+- Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora)
+-- Forum: Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-1.html)
+--- Forum: Historical Events (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-8.html)
+--- Thread: November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US (/thread-4941.html)
November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US - Myra Bronstein - 27-11-2010
On November 18, news broke of the mass deaths of members of Peoples Temple in Jonestown. Prior to the group's move to Guyana, Peoples Temple had been based in San Francisco, so most of the dead were recent Bay Area residents, including Leo Ryan, the United States Congressman (and CIA enemy) who was murdered in the incident. On November 27, 1963 San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot dead in city hall. Both Moscone and Milk were supporters of Jim Jones.
Their deaths so soon after Jonestown seem to be more than a coincidence given that the Jonestown deaths were murders (according to Guyanese coroner Leslie Mootoo) not suicides.
"The official report stated that there were approximately 1100 people at Jonestown at the time of the massacre but other reports claim that there were closer to 1200. Of this number there were 913 dead bodies found and 167 survivors. Twenty people, if the 1100 figure is correct, are left unaccounted for. If they were the assassins, where are they now? Also unaccounted for, and never referred to in news reports, are the armed guards who were present in Jonestown but were free to come and go from the compound. A congressional aide may have been referring to these men in an Associated Press quote There are 120 white, brainwashed assassins out from Jonestown, awaiting the trigger word to pick up their hit.
Such a possibility seems to be confirmed for the theorists by a number of unusual deaths that have occurred since the Jonestown massacre. The first of these occurred in Georgetown at the Peoples Temple headquarters at the same time as the Jonestown massacre. Charles Beikman, an early Jim Jones follower who had become an adopted son was found to be responsible. Apparently, Beikman was also a Green Beret, of which there were over 300 in Guyana at the time on a training exercise.
Nine days after Jonestown, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk were killed. Both men had received financial support from Jones while he was in San Francisco and were involved in an ongoing investigation into their involvement in the disappearance of Peoples Temple funds. Dan White, described as being in a "zombie state" at the time of the killings, murdered them. Whites lawyers attempted to defend their client by stating that White had been temporarily insane due to the effects of eating too much sugar, a defence which was mockingly known as the Twinkie defence.
Some time later, Michael Prokes, a former member of the Peoples Temple, informed a press conference, held in his motel room, that the CIA and FBI were secretly holding an audiotape of the Jonestown massacre and that he was an FBI informant. Immediately following his announcement, Prokes went into the bathroom where he supposedly committed suicide.
Jeanne and Alan Mills, Peoples Temple members who had defected before the move to Guyana, were found bound and killed in their home almost a year after the Jonestown massacre. They had written a book about the Peoples Temple and had expressed their belief that they would eventually be murdered. Official reports state that the Mills probably knew their murderers, as there were no signs of forced entry or struggle. Their son was at home at the time of the murders but somehow escaped death. The case continues to remain unsolved."
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/mass/jonestown/connections_5.html
November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US - Jan Klimkowski - 27-11-2010
More:
Quote:Milk's Premonitions
by Alex Constantine
"I can be killed with ease," Milk noted in a poem written the month he died, "I can be cut right down...."
The murders of Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk had all the earmarks of mind control. Dan White, their assassin, had been a paratrooper in the 173rd Airborne Division, in which capacity he served in Vietnam. He was discharged from Fort Bragg in 1967, returned to San Francisco and joined the police department. He lived in Sausolito, drove a Porsche and generally lived far beyond his means. In 1972 he gave it all up and took a vacation since known as White's "missing year."
Back in San Francisco, he joined the fire department. His temper tantrums were an embarrassment to co-workers, though his work record was without blemish. In his run for the Board of Supervisors, White spoke as if he was "programmed," according to Stan Smith, a local labor leader. During Board sessions, White was known to slip into lapses of silence punctuated by goose-stepping walks around the chambers.
White used illegal hollow-point bullets. After Milk's body was cremated, the ashes were enshrined at his prior direction with bubble bath, signifying his homosexuality, and several packets of Kool-Aid, a clue that Milk left behind, per the will he'd revised a week before the shootings, to signify Jim Jones of the People's Temple, a CIA mind control experiment that ended with the destruction of 1200 subjects.
"I can be killed with ease," Milk noted in a poem written the month he died, "I can be cut right down." In his new will, he wrote: "Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash every closet door in the country."
November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US - Peter Lemkin - 27-11-2010
When one totals up the numbers of political murders and murders done by the deep political state it comes to an staggering number - and I'm sure we only suspect a fraction. Of course the numbers of those our policies [for which these political assassinations are often done] to allow external aggression, coups, wars, death squads, puppet states, etc. have cost the lives of MILLIONS and abject misery of a sizable portion of the Planets living systems and humans. Here is yet another that is clear, to me, as mind-control and political control and, as with most of them, covered-up and unknown to the average citizen except as a freak even by a deranged or upset lone-nut [or some such varient on the theme].
November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US - Myra Bronstein - 05-12-2010
Though I don't know anything about the site The Impious Digest they have interesting material on the links between Milk and Jim Jones/Jonestown. [Emphais mine.]
http://impiousdigest.com/index.php?Itemid=12&id=214&option=com_content&task=view
"Jim Jones and Mayor Moscone
Mayor George Moscone's former Housing Authority chairman, the Reverend Jim Jones, had fled town in advance of a series of stories damning his People's Temple. Politicians valued the Rev. Jones because he could reliably turn out a pool of precinct canvassers.
What they did not realize was that these "volunteers" were slave labor. The People's Temple tortured dissidents. Moscone, along with Supervisor Harvey Milk, it was believed, were about to blow the lid off the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments secretly continued in religious cults days before his murder at the hands of Dan White. The aim was to create suicide killers, assassins much like the middle eastern suicide bomber using a mix of psychoactive drugs, instilling religious fanaticism from birth and perfecting it in the isolation of Guyana. Charles Manson used the same technique to program a family of killers in the Manson murders of 1969. His "family" were outcasts, prostitutes, drug addicts, etc. His isolated retreat was Spahn Ranch in the California desert.
His psychoactive drug of choice was LSD, and the hypnosis and conditioning employed trigger mechanisms from Beatles music, in particular The White Album. One song, "Helter elter", written in the victims' blood in one murder scene, was likely post-hypnotic triggered. Indeed, even after his conviction for the murders, one of Manson's followers, Squeaky Fromme, made an attempt on President Gerald Ford's life. Manson believed The White Album was an outline for a coming race war.
Jonestown, Guyana was a macrocosm of the Manson family, on a much larger scale and an extension and continuation of the Mk-ULTRA program that the CIA was supposed to have ended in 1973.
The wholesale cover-up of Moscone's doomed inquiries into the CIA/Jonestown connection was far reaching. Dan White trained at Fort Bragg, NC; which is the nation's leading research centre for psychological warfare."
---
The Jonestown Massacre; CIA Mind Control Run Amok?
By Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen*
Copyright © 1995
"The CIA was first with news out of Jonestown, reporting the mass suicides. The gunmen struck at Port Kaituma airfield, as the Ryan party was preparing to depart. Ryan was assassinated in the attack. Four others died as well. Several more were shot, including Reiterman, then a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. Among the wounded was U.S. embassy official Richard Dwyer.
"Wounded, but ambulatory....
"Did Dwyer stroll back to Jonestown after the airstrip assault? Was he there during the massacre? Reportedly, at one point on a tape recorded as the killings began, [Jim] Jones's own voice commands, "Get Dwyer out of here!" Reiterman assumes that this was a "mistake" on Jones's part, that Dwyer was not actually there. If he was, however, the implications are chilling.
"Dwyer was an agent of the CIA....
"Nor was Dwyer necessarily the only intelligence-connected character in Guyana. The U.S. ambassador himself, John Burke, later went to work for the "intelligence community staff" of the CIA. Richard McCoy, another embassy official, has acknowledged his counterintelligence work for the U.S. Air Force. The socialist government of Guyana had piqued the interest of U.S. intelligence for years. If there were covert operations going on there, no one should be surprised.
"Leo Ryan's aide Joseph Holsinger feared that the CIA might have been running a covert operation there so sinister it would shock even hardened CIA-watchdogs. In 1980 Holsinger, who'd already discovered Dwyer's presence at Jonestown, received a paper from a professor at U.C. Berkeley. Called "The Penal Colony," the paper detailed how the CIA's mind-control program, code-named MK-ULTRA, was not stopped in 1973, as the CIA had told Congress. Instead, the paper reported, it had merely been transferred out of public hospitals and prisons into the more secure confines of religious cults.
"Jonestown, Holsinger believed, was one of those cults.
"There were large amounts of psychoactive drugs, i.e., mind-control, drugs found on the site of the suicides.*Larry Layton, the Jones lieutenant who became the only person charged in any of the killings (he was in the airstrip hit team, and somehow survived the Jonestown massacre), was described as sinking into a "posthypnotic trance" as he sunk ever deeper under Jones's spell. Layton's own father called him "a robot."
---
Milk's Premonitions
by Alex Constantine
"I can be killed with ease," Milk noted in a poem written the month he died, "I can be cut right down...."
The murders of Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk had all the earmarks of mind control. Dan White, their assassin, had been a paratrooper in the 173rd Airborne Division, in which capacity he served in Vietnam. He was discharged from Fort Bragg in 1967, returned to San Francisco and joined the police department. He lived in Sausolito, drove a Porsche and generally lived far beyond his means. In 1972 he gave it all up and took a vacation since known as White's "missing year."
Back in San Francisco, he joined the fire department. His temper tantrums were an embarrassment to co-workers, though his work record was without blemish. In his run for the Board of Supervisors, White spoke as if he was "programmed," according to Stan Smith, a local labor leader. During Board sessions, White was known to slip into lapses of silence punctuated by goose-stepping walks around the chambers.
White used illegal hollow-point bullets. After Milk's body was cremated, the ashes were enshrined at his prior direction with bubble bath, signifying his homosexuality, and several packets of Kool-Aid, a clue that Milk left behind, per the will he'd revised a week before the shootings, to signify Jim Jones of the People's Temple, a CIA mind control experiment that ended with the destruction of 1200 subjects.
"I can be killed with ease," Milk noted in a poem written the month he died, "I can be cut right down." In his new will, he wrote: "Let the bullets that rip through my brain smash every closet door in the country."
November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US - Myra Bronstein - 05-12-2010
[Emphasis mine.]
http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/Articles/bellefountaine.htm
"Research on Harvey Milk Renews Calls for Reappraisal of Peoples Temple"
by Michael Bellefountaine
Harvey Milk’s name appears throughout San Francisco. A municipal railway station and plaza, a park and recreation building and one of the city’s most influential political clubs are all named in his memory. A local elementary school is known as the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy, and the Eureka Valley Library is now called the Harvey Milk Branch. The theme for this year’s gay pride parade was “give them hope,” Milk’s inspirational rallying cry from gays and lesbians in San Francisco to their brothers and sisters living in rural America. The International Gay and Lesbian Historical Society is producing an extensive exhibit of Milk memorabilia which includes the blood-stained suit he was wearing when he and Mayor George Moscone were gunned down in San Francisco City Hall on November 27, 1978. Twenty-five years after his murder, Harvey Milk has been catapulted to the level of gay martyr. Without question, he has left his mark on San Francisco.
Despite all the exhibits and memorials of Harvey Milk throughout San Francisco, though, none of them acknowledges Milk’s relationship with Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.
Harvey Milk was able to draw large, diverse crowds during his campaigns, which evolved over time from focusing on the needs of small business owners to championing the politics of senior, poor and other disenfranchised people. As the first openly gay man elected in California, and one of the most prominent gay men in America, Milk’s murder galvanized a politically fractured and fledgling queer community. Longtime political opponents of Milk – and there were many – suppressed their deep-seated negativity, joined with Milk supporters and, over time, fashioned a deified image of him, as is evidenced by the Gay Historical Society’s exhibit which is titled “Saint Harvey.”
When Milk and Moscone were killed, San Franciscans were still reeling from the murder of Representative Leo Ryan and the news that hundreds of Jonestown residents, previously thought to have saved themselves by running into the jungle, were apparently willing participants in a suicide ritual. In the aftermath of their murders all mention of connections between Milk, Moscone and Jones were intentionally obscured. Out of respect for the politicians, their followers took all necessary steps to sever Milk and Moscone from the pariah Jones. It was not the only mass exodus of political support in the wake of the Jonestown tragedy. Politicians who once enjoyed volunteers, donations and votes from Peoples Temple, could not distance themselves from Jim Jones fast enough. Many of these people are still in politics today.
Because Milk and Moscone were murdered so soon after the Jonestown tragedy, there was immediate speculation that Peoples Temple was somehow involved. Ann Kronenberg, Milk’s hand- picked successor, told Milk biographer Randy Shilts, that when she first heard Milk was murdered, she thought Jim Jones was responsible. Rumors began to circulate (and some persist today) of obscure connections between Jim Jones and Milk’s murderer, Dan White. Vague rumors of a falling out between Milk and Jones also surfaced. One story has it that Milk asked Peoples Temple to remove his name from the church’s list of supporters when reports of violence and theft first came to light, and that he was outraged when the Temple failed to comply with his demand. Eventually, history settled on an official story: Jim Jones was a master manipulator who used unwitting local politicians to gain power for himself. The politicians, including Milk and Moscone, used Jones for volunteers and votes, while remaining personally distant and blissfully unaware of rumors of Temple violence, abuse, theft and even murder. The timing of Dan White’s murderous rampage was deemed coincidental.
However, upon closer inspection, it is clear that Harvey Milk was a strong advocate for Peoples Temple and Jim Jones during his political career, including the tumultuous year leading up to the Jonestown tragedy. Milk spoke at the Temple often, wrote personal letters to Jim Jones, contacted other elected officials on the Temple’s behalf, and used space in his weekly column to support the works of the Temple, even after the negative New West article went to press. Milk appeared in the pages of the Peoples Forum, the Temple newspaper, and received over fifty letters of sympathy from the residents of Jonestown when his lover, Jack Lira, killed himself in September 1978.
It is readily apparent from the letters and historical memorabilia that Milk and the Temple enjoyed a mutually supportive relationship until their concurrent deaths. Why then is the relationship such a secret, even taboo to discuss? The only biography of Milk to date, The Mayor of Castro Street, by Randy Shilts, downplays the Milk/Temple relationship, even going so far as to paint Milk as one of the countless people who cruelly ridiculed and ostracized the surviving Temple members and their supporters. Like most historians, Shilts opted for an image of an expedient politician, instead of truthfully portraying how Milk worked with Peoples Temple until the end of his life.
Enough time has passed since Milk’s brutal murder to reanalyze this relationship, to explore how and why Harvey Milk supported Peoples Temple. As people who hold Milk in high esteem, we should honestly and openly explore and reevaluate what we know about Peoples Temple, to see what it was about the church that appealed to Milk. Whether it was its pro-gay public persona, its support for embattled gay teachers, its opposition to anti-gay ballot measures, its active opposition to racism and sexism, the multiple stories throughout the pages of the Peoples Forum denouncing violence against gays and lesbians, or simply its acceptance of him and its continued support for his political campaigns – whatever the reason – Harvey Milk irrefutably supported Peoples Temple.
It may be understandable why in November 1978 the supporters of Milk would attempt to distance the newly martyred supervisor from the still-unfolding horrors of Jonestown. However, we as witnesses, historians, researchers and writers have an obligation to tell future generations the whole truth, as we understand it, to record as much documentation as possible and let the biases and subsequent interpretations transform over time. As Dr. Susan Stryker states in the curator’s statement of the Milk exhibit, “While I wanted to respect Harvey Milk’s legacy, I also wanted to suggest that in venerating him, we risk obscuring a great deal of other equally compelling gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history.”
If Milk supported Peoples Temple, now is the pivotal time for us to unveil the truth. What we cannot do is let our animosity toward Jim Jones and our horror of Jonestown taint our understanding of the individuals who made up Peoples Temple, including their incredible community based work as well as their relationships with prominent people like Harvey Milk. We should challenge the image of Temple members as mindless, uneducated zombies, and instead, portray them as the passionate, loyal and committed people who inspired Harvey Milk. It is most important that we not participate in or settle for the revisionism and obfuscation that has passed for the historical account of this relationship to date.
The extent of Milk’s relationship with Peoples Temple may never be fully known. Certainly his murder, along with that of Mayor Moscone, was yet another blow to Temple survivors. Milk and Moscone were the two most powerful San Francisco politicians who maintained close ties to Jim Jones and Peoples Temple; they could have demanded an investigation into the murder of Leo Ryan and the Jonestown tragedy. When Jones tells the residents of Jonestown in the community’s last hours that the “folks in San Francisco won’t be idle over this,” he could have been referring, in part, to Milk and Moscone. Indeed, recently-uncovered research refutes the supposition that Jones ordered Dan White to execute Milk and Moscone; to the contrary, if there were any connection between the City Hall murders and Peoples Temple, it would clearly have been because Milk and Moscone were too closely tied to Jones and the Temple.
A Lavender Look at the Temple, scheduled to be published in early 2004, examines the connections between Harvey Milk and Peoples Temple as part of its consideration of the church’s internal and external relationship with gay men and lesbians. Reviewing letters from Milk, news clippings and first hand accounts, A Lavender Look not only pieces together this complex and obscured relationship, it also includes accounts from gay and lesbian Temple members and Jonestown survivors.
November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US - Myra Bronstein - 05-12-2010
[Emphasis mine.]
http://www.whale.to/b/jonestown.html
"Quotes
Jonestown was a CIA experiment to determine whether it was possible to establish a large mind-controlled slave labor force. Jim Jones was a CIA operative and former Housing Commissioner for San Francisco. Ukiah District Attorney Tim Stone was assigned the task of procuring state mental patients and transferring their guardianship to the Peoples Temple. Assisting Jones was former police chief Dan Mitrioni, a contract CIA operative, who previously had instructed Brazilian and Bolivian security personnel in advanced torture interrogation techniques. Prior to the purchase of the Guyana property, the entire staff of the Mendocino State Mental Hospital were dismissed and replaced by Jim Jones's personnel. According to mind-control survivors, Josef Mengele programmed inmates there, at that time period. One member of Jones's staff at Mendocino was allegedly the mother of O.J. Simpson. Perhaps this explains why one psychologist, very experienced in observing mind-control survivors, noted that during Simpson's trial, he displayed symptoms of alter-personality switching. STOP MISLEADING the CHILDREN, MR. JENNINGS by Brian Desborough
The People's Temple parishioners did NOT commit "suicide," despite widespread belief to the contrary. Most took forced injections under the shoulder blade, and some 30 percent were shot. There wasn't enough cyanide in a glassful of the punch to kill an adult. It killed children. The adults had to be murdered at the People's Concentration Camp by Jones's death squads.
Jones was a Nazi with a KKK father. At the age of five, little Jimmy combed his hair in Hitler's style, and he delivered "funeral orations" over the dead pets of his friends - animals he'd murdered. Jones was Nazi, not "left-wing" (the charade is an echo of the National "Socialist" front used by the far-right Nazis to co-opt and kill off Germany's communist agitators in the wake of WW I).
And it was not Jones's corpse found at Jonestown, but a double - CIA agents and Nazis do that (look into Heinrich Mueller's "death" at the close of WW II for the classic example. CIA recruit Joseph Mengele kept getting found in South America and had to "die" five times).
Jones survived the carnage. (If the world believes otherwise, it should have a good talk with the CIA/military media. ... )
[2008] Jonestown, Harvey Milk, and George Moscone By Alex Constantine
Thorazine was used regularly at the CIA’s Jonestown , Guyana group control experiment. Survivors of Jonestown have testified as to its effectiveness. After this gruesome experiment in mind control came to its end with a massacre, large amounts of drugs were discovered. Just one footlocker at Jonestown alone contained 11,000 doses. The authorities prevented chemical autopsies of the bodies to insure secrecy of this sophisticated concentration camp which was used for medical and psychiatric experimentation by the CIA. An examination of the drugs that are used in mental hospitals to alter the minds of patients offers a clear indication of what is being used in the Monarch Mind Control programming. The Illuminati Formula 3. THE USE OF DRUGS
On page 584, Col. Gritz outlines the true story of the Jonestown, Guyana, camp massacre, and how Jonestown was actually a tightly-run concentration camp, complete with medical and psychiatric experimentation, run with the assistance of the CIA. The people who died didn't drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, as reported; half of them were cold-bloodedly murdered by hypodermic injection in the camp, and the other half who fled into the jungle were deliberately hunted down and shot in cold blood by British and American Special Forces troops. Col. Gritz spoke to an embittered SF Sergeant who'd taken part in the operation, and who subsequently wrote a book on the experience, entitled, "All The Niggers Are Dead!" When Col. Gritz asked him to explain the crudeness of that name, he replied, "Sir, that's what they were. Both blacks and whites were niggers; that's what any slave is; that's what they were. That was our final radio message when the job we were assigned was finished. " (From the book CALLED TO SERVE, by Special Forces Lt.Colonel "Bo " Gritz, 1991, p. 524.)
"A few weeks ago there was a report out of Montreal about people winning cases against the CIA because they were utterly abused in the mental health clinic that was set up by the CIA in Canada. That all came down under Allen Dulles tried to make a Manchurian Candidate. I think the Jonestown incident was an extension of In Search of the Manchurian Candidate, I think those people were conditioned to act in certain ways and would have probably just moved from Montreal to Guyana, in this case. You look at Jim Jones' background carefully, he had a lot of intelligence contact there for doing exactly what he did.........It escalated once they killed congressman Leo J. Ryan; basically, they had no other way to go, so they just tried to self-destruct the whole mission. And that means the death of hundreds of people. As I point out in the book, the medical examiner there made some startling statements, and we wouldn't even allow the bodies to be properly examined when they were brought back in to the East Coast and turned in. So obviously it was a cover-up. Jonestown I think was an extension of Mk-Ultra from the CIA and there are probably other experiments going on........I think the Special Forces units were pulled together as an exterminator after it had reached a point where they had to destroy the evidence."--Bo Gritz Interrogated by Adam Parfrey
"I hope it is becoming clear to you the various levels that are used by the Intel community to get their job done. Remember Jonestown? It was one of ours that went sour because a "Clear Eyes" was in the group. "When he, the "Clear Eyes", began firing on the runway, it all self destructed. Congressman Leo Ryan, who was killed, knew it was a government operation. The "Clear Eyes" was accidentally, through a lone sequence, activated! There was no way to stop the killings. All members of the cult were programmed to at least level 3. There were only 3 deaths attributable to cyanide, the rest died of gunfire. Now you know little more about our line of work. I am glad I am out of it." Gunther Russbacher"
Book
Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence by Michael Meiers
External
The Jonestown Genocide by Robert Sterling
http://www.parascope.com/articles/0997/jonestown.htm
November 27, 1963: Mayor Moscone & City Supervisor Harvey Milk are murdered in US - Myra Bronstein - 05-12-2010
[Emphasis mine.]
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/169344-The-Lesson-of-Jonestown
The Lesson of Jonestown
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:59 CST
Sarah Golstene
Sott.net
The events of November 18, 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana were a tragedy that few can come to grips with even today, 30 years later. But that was not a singular event. As a sign posted at Jonestown read, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
I'm Warren Olney in Los Angeles. Ninety minutes ago came word from Guyana, making this bizarre story more bizarre than ever. Troops from Guyana have found between three and four hundred bodies at the People's Temple commune at Jonestown. No marks of violence on any of the bodies. No marks of anyone alive, despite reports that as many as 1,200 people lived in Jonestown. There had been predictions that a mass suicide would occur from several defectors. We don't know that that's what happened. We don't know what happened to the rest of the people who lived at the commune. We don't know what's happened to attorneys Mark Lane or Charles Garry, or to the Reverend Jim Jones. And we don't know how much longer this awful story will take to unfold. For Edwin Newman and for all of us at NBC, I'm Warren Olney in Los Angeles.
This is not the article I'd intended to write to mark the 30th anniversary of the horrific events the took place in Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978. I'd already written several pages of scathing expose of the CIA and their ongoing criminal activities in South America and of how Jonestown was a CIA sponsored mind control experiment.
Is that really the key lesson of Jonestown? Is there anyone with half a working brain that is not aware of what the CIA does? That The Agency is filled to the brim with murderous psychopaths who get their jollies by torturing innocent citizens and manipulating foreign governments?
The evidence of CIA involvement in Jonestown is too strong to ignore. Jim Jones was friends with Dan Mitrione, the CIA agent notorious for both torturing South American political dissidents and teaching the security thugs of the right-wing dictators there how to torture for themselves. Mitrione's torture lessons were hands-on, demonstrating the techniques using beggars taken from the streets. He was memorialized in the film State of Siege, though his name was changed in the film to Philip Michael Santore. Following his death at the hands of the Uruguayan Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, or Tupamaros, Mitrione was all but canonized as a saint by the right-wing in the U.S. None other than Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis held a benefit to raise money for his family in his home town of Richmond, Indiana after his death. White House spokesman, Ron Ziegler, said of him, "Mr. Mitrione's devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.''
All this for a man who not only tortured innocent beggars pulled from the streets of South Amercian countries but also had a soundproof room built in the basement of his Montevideo, Uruguay home. I don't want to even think of what went on there for his personal entertainment.
It was in Richmond, Indiana that Mitrione and Jones met. Mitrione was the Chief of Police and Jones was a young street preacher who'd had an obsession with religion, death and racial integration since he was a small child. And he was charismatic.
Mitrione took a keen interest in the young preacher. While we have no solid documentation on the details of any ongoing relationship between them after Mitrione left the Richmond Police and joined the CIA, we do know of one very curious fact. In the early 1960's, Mitrione was stationed in Brazil. At the very same time, Jim Jones packed up his family and moved to Brazil, ostensibly to preach there. What he told his Brazilian neighbors had nothing to do with preaching, however. He claimed to work for Naval Intelligence and to be supported in Brazil by the U.S. Embassy. One of his sons claims that Jones took regular trips to Belo Horizonte, the home of the CIA's Brazilian headquarters and the first place Mitrione was stationed in Brazil.
Jones left Brazil in 1963 $10,000 richer, nearly twice the average yearly income in the U.S. at that time. He returned to Indiana and established the People's Temple there, eventually moving it to Ukiah, California, a few hours north of San Francisco. He gathered his flock from amongst the poor and disenfranchised, mostly black, preaching racial integration, equality and an utopian society in which all would be respected for who they were rather than the color of their skin. His notoriety was such that he was referred to as the "Messiah from Ukiah."
When Jones eventually moved the Temple to San Francisco and Los Angeles, his star really began to rise. His flock numbered in the thousands, and they would do whatever he asked them to do. Thousands of people at your command meant serious political clout. Jones put that clout to work helping George Moscone become the Mayor of San Francisco. Moscone won by a narrow margin - a margin so narrow that it could be accounted for by the population of the People's Temple, all of whom voted for Moscone. There were also rumors that Jones had bussed in thousands to vote illegally for Moscone, too. Jones was rewarded with the title of Housing Authority Chairman of San Francisco.
Political support for Jones was strong. He was passionately promoted by Speaker of the California State Assembly, Willie Brown, Angela Davis and, of course, Mayor George Moscone. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley visited the temple. California Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally flew to Guyana to visit the agricultural project then underway. First Lady Rosalyn Carter invited Jones for a private dinner during a visit to San Francisco. When Mrs. Carter arrived to speak at the shabby San Francisco Democratic Party headquarters, it was Jones who swelled the embarrassingly small showing of 150 people into a more respectable 750 by busing in 600 People's Temple members for the event. Incidentally, hundreds of letters arrived the very next day at Party headquarters praising Jones. For the letters to arrive the next day, they had to have been mailed before the event.
It was understood in San Francisco that if a political race was close, it was impossible to win it without the support of Jones. But word was about to leak in the press that all was not as it appeared on the surface at the People's Temple. Mere hours before the August 1, 1977 edition of New West Magazine hit newsstands, Jones and a large number of followers were on a plane headed for Guyana to join the already large number of people already populating Jonestown. Within that issue of the magazine was an article titled "Inside People's Temple" by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy. The revelations in the article were damning. It told of abuse, beatings, crooked financial dealings. And Jones, who had been read the article before publication, clearly knew it meant the beginning of the end.
According to those who lived at Jonestown and managed to get out before the tragedy, the atmosphere of Jonestown changed dramatically upon the arrival of Jim Jones. What had been a vibrant and joyful community became somber and fearful. Jones had become a monster. More specifically, he had become a drug addicted monster. He talked all day over the compound speaker system. When night came, tapes of his talks were played. No one could go anywhere without hearing the sound of his voice, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
There is some evidence of medical experimentation at Jonestown. The cache of psychoactive drugs found there was staggering. The fact that Jones had armed guards around the camp is telling, as is the fact that Jones was not the only one with interesting connections to U.S. Intelligence organizations in the hierarchy. The fact that his attorney, Mark Lane, also served as the attorney for John Hinckley (the would-be assassin of President Reagan), James Earl Ray (the accused assassin of Martin Luther King) and, for a short time, Lee Harvey Oswald is interesting, to say the least.
Then there is the description of the men who drove a tractor onto the Kaituma airstrip and opened fire, giving Leo Ryan the dubious distinction of being the only U.S. Senator in history killed in the line of duty. Like nearly every political assassin, they were described by the survivors as glassy-eyed and mechanical. Where have we heard that one before? Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Lee Harvey Oswald, who seemed completely oblivious to why he was being held by the Dallas Police. And San Francisco Supervisor Dan White.
Dan White was the assassin of Mayor Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk, both strong advocates of Jim Jones. Interestingly, like many other assassins, White somehow managed to live a life that seemed far beyond the salary he drew. Also, like some other assassins, White had an episode of "missing time" in his life. In 1972, White mysteriously disappeared to points unknown for a year.
Harvey Milk, portrayed recently by Sean Penn in the movie The Times of Harvey Milk, was the nation's first openly gay elected public official. He was a man who had fought his entire life for the world of equality and acceptance that Jones preached and seemed to be working to achieve. Naturally, he was more than a mere political ally of Jones. He often spoke at the Temple and wrote personal letters to Jones. Moscone, as you'll remember, is the mayor who was virtually elected by Jones.
About a week before the Jonestown massacre, Dan White unexpectedly resigned his position with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The reason he gave was that he could not support his family on the city salary he was receiving. Lobbying by supporters convinced White to approach Moscone and ask that he be allowed to rescind his resignation. Moscone, on advice from Milk and others, refused. On November 27, just nine days after the Jonestown massacre, White entered San Francisco City Hall, strangely through a basement window, and murdered Moscone and Milk.
What should be no surprise by now is that White was described by witnesses as being in a "zombie" state during and after the murders.
I could go on. Others already have, for thousands upon thousands of pages. The facts of CIA involvement in assassinations, both in the U.S. and abroad, are so well documented that anyone who doesn't get it by now probably never will. The sordid details of the Jonestown massacre that have come to light over the past 30 years are easily available to anyone with an Internet connection and a couple of hours to spare reading. Search, read and judge for yourself. I have my own ideas, but they don't really matter in the long run. Sure, the CIA was involved. So what else is new?
Jonestown was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a mind control experiment. Whether that experiment included well-researched aspects of MKULTRA, such as drugging, hypnotism and torture, I don't know. What I do know is that one form of mind control that was used by Jim Jones, the one I haven't seen written about in any of the countless pages I've read on the subject, is one that is used on you and me every single day. It is the most effective form of mind control known.
Jim Jones sold an insane agenda by convincing his followers they were buying something else entirely: their dreams.
The secret of mind control is not the complete replacement of human will with programmed instructions, which was ostensibly the goal of MKULTRA. The secret of mind control is the control of perception, of making the controlled believe they are doing one thing while they are doing something else entirely. This can be done over long periods of time or, under the right circumstances, rather quickly. It is a technique that you are subjected to every day of your life. No one ever sells you a car, do they? They sell you luxury, excitement, status or practicality. There is no need to sell you on the idea of a car. You already think you need one. The only question posed is, "which car?"
[COLOR="red"]Jones had no need to sell his flock on the idea of an alternative society. His followers were taken from the downtrodden, disenfranchised and abused of society. The idea of the need for an alternative to the culture that had abused them was already in their minds.
His followers had recently suffered the assassinations of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and many members of the Black Panthers. Men rose to lead only to be just as quickly laid to rest. To many, the situation must have seemed hopeless. [/COLOR]
The came Jim Jones. Bigger than life, charismatic, a mover and shaker. He had political connections and he got things done. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear and they believed. They hoped. They dreamed that they could, at last, build the world that so many times had seemed almost within their grasp, only to be violently taken away again. When Jones told them there were plots against the Temple and the good work they were doing, what sliver of evidence would contradict his claims? They knew he was telling them the truth because they had witnessed it for themselves in the previous decade.
These were a people raised on misery and the super-hero comic literature of Christianity. They had been trained from day one to believe in a savior. With enough faith, God and Superman would swoop down from the sky and make everything right again. Jim Jones did not need to brainwash his followers. They came to him with minds already drowning in suds. Like every other con man, he just identified his mark, played the game and reaped the rewards.
I can't count the number of times I've heard references to "those people" in Jonestown, as if those making the references were any less brainwashed than the members of the People's Temple. Look no further than the recent presidential election to find exactly the same hopes and dreams that lead the followers of Jim Jones to their deaths. I am not speaking only of those who saw Barak Obama as practically the second coming of Jesus. I am talking about everyone across the ridiculously narrow U.S. political spectrum sure that the election of their candidate would mean a bright new day for the country.
With all due respect to the dead of Jonestown, is that event really so singular and spectacular in our history? How many men and women have been lead to their deaths by every "savior" to hit the scene? Look at what has come from the latest political savior, the wartime President George Bush?
Following the events of 9/11, we all felt dazed and abused, much like how many of Jones' followers felt every day of their lives. When Bush stood before the citizens of the U.S. and promised a brave new world of freedom and liberty, a world that would require sacrifice to achieve, did we run for the doors and disavow this mad man? Absolutely not. We rallied behind him and his insane "war on terror." When evidence of his misdeeds became so common as to be almost comical, did we say, "stop the madness now?" No, we did not. We told ourselves that we needed to stay the course and finish what we'd begun.
And when our children were sent to a foreign country to kill and rape innocent people then get killed themselves, did we rebel and demand that this lunatic be stopped before more innocent lives were taken? No. We reminded ourselves that freedom and liberty would require sacrifice or just waited for the election of the next messiah and hoped for the best.
So I ask the question again. What is so special about Jonestown? It was a terrible tragedy, to be sure. Yet, that same tragedy is playing out right now, right here amongst us. We willingly send our sons and daughters to the jungles and deserts of foreign lands to kill and be killed, solely because our "leader" has told us this is what needs to be done. We still believe that someone else is going to fix our problems and build utopia for us. All we have to do is elect the right people, follow the right leader, then pack our stuff and get ready to move in.
Mourn for the people who lost their lives at Jonestown, then mourn for yourself and the life you are willingly handing over to whatever savior you happen to like. The result is always the same. When you abdicate your responsibility to think for yourself and build a sane world to someone else, you have abdicated the choice of whether you get to live or die.
Jonestown did not just happen 30 years ago, it is happening right now.