Was Jonestown a CIA medical experiment?

[Jan Klimkowski]

There are several different versions of Jim Hougan's excellent article available on line. However, he was perhaps the first researcher to put meat on the bone of the concept of Jim Jones as a controlled controller:

According to Kathleen Adams, the anthropologist who first related the story about Smith and the Amerindians, Jim Jones was in fact familiar with the suicides of 1845. He had learned of them, she said, while working as a missionary in the Northwest District.

Adams does not tell us when this was, but the implication is that it was long before the establishment of Jonestown. The possibilities here are two:

The first is that Jones's Cuban friend, Carlos Foster, is correct when he says that Jones was well-traveled and had been to Guyana prior to 1960. The difficulty with this, of course, is that Jones's biographers are ignorant of any such travels. But if Jones did not go to Guyaya prior to 1960, he must have learned about Smith's precedent while doing missionary work in Guyana---after his 1960 visit to Cuba. But when could that have been?

The answer would appear to be at about the end of October, 1961. Arriving at that conclusion is by no means an easy matter, however, given the chronological confusion that his most responsible biographer, Tim Reiterman, relates. [68] Because this confusion raises a number of interesting questions about Jones's activities, whereabouts and true loyalties, the matter is worth straightening out.

In the Fall of 1961, Jim Jones was becoming paranoid. Under treatment for stress, he was hearing "extraterrestrial voices," and suffering seizures. [69] Hospitalized during most of the first week in October, he resigned his position as Director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission. [70] It was then, according to Reiterman, that Jones confided in his ministerial assistant, Ross Case, that he'd had a vision of nuclear holocaust.

"A few weeks later, Jones took off alone in a plane for Hawaii, ostensibly to scout for a new site for Peoples Temple...." (At a loss to explain why Jones should have gone to Hawaii, Reiterman implies that Jones viewed the islands as a potential nuclear refuge---a ludicrous notion in light of their role as stationary aircraft carriers.)

"On what would become a two-year sojourn, Jones made his first stop in Honolulu, where he explored a job as a university chaplain. Though he did not like the job requirements, he decided to stay on the island for a while anyway, and sent for his family. First, his wife, his mother and the children, except for Jimmy, joined him. Then the Baldwins followed with the adopted black child.... During the couple of months in the islands, Jones seemed to decide that his sabbatical would be a long one." [71]

According to Reiterman's chronology, therefore, Jones left Indianapolis for Hawaii near the end of October, 1961. He then sent for his family, which joined him in what we may suppose was November. The family remained in Hawaii for a "couple of months": i.e., until January or February.

"In January, 1962, Esquire magazine published an article listing the nine safest places in the world to escape thermonuclear blasts and fallout.... The article's advice was not lost on Jones. Soon he was heading for the southern hemisphere, which was less vulnerable to fallout because of atmospheric and political factors. The family planned to go eventually to Belo Horizonte, an inland Brazilian city of 600,000."

Jones's biographer goes on to say that, after leaving Hawaii, he subject traveled to California, and then to Mexico City, before continuing on to Guyana. There, Jones's visit "made page seven of the Guiana Graphic." [72]

That Jones made page 7 of the local newspaper is a matter of fact. Unfortunately for Reiterman's chronology, however, he did so on October 25 (1961). Which is to say that the head of the Peoples Temple is alleged to have been in two places at that same time: in Hawaii and Guyana during the last week in October---with intervening stops in California and Mexico City.

Obviously, Reiterman is mistaken, but the issue is not merely one of a confused chronology. There is evidence (including, as we'll see, a photograph) which strongly suggests that two people may have been using Jones's identity during the 1961-63 period. Because of this, rumors that Jones was hospitalized in a "lunatic asylum" during that time should not be dismissed out of hand. The rumors were started by a black minister in Indiana who is said to have been jealous of Jones's success among blacks at the Peoples Temple. While the allegation has yet to be documented, there are many other references to Jones's having been under psychiatric care at one time or another.

Ross Case says that Jones sometimes referred to "my psychiatrist." Others have suggested that the real reason Jones went to Hawaii was to receive psychiatric care without publicity.

In later years, Temple member Loretta Cordell reported shock at seeing Jones described as "a sociopath." The description was contained in a psychiatrist's report that Cordell said was in the files of Jones's San Francisco physician (probably Dr. Carleton Goodlett).

In a recent interview with this author, Dr. Sukhdeo confirmed that Jones had been treated at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco during the 1960s and 70s. According to Sukhdeo, he has repeatedly asked to see Jones's medical file from the Institute, and he has been repeatedly refused permission.

"I have asked (Langley-Porter's Dr.) Chris Hatcher to see the file several times," Sukhdeo told this writer. "But, each time, he has refused. I don't know why. He won't say. It's very peculiar. Jones has been dead for more than 20 years."

"The nation's leading center for brain research," Langley-Porter is noted for its hospitality to anti-cult activists such as Dr. Margaret Singer and, also, for experiments that it conducts on behalf of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). While much of that research is classified, the Institute has experimented with electromagnetic effects and behavioral modification techniques involving a wide variety of stimuli---including hypnosis-from-a-distance.

Some of the Institute's classified research may be inferred from quotations attributed to its director, Dr. Alan Gevins (see Mind Wars, by Ron McRae, St. Martin's Press, 1984, p. 136). According to Dr. Gevins, the military potential of Extremely Low Frequency radiation (ELF) is enormous. Used as a medium for secret communications between submarines, ELF waves are a thousand miles long, unobstructed by water, and theoretically "capable of shutting off the brain (and) killing everyone in l0 thousand square miles or larger target area."

"'No one paid any attention to the biological affects of ELF for years,' says Dr. Gevins, 'because the power levels are so low. Then we realized that because the power levels are so low, the brain could mistake the outside signal for its own, mimic it (a process known as bioelectric entrainment), and respond when it changes.'"

The process is one that would no doubt fascinate Jonestown's foremost psychiatric interpreter, Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo. Interestingly, virtually every survivor of the Jonestown massacre seems to have been treated at Langley-Porter. This occurred as a result of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone's request that Dr. Hatcher undertake a study of the Peoples Temple while counseling its survivors. (Hatcher's appointment was made with surprising alacrity since Moscone himself was assassinated only nine days after the killings at Jonestown.)

Returning to the Guiana Graphic article about Jones's visit to Guyana, it is worth pointing out that the story throws a crimp in much more than Reiterman's chronology. It makes hash as well of Jones's motive for going to South America. The Esquire article, published in January, 1962 could hardly have prompted Jones to go anywhere in October, 1961.