analysis, the Temple's animals provide an insight into the mind of Jim Jones. Perhaps the most accurate accounting of the Reverend Jim Jones comes from viewing his career through the eyes of dogs and monkeys.
The first congregation of the child preacher's "pretend church" was comprised of several stray dogs that young Jim had adopted. His canine congregation followed the Bible-toting boy everywhere he went and sat patiently whenever he practiced preaching to them.
Jones' pretend church grew to include the other children in his neighborhood but it remained oriented towards animals as Jim's primary function was to conduct funeral services for his playmates' deceased pets. Judging from his later treatment of animals, it is highly possible that young Jim murdered the pets just for the opportunity to officiate at the funerals. Jim Jones learned at an early age that a dead animal could give him power over people.
Years later, in an effort to finance his Peoples Temple, Jones embarked on the most absurd fund-raising campaign in religious history. He sold live Rhesus monkeys door-to-door. According to an interview published in the Indianapolis News on December 5th, 1953, Jones got the idea from an unidentified South American student who promised that there was money to be made in the monkey business. His first acquisition was a pet chimpanzee that he trained in table manners and the use of the toilet. Jones named the chimp "Sugar." Sugar enjoyed all the privileges of the other members of the household but received most of the attention as Jones had began an intensive study in primate behaviour. Sugar would die of strychnine poisoning. By Jones' account, he then imported several dozen Rhesus monkeys from South America, Africa, Thailand and India, housed them in his garage and sold them, one at a time, for $29 each. The local Black residents must have been quite surprised to discover the young White preacher at their door with a Bible in one hand and a live monkey in the other. It was the Christmas season and Jones convinced many parents that a monkey would make an excellent present for their children. The unlikely combination of salvation, racial equality and monkeys was successful in raising funds while providing a foot-in-the-door to recruit new parishioners. It was also good publicity; at least for a while.
A front page article in the Indianapolis Star, dated April 10, 1954, heralded the death of Jones' monkey business. According to the report, Jones had abandoned a recent shipment in the customs warehouse in the Federal building in Indianapolis when he refused the air-freight bill. Of the seven monkeys in the crate, three had died in transit and the remaining four were very sick. Despite efforts by the customs officials to nurse the four back to health, only two survived to be sold at the unclaimed freight auction. Though the article tarnished the preacher's reputation, it did serve to disguise the true source of the monkeys.
It would have been impossible for Jones to have profited from the sale of imported monkeys at $29 each, the cost of the operation was too prohibitive. Aside from the normal business overhead, there was the high cost of international communications, the initial price of the monkeys, the expensive crating and air freight to Indianapolis, the high mortality loss in shipment, the required vaccinations against communicable cable disease and, of course, bananas, bananas and more bananas. Jones, whose business background which would later build an empire valued between $20 and $50 million, would never have sold at a loss. Indeed, he did sell several dozen Rhesus monkeys for $29 each but they had not been imported. Jones had acquired the monkeys from a domestic research laboratory where they were to be used as subjects in medical experiments. Fearing that his association with the research lab might prove embarassing, if not incriminating, Jones staged a media manipulation by ordering a token shipment, refusing to accept it and reporting his activities to the local newspaper.
The monkey business was bizarre but important as it established Jones' early interest in behavioural science and his covert association with a medical research laboratory that apparently was of sufficient size that the loss of several dozen lab animals went unnoticed. It also attests to his ability to manipulate the press, a skill he would later hone to perfection, as well as his devious, yet intelligent, planning, as this one project built the first Peoples Temple with money, parishioners, publicity and purpose as the first in many studies in behaviour modification. In retrospect, the monkey business had all the elements of sadistic irony that marked the Temple's future projects. Whenever Jones set the record wrong he provided posterity with a glimpse of his sick sense of humour. The fact that this son of a Ku Klux Klan officer bankrolled his self-destructive interracial church by selling monkeys to his prospective Black victims is, in itself, a racial slur. There is also strong symbolism in selling lab animals to finance a medical experiment that used "lab people." It was almost as if the experiments in behaviour modification had progressed to the point where Jones, or his superiors, said, "Out with the monkeys; in with the Blacks" and, with his talent for logical planning, Jones accomplished both goals in one step.
Once he completed the transition from selling monkeys to saving Blacks, Jones returned to murdering dogs in an attempt to control people. The Indianapolis Temple was full of new Black faces but Jones realized he needed to do something spectacular to keep their attention and ensure their return. He also knew that nothing could bind a group closer than the threat of a common enemy. Since their only common enemy was Jones, himself, he proceeded to invent a fictitious one. From the very beginning, Jones claimed that his doctrine of racial equality and Utopian socialism had made him a target for the racist Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party. According to Jones, he was constantly harassed by threatening phone calls and night riding vigilantes who vandalized his parsonage. He tried very hard to impress upon his predominantly Black congregation that he was somehow a champion for their cause.
Jones had converted his then defunct monkey house into an animal shelter where he fed and found homes for stray dogs, one in particular. He brought the dog to church services and introduced it to the congregation as a wayward stray that he had compassionately adopted as his personal pet. The following Sunday morning, the congregation arrived at the Temple to discover that the building had been vandalized during the night. There was garbage spread on the front steps and swastikas painted in red on the doors. Over the entrance were written the words, "Nigger Lover." The faithful ascended the steps, passed the garbage, and into the door marked "Nigger." In the vestibule they had to side-step the corpse of their preacher's "pet dog." Its throat had been slit and the body had obviously been thrown through a nearby broken window. There was a large puddle of blood on the floor and, for the first time, the parishioners realized that the warnings on the church facade had been painted in dog's blood. They proceeded to take their places inside with the uneasy silence of a wake. When everyone was assembled, Jones made his entrance.
The air was electrified with anticipation as he walked stiff, tight-lipped and determined to the pulpit. He paused long enough to make eye contact with each of his followers and then, in the loudest voice he could muster, he screamed, "Nigger Lover! Nigger Lover! You better believe I'm a nigger lover!" The audience roared in wild applause, spurred on by White provocateurs positioned throughout the crowd. Pent up emotions from years of discriminatory treatment were released and focused on this one dramatic incident. The scheme succeeded, not only in drawing the congregation closer to Jones, but in spreading the word to other Blacks that the young White preacher was a champion of their cause. Blacks flocked to the Peoples Temple as a sanctuary from the retribution of an enemy that they perceived as growing stronger with each passing day. It was amazing what Jones could accomplish with a dead dog, a broken window and a few cans of garbage.
When the Temple moved to California in 1965, Jones made the trip in the company of his family, his Black maid and a stray dog with her litter of puppies - - all in the same car. The dogs were important as, even before he established a permanent headquarters for the Temple, he opened another animal shelter. The Redwood Valley shelter introduced the Reverend Jones to the tiny Northern California community as a civic-minded "good Samaritan" and provided an endless supply of stray dogs for his use. Once the new Peoples Temple building was completed, unseen vigilantes again hurled dead dogs onto Temple property. This time, Jones blamed the Nazis and the John Birch Society, as the Ku Klux Klan was not active in Northern California. He used the incident as an excuse to tighten security at the church and to explain the high metal fence that was erected around the perimeter. The fence apparently did not deter the alleged enemies of the Temple as they simply threw the dead dogs over the gate and onto the front lawn. Barbed wire was added to the fence, a guard tower was built at the front gate, search lights were installed and sentries, with trained German Shepherds, twenty-four hours a patrolled the compound day. The Redwood Valley Temple evolved to look very much like a Nazi concentration camp and when anyone asked why, the answer boiled down to dead dogs.
Though the dead dog tactic was, once again, successful in achieving the desired results, it was a mistake for Jones to stage the deceit in California. This was a new Peoples Temple, 2,000 miles from the old one, with a new membership and, according to Jones, a new set of invisible enemies that, against all odds, employed the same tactics as his alleged enemies in Indianapolis. The use of dead dogs in Indiana as well Indianapolis. as in California provides posterity with an obvious clue that Jones, himself, had perpetuated all the deaths. Jones realized that most people are as appalled at the murder of a helpless dog as they are a the murder of a fellow human being. With his understanding of human nature, he was able to create martyrs for his cause without risking capital punishment. The penalty for killing a dog is, at worst, a sharp reprimand from the SPCA and a nominal fine from the courts, yet it was just as effective as the murder of a human advocate of the Peoples Temple.
All of the dogs in the Redwood Valley animal shelter were put to use. Temple aides would call on prospective recruits under the pretext of giving away free puppies from the shelter. Once inside the prospect's home, the conversation would change to a dissertation on the good works of Jim Jones and an invitation to attend the next services at the Temple. The technique was a variation on the monkey business in Indiana but this time the prospective recruits were mostly Native Americans as there were very few Blacks living in the Redwood Valley area. Jones would later look to the ghettoes of San Francisco and Oakland to complete the required number of Black parishioners. Temple aide Carolyn Layton provided a record of the puppy give-away program in a typed memorandum dated June 21, 1973, in which she described a recent housecall,
(basis of C (call) giving away puppies--Mrs. S--_________ wants a dog Melvina says.[155]
The older canines in the shelter, which were too large for the puppy program, were trained as attack dogs and released in the Temple's compound at night. Their presence was as effective at keeping parishioners inside the building as it was in keeping the alleged enemies out. When the Temple moved its headquarters from Redwood Valley to San Francisco, Jones ordered Jim McElvane and Jack Beam to shoot the thirty or so remaining dogs in the kennel and bury them in a large pit on Temple property because they had outlived their purpose.
In 1973, Jones acquired a new mascot for his Redwood Valley Temple, a young chimpanzee he named "Mr. Muggs." Mr. Muggs was introduced to the congregation in the first issue of the Temple Reporter, published late in the summer of 1973. According to Jeannie Mills, a member of the Temple's publication staff,
After thousands of papers had been printed and folded, Jim found a sentence that had to be deleted. We destroyed thousands of papers because of that one sentence. In an article about "Mr. Muggs," the chimpanzee that our church had adopted, the newspaper stated that Muggs had been saved from scientific experimentation. Jim was afraid that sentence (containing the word 'vivisection') might offend the scientific community, so we had to reprint the entire paper saying that Muggs had been "grossly mistreated."[156]
Jones was certainly not afraid of offending the scientific community in general as much as he was afraid of exposing the particular medical research laboratory that had given Mr. Muggs to him. For the second time in his career, he had gone to great lengths to suppress the identity of the benefactor of his monkeys. In all probability, Mr. Muggs came from the Berkeley laboratory of Dr. Lawrence Layton, the former chief of the Chemical Warfare Division, whose family played such a prominent role in the Peoples Temple and the experiment in Jonestown.
In addition to serving as the Temple's mascot and living testimony to Jones' humanitarian heart, Muggs provided another important service to the Redwood Valley compound. Muggs's huge outdoor cage was built near the entrance to the estate in order to camouflage the guard tower, searchlights and short wave radio antenna that were installed on its roof. To outside observers, who questioned the concentration camp setting, Temple members would respond that the unusual structure was not a guard tower but the home of Mr. Muggs, the chimpanzee that their beloved leader had rescued from a torturous existence at the hands of its former owner.
Sometime in 1974, Mr. Muggs was shipped from California to Jonestown with the advance party that cleared the jungle floor for cultivation. Following the carnage in 1978, Max Krebs, the U.S. Ambassador to Guyana from 1974 to 1976, provided a statement to the Congressional committee investigating the Peoples Temple in which he described his brief inspection tour of the early stages of Jonestown. Krebs reported that the Americans and the local Guyanese laborers they hired toiled to build a town in the muddy, seemingly uninhabitable, jungle. He noted that the accommodations were primitive, that is, except for the new home of Mr. Muggs, of which he wrote,
...the comparatively sumptuous roofed cage in
which was housed a chimpanzee (or some kind of
primate), reportedly rescued from an unkind fate
with a circus or zoo in California and brought
to Guyana.[157]
The key words in the testimony are "reportedly rescued." Krebs, no doubt, received his information from a Temple worker who inadvertently perpetuated the lie regarding Muggs' former owner but who could only speculate on Jones' explanation that Muggs had been "grossly mistreated."
By 1977, when Jones and the balance of the Temple pioneers arrived in Guyana, there were several dogs living in Jonestown. These were the communal pets and watchdogs that provided an early warning system against the jaguars that frequently prowled the jungle community at night. On one occasion, Jones boasted to a visiting dignitary that he had invented a wheelchair-like device for three legged dogs. This would not have been the first time that Jones amputated an animal's leg as a publicity stunt.
In the final hour of Jonestown, with most of the residents lying dead in neat, orderly piles, Jones and his surviving guards were preparing to depart on their planned thirteen mile hike across the Venezuelan border when they realized the dogs presented a hindrance to their escape as they would undoubtedly follow the group into Venezuela rather than remain with the nine hundred dead in Jonestown. Jones ordered the dogs assembled and shot. Also, in a symbolic move, he ordered that Mr. Muggs receive a dosage of cyanide. Muggs died in his cage, as did the other guinea pigs in the experiment. The killing of Mr. Muggs and the Jonestown dogs has been reported as evidence that the crazed Bishop Jones wanted to destroy all life in his jungle community, but such was not the case as the community's collection of exotic birds was spared. Days later, when the first outsiders arrived to survey they found the birds resting on their perches like silent sentinels above the carnage.
Dogs and monkeys; throughout his career, Jones used and abused them to achieve his desired results. It is essential to fully understand his inhumane treatment of these animals for it was with this same ruthless brutality that Jim Jones treated people.
X IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE
In 1593, after exploring the rain forests and savannahs of the Northeast shoulder of South America, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote: "If God aides me to settle Guiana, Trinidad will be the richest trade center in the Indies, for if Guiana was one-twentieth of what it was supposed to be, it would be richer than Peru." With this and other encouraging reports, Europe soon sought to colonize the sparsely populated region that eventually was subdivided into French Guiana (famed for its Devil's Island), Dutch Guiana (now known as Surinam) and British Guiana (now called simply Guyana). In the early 1800's, following the loss of their North American colonies, Britain declared sovereignty over a tract of jungle about the size of the state of Idaho. Poison dart guns and arrows were no match for the British musket; there was little or no resistance to the take-over and the primitive natives simply retreated into the interior. British Guiana was rich in gold, diamonds, manganese, bauxite and timber, but more important than its mineral and natural resources was the tremendous potential for agriculture. The English imported Black African slaves and East Indian indentured servants to labor in their lucrative rice and sugarcane fields as well as in the colony's mining, timber and fishing industries. The capital city of Georgetown, named for the king of England, was built on the coast where most of the EngIish enterprises were concentrated. Few ventured into the hostile interior. Today, most of the 800,000 inhabitants of Guyana are the descendants of Black Africans and East Indians with only a few scattered Amerindians: the native people. Guyana is the only South American country where English is the official language. It is bordered on the south by Brazil , on the east by Surinam, on the west by Venezuela and on the north by the Atlantic Ocean which is the only border that is not contested. It is so isolated that there are no roads or railway lines connecting it to neighboring countries.
The political scenario in Guyana that led to the Jonestown Agricultural and Medical Mission began in 1953 when the People's Progressive Party suspended the British constitution and, though still a British colony, took the first step towards independence. The PPP, a coalition of the two major indigenous factions, was controlled by Forbes Burnham, representing the Blacks, and Cheddi Jagan and his American wife Janet, representing the East Indians. A year later a power struggle ensued and the two factions split. Jagan's socialist PPP maintained control for the next ten years while Burnham formed the People's National Congress and waited for his turn . His opportunity came in 1963 when, with the help of the British Colonial Office and the Central Intelligence Agency, Burnham was installed as Prime Minister. Three years later, Burnham severed ties with England, declared independence and renamed his country the cooperative Republic of Guyana. Until his death in 1985, Burnham remained in power through elections that the opposition party claimed were fraudulent. Janet Jagan often cites the example of a mysterious American who appeared in Georgetown just prior to the balloting. She contends he was a CIA consultant in election rigging and she is probably correct.
Prime Minister Burnham (who almost everyone except the CIA agrees was a puppet of the CIA) formulated a master-plan for the 1970's that would make the decade prominent in his country's history for more then just the Jonestown experiment. He faced several problems. Though he controlled the capital city of Georgetown, that was about the extent of his domain. Most of the natural resources in the interior were owned by foreign business concerns and over 80% of its land was claimed by neighboring Venezuela and Surinam. Regarding the former, Burnham nationalized Canadian and U.S. bauxite mining operations and British sugar plantations from 1971 until 1976 when the purge of foreign interests was completed. Nationalizing the mining operations of Reynolds Aluminum, Union Carbide and Alcan in 1974 is of particular interest to this story as their mines in Port Kaituma and Mathews Ridge were only about fifteen miles from Jonestown. The Port Kaituma airstrip that served Jonestown, and as a stage for Congressman Ryan's assassination, was built by these American mining interests to support their local operations. Guyana did not immediately profit from nationalizing its industries as production ceased due to a lack of domestic experience and ambition. Guyana's relationship with the United States continued to decline until reaching a low ebb in late 1976 when, on October 6th, sabotaged Air Cabana Flight 455 exploded just minutes after taking off from Barbados. It crashed into the sea. On board the flight bound for Havana were the Cuban National Fencing Team, a delegation of North Koreans and eleven Guyanese diplomats; all 73 passengers were killed. Only eight bodies were recovered. It was the culmination of a three-month reign of terror by the Miami-based Cubans under the direction of the CIA. The first bombing, like the last, was an attempt to down an Air Cubana flight but the time bomb exploded on a baggage cart in the middle of the airport runway. The bomb was on time; the plane was late. In September the U. S. based Cubans claimed responsibility for bombing Guyana's consulate in Trinidad; there were no fatalities. About the same time, Orlando Letelier, former Chilean Ambassador to the United States, was killed in a car bombing in Washington, D.C. credited to the same group under the direction of CIA mercenaries in the service of the new Chilean regime. Finally, the exiled Cubans claimed to have downed Air Cubana Flight 455, using an altimeter instead of a clock for detonation. According to a BBC interview, taped days before his disappearance, CIA arms dealer Frank Terpil described the agency's common use of this device that detonates only when the plane reaches a predetermined altitude, insuring total destruction. The altitude detonation device works only in the non-pressurized baggage compartment. According to Terpil's last testimony, it was quite easy to buy a ticket, check a bag with the bomb and never board the plane, or hide the bomb in a gift and give it to the intended victim or, since it did not matter, anyone else booked on the flight. Terpil admitted to selling such devices. He also admitted that one of his customers was Jim Jones. Eventually, CIA operative Luis Posada and Miami terrorist leader Dr. Orlando Bosch were jailed in Caracas, Venezuela, charged in the bombing of Air Cubana Flight 455. In the end they were just two more anti-Castro Cuban exiles, sacrificed by the agency that anti-Castro claimed to support them.
Fidel Castro held a memorial service for the crash victims in which one million Cubans, one-tenth of the population, gathered in a square to hear their leader say, "The CIA is behind all these deeds." Washington frustrated the situation by delaying several days before they reluctantly sent their condolences to Forbes Burnham at the loss of his ministers. Burnham proceeded to broadcast a fiery speech in which he claimed, "The friends of the CIA, the people that are harbored by the CIA, the people that have been encouraged by the CIA, the people who had guns from the CIA to invade Cuba in 1961 are responsible." The U.S. State Department immediately responded in a note of protest to Burnham. John Blacken, the U.S. Charge' in Guyana recalled to Washington as further evidence was of their indignation. Henry Kissinger, dissatisfied with the initial State Department response, issued a second statement referring to Burnham's accusations of U.S. complacency in the bombing of Flight 455 as "bold faced lies." Three months later and a few days into the new Carter administration, Blacken was sent back to Georgetown, ending whatever threat the State Department wished to convey and beginning a resumption of normal relations that would prove to be very profitable to Burnham.
Dictators, like Castro, Burnham and others installed by the CIA, all seem to follow the same pattern. First, the agency puts their man in power. Then, after a few years, an international , incident serves as a stage to disassociate the leader from his CIA sponsors when in reality it was no more than the mass murder of his political enemies. For Castro, it was the Bay of Pigs. For Burnham, it was Flight 455. The accepted theory is that the Miami-based Cuban terrorists, under the direction of the CIA, sabotaged the flight for some unstated Cuban reasons. Though the loss of the Cuban National Fencing Team was regrettable, from the point of view of a politically- motivated' terrorist, the deaths were insignificant compared to the assassination of the North Korean and Guyanese delegations. They were more important to the CIA than the Cuban Fencing Team was to the CIA-backed terrorists. Burnham grieved the loudest at the loss of the Guyanese delegation (which included the wife of his ambassador to Cuba) but in reality their deaths improved his political position. He said he somehow felt personally responsible as it was he who recommended they take, not only that trip, but that particular flight.
The day after the bombing, Jim Jones flew from Havana to Georgetown where he surfaced in the offices of the Guyana Chronicle. Amid all the activity of what must have been a heavy news day, Jones was granted a one hour interview in which he claimed to have booked a seat on Flight 455 but had refused to board the plane at the last minute following a premonition that the CIA would try to kill him. "They've tried to kill me three times in the U.S.," he told the reporter who eventually wrote glowing accounts of the almost martyr. According to Jones, it was a very close call, so close that he had even checked his baggage on the flight before deciding not to board the plane. His bags were destroyed in the explosion. Whether related or not, one account described a Temple Planning Commission meeting in San Francisco held just prior to Jones' trip in which he passed a note around the table that read, "We now have the last part we need for the bomb." After the note had circulated, informing some and puzzling others (who would later recount the event), Jones burned it. Jones did have the motive, ability and opportunity to bomb Flight 455 but, in any event, both he and his old friend Forbes Burnham used the incident to disassociate themselves from their CIA sponsors.
While in Georgetown, Jones met with Burnham, reminisced about the past and planned the last project in their long history. Few realize how close the two men were. Jones had helped Burnham establish control in the early 60's and had kept in communication since, visiting Georgetown and Burnham often. Burnham once reciprocated and visited Jones in California but they tried to keep that a secret. Now, the two set out to solve a recurring problem that had plagued Guyana and the United States for over a century.
In Sir Walter Raleigh's time, the term "Guiana' encompassed Venezuela as well. When Venezuela achieved independence in 1821 no clear border was established with British Guiana because the region is a dense jungle inhabited only by a small number of apolitical natives. In 1840, a British agent surveyed the region and published a map which gave Britain all the hinterlands drained by the rivers that emptied into the Atlantic Ocean along the narrow strip of coastline that they occupied. Venezuela immediately protested British rule over an area that their maps referred to as "Venezuela Esperia." England stalled for forty years while they tried to fortify the frontier. In 1886, Venezuela broke off diplomatic relations with Britain and looked to the United States for help. In 1895, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution recommending arbitration, which, along with a strong note from the Secretary of State, was sent to London. The British government refused until President Grover Cleveland convinced Congress to appropriate $100,000 for an independent commission to investigate the dispute. The British agreed to arbitration with a supposedly impartial Parisian board that eventually awarded most of the disputed territory to Britain. And so it was that the issue was laid to rest in 1899, only to be reborn in 1966 when Venezuela, tempted by the weakness of the fledgling Guyanese government, claimed to have discovered evidence that the French arbitration board was in collusion with the British. They immediately invaded Guyana's Northwest territory and occupied the river island of Ankoko which Guyana claimed was half theirs. A few years earlier, a 166-ounce gold nugget had been found on the island. But more important than the region's mineral wealth was its potential to produce hydroelectric power from a proposed site on the Upper Mazaruni that could rival the largest dam in the world. With the natural resources and the inexpensive energy to convert them into finished goods, this area could become a major manufacturing center in a very short time. Fortunes were in the balance as the tension rose at the border. A war was narrowly averted when, in 1970, Venezuela signed the Port-of-Spain Protocol agreeing to forego their land claim for twelve years to see what, if anything, the new Guyanese government would do to develop, or even just occupy, the disputed territory.
The conflict was critical, because losing it would mean losing five-eighths of Guyana. Actually, if Burnham were to lose all of the land disputes, Guyana would be reduced to just Georgetown and a small strip of coast because that is where almost all the Guyanese people live. In true Caribbean fashion, 95% of the people population lives on the coast, occupying 5% of the land. The other 95% of the country, which is mostly dense jungle, is inhabited by the remaining 5% and most of them are primitive natives. Burnham's problem was that he could not claim what his people did not possess. The Guyanese people are not pioneers. They prefer to accept what exists rather than to build something new and consider venturing into the interior very dangerous. The giant anaconda and boa constrictor snakes as well as the panthers are frightening, but not as dangerous as the alligator, or the brightly colored frogs that are poisonous to the touch, or the arrows of the local natives or the ever-present chance of getting hopelessly lost in the tangled underbrush.
In pursuit of his goal to secure the interior, Burnham formed the Guyanese National Service; a Hitler-youth type organization intended to educate "The New Guiana Man" in the hopes that the generation that was coming of age would develop the agricultural potential of the disputed Northwest territory. Service was not mandatory but without it a youth was barred from the country's only university and any but the most menial jobs. Land was cleared and outposts, which were more military than agricultural, were built by the young Guyanese who had been relocated in the jungle in the service of their country. After only three years, twenty-five percent of his allotted time Burnham realized the program was failing. In the ranks of the National Service, apathy was as common as expertise was rare. They lacked the drive of the North American pioneers and what has accurately been defined as "American ingenuity." Burnham believed they could succeed if his U.S. sponsors would construct a pilot project as an example for the young Guyanese to follow, and who better to help in this endeavour than his old CIA buddy, Jim Jones, who arranged to lease a 3,852 acre tract in the disputed territory, thirteen miles from the Venezuelan border. The Peoples Temple occupied the site in December of 1973 but the five year lease, which expired one month after the massacre, was not signed until 1976. There was talk of an additional 20,000 acres but this was only rhetoric to impress the Venezuelans.
The project's contribution to the security of Guyana's interior is best described by Laurence Mann, Guyana's ambassador to the United States, in a letter he wrote to his Foreign Minister in 1977,
We have not, of course, told the press that the
peopling of the North West region of the country
near the Venezuelan front by American citizens
is a consideration not to be dismissed lightly,
since the death of American citizens in a border
war cannot be a matter of indifference to the
Department of State. Nor have we told the press
that Bishop Jones's endorsement of the Party, the Government, and its
philosophical objectives is not a matter of
regret to us.[158]
While home on leave in Georgetown, Ambassador Mann regularly slept with pretty Temple aide Paula Adams; an arrangement that no doubt pleased Jim Jones. Adams survived the events of November 18th. She moved from the e Temple's headquarters into Mann's home where she remained for the next five years. In October of 1983, Paula Adams, Ambassador Mann, and their infant son were found dead. All three had been shot point blank. Though the ambassador was probably aware that Jonestown was a CIA operation, he was not aware of the medical aspect of the project. But there is strong evidence, other than the well-timed land lease, to suggest that Forbes Burnham was cognizant of the date that Jonestown would self-destruct. One month before the massacre, with Jonestown at its most developed and impressive state, Burnham invited Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez to Georgetown for an interim conference on the disputed territory; eight years into their twelve year agreement. After viewing Jonestown from the air on his flight from Caracas, Perez was given a videotaped tour of the jungle community and reminded that any future advances by the Venezuelans into the disputed region would be met with opposition from not only Guyana but the United States as well. Perez, whose country traded with the Russians at the rate of 600 million annually, did not want Venezuela to become the focus of US Russian hostilities. He ended his state visit bu announcing Venezuela's interest in by financing the Upper Mazaruni dam in exchange for the privilege of purchasing electricity from Guyana. Apparently, Perez, and perhaps even his Russian business partners, had determined that the inexpensive energy to develop Venezuela's own uninhabited interior was more important than risking a major international confrontation by claiming land that they could not occupy or develop for profit. Perez stated publicly that Venezuela had given up any expectations of ever owning the disputed Northwest territory, resolving a problem that dated back to 1821; a problem that was solved mainly through the presence of Jonestown which, with less than four weeks to live, made its last and largest contribution to the government of Guyana. Jones had secured Burnham's control of five-eighths of Guyana and the CIA's control of Burnham.
With the tropical sunshine, adequate rainfall and virgin soil, Guyana's Northwest territory has the agricultural potential to support two, if not three, growing seasons. As described in Chapter Two, the initial phase of the Jonestown Agricultural and Medical Mission was charged in part with clearing a road to the encampment where several hundred additional acres were cleared for cultivation by slash and burn techniques. Temple workers planted a wide variety of crops including sugarcane, bananas, citrus fruits, pineapples and cassava.
Cassava, also known as manioc or yuca, is the generic name for plants in the genus Manihot of the family Euphorbiaceae. Native to tropical South America, the bush, which grows to a six foot diameter, has long provided the local natives with their main staple. There are two varieties of cassava, sweet and bitter. Bitter cassava is extremely poisonous, but edible, if heated during preparation to evaporate the hydrocyanic acid. The roots are harvested and grated by hand. The juice is the main ingredient used to prepare sauces, an intoxicating beverage and starch for clothing. The fleshy part of the root is cooked and eaten or processed into tapioca or farina, a ground meal that is the flour of cassava bread and cakes. It Is not surprising that cassava was the main staple of Jonestown, but what is surprising is that they would deliberately cultivate only the poisonous variety.
Cassava production, along with every other aspect of Jonestown, was recorded in minute detail and published as a "Progress Report" to Forbes Burnham's government. One such lengthy report, issued in the summer of 1977, was concerned in part with a new type of cassava mill invented by the Americans.
...We can grate 100 pounds of cassava in about
three minutes using the homemade mill.
We collect bitter cassava from the field in
open, 50 gallon drums, and wash them in the
trailer wagon through the jostling action on the
way to the mill. The grater is a heavy table, 3'
X 8-1/2', with a hole 12" X 14" in the middle.
Two iron pulleys welded together work the
grater. The grater blade is made with a small
three-cornered file, sharpened to make a small
hole at half-inch intervals, with each row off-
set to the last. We use a 5 HP electric motor to
turn the grater. One person puts the cassava in the
grater, and another uses a cassava root to push
the cassava against the grater.
Grated cassava comes through the bottom of the
mill into a tub lined with a plastic feed bag.
This is then lifted into the press, which
consists of two heavy truck wheel rims, 21" in
diameter, with a solid bottom, except for a 2"
hole for the juice to escape. Cassava is pressed
against the sides of a cylinder which has slits
cut about 4" apart and 6" in length. In the
bottom is a set of 5 ribs, made of crab wood, 2"
square with spacing to match. On these ribs is
placed a lead cylinder to give better pressing
effect.
The pressing plate is applied using a 10-ton
hydraulic jack. It is set against a press frame
made of wood timber. The cassava water drains
into buckets and sits for about 30 minutes to
let the starch settle to the bottom. The water
is poured off into cooking vats and then boiled
slowly for a few hours. It is strained through
cheesecloth, then slowly boiled again until cooked down to a heavy syrup called cassareep.
This is used in cooking as flavoring. The starch
is also used in cooking, and to starch clothes.
The pressed cassava is put back through the
grater and ground, then dried on the floor. It
is now about 40% of its original weight, and is
mixed into pig feed. About 1,000 pounds of
cassava produces 170 ozs. of cassareep; 100
pounds of cassava will make 50 cassava breads,
18" in diameter.
We have grated and pressed sweet potatoes by the
same process as the cassava, producing a
substance slightly sweeter than cassareep. We
dried the processed potato. Some of the Guyanese
have used it for porridge, which they said was
produced very good. We have also p a sweet
potato flour which, mixed with eggs and fired in
cakes has a meat-like flavor. It could easily be
used as a meat stretcher. It can also be stored
for periods of time in this flour state.[159]
Much of Jonestown's cassava crop was planted a few rows deep on either shoulder of the road they had cut through the jungle to the community. It was a new idea and quite ingenious. The main obstacle in farming a jungle is the indigenous plant life that first must be cleared to allow the sun to shine on the soil and the crops. Since roads had to be cleared first in the development of any virgin land, why not use the narrow strip cut through the jungle for more than just a road? Temple workers planted cassava bushes all along the unpaved way. With the road within feet of this long, thin farm field, the crops were easy to care for and harvest and the cultivation along the shoulder helped to hold the jungle at bay and prevent it from engulfing the road.
Cassava production was only one small aspect of the Jonestown Agricultural and Medical Mission and has been presented here as an example of Jonestown's work for the Guyanese government as a pilot project; an example to follow in settling the Northwest territory. It is also a study in American ingenuity. The Guyanese would never have thought of building a cassava mill out of what was basically salvaged junk. Though ideas like planting along the roadside and washing the harvested root through the jostling action of the trailer on its way to the mill might seem simple enough, they served to elevate the science of cassava production, which, after centuries, was thought to have been perfected.
There was equal attention paid to the other agricultural experiments. Every edible plant imaginable was planted in the vegetable garden, many for the first time ever in the jungle. Successes and failures were noted and reported to the Guyanese government. The experimentation was not restricted to the fields and the processing but extended to the "Jonestown Experimental and Herbal Kitchen" that even published recipes for the Guyanese.
Shelter and especially energy were also subjects covered in the Temple's progress reports. In the aftermath of the 1974 Arab oil embargo, the United States was thrust into an energy crisis that, whether real or contrived to raise prices, resulted in a search for alternative energy sources. Guyana, too poor to afford to import and rely on vast quantities of oil, was affected little by the embargo but shared with the United States the need for inexpensive energy. Power black-outs were a daily occurrence even in Georgetown and, though the upper Mazaruni power plant might one day solve Guyana's shortage, it would take years to construct the plant and even longer to run the electrical lines to remote places in the interior. Part of the task of Jonestown was to develop an energy self-sufficient jungle community, something the Guyanese National Service had failed to do.
It was impossible to ignore the energy potential of wood, especially since large quantities of jungle timber had to be removed to clear the floor for cultivation. The Jonestown sawmill cut lumber for the construction of the town. In characteristic detail, every plank, every nail and every form of design or construction of even the resident piggery was meticulously reported to the Guyanese. An entire town was built from the natural resources around it. Little more than tin roofing, nails and tools were brought in from the outside. Every part of the tree was used. Less desirable pieces were cut into firewood and burned for cooking, some heating (what little was needed) and to dry clothes. Daily rainfall makes hanging laundry out to dry in the jungle an unreliable method.
Jonestown technicians invented a wood-fired clothes dryer that solved the major problem faced by the "Jonestown launderette." Wood chips and saw-dust from the mill were used as litter for the chickens and pigs and, after soiled, spread on the fields for fertilizer. Other solid waste from humans and the few dozen cattle was first composted to produce methane gas (a clean-burning fuel used like natural gas in cooking) and then spread on the fields.
The free methane gas was used to fuel the town's electric generator; a slightly modified conventional gasoline-powered unit. Power was supplemented by a homemade wind generator built from halved 50 gallon drums and an alternator from an automobile engine. But, of all the clever inventions, Jones was particularly proud of the solar powered water heating system in the communal showers. His son-in-law , Forrest Ray Jones (not a blood relative -- he had married Jones' adopted daughter, Agnes) designed and built the thermosyphon solar water heater from conventional building materials. The system worked well and stands as another example of Jones' successful efforts to bring U.S. technology to the jungles of Guyana.
Jonestown's value to Burnham's government is almost always underrated, due primarily to Jones' attempts to hide his success from everyone except the Guyanese. One rumor claimed that the first fields cultivated were plowed up and down the hills and the rain washed the thin layer of topsoil away, exposing the barren subsoil and destroyed the land forever. Another rumor reported that the electricians had ruined the generator by miswiring it. The sawmill was said to be a failure, unable to cut the jungle hardwood. It was all Jones' propaganda. An experienced farmer (Phil Blakey), under the direction of a senior scientist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (Dr. Laurence Layton must certainly have remembered learning the technique of contour plowing in grammar school. Besides the fields surrounding Jonestown were flat. Even if it were possible to completely ruin the generator and sawmill, it would seem to be a minor set-hack for a man who possessed millions of dollars and the ability to buy anything he wanted from the United States, even a drum of cyanide. At worst, replacement would seem easy. In truth, the Jonestown electrical system worked well, better than the government operated generators elsewhere. The sawmill produced enough wood to build the town, with enough left over to construct wooden boardwalks throughout the community. The walks kept one's feet out of the mud; a convenience made possible by the lavish supply of lumber from the sawmill. In the end, the rumors about the failing of the mill were quickly accepted because Jones had deliberately left clues supporting them. Though the community had always produced its own lumber, in the aftermath of the carnage, a large order of wood for Jonestown awaited their pick up on the docks in Georgetown which gave the impression that Jones, in the midst of a jungle, could not produce his own wood. It also implied that he had a future in mind for Jonestown when actually he had only ordered a load of lumber that he never intended to pay for or pick up. The entire purpose propaganda was to create the image of of the failure intended to mask the project's value to the CIA-installed government of Guyana and help explain the project's unexplainable demise.
Thus was the nature of Jones' last published work for Prime Minister Burnham. The two men had been friends since the early 1960's when the CIA put both in their respective positions. And now, fifteen years later, they closed their last business deal. The Jonestown Agricultural and Medical Mission was a tremendous success but, despite the obvious advantages to Burnham, he wanted more in exchange for hosting the atrocity. In the last year of Jonestown, U.S. aid to Guyana went from $500,000 to $31.5 million; an increase of 6,300%. Burnham profited handsomely from his relationship with the U.S. State Department which had taken him from obscurity and made him one of the ten richest Black men in the world. He was sufficiently confident in his knowledge of the true nature of the Jonestown experiment that, amid all rumors of a Temple hit squad and hundreds of missing, he sent his wife Viola to tour the carnage. Escorted by Guyanese soldiers, the first lady was the first outsider on the scene. Most accounts imply that she was there to confiscate anything of value, but moreover, her visit stands as evidence that Burnham felt in control of a situation that all others considered extremely dangerous.
In the end, Jonestown reverted back to Burnham, who ordered all the personal effects, even the mattresses, burned, as if he feared contamination. Jonestown remained intact and today stands like a ghost town except for groups of aspiring members of the Guyana National Service who tour the facility as an outdoor classroom. The curious inventions and ingenious adaptations that represent a marriage of modern technology and pioneering spirit remain on display as the prime example of how to secure and settle Guyana's Northwest territory.
Of course, in the wake of the tragedy, Burnham tried to deny his association with Jonestown but his speech to Parliament was drowned out by the representatives' cries of "Cover Up! Shame! Cover Up!" On the eve of the next national election, in December of 1980, Burnham was accused of padding the voter registration rolls with the names of deceased Jonestown residents. Guyana's Information Minister confirmed the accusations, adding that even if the cultists were alive they were American citizens and could not vote in is insignificant a Guyanese election. This postscript is insignificant except that everyone concerned with the incident had automatically assumed that the bogus Jonestown ballots would be cast for Burnham. Such was the undeniable relationship between the CIA-sponsored Prime Minister and the CIA sponsored experiment in Jonestown. Burnham was eventually pressured to conduct an official state investigation into his government's relationship with Jonestown. All the files and records were entrusted to the Chief Justice of Guyana's Supreme Court who stored the documents in a building that soon afterwards burned to the ground. Witnesses claim that the arsonists wore GDF uniforms.