Jim Jones was an expert in the psychic science of coercive persuasion, behavior modification, mind control and brainwashing. It was his favourite subject ever since the early days in Indianapolis, when he studied and altered primate behavior. The first modern studies into the psychic sciences took place in Nazi Germany. Following World War II, the United States, impressed with the superior knowledge of the Nazi scientists, placed them and their research under the security and direction of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA employed hundreds of scientists and behavioral experts in over 149 different projects located in laboratories throughout the world. This multi-million dollar, super-secret project was given the code name MK ULTRA. Their psychic research encompassed hypnosis, sensory deprivation, electroshock, ESP, subliminal projection, sleep deprivation, sleep teaching, and the development of hundreds of mind altering drugs. By the early 1960's, most of the work had progressed as far as it could in a laboratory and the CIA gathered the results of the lab experiments to compile a comprehensive study in the psychic sciences. The compiled data was then given to their agent, Jim Jones, who was assigned the task of conducting an actual field test to verify and improve upon the results of the lab tests. Considering the vast amount of knowledge he possessed, both from his personal research and from the MK ULTRA project, Jim Jones was the foremost authority on the psychic sciences in the world.
When Jones moved his Peoples Temple to the Ukiah, California area in 1965, the group immediately infiltrated the Mendocino State Mental Hospital which would provide, not only test persons (TP's as the Nazis called them) for his preliminary experiments, but also a training ground for the many medical technicians he needed for the ultimate experiment. Within a very short period of time, every employee of the hospital was a member of the Peoples Temple. From nurses, to therapists, to counselors, to cleaning women, every worker in the facility was replaced by a Temple member. California virtually gave the Mendocino State Mental Hospital to Jim Jones. A few of the mental patients were coerced into joining the Temple, but, moreover, they provided the Temple with state funding, both as patients in the hospital and as outpatients assigned to one of several Temple operated care homes financed by the Department of Social Services.
The Mendocino Plan was a pilot program of the federal government designed to evaluate the feasibility of deinstitutionalizing the nation's mentally ill. It was a study in whether private enterprise could provide adequate patient care for less money than government-run institutions required to provide the same services. Dennis Denny, Mendocino's Director of Social Services has speculated that the Mendocino Plan was the sole reason that Jim Jones moved to Ukiah.
Eventually, most of the patients at Mendocino State Hospital were released in the charge of the Peoples Temple. The public funds previously allocated to Jim Jones via the hospital's budget, the staff's salaries and their subsequent donations, now came directly from the state to Jones, who reportedly bled the program by providing a minimum of patient care for a maximum profit. By 1972, the absence of mental patients at Mendocino State Hospital prompted then Governor Ronald Reagan to close the facility which, after all, was the desired intent of the Mendocino Plan. Jones protested the closing, but, in truth, it mattered little to him. The hospital had outlived its usefulness as a training center for the Temple's medical staff. The patients and their state subsidy were now under his direct control. Jones' wife, Marceline, exemplified the transition, leaving her job as a nurse at Mendocino State Hospital to be appointed state inspector of private care homes. Among her official duties was the oversight of the Temple's facilities.
Jim Jones contributed more to American society than has previously been accredited to him and his successful management of the Mendocino Plan is a prime example. His Peoples Temple was the vanguard of a reform movement that swept the country to such an extent that, within a decade of the project's completion, the total number of mental patients housed in public institutions nationwide had been reduced by over 75%, saving the government a proportionate amount of revenue.
The Temple's medical staff conducted experiments in behavior modification both on the mental patients in their care and on the general congregation during the organization's stay in California. The "Board of Education" was the name Jones gave to a large wooden plank that resembled a fraternity initiation paddle, and that was used to beat Temple children into submission. The child to be disciplined was called to the Temple's stage where he was paddled in full view of the congregation, as a deterrent to other children who might misbehave. Jones would stand off to one side and call out the blows, usually given by 250 pound Ruby Carroll. Upon completion of the predetermined punishment, the child was expected to say "Thank you" into the microphone that Jones extended down to him. It was this "Thank you" plus the signed authorization from the child's parents giving the Temple permission to discipline their children that protected Jones from any legal ramifications resulting from the beatings that were so brutal that many children were rendered unconscious.
The Temple also used electroshock treatments to modify the behavior of the children entrusted to their care. In a locked room of the San Francisco Temple was a machine that only the children to be disciplined and an attending nurse were allowed to see. The machine was named "The Blue-Eyed Monster" though later reports referred to it as "The Blue- Eyed Demon." Some said this Aryan devil was a simple cattle prod, others claimed it was a heart defibrillator or the shock treatment machine the Temple had acquired from Mendocino State Hospital. Few children would describe the apparatus; but those who did said it was a scaled-down version of an executioner's electric chair. The child was strapped into the metal chair and electrodes were attached to various parts of his or her body. Though the machine itself was hidden from the general adult congregation, the existence of the machine was not. At closed meetings of the congregation, Jones would call out the names of those children to be disciplined and they would be taken into the Blue-Eyed Monster's den. A microphone, attached to the public address system, was placed in the room. The general congregation heard no noises from the machine only the screams of the children attached to it. The child emerged from the room and ran to Jim Jones; grovelling at his feet to say "Thank you -- Thank you" in robot-like repetition.
Later, in Jonestown, the physical beating and shock treatments of Temple children were replaced with sheer terror in the form of "Big Foot"; a monster that Jones told them lived in a shallow well on the outskirts of the jungle community. Children who misbehaved were lowered into the well, where, unknown to them, adults were hiding in the darkness. The adults made animal sounds and grabbed at the child's dangling legs in a feigned attempt to pull him into the abyss. Kicking and screaming, the child was pulled out of the well and told that if he misbehaved again he would be dropped into the well and Big Foot would eat him. Of course, Big Foot was only effective on the very young children who honestly believed in its existence.
Sleep deprivation was also used to break the will of Temple children and adults and render them open to Jones' strong willed orders. For no other apparent reason, the subjects were forced to go days without sleep. Many were so deprived that they would fall asleep standing up. This brainwashing technique, originally developed by the Chinese, was used extensively by Jones throughout the history of his Peoples Temple.
Sensory deprivation was also widely employed as a means of breaking down the will of a test subject. Early Temple experiments in sensory deprivation are not well documented, but it is known that Jones imparted his expertise to Donald DeFreeze, who utilized the technique to brainwash Patricia Hearst, as described elsewhere in this work. It was not until the Temple moved to Guyana that their experiments in sensory deprivation surfaced. Tom Grubbs, a psychologist with a degree from the University of California, was in charge of "the box." Grubbs, who was also the principal of the Jonestown school, personally constructed Jones' sensory deprivation chamber. Test subjects were locked in the chamber which was then placed below ground in a root cellar. The effect was that of being buried alive. Jones recognized the terror in the technique and ordered several additional chambers built in the shape of coffins. The test persons interred in the boxes were totally deprived of all sensory input. Without input, the mind goes blank and the subject emerges from the ordeal in a very receptive state for further conditioning. Tom Grubbs, who had been the Temple's expert in sensory deprivation for eight years, reportedly died in the Jonestown massacre but this cannot be confirmed as his body has never been identified. His wife, Beatrice Orsot Grubbs, a former legal secretary for the Internal Revenue Service, was also one of Jones' top aides. She conveniently escaped the massacre as she was in Georgetown at the time for a "dentist appointment."
Upon her return to the United States, she reported to the New York Times that her stay in Jonestown was, "the happiest year of my life." One year later, on November 18, 1979, the New York Times Magazine published an Interview with Beatrice Grubbs under the title, "Jonestown The Survivors' Story" in which she defended herself by expressing regret at having missed the chance to die with her friends. She also told her Interviewer that she "thinks the C.I.A. had something to do with what happened in Jonestown." Her Temple companion and bodyguard during the trip to the Georgetown dentist office had been Tyrone Mitchell who also escaped the carnage. On February 24, 1984, Mitchell opened fire with an AR 16 semi- automatic rifle on a group of young children in the school yard across the street from his Los Angeles home. He killed one ten-year-old girl and wounded thirteen others before reportedly taking his own life. The newspaper reports attributed his actions to allegations that he was a known user of many drugs, most notably alcohol and PCP, and that he had suffered from an "unremitting bleakness" ever since his parents, four sisters and one brother had been killed in Jonestown. No mention was made of the possibility that Tyrone Mitchell survived because he was a brainwashed Temple assassin whose subconscious programming exploded to the surface five years later. In the fall of 1978, the sensory deprivation chambers were dismantled so as not to leave any evidence of the experiment in the inevitable aftermath of Jonestown.
One of the most important aspects of the Temple's early medical experiments was their research into ethnic disease. Jones' Sickle Cell Anemia clinic was one of the finest such facilities in the United States. Understanding both the affliction and Jones' interest in it is a critical prerequisite to understanding the experiment that followed in Jonestown. Sickle Cell Anemia first appeared as a human mutation in Black Africa sometime in prehistory. The blood cells of a Sickle Cell victim change form from the normal disc-shape to a spiny "sickle" shape when the cell gives up its carbon dioxide wastes. Such mutations have come and gone throughout man's evolution; most being quickly bred out of existence. The sickle cell deviation however, had one major advantage that insured its survival through natural selection. The malaria parasite, a predominant killer in ancient Africa, cannot invade the sickle-shaped cell as readily as it invades normal cells, thus persons with sickle cell anemia were more likely to survive, breed and perpetuate the trait. Though malaria has since been all but eradicated, the sickle cell trait remains locked in the genetic structure of the Black race. The basic problem is that the odd-shaped cells tend to block intersections in the body's blood system. Cells then back up in a massive "traffic jam" that stops the flow of blood to various parts of the body, which become starved for oxygen and suffer irrevocable damage. From a very early age, victims suffer a variety of paralyses and strokes that render them bed-ridden and completely helpless. All victims die prior to their twentieth year. Presently, one out of every ten Blacks in the United States carries the sickle cell trait. If a trait carrier mates with a non-carrier there is a fifty percent chance that their children will also carry the trait. If a trait carrier mates with another carrier, all of their offspring will carry the trait and one out of four will have Sickle Cell Anemia. Since there is no medical means of altering the genetic structure of the Black race, the study of Sickle Cell Anemia is a study in genetic engineering that eventually becomes a question of dictating who mates with whom. Jones viewed his Black congregation with much the same detachment that a farmer views his livestock. His research in breeding out (or breeding in) the sickle cell trait attests not to a humanitarian intention, but rather to Jones' superior attitude toward Blacks. It is this superior attitude that dominates and even dictates the story of Jim Jones.
With his research in the psychic sciences and ethnic diseases as background, Jones was prepared for the next phase his work; the development of weapons of that would affect only specific racial groups, namely Blacks and Native Americans. The science of ethnic weaponry was first developed in Nazi Germany and Jones did not hesitate to credit the Nazis in his warnings that Blacks and Native Americans were targeted as the victims for a second holocaust. He claimed that fascism was simply "capitalism gone mean" and that the United States was already preparing to wage a race war in which the targeted groups would be interned in concentration camps, enslaved, and eventually exterminated. He reminded his congregation that the government had maintained the World War II Japanese detention centers for just such a purpose. His threats were not without basis in fact. The U.S. Indian Health Service had recently sterilized nearly 4,000 Native American women without their consent. Black prisoners were being used as guinea pigs in macabre experiments in genetic engineering, mass sterilization, and ethnic weaponry. There was talk of mandatory sterilization According to Jones, the for all welfare recipients. According to Jones, the New Nazis were closing in on the Blacks in the U.S. and, though his warnings were exaggerated, they were basically true. Jones, however, neglected to inform his congregation that he was the foremost proponent of the New Nazi ideology.
Issue after issue of The Peoples Forum, the Temple's newspaper, was devoted to the subject of the pending Nazi persecution of the Blacks. The following examples of Temple news articles speak for themselves.
A state which, in an age of racial pollution, devotes itself to the cultivation of its best racial elements, must someday become the master of the earth...we all sense that in a far future mankind may face problems which can be surmounted only by a Supreme Race supported by the means and resources of the entire globe. -Adolph Hitler[160]
Another People's Forum issue included one of the Nazi hate letters the Temple reportedly received daily but which were actually written by the Temple's publication staff.
First of all let me say at this time your paper 'the peoples forum' is really sick... you say that the Nazi party is, or does teach, Hate, well you got it all backwards. The Nazi party is teaching Love for ones own kind, not Hate of others. There are but a few Aryans left, you Niggers want us white people to mix with you, and you white Nigger loving punks make me even sicker...If you are still reading this letter the next Reich will be here in the USA. And this time there are not going to be any of your kind left to write this Kind of Shit...Heil Hitler.[161]
Another People's Forum editorial warned,
No, it couldn't happen here. We are freedom loving people after all. White Power? Nazism? Dictatorship? I mean this is America. We have to let people have their say. But do you really think they can...I mean, like in Germany? No, that was different ... no not here ... but ... the poison begins to work. Maybe we should stop these 'niggers' and 'riff-raff' from terrorizing our neighborhoods , driving down property values, eating up our taxpayers' hard-earned dollars on welfare checks, spreading crimes, drugs, mayhem, corrupting our children...maybe send them all back to Africa or just get RID of of them somehow, as Hitler rid Germany of the Jews and all other minorities...[162]
One Forum article told of a recent experiment conducted by a Yale psychologist in which test persons inflicted what they believed to be near fatal electric shocks on another test person simply because an "authority figure" assured them that he would take responsibility for their actions. According to the article, the experimenter concluded, "that ordinary Americans were perfectly capable of carrying out genocidal acts such as those devised by Hitler and his henchmen."[163] The People's Forum also went to great lengths to describe the U.S. government's plan to use racial weapons. Articles elaborated on the U.S. Army's "Population Genetics" program which mapped the distribution of various blood types across the country. Articles told of drugs that only affect certain races, leaving the rest of the population unharmed. Lactose incapacitated only Blacks and Asians. One anti-tubercolosis drug caused nerve damage in persons of Egyptian and Jewish descent but had no such effect on other groups. The science of racial warfare was well established in the United States and, according to the People's Forum, intended for deployment "among our own ethnic populations." The Forum went on to say:
Imagine that a military power, in pursuit of global conquest, could pinpoint genetic differences between the races and design chemical agents to ATTACK AND VIRTUALLY DESTROY ETHNIC OR RACIAL GROUPS!! Science fiction, you say? On the contrary, the creation of ETHNIC WEAPONS presents a terrifying present day threat.[164]
One could write volumes on the deceitful nature of Jim Jones but, in the case of ethnic weaponry, he did not lie. The CIA WAS developing ethnic weapons and their largest project was a field test called Jonestown.
Between 1973 and 1975, foreign management, employed by the CIA used Jonestown as a training base for mercenaries bound for Angola, but by 1975 the site was under the complete control of the Peoples Temple and was known, not as an agricultural project, but as a "medical mission." It was a medical mission but, for obvious security reasons, all references to "medical" were dropped the community was renamed Jonestown and and billed as an agricultural project.
At the height of the experiment, the Jonestown medical staff numbered seventy. Most were psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioral scientists, therapists pharmacologists and an army of nurses. There pharmacologists was but one doctor, Larry Schacht.
According to the Temple's reports, Larry Schacht, a former art student from Texas, was a homosexual drug addict and vagrant who wandered north to Redwood Valley in 1971 because I Ching, a Chinese book of philosophy, told him that he would find there a man possessed with divine powers. The man was Jim Jones. Jones reportedly welcomed the eighteen year old, cured him of his drug addiction and assigned him to his harem where Schacht became his favorite male lover.
There has been some speculation that Schacht's family had a working relationship with the CIA and that he was a direct descendent of the notorious Nazi Doctor Hjalmar Horace Greely Schacht. Though this is unconfirmed speculation, it is far more believable than the Temple's account of how the two met.
Jim Jones decided that Larry Schacht would be a doctor and offered to pay for his education. He enrolled Schacht in a pre-med course at Santa Rosa Junior College where he would live in a Temple student commune with other future professionals whom Jones was educating. Jones then sent him to medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico. California has some of the finest medical schools in the world; why Jones sent him to Guadalajara is a mystery. The city was listed as one of the nine safe places in the even of nuclear war according to the 1962 article in Esquire Magazine. Perhaps that was the reason or perhaps Jones did not want to incriminate any educational institutions in the United States in what he knew would be Schacht destiny. Schacht completed his education and returned to California to serve his internship at San Francisco General Hospital and at another facility in Irvine, California. Just days before Schacht would be licensed to practice medicine in California, Jones sent him to Jonestown. Jones interrupted the education of several other members of his medical staff just prior to receiving their credentials. Some say that he was trying to prevent them from working anywhere but in the Temple but they could have easily left the Temple and finished their training on their own. The true reason was probably just expedience. Larry Schacht's education seems to have dictated the scheduling of the Jonestown experiment but more than likely Jones timed his education to coincide with the experiment.
Reports of Dr. Larry Schacht's performance in Jonestown vary to the extremes. Several visitors to Jonestown claimed that he was the most gifted, brilliant physician they had ever encountered, while some residents reported that he was so incompetent that they would not even allow him to treat a cut finger. The truth lies somewhere in between. Dr. Schacht was in charge of the Jonestown Medical Clinic, reported to be far better than any hospital in Guyana. Many visitors, such as Temple attorney Charles Garry, said the Jonestown clinic was the finest medical set-up they had ever seen. Dr. Schacht also oversaw the Extended Care Unit, where unruly residents were kept under heavy sedation. In the end, Dr. Schacht would mix the poison potion that would kill most of the Jonestown residents. He reportedly died with the others.
Jim Jones supplied his expertise in the psychic sciences and ethnic weaponry as well as the laboratory, medical staff and test persons for the experiment designed by Dr. Lawrence Layton and others. The following is presented as a summary of the parameters of the experiment their cooperative efforts produced.
Purpose:
To evaluate the effectiveness of two different mind control drugs on Blacks and Native Americans. The selected drugs must only have an effect on these two racial groups and no others. The existence in the test person must be undetectable in standard medical examinations and render the test persons without a will of his own but capable of heavy manual labor.
Laboratory:
The laboratory must be totally isolated and controlled so as to minimize any outside influences that might affect and alter the test results.
Test Persons:
The Test Persons must be of significant numbers to effect a quantitative result. They should be representative of the typical American Black and Native American. The group should encompass the entire range of ages with a proportionate number of males and females. The Test Persons must never be aware that they are subjects of an experiment. They will be divided into three groups. Group A will receive drug A. Group B will receive Drug B. And Group C will receive no drug and act as the control group. The diet of the TP's should be closely monitored and work must be assigned to ascertain their ability to produce under the influence of the drugs.
Procedure:
The test drugs must be administered to the Test Persons in small dosages at regular intervals, following which a definitive test will be performed to determine the extent of the drug's long-term effect.
The Test:
There is but one definitive test to determine a subject's mind in under complete control. The experimenter must ask the subject to commit suicide, the ultimate sacrifice. Those TP's who voluntarily killed themselves could be considered under the control of the experimenter, those who did not were not under control and, due to the top secret nature of the experiment, they must be eliminated.
There were additional medical experiments conducted in Jonestown and one of these, the most frightening of all possibilities, was concerned with the virus responsible for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. The ancestral AIDS virus has existed for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years as a relatively harmless parasite in African monkeys. Scientists theorize that sometime in the late 1970's, the virus evolved naturally into the killer it is today. To accept this conventional theory on the origin of AIDS, one must contradict logic, ignore history, and defy all probable odds.
Timing is everything. Science accepts as some sort of happy coincidence the fact that the virus first surfaced precisely when the study of immunology had progressed to a point where the experts could at least understand the affliction. Had the outbreak of the few months earlier, it would epidemic occurred even a have totally baffled scientists. Considering the length recorded medical history, it is highly unlikely that the virus evolved on the cutting edge of man's research without being a product of that research. Since monkeys do not have AIDS and humans do not suffer from the ancestral parasitic virus, one must also accept that the virus evolved during or shortly after it was first transmitted from monkeys to humans.
Beastialiy has been suggested as one possible conduit but a more common, though less sensational, means might have been a monkey bite. The uncanny timing of the epidemic is an indication that the virus was genetically engineered by man and not nature.
Since 1983, Soviet news agencies have circulated articles which accuse the U.S. Army's Chemical and Biological Warfare Division of creating the AIDS virus in their Fort Detrick facility in Maryland. The Soviet's published evidence is based largely on the fact that this laboratory is concerned with both the development of biological weapons and AIDS research. Even if the virus was engineered at Fort Detrick, a field test would still have been required and this is where Jonestown enters the story. The only element that the Jonestown theory shares in common with the Soviet theory is the U.S. Army's Chemical and Biological Warfare Division, a rather small department that was formerly under the direction of none other than Dr. Laurence Layton.
In the summer of 1978, CIA conspiratorialist Mark Lane and his colleague Donald Freed traveled to Guyana to meet their new client, Jim Jones. As a 'courtesy', they were offered the free services of the Jonestown Medical Clinic. Lane would later write glowing reports about what he considered to be the most thorough physical examination that he had ever received. Freed was less enthusiastic because Dr. Larry Schacht diagnosed him as suffering from a fatal immune deficiency that he had contracted from a homosexual act. The entire concept of such an affliction and its means of transmission were not known to medical science in the summer of 1978 which makes Dr. ,Schacht's diagnosis the first recorded reference to AIDS.
All the elements that would have been necessary to conduct a field test in the transmission and Implementation of the epidemic were present in Jonestown. As evidenced by their own published articles, the Peoples Temple was very concerned about the development of racial weapons. They had the medical expertise, the required lab monkeys, and even a group of supposedly 'reformed' homosexuals and drug addicts who made up a disproportionately large number of the Jonestown residents. Initially, the virus could have been transported to Jonestown in the body of one of the Temple members or perhaps Mr. Muggs, the community's chimpanzee mascot. Since sex of any kind was banned without the consent and often command of Jones, transmission of the virus could have easily been monitored as it spread through the community. In her sworn affidavit that warned of the possibility of a mass suicide, Deborah Layton wrote that by 1978, "half of Jonestown was ill with severe diarrhea and high fevers," two early symptoms of AIDS.
In the fall of 1978, Jones sent a few of his infected homosexual followers on a paid vacation to nearby Haiti, a frequent port of call for the Temple's ship and a popular winter resort for New York City gays. While in Haiti, they infected a number of male prostitutes just prior to the tourist season. This was the origin of the AIDS epidemic in the gay community. It first surfaced in the Haitian homosexual whorehouses in December of 1978 and in New York City in January of 1979. Statistically, 73% of the AIDS victims in the U.S. are male homosexuals, 15% are intravenous drug users and the remaining 12% are mostly hemophiliacs who contracted the virus from blood donated by someone from one of the other two groups. U.S. health officials first coined the phrase "intravenous drug users" who they say contracted AIDS by sharing infected hypodermic needles but this does not explain how the epidemic started among this group that should have been defined as heroin addicts. Though addicts do share needles, they share more in common with the smuggled shipments of heroin, a tainted batch of which could have been the source of the epidemic. Soon after the White Night, an unidentified group circulated a handbill in San Francisco that claimed the CIA had smuggled two kilos of heroin in the stomach cavity of each of the corpses shipped from Jonestown to the United States.
Outside North America, AIDS is most prevalent in Central Africa where the virus first appeared in the blood supply of Sickle Cell Anemia Clinics from where it spread quickly through the Black heterosexual population. Jones had very powerful connections in Central Africa and, as outlined elsewhere, he might have sought sanctuary there after his escape from Jonestown. It would have been very easy for him to volunteer the services of his Sickle Cell Anemia experts, taint the blood supply and start the distinctively different African epidemic.
It is now the ninth year of the epidemic and there is no cure in the foreseeable future. To date, the federal government has done little to combat the disease. Most of their token, under-financed, research programs have produced only the means to test whether a person has been exposed to the virus. Confinement of the disease to gays and addicts seems to be the government's only concern. Today, blood tests for AIDS are required for anyone in the military or in prison.
It is also a prerequisite for an entry visa, life insurance policy and, in some areas, a marriage license. Soon, everyone in the country will be required to take a test for AIDS. Fear of the epidemic has created a growing public animosity towards gays. The governor of Colorado recently said, "There are two kinds of AIDS victims; the dead and the dying and we should not spend money on either." "Shoot the queers!" was one Texas candidate's solution to the problem. There are presently hundreds of candidates campaigning for public offices nationwide on a platform that promises the mandatory testing of every citizen and the compulsory internment of anyone exposed to the virus. Many of these politicians are members of the Neo-Nazi cult of Lyndon LaRouche who advocate the quarantine of AIDS patients in special "medical treatment centers"; a euphemism for the death camps of the 1990's. (Lyndon LaRouche's intelligence organization has strong ties with the CIA and there has been some speculation that they wing are actually a private, right faction of the agency.) In April of 1986, popular conservative and former CIA operative William Buckley, Jr. used national television air time, (that had been designated for the promotion of his new book) to present his plan to tattoo everyone who tested positive for AIDS. He rationalized that diagnosed patients are knowingly passing the disease onto others who need some means to identify the carriers. Fifty years ago, the Nazis used a similar health excuse when they rounded up all the homosexuals and drug addicts and tattooed them on the inside of their left forearm just before they were sent to the death camps. The forearm might satisfy Mr. Buckley but, since he is concerned with the social transmission of AIDS, perhaps he would prefer something more obvious to the public, like a simple "666" across the forehead.
AIDS is the perfect biological weapon. It can be confined to specific groups and, since the incubation period can be as long as seven years, thousands can be infected before the first person in the chain displays any symptoms. Also, it is not itself a killer. It merely defeats the immune system so that some opportunistic disease can claim the victim. Rather than waste millions of research dollars in pursuit of a cure for a 'natural' condition, it might be wiser to dismiss the natural theory, accept that AIDS was artificially created and seek the cause of the epidemic for within the cause one might fight the cure.
This was the nature of the Jonestown medical experiments. Had they remained this simple, they might have gone undetected but the CIA proceeded to add so many other desired results to the project as to make their sponsorship all too obvious.
The first outsiders to reach the Jonestown Medical Clinic in the aftermath of the carnage found enough drugs to supply an average U.S. city for over a year. Predominant in the stock of narcotics were the hypnotic drugs Pentothal and Nembutal as well as over ten thousand injectible dosages of a chloral-hydrate compound known as chlorpromazine or Thorazine. Thorazine increases the production of certain histamines in important parts of the brain. It is used primarily to alter the violent behavior of mental patients and, according the one article published by the Black Panthers, Thorazine and its related compounds are common ingredients in the CIA's MK ULTRA experiments. The article buttressed its argument by quoting Jones who reportedly told a visiting Swiss psychologist that his Black followers were given Thorazine on a regular basis as per orders of the CIA. Although these drugs are used to alter a person's behavior, it is highly unlikely that they were the test drugs used in the Jonestown experiment as Jones would never have allowed such incriminating evidence to be discovered in the aftermath. The two unidentified drugs used in the experiment were far more advanced than those found in the rubble of Jonestown but, due to the top secret nature of the experiment, the precise chemical formulas will never be disclosed.
In order to accurately compare the effects of mind control or behavior modification drugs on a group of test persons all other stimuli must first be removed. The jungle community provided the isolation necessary for Jones to substitute himself for all outside influences of society. Jonestown residents were forbidden to consume alcohol, tobacco and even sugar; necessary but ironic as Guyana ranks among the world's sugar-producing nations. The diet of Jonestown, though prepared by the kitchen staff, was under the direct and stringent control of the medical staff. Once all outside influences had been removed and "ground zero" reached, the medical staff proceeded to drug the different test groups without their knowledge. Since the intent was long-term control, the drugs were administered in small repeated doses rather than one large dose. The most successful drug tested could then be deployed in society by introducing it into fast foods or the water supply or the glue on the back of postage stamps.
A few visitors to Jonestown noted that the residents were drugged. One such observer was Frank Tumminia, the State Department's desk officer for Guyana, who visited Jonestown on February 2, 1978, with John Blacken, the Deputy Chief of Missions at the United States Embassy in Georgetown. Tumminia stated:
One of the things that struck me at the time and upon which I remarked to Embassy staff as well as to Department officials, was my feeling that many of the people with whom I met and spoke appeared drugged and robot-like in their reactions to questions and, generally, in their behavior towards us visitors.[165]
Tumminia and Blacken held positions in the State Department that were very important to this story. Tumminia's predecessor was President Kennedy, who was so concerned about a possible communist take-over in Guyana in the early 1960's that he personally manned the Guyana desk at the State Department to direct the efforts of the CIA operatives there. Among the operatives was one Jim Jones. Blacken's successor was CIA operative Dick Dwyer, who would be present at the airstrip to witness the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan.
Though it will never be known which mind control drugs were administered to the test persons, it is known how the drugs were administered. In the post-Jonestown murder trial of Larry Layton, the defense attempted to establish that Layton had been drugged into participating in the assault team that killed congressman Leo Ryan and others at the airstrip. According to his defense lawyer, "Layton looked spaced out and was mumbling of a CIA conspiracy during the fatal airstrip shootout.[166] Prosecution witness Dale Parks, a member of the Jonestown medical staff who allegedly defected with the Ryan party and wrestled the gun from Layton at the airstrip, was pressed under cross-examination to admit to drugging Layton and others. According to a newspaper account of the court proceedings:
Parks agreed that large quantities of Thorazine and other drugs used in mental hospitals were available at Jonestown, but he denied knowing that milk shakes "spiked" with so-called mind- control drugs were given to Jonestown cultists on a regular basis.[167]
If milk shakes were used in administering the drugs , the practice was abandoned early in the experiment as this method would have been terribly inefficient. The experimenter would not have been able to determine if the test person had consumed the entire drink (hence the premeasured dosage) or, worse yet, had given some of their drink to others unobserved. Also, the milkshake containers might survive and under chemical analysis expose the true nature of the experiment.
Larry Layton's sister, Deborah Layton Blakey, hinted at the truth in her post-defection affidavit that warned of the threat of mass suicide in Jonestown , "On Sunday we each received a cookie. "[168] She later elaborated on her statement in an account published in the Layton family's history in which was written:
But the culinary high point came every week on Sunday evening, when the entire population would line up to receive a cookie from the hand of Jim Jones. The cookies, made from cassava flour , were the only sweets allowed in Jonestown, and they were doled out by Jones himself.[169]
The cookies were made in Jonestown's "Experimental and Herbal Kitchen" that a 1977 Temple brochure described as: "The all-purpose kitchen where meals and treats are provided for workers and residents."[170]
The test drugs were added to the cassava flour in the Jonestown flour mill. It was quite simple to keep the batches of flour, hence cookies, separated through the baking and distribution process. Extreme precautions were required in handling the potent drugs and the "Experimental Kitchen" soon adopted the stringent procedures of a research laboratory, as indicated by this published Temple report:
The dishes are cold water rinsed, washed and stacked, then washed in a soapy detergent with bleach and boiling water and put away...all surfaces are continually scrubbed and sanitized from ceiling to floor to provide the most healthful environment.[171]
On Sunday evening, as each of the test persons approached the throne, Jones would select a cookie from one of the three containers at his side. He was intelligent enough to have memorized which test persons were in which group but, more than likely, the person's group was designated by his or her Temple membership number or perhaps just in the predetermined perhaps order in which they lined up every Sunday evening to receive their one cookie.
One and only one cookie was the rule. No one, not even a preferred aide who otherwise enjoyed special privileges, was allowed more than one cookie. On one occasion, a young Black girl who was baking the cookies, in the kitchen, unaware that the flour had been spiked with drugs, handed one out an open window to her boyfriend. Temple guards, who monitored every step of the cookie production, reported the infraction to Jones. At the next community-wide meeting, the young girl and boy were called to the stage, ordered to disrobe and forced to have sex in full view of the entire congregation. Such was the humiliating punishment for violating the one cookie rule and understandably so, as such an infraction would alter the controlled dosage and taint the test results.
There were only two other mandatory weekly rituals in Jonestown and both were related to the one cookie. The first was a weekly TPR examination in which the medical staff examined each of the test persons and recorded their temperature, blood pressure, respiratory system, weight and other health monitors in the Test Person's medical records. This was necessary to determine if the mind control drugs could be detected in standard medical examinations. Though the average American might have a physical examination once in five years, and the medical profession recommends (to their profit) a yearly exam, the Jonestown residents received a weekly examination. The second weekly ritual in Jonestown was the White Night rehearsal in which Jones ordered his congregation to drink what they were told was poison and commit suicide for the "cause."
Following the final White Night, the Jonestown guards identified the dead and catalogued them in two separate groups, those who voluntarily drank cyanide and those who had to be forcibly injected. This took time to accomplish which accounts for the long delay before outsiders were allowed to enter the compound. As the cause of death was noted on the medical records of each Test Person, the corpses were dragged to one side and placed in neat, orderly piles. This was a mistake, as death from cyanide poisoning is preceded by such violent contortions that victims often die with only the top of their head and the heels of their feet touching the ground. The Jonestown residents could never have died in the neat, orderly piles in which they were found.
The medical records, the embodiment of racial weaponry, were missing in the aftermath of Jonestown which was another mistake. The existence of such extensive records had been well documented and their absence in the aftermath confirms that some unknown residents escaped and considered the records worth taking; an interesting priority judgment considering that several hundred thousand dollars in cash was not taken. It would have been better to have kept two separate sets of medical records and left one phony copy behind but, considering the complexity of the project, Jones is granted these few damning mistakes.
The assassination of Congressman Ryan and the mass suicide murder that followed was not the flippant reaction of a crazed preacher but a calculated political assassination and medical field test that had been planned or at least outlined ever since Jim Jones ordered the first White Night rehearsal five years earlier. The demise of Jonestown is an historic incident that has been widely reported, so rather than duplicate the heretofore published accounts, this chapter will explore some of the behind-the-scenes activities that occurred before, during and after the White Night.
A major item in Jones' preparation was the safety of the agency's personnel who had been assigned as his middle-management in the experiment. The exodus began several months before Ryan's visit when top Temple aides like Deborah Layton, Terri Buford, Bonnie Thielmann, Tim Stoen, and Stoen's wife, Grace Grech, feigned their defection from the Temple to disassociate themselves from the scheduled carnage in Jonestown and to help orchestrate the event from outside the organization. Thielmann and the Stoens would accompany Ryan to Guyana, but only as far as Georgetown, relying on the limited number of charter airplane seats as their excuse for not accompanying him to Jonestown and what they knew would be his death. There were other ways to "escape" the Peoples Temple. Lisa Layton staged her own death just eighteen days before the Event. Other top aides were conveniently sent to Georgetown just prior to the massacre. Jones' son Stephan and several others were in the capital for a basketball tournament with the Guyanese National Team. Beatrice Grubbs, Jonestown's resident expert on U.S. tax legalities, was also in Georgetown, missing the mass suicide for a dentist appointment of dubious necessity as, reportedly, Guyanese dentists regularly visited Jonestown to provide one of the few medical services beyond the abilities of the Jonestown clinic. But, for all the shuffling and positioning of people just prior to the Event, the story of one Gordon Lindsay is most interesting.
As shown earlier, the CIA's activities in Guyana were always conducted with the full cooperation of British Intelligence and Jonestown was no exception. In the early 1960's, Jones and the CIA had worked with the British in a cooperative effort to establish Forbes Burnham as Prime Minister of what was then a British colony. It was Phil Blakey, a British subject, whom Jones sent to Guyana to command the early stages of Jonestown when the site was used as a training camp for mercenaries bound to fight in Angola's Civil War. From the perspective of British Intelligence, the South American mission would always be closely connected with African politics. So it was with no great surprise that a British subject with experience in reporting African affairs be enlisted to tie up the loose ends and cover British tracks in the final stages of Jonestown. Such a man was Gordon Lindsay.
After a career reporting African political uprisings from the British point of view, Gordon Lindsay emerged as a freelance reporter in Los Angeles in 1978. He was working for the National Enquirer on an expose of the Peoples Temple; an expose that Jones loudly protested and that was never published. Jones claimed (in a conversation with Temple attorney Mark Lane) that the publisher of the National Enquirer worked for the CIA as demonstrated by his ability to convince the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown to intercede on Lindsay's behalf to acquire an extension on his Guyanese visa. It was rather odd that the U.S. government would ask a South American country to help an Englishman. Both Lindsay and Jones made a big fuss over an incident in which Lindsay flew very low over Jonestown in a plane he had chartered in Trinidad. Jones complained to Guyanese authorities that Lindsay's low altitude aerobatics so frightened an elderly resident that the woman had a heart attack and died. According to Lindsay, in all the months he spent on assignment in Guyana, this was as close as he was able to get to Jonestown. Actually, the incident successfully established Lindsay as an enemy of the Peoples Temple and provided several aerial photographs of Jonestown that impressed Will Holsinger (son equally of Joe Holsinger) whom Congressman Ryan had hired to investigate the activities of the Peoples Temple. In his conversations with Holsinger in California, Lindsay learned of Leo Ryan's congressional inquiry into Jonestown and suggested the Congressman invite the press to accompany him for some degree of protection on what could be a dangerous mission. Ryan, who always played to the cameras, agreed and Lindsay took it upon himself to invite the newsmen he wanted to attend. He convinced the National Broadcasting Corporation, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner to assign specific reporters to the congressional junket.
Lindsay managed to be hired as a guide by the 4 NBC-TV news crew, headed by Don Harris, with reporter Bob Flick, cameraman Bob Brown and sound man Steve Sung. They were NBC's combat crew, having covered the Vietnam War individually. The Washington Post assigned their Argentina correspondent, Charles Krause. The San Francisco Chronicle's first choice was their resident expert on the Peoples Temple, Marshall Kilduff, but they feared that Kilduff's presence might aggravate Jones, who had publicly protested the reporter's expose of his organization. They decided instead to send Ron Javers, a recent addition to their staff whose prior journalistic experience dealt primarily with investigating prison conditions in Pennsylvania and a bizarre Black cult known as "MOVE." The San Francisco Examiner assigned their award-winning journalist, Tim Reiterman and cameraman Greg Robinson. When the roster of newsmen was complete, Lindsay radioed the list to Jonestown. Jones, in turn, informed the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown, which forwarded his report to the State Department in Washington. Including Lindsay, the news crew numbered eight, of whom five would return alive.
After several tactical delays in Georgetown (which most agree were engineered by Jones), Gordon Lindsay boarded the chartered plane to Port Kaituma and Jonestown. On board were Congressman Ryan; Jackie Speier, the Congressman's assistant; Dick Dwyer, the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy; Neville Annibourne, an official of the Guyanese Ministry of Information; Attorney Mark Lane, representing Jones; Attorney Charles Garry, also representing Jones; Jones; eight newsmen, including Lindsay; and as many Concerned Relatives as there were remaining seats on the plane. Ryan was well prepared but somewhat confused about the conflicting reports he had received about Jonestown. From ex-Temple members and Concerned Relatives in California, he half-expected to find a barbed-wire concentration camp where the inmates were drugged, beaten or tortured into submission for reasons no one could explain. On the other hand, during his few days delay in Georgetown, Dick Dwyer had shown him slides and home movies which gave the impression that Jonestown was a utopia. Ryan pondered the discrepancies during his one-hour flight over some of the most isolated jungle in the world. A small clearing soon appeared in the rain forest below. It was the Port Kaituma airstrip, the nearest airfield to Jonestown. The disembarking passengers were met by a contingent of Temple guards, a minister of Guyanese Region Development and a local Port Kaituma Policeman, Corporal Rudder. Rudder had no uniform, badge or credentials. His authority rested solely on the 12 (some say 30) gauge shotgun cradled by his young, sad-eyed assistant. Corporal Rudder stepped forward and announced,
I was informed by a superior officer that Peoples Temple do not request the parties present (to go) into the Peoples Temple..I don't know the reasons. I was informed three days ago of this...You can wait around.[172]
Mark Lane and Charles Garry emerged from a conference with the Temple guards to say that Congressman Ryan, Jackie Speier and Dick Dwyer had been given permission to enter Jonestown. They boarded the Temple's dump truck for the fifteen mile trip through the jungle to the remote settlement, leaving the reporters and the Concerned Relatives sequestered on the airstrip with Corporal Rudder and his unidentified assistant. Corporal Rudder escorted Don Harris to a shack in the village where Harris radioed Rudder's superiors to confirm his story and see if he could arrange for permission to visit Jonestown. Meanwhile, those on the hot and humid airstrip had sent one of the locals into the village for two cases of cold Banks Beer. They relaxed in the shade of a passenger shed and it was there that the young constable with the shotgun began telling them stories about Jonestown. He spoke of escapees who reported brutal treatment in the encampment and of strange night-time activities at the Port Kaituma airstrip that Temple members lit with red flares for mysterious landings in the dark. It was the beginning of a special relationship between the press and the young constable who carried the shotgun that would be used to kill Congressman Ryan.
After about two hours of waiting, a Temple farm tractor appeared in the clearing. A Caucasian woman standing behind the Black driver announced, "Everyone who wants to come out to Jonestown can come, except Gordon Lindsay. The truck is coming now."[173] Unlike Tim Reiterman or Ron Javers' colleague, Marshall Kilduff, Gordon Lindsay had never written a published article on the Peoples Temple, yet he was singled out as the only one denied entry into Jonestown. He accepted Jones' wish without protest or even a display of disappointment and, while the others boarded the truck for the forty-five minute ride to Jonestown, Lindsay boarded the twin engine Otter for its return flight to Georgetown where he filed his co-reporters' first stories. For the next several critical days, he would remain in the safety of the Pegasus Hotel relaying news of the historic event to the outside world.
By the time that the newsmen and relatives finally reached Jonestown, it was about seven o'clock and the sun was setting. Clearly, their visit was intended to be a night encounter. They soon joined Ryan, Dwyer, Lane, Garry and Jones in the open-air pavilion for a welcomed and reportedly delicious barbequed pork dinner. Mark Lane refused to eat the meal, choosing instead to consume a box of cough drops that he had brought with him. Some time later, Lane would be accused of coercion based on speculation that he feared that the dinner had been poisoned. In other words, Lane was an accessory in that he had prior knowledge that Jones had murder on his mind. Actually, the truth was much more basic. Jones had intentionally served a very healthful pork dinner to the guests, which included his Jewish attorney. No sooner had they finished eating than the evening's entertainment began with the singing of the Guyanese National Anthem and a rendition of "God Bless America." The very professional rock and roll band, the "Jonestown Express" took the stage directly in front of the visitors to accompany a number of entertainers like the "Soul Steppers" dance team and an elderly Black singer comedienne billed as the "Moms Mabley of Jonestown." The evening was well orchestrated in more ways than one. If Ryan and the newsmen didn't have a a mouthful of food, they had an earful of noise. Conversation had been reduced to screaming above the electrically-amplified music. Ryan did manage to comment to one of the newsmen regarding the strange, trance-like reactions of some of the elderly residents to music that ordinarily appeals only to the young. He said their reactions were "unnaturally animated." His implication was that they were drugged. Jackie Speier was quoted as telling Ryan, "There is no question in my mind that there is mind control being exercised here. While the band played on, the print media reporters interviewed Jones though the music was so loud that they couldn't even record the shallow exchange. The NBC news crew wandered about the Pavilion filming the residents and their visiting relatives. Though they wanted to see more of Jonestown, it was easy to confine them to the pavilion area as they were reluctant to venture into unlit areas as this was the middle of the jungle at night. Ryan had come with a list of residents he wanted to see. He had a letter for Lisa Layton but was told she had died two and a half weeks earlier. He asked to see Brian Bouquet as he had promised his relatives he would do. Temple members giggled because Brian Bouquet had been standing in front of Ryan for most of the evening, playing saxophone in the "Jonestown Express." After a few interviews, Ryan took the microphone and announced to the gathering: "I can tell you right now that by the few conversations I've had with some of the folks here already this evening that... there are some people who believe this is the best thing that ever happened in their whole lives."[174] The crowd responded with a roaring, applause that is said to have lasted for twenty minutes, well past the point of embarrassment. When Ryan was again allowed to speak he joked that he was sorry they could not all vote in his congressional district. Jones yelled back that they could, by absentee ballot. Ryan replied in a serious tone, "I want to pull no punches. This is a congressional inquiry."[175]
It was about 11PM when the crowd dispersed in unison like so many fish in a school responding to some mysterious mass communication. It was obvious that the evening encounter had drawn to a close. As the residents made their way back to their cabins, Jones concluded the interview with reporters, complaining of a conspiracy to destroy the Peoples Temple. When asked who was plotting his demise, Jones responded, "Who conspired to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and John Kennedy? Every agency of the whole government is giving us a hard time. Somebody doesn't like socialism."[176] It was another calculated statement from the master of deceit. In so few words he gave the reporters the impression of a paranoid man with delusions of grandeur who was persecuted by the U.S. government for his socialistic beliefs. To add credence to his claim, at his side was Mark Lane, the foremost authority on the CIA conspiracies to assassinate King and Kennedy. Actually, Jones was working for the CIA which had issued a "hands off" order to the other agencies of the government permitting him to perpetuate his many crimes in the U.S. unabated. The "somebody" who didn't like socialism was Jim Jones.
Ryan, Dwyer, and the attorneys would spend the night in the Jonestown guest house that, until recently, had been occupied by Lisa Layton. The reporters were told that there was not enough room in the community to accommodate them. They said that they would be perfectly comfortable on the floor of the pavilion but Jones resisted and sent them, sleeping bags and baggage, back to Port Kaituma. As Don Harris boarded the Temple truck for the return trip he was handed a note that read, "Help us get out of Jonestown. Vern Gosney, Monica Bagby." He told only his NBC news crew.
Between the dinner, the darkness, the rock music and the deafening applause ,there was almost no opportunity for serious investigation or even conversation and the reporters left with little or nothing to show for their first day's visit to Jonestown, except an impression of Jones who, in Tim Reiterman's words, "seemed paranoid if not crazy." Jones had been manipulating the press for years and was a far better actor than they were investigators. "Crazy" was just the impression he wanted to effect.
The newsmen and visiting relatives were driven to "Mike's Disco and Rum House" where the Temple had reserved accommodations that were no better than the floor of the pavilion and not worth the bumpy, fifteen mile trip to Port Kaituma. But their comfort was not important to Jones; getting them out of Jonestown was all that mattered. The women in the group shared a bedroom while the men were told they could sleep on the kitchen floor.
By then it was after midnight and the reporters sat about the bar drinking rum and beer and discussing the events of the day with some disappointment at bp coming away with so little. Into the midst of their conversation wandered Corporal Rudder's unnamed assistant but the reporters did not recognize the young constable at first because he did not have the one thing that distinguished him from the other local Black men, his shotgun. After a few beers the young constable invited the print media reporters, Krause, Reiterman and Javers to accompany him to the village police station where he wanted to relate some information about Jonestown in private. They left the bar, one at a time, and regrouped outside so as not to alert the NBC television crew. (Reporters can be a very competitive lot.) They walked down a dirt road that followed the river, passed the Temple's ship --the "Cudjo" and into an adobe shack. It was so dark that they had to feel their way through the door. It was sometime between 2 AM and 4AM (reports vary) when the four men sat down around a wooden table in the small room lit only by a candle in a beer can.
The young constable recounted an incident that had happened a year and a half earlier when Leon Broussard escaped from Jonestown and staggered out of the jungle and into that very room. Broussard had told the constable he escaped after having been repeatedly beaten by Temple guards. He described an underground by cell used as solitary confinement for resident offenders and gave the constable directions on how to locate the torture chamber, which he did in his subsequent investigation. It was a root cellar-type cave containing a black box that resembled a coffin. When the constable asked Jones about the cave, he said it was for the storage of fresh produce though it was located in the jungle about 1/4 mile to the rear of the "Jonestown Experimental and Herbal Kitchen." What he quite accurately described was the sensory deprivation tank used, not to punish, but as an experimental tool. In the light of one candle, the constable opened a safe plastered flush in the wall. He retrieved a ledger and read the names of three Temple members who had been airlifted out of Port Kaituma two evenings before the Congressman's party arrived. One was an elderly woman, reportedly ill. The other two were middle-aged men, one with a cast on his arm, the other with a cast on his leg. The constable took their alleged injuries as additional evidence of beatings in Jonestown and their departure as Jones' desire to hide the evidence from the probing eyes of Ryan and the press. The reporters believed what is, in retrospect, a very unlikely story. Jones' techniques of punishment were far more sophisticated than breaking bones and, if he had done so, he never would have sent the victims out of his control and especially not to Georgetown where they could have told their story to Ryan and the reporters who were waiting there for permission to visit the interior. Nor would there be any medical reasons to send the three out of Jonestown. Between Larry Layton's X-ray machine and Dr. Larry Schacht's skills as a physician, the Jonestown clinic could provide as many, if not more, services as any hospital in Guyana. The chartered plane and the rather dangerous night-time landing was probably for another, more important reason. Conceivably, it was the last-minute evacuation of key agency personnel assigned to the experiment. Perhaps the woman was Lisa Layton or Charlotte Baldwin. The reporters never identified the three or even the constable who played a significant role in establishing their opinion of Jonestown. A fifth man, wearing a construction hard hat, entered the shack and, without invitation, joined in the conversation. He was introduced as the electrical engineer who, every morning at this time, shut down the town's generator as a part of a nationwide energy conservation program. HE was very, even suspiciously, knowledgeable on the subject of Jonestown. The conversation drifted to reports of automatic weapons and the constable confirmed that the government of Guyana had issued one such permit to the Peoples Temple. The discussion ended when the constable promised to accompany the reporters the next day to show them the underground torture chamber. He never did.
The reporters made their way in the dark back to "Mike's" Disco" for a few hours sleep before the Temple truck was to pick them up at the prearranged time of 8:30 AM. All three would survive the next day's carnage. All three would write books about Jonestown. All three were influenced by the unnamed constable, but none more than Tim Reiterman. It seems that Leon Broussard had left Port Kaituma and made his way back to San Francisco in the summer of 1977 to retell his story of the brutal treatment in Jonestown to none other than Tim Reiterman who doubted his claims. Now, a year and a half later and several thousand miles away, Broussard's testimony was being confirmed.
The Temple truck pulled up to "Mike's Disco" at about 10:30AM, two hours late. The driver cited mechanical problems but, in fact, his tardiness was just another means of restricting the reporters' access to Jonestown. After an uneventful trip they were greeted at the front gate by Marceline Jones who announced that a lavish breakfast and an all-day tour awaited them. Not wanting to be tricked into another non-productive day, Don Harris, the most outspoken reporter, said that they had a lot of work to do and no time for breakfast though "coffee would be nice." Impatiently looking at his watch, he said something to the effect that they would begin the tour of what they wanted to see in just a few minutes. Mrs. Jones backed off.
For the first time the reporters viewed the well-organized community in the light of day and they were both impressed and suspicious of what they saw. Everything seemed staged. A group of children lethargically played on the grounds as if they had been ordered to do so. Another group watched a children's movie on the videotape machine in the pavilion while others sat attentively in an outdoor classroom. It was Saturday and the reporters had learned that Jonestown maintained a typical Monday through Friday school week. No one seemed to be working. Everyone was relaxing in pastoral, picnic-like settings. Whenever a reporter would stray from the chosen path he was confronted by a friendly "Hi! Can I help you"? and herded back into line. They were too often told not to venture into certain areas because they would disturb the residents who were sleeping there. It was another wasted day. They did confront Jones with the constable's allegations of the presence of automatic weapons and an underground chamber; Jones denied the existence of both. The firearms had been locked away and the sensory deprivation tank long since destroyed in preparation for the day and the investigation that would inevitably follow.
Ryan announced over the public address system that anyone wishing to return to the United States with him should gather up their belongings and board the truck to the Port Kaituma airstrip. Vern Gosney, Monica Bagby, the Parks family and several others stepped forward. Jones spoke privately with each to either convince them to stay or to give them Last minute instructions. Fifteen residents, most Caucasian, wanted to leave. Jones gave each their passport and 5,000 Guyanese dollars for the passage home.
Some said they would return after visiting relatives in the U.S. Jones was noticeably shaken at little more than 1% of his followers who wanted to go home. He grasped his chest as if in pain and said to to his wife, "A pill," loud enough for the reporters to overhear. Tim Reiterman later reported that "Lovingly, his wife resisted his entreaty." Though Reiterman and the other reporters recognized that some aspects of the tour had been staged, they failed to realize that all aspects of the tour, including Jones' reference to "a pill", had been staged. They were convinced, and in turn convinced the world, of Jones' imaginary drug dependency. Their portrayal of a crazed drug addict was exactly the public image Jones needed to explain the bizarre events that would take place later that day.
From over the public address system echoed, "Bonny Simon! Bonny Simon! Please come to the radio room!" A few minutes later, a very upset Bonny Simon ran past Congressman Ryan. She was chasing after her husband Alvin and screaming, "I'll kill you! You bring those kids back here! Don't touch my kids!"[177] Alvin Simon, a full- blooded Pima Indian from Arizona, was herding his three small children towards the front gate and the truck that was about to depart for the Port Kaituma airstrip. Bonny caught up to her family near the pavilion and tried to wrestle the children from their father who obviously intended to take them back to the United States. With Ryan as an audience, Bonny and Alvin played tug-of-war with young Alvin, Jr. Ryan, Lane and Garry intervened and determined that questions of child custody should be settled in the courts. Alvin Simon conceded, deciding to remain with his children in Jonestown. Jones reassured everyone present that he would not punish Alvin for his attempt to leave and the situation calmed down. The U.S. State Department would later inform the Pima Indian tribe that Alvin Simon and his father Jose--a Pima chief and Jonestown resident--did not voluntarily drink the poison later that day. They had been injected.
Everyone was in position and everything on schedule for the planned assassination at the airstrip; that is until Ryan decided to stay another night in Jonestown to document others, like Alvin Simon, who might wish to return to the U.S. at some future date. Jones was not about to rely on some unrehearsed contingency plan to kill the Congressman. He had to force Ryan to leave. As a last resort, Jones called upon his knife expert Don Sly to get the Congressman Ryan on the road to his death.
Jones, Ryan, Lane and Garry were standing outside the pavilion when Don Sly approached the group, grabbed Ryan in a stranglehold, put a knife to his throat and screamed, "I'm gonna slit your throat you motherfucker." Ryan fell backwards on top of his attacker and the two attorneys wrestled the knife away but not before Sly reportedly cut himself between the thumb and forefinger. There was blood everywhere but mostly on the front of Ryan's shirt. Sly, an extremely strong athlete who had once trained for the Olympic swimming team, could have easily killed Ryan but the plan was not to kill him there, only to scare him into leaving for the airstrip where the assassination team was waiting. The knife attack was staged. The blood was real but it came from a Hollywood special effects capsule Sly had concealed in his hand. Ryan, obvious shaken, ghostly white and spattered with blood, still wanted to stay another night. Jones, who never apologized or showed any remorse over the incident , asked, "Does this change everything?" Ryan responded "It doesn't change everything but it does change some things." Jones assured Ryan he would have Sly arrested for the attempted murder although he had no intention of doing so.
Meanwhile, the truck loaded with newsmen, relatives and Jonestown defectors was delayed at the front gate because, according to the driver, it was stuck in the mud. Actually, they were stalling, waiting for Ryan. Back at the pavilion, Jones huddled with several of his aides as Dick Dwyer pleaded with and even ordered Ryan to leave. Finally, Ryan agreed to go with the others after Dwyer promised that he would return to Jonestown to document any other residents who might wish to leave but first he would see Ryan off at the airstrip. At that precise moment the truck was freed and Ryan and Dwyer had to run to catch up with it. Out of the huddle with Jones and running alongside the two men was the sixteenth Jonestown "defector," Larry Layton.
The ride to the airstrip was uneventful. The mood was one of relief; relief that everyone had gotten out alive, relief that Ryan had not been hurt in the knife assault, relief that it was all over--or so the thought. The only thing to spoil the moment was an apprehension everyone felt at Larry Layton's presence. Those who knew him warned the others that his defection was probably feigned, as he was too close to Jones. The truck swayed back and forth in the muddy ruts of the road built in the early days of Jonestown and into the clearing of the Port Kaituma airstrip built years earlier by United States mining concerns. The passengers disembarked and assembled in and around the only structure, a tin roofed passenger shed. Dick Dwyer quietly slipped into the village and returned with the unnamed constable before the group (which now numbered about thirty) had noticed he was missing. The airstrip was deserted except for some local onlookers and four (possibly six) armed men in Guyanese military uniforms camped near the end of the runway to guard a "disabled military plane" that someone said had a broken wheel.
Before long, two planes landed; the Otter from the day before and a six-seater Cessna that Ryan had ordered over the Jonestown radio after the defectors joined his party. It is interesting to note that just a day earlier Ryan could not charter enough seats to fly all the Concerned Relatives into Jonestown but he had no trouble arranging for this additional plane on short notice. In this story, when things worked smoothly it was because Jones wanted them to. Even with the additional plane there was still not enough room for everyone. Ryan decided that the defectors and the reporters with deadlines would be the first to fly to Georgetown; he and the others would wait for the Otter to return. Reporter Charles Krause begged defector Jim Cobb for his seat. While Jackie Speier organized the passengers and baggage, Ryan pat-searched the boarding male passengers following the advice of Dwyer and some of the defectors who suspected trouble from Larry Layton, among others. Layton managed to smuggle a handgun onto the Cessna. Everyone was milling about the two planes, except Dick Dwyer and the shotgun-toting constable who stood off the runway near the shed.
The Temple's dump truck returned and, along with a farm tractor towing a trailer, emerged from the Jonestown road and parked near the far end of the runway across from the disabled military plane. The truck remained stationary but the tractor-trailer moved down and across the runway to a vantage point between the Cessna and the Otter. When the driver of the tractor began questioning the defectors as to who was assigned to which plane, the others became alarmed and hurried to board and fly out of there before any trouble started. The tractor driver and his passenger: who rode in the high sided trailer (identified by Harold Cordell as Stanley Gieg, Tom Kice, Sr., Albert Touchette and Joe Wilson) walked over to the small group of Port Kaitumans and pushed them back out of the way. They then approached Dick Dwyer. The young constable handed them his shotgun and both he and Dwyer backed away. The Temple guards went back to the trailer and picked up automatic weapons described by survivors as M-16's. Shots were heard in the distance; probably the signal to begin the assault from the Temple guards in the dump truck. The Cessna, fully loaded, began to taxi when the shooting started. From inside the plane, Larry Layton shot Vern Gosney and Monica Bagby but, as difficult as it is to believe, he reportedly missed the pilot. According to Dale Parks, he then pointed the .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver at him and fired. There was noise but no bullet as if the gun had been loaded with a blank cartridge. Parks wrestled the revolver from Layton, ending that half of the attack. Meanwhile, from the trailer, marksmen fired a volley low into the crowd surrounding the Otter, hitting several below the waist. This first round was obviously intended, not to kill, but to immobilize the crowd, all of whom "hit the dirt." About half of the thirty had been shot but only Patty Parks died in the first round. She was struck high in the torso because she was bent over when the shooting began. Her death was probably an accident. Bob Brown bravely continued to film the assault as the Temple guards moved in for the kill carrying the shotgun they had confiscated from the constable. One blast to Brown's head and his brains splattered over his video camera. Greg Robinson, who had been snapping still photos as fast as he could, was the next to fall to the shotgun. With both photographers dead, the assassins turned to Ryan who lay wounded near the Otter and shot him point-blank in the head. Don Harris suffered the same fate. In all, five were dead, five seriously wounded, five slightly wounded.
The Temple assault team could have easily killed everyone at the airstrip. No one fought back and, thanks to Dwyer's advice to Ryan, no one could as they had been searched and disarmed moments before the attack. During the shooting, Bob Flick had pleaded with the Guyanese soldiers for protection or the loan of a weapon but they refused to even allow him near the disabled plane in their charge. In their words this was "Americans shooting Americans" and none of their business.
Obviously, it was not the intention of the Temple assault team to kill everyone or to stop the Jonestown defectors from leaving. The intention was to assassinate Congressman Ryan. Cameramen Bob Brown and Greg Robinson were killed just before Ryan because they were filming the assassination. Patty Parks' death was an accident. Only the motive for killing newsman Don Harris remains unclear. It is possible that he too was an intended target who had been deliberately recruited for the trip to Guyana and his death. Harris did share a common history with the other dead newsmen in their coverage of the Vietnam War. He was so close to the action that he witnessed the fall of Saigon from the roof of the U.S. Embassy. If he was an intended victim, the root of the reasoning may have been a result of his Vietnam experience. In short, he learned something he shouldn't have. But there is another very interesting, yet unfortunately unconfirmed, report that Harris' hobby was the study of Howard Hughes' connections with the CIA, which if true would be as good a motive as any for his murder.
Of the five slightly wounded, one was visiting relative Beverly Oliver, three were the print media reporters Javers, Reiterman and Krause. Krause, however, could hardly be considered wounded; his leg was scratched while he squeezed through the baggage compartment door of the Cessna for cover during the assault. The U.S. Embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission, Dick Dwyer, was the fifth, claiming to have been grazed by a bullet in the buttocks. There was blood on his pants but that's all anyone saw. His wound, if it was a wound, did not stop him from assuming command of the group after the shooting stopped and the Temple assault team retreated. Dwyer was out of the line of fire and was probably not shot as further evidenced by the fact that he waited several days before seeking any medical attention in Georgetown. Years later, he claimed to still carry a bullet that was lodged near the base of his spine, but this is pure conjecture because he has never backed his claim with hard evidence such as a verified X-ray.
Despite Dick Dwyer's support of Jim Jones prior to the incident, his leadership of the survivors of the assassination went uncontested. He was, after all, the only ranking U.S. official on the airstrip. Dale Parks recognized his authority when he brought Larry Layton and his revolver, not to the local police, but to Dwyer.
There was a commotion at the end of the airstrip and Dwyer yelled, "They're coming back! They're coming back!," which was enough of a real threat to send any ambulatory survivors scrambling for cover in the nearby high swamp grass and jungle. Only the two pilots and Dwyer remained and after, a brief conversation the pilots boarded the Cessna and took off for Georgetown with Monica Bagby, leaving the others stranded in Port Kaituma under threat of another attack. There was no pilot to fly the Otter; besides, one of its engines had been damaged in the assault. The police radio that Don Harris had used the day before was conveniently inoperative (some say broken , others missing). There were no working telephones in Port Kaituma; no way to communicate with the outside world. There was but an hour or so of daylight left and, even if the Cessna had radioed Georgetown for help, there was not enough time for a rescue plane to arrive at the unlit strip before dark. Dick Dwyer quietly confiscated the group's only flashlight. Obviously, they would have to spend the night in Port Kaituma.
While hiding in and around the village from Dwyer's imaginary second assault, Tim Reiterman was confronted by several men he believed to be locals. One stepped forward, handed him a book on CIA conspiracies and said, "We were told that you, the group with the congressman, were CIA and heavily armed."[178] Reiterman replied that he was a reporter and neither armed nor employed by the CIA. He would later report that the man's peculiar remark was evidence that Jones had primed the locals to be against the congressional inquiry. He failed to realize that, from the perspective of a Port Kaituman, all Americans were the same whether they be congressmen, Concerned Relatives, reporters, or the heavily armed CIA technicians who had filmed the entire assassination from their vantage point within the so-called "disabled" military plane.
With the exception of the constable providing the murder weapon, neither the Guyanese police nor the military (if that is who they really were) played any role in the attack other than that of witness. The they were helpless because their only armed constable had been disarmed by the assailants. The soldiers, who incidentally had not been disarmed during the attack, remained aloof to the whole affair, that is until Dick Dwyer approached them. They agreed to house the severely wounded, not in the plane that they were guarding, but in their small camp tent. With old bedsprings for litters and rum for anesthetic, the four critically wounded were carried to the tent. The dead were left lying on the airstrip overnight, during which time the bodies were looted of everything but their clothing. This has been attributed to the local natives who have a reputation for stealing anything of value that isn't nailed down but the most valuable items on the bodies were their notes on Jonestown; the missing notes that someone took from the bodies under the cover of darkness. One at a time, the survivors emerged from the jungle and returned to the airstrip after Dwyer's false alarm. Dwyer sent them to the Port Kaituma Rum Shop where he had arranged for them to spend the evening. Everyone was sheltered by sunset. The wounded in the tent certainly could not move and the others in the Rum Shop certainly would not move. They were so afraid of a second Temple assault that they sent two escorts with any of their number who exited the rear door of the shop to relieve their bladders from another evening of over indulging in drink. Between the cases of beer at the airstrip, the first evening at Mike's Disco and Rum House, and the second evening at the Port Kaituma Rum Shop, whether intentionally or not the reporters would o pass their two days in Guyana's interior under the influence of alcohol. Only Dick Dwyer remained mobile during the long night. He shuttled between the Rum Shop and the tent on the airstrip, being away from both for hours at a time.
Out of the dark and into the Rum Shop stumbled the unidentified constable, obviously drunk. "I'll kill them! I'll kill them! I'll kill them all in Jonestown!" he screamed. The reporters tried to calm him down, fearing that in his enthusiasm he might decide to kill them instead. No one suspected that, at that precise moment fifteen miles away in Jonestown, the residents were killing themselves. The constable left the Rum Shop, never to be heard from again. This man, who knew so much about Jonestown, who had such a profound influence on the reporters and the stories they told to the outside world, who provided the murder weapon to kill Congressman Ryan, has never been questioned or even identified, which exemplifies what would be a mediocre investigation into the assassination. No attempt was made to even locate the murder weapon or the Temple guard who fired the fatal shotgun blasts. Nor were several critical questions even addressed. For example, though reports vary as to the caliber of the shotgun, all agree it was a single-shot, but even if it were a double- barrel the assassin would have had to reload to have fired the four fatal shots. Where did he get the additional ammunition? Reports indicate that the constable provided only the shotgun. Was the Temple assault team equipped with just the right ammunition for the constable's gun? If so, this is evidence of collusion as the Temple guards must have had prior knowledge that Dwyer's companion would be present during the attack and would give them his gun.
As absurd a miscarriage of justice as it would appear to be, in the final analysis, a U.S. Congressman was assassinated in full view of at least four dozen people, some of whom, like the constable have never been identified or even questioned as to what they witnessed. No attempt was made to bring anyone to justice or to even locate the murder weapon. Larry Layton would be the only one tried in U.S. courts for the crime and he was charged, not with murder, but with conspiracy to murder. As to who actually killed Leo Ryan, no one seems to care and everyone has a preconceived, precontrived rationale. To a privileged few, Ryan was killed by the CIA. To the rest of the world, Ryan was killed by the crazed Jim Jones. Though both opinions are basically correct, it is still difficult to fathom that U.S. authorities would not search for the man who pulled the trigger. In the Layton trial, the prosecution not only did not indict the other Temple guards identified as members of the airstrip assault team, they did not even subpoena them to testify. The investigation into Ryan's death was sloppy to the point of suspicion.
It was early morning, California time, when the phone rang in the Foster City home of Ryan's attorney and close friend, Joe Holsinger. It was the White House informing him that Ryan had been killed in Guyana. "How do you know this?" he asked. The White House spokesman answered that CIA personnel had witnessed the assassination. To pinpoint the agent the White House was referring to is difficult as there were many on the airstrip at the time. There was the U.S. Embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission (by definition, a legal agent) who, when later asked about his employment with the CIA, gave the agency's standard, up-against-the-wall, reply, "I can neither confirm nor deny the allegation." Dick Dwyer would later leave Guyana and take up residence in, of all places, Grenada where he continued the work started by Jones in preparation for the U.S. invasion of the island nation. There is no doubt that Dwyer worked for the CIA. Then, there was Larry Layton, whose entire family had been cleared for top secret work by the federal government. Layton was too close to the true nature of the experiment to be anything but CIA. And then there were the current and former Temple members on both sides of the assault. All were top aides in a CIA operation and some realized it. Even the reporters were suspect. Charles Krause's position as the Buenos Aires correspondent for the Washington Post as well as his future work investigating political turmoil in Central and South America make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to deny at least an affiliation with the CIA. There are other suspects like the unnamed constable and the man who carried a book on CIA conspiracies through the enactment of a CIA conspiracy. But more than likely, the White House was referring to the group of CIA observers who filmed the entire event from their command center in the disabled plane that had the only operative radio outside of Jonestown. There were only three possible ways that the message could have been sent out of the interior. First, there was the Cessna that returned to Georgetown. If the message was sent by them, then one of the two pilots, or Monica Bagby, was a CIA operative. The other two possibilities were the two radios; one in Jonestown and the other in the disabled plane. Meanwhile, the assault team had returned to Jonestown to report their success. Jones switched on the reel-to-reel tape recorder to document the White Night. Into the microphone he said, "Take Dwyer to the East House." Many have seen this as a mistake on the part of Jones who supposedly thought that Dwyer had returned as he had said he would but, in reality, it was a calculated statement designed to give the impression that Jones had no knowledge of Dwyer's whereabouts or activities in order to disassociate him from the master-plan.
The Congressman is dead! The Congressman is dead! Come to the pavilion. What a legacy! What a legacy! It's time to pass over. This isn't just a suicide, it's a revolutionary suicide. Come my children before the GDF (Guyanese Defense Force) parachutes in here to castrate, rape and kill.
Obviously, Jones was using the assassination as a mechanism to trigger the experiment. He had put Guyana's Prime Minister in power and neither the GDF nor any Guyanese authority were about to interfere with his project. It was all a bluff.
A few minutes earlier Jones had sent Mark Lane and Charles Garry to the East House under the armed protection of none other than Don Sly, the same man they had wrestled to the ground just a couple of hours earlier. Jones' odd selection of a bodyguard was a two-fold plan. Overall, his intention was to discredit Mark Lane and his association with Ryan's assailant after the incident was at least a vague reference to collusion. Besides, Sly got to show off the bandage on his hand that, in the minds of the attorneys, reinforced the impression that he had been injured in his attack on Congressman Ryan. Jones never intended to kill the attorneys. If Lane had been murdered in Jonestown just prior to his scheduled Congressional testimony about CIA assassinations, the press might have accused Jones of working for the CIA. Instead of taking Lane's life, Jones and the CIA decided to take his career, hence influence. The intention was to discredit Lane, hence he and Garry were allowed to "escape" the White Night. Don Sly disappeared, leaving only the Temple guards Jimmy Jones and Jim Johnson between the attorneys and the open jungle. Lane claims they convinced the guards to let them leave so they could write the truth about the Peoples Temple but the guards would have allowed them to leave anyway because that was Jones' plan. Together, Lane and Garry tore small strips of cloth from a spare pair of underwear, tied the strips to the vegetation and, like Hansel and Gretel, made their way through the jungle to Port Kaituma where the following morning they were reunited with the survivors of the airstrip attack. Later that day they would be rescued by the GDF who were obviously in no hurry to reach Port Kaituma or Jonestown. The troops didn't fly, but took the train, and then walked the last twenty miles fearing the train might be sabotaged. The delay allowed Jones the time to count bodies and record the results of the experiment.
Back at the pavilion, about a dozen staffers, under the direction of Dr. Larry Schacht and poisons expert Faith Worley, gathered around a metal vat to mix and distribute the Kool-Aid/ cyanide /tranquilizer potion, the recipe for which had been formulated some five years earlier during the first White Night rehearsal in 1973. Despite one report that Jones had threatened mass suicide by fire the year before, poisoned wine had always been the intended medium for the Temple's "Last Supper" communion. Early on, Jones had asked Faith Worley what poison to use. "Cyanide" was her reply. Jones agreed and reportedly added, "That's what the Germans used."
Recipe for Mass Suicide 15 gallons of grape drink mix
The grape Kool-Aid (many say it was actually an imitation product called Fla-Vor-Aid was as close to wine as practical but it was not a last minute substitution. Several months earlier, Jones was conducting a video-taped tour of Jonestown when he went out of his way to describe the community's stock of Kool-Aid in the supply room; another example of his offbeat sense of humor and evidence of his awareness of and plans to use the drink mix as flavoring.
100 pounds of potassium cyanide
More important than the flavoring was the cyanide, or rather the timing of the cyanide. It is critical to understand that even though Jones had rehearsed the White Night for over five years and had threatened mass suicide in 1977, he did not have the ability to carry it out until just two days before Ryan arrived in Jonestown when the Temple ship, "Cudjo" brought the plastic drum of poison from Georgetown to Port Kaituma. It was Wednesday, November 15th, when Harold Cordell unloaded the drum on the dock for the last leg of its long journey to Jonestown. Jones had purchased the cyanide compound from a chemical company in Upstate New York about the same time that the dates of Ryan's visit had been scheduled, which disproves the federal government's position that Jones did not plan the assassination or the suicide murder that followed.
Tranquilizers
Liquid Valium and Darvon were added to the potion to ease the pain of death--a twisted compassion in an inhumane act.
The medical staff filled hypodermic syringes, squeeze bottles and hundreds of paper cups with the poisoned brew. Jones called everyone to the pavilion and, with the reel-to reel tape recorder operating, he ordered the final White Night. "Please get the medication before it's too late... The GDF will be here ... Don't be afraid to die ... It's all over ... The Congressman is dead. How many are dead?"[179] He then took a few minutes to debrief the assault team before returning to the microphone. "Oh, God almighty. Patty Parks is dead."[180] Jones, who showed no remorse for the death of Ryan and the newsmen, or for that matter, the pending death of his congregation, was honestly upset with the news of Patty Parks' demise , which supports the theory that her death was an unintentional accident.
From time to time Jones left the pavilion and the services for various errands. Once he radioed the Temple's Georgetown headquarters in Lamaha Gardens to instruct them to begin their own White Night. When they asked how, Jones replied, "K-N-I-F-E" as he spelled out the murder weapon. Sharon Amos and her three children died from having their throats slit with a large knife. Some say that Amos killed her children and then herself but others claim they were all murdered by long-time Temple aide Charles Beikman, who witnessed the deaths but survived uninjured. Beikman was a Caucasian ex- Marine who operated the Temple's thrift store in Kumaha. As further evidence of premeditation, the store was closed seven days before the massacre.
The first to die in Jonestown were the babes-in-arms. On Jones' order, mothers holding small children were the first to line up in front of the vat of poison where the technicians squirted the potion into the throats of the children. The infants swallowed and screamed. "Don't be afraid," Jones reassured them. "It isn't painful, just a little bitter tasting." The very young were not a part of the experiment as they had not reached the age of reason. This first step was not to test the children but the willingness of the mothers to kill their children. Many mothers wandered aimlessly about the pavilion, holding their dead or dying offspring. In this first round, only the infants were poisoned, the mothers were not. Next to the vat of poison stood Annie Moore holding a box of colored Magic Markers. She placed a black "X" on any mother who cooperated in the murder. Their time would come soon as, clearly, the order of execution was by age.
The older children were next. One at a time they drank their paper cup of death. The adults followed and so did the trouble as many refused to drink the poison. Force-feeding would have been a waste of precious time. Uncooperative residents were captured by armed guards who had formed two concentric circles around the pavilion. The guards dragged them to the vat of poison where they were injected and somehow labelled involuntary (an essential procedure necessary to document the results of the experiment). The last to die were the seniors. Death from cyanide poisoning takes several minutes, during which time the victim suffers uncontrollably wild convulsions and finally succumbs to suffocation.
Eventually, only the guards, medical technicians and Jones were left standing. They gave three loud cheers at the successful completion of the experiment but they were not finished; there was still a lot of work to do. Corpses were counted, identified, recorded as suicide or murder and dragged by the arms to areas outside the pavilion that had been designated for the documented dead. They labored for several hours into the night.
The first outsiders to view the carnage arrived the following morning to find the dead in neat, orderly piles, head-to-head, toe-to-toe. Aside from the tropical birds pecking at the bodies, there were only two Jonestown residents found alive, a lone dog and Hyacinth Thrash, an old woman who reportedly slept through the entire White Night. Viola Burnham, wife of, the Prime Minister, was in charge of the expedition that included a contingent of Guyanese soldiers and Dr. C. Leslie Mootoo, the country's chief medical examiner. Mrs. Burnham and her guards ransacked the office, kitchen and Jones' cabin. They confiscated money, documents, weapons and just about anything of value. With the booty in hand, they then returned to Georgetown with Mrs. Thrash (who, by one report, was suspected of actually being Lisa Layton). Meanwhile, Dr. Mootoo and his two unnamed assistants stayed behind to examine the remains. Temple members Odell Rhodes, Stanley Clayton and Tim Carter (all of whom were in Guyanese custody) helped Dr. Mootoo identify and tag many of the bodies. About eight autopsies were performed on the site but, oddly, Dr. Mootoo selected only children as subjects and not Jim Jones. Eleven-year old Nawab Laurence was of particular interest as one of the medical assistants remembered the child entering the country through customs. The boy had been born a heroin addict in California. Jones had somehow (probably through Mendocino State Hospital) gained custody of the child who now lay dead. Dr. Mootoo determined that the examined had "died from asphyxia due to violent convulsions." Their stomachs contained cyanide and traces of Valium. He also reported that at least "eighty-three people had been injected with cyanide." Dr. Mootoo never addressed the unusual placement of the bodies. The "violent convulsions" of nine hundred dying people could never have resulted in the neat, orderly piles in which the corpses were found. The press would later quote Dick Gregory as saying that the positioning of the bodies was "evidence of a CIA conspiracy." Though his conclusion was correct, his rationale was ridiculously simplistic and served only to discourage anyone who might otherwise have investigated the CIA's role in Jonestown. (Dick Gregory had once co-authored a book with Mark Lane about the conspiracy to assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King).
Dr. Mootoo and his assistants worked for thirty-two hours nonstop before they ran out of energy and supplies. One account claims that forensic pathologist Dr. Robert Stein of Chicago radioed Dr. Mootoo to offer U.S. assistance but Washington never gave him permission and later denied the offer. Another account claims that Dr. Mootoo asked the U.S. for help but, regardless of who initiated the exchange, no medical personnel were sent. Dr. Mootoo would later accuse the U.S. government of suppressing his initial investigation into the deaths in Jonestown by denying him both official U.S. aid and unofficial offers to help by private citizens like Dr. Robert Stein.
Washington was very slow to react. At first they relied on the State Department's request that Guyana dig a pit and bury the dead in Jonestown. When Mayor George Moscone, the relatives of the victims and the government of Guyana refused to accept this plan, a U.S. military team was dispatched to recover the bodies. The U.S. Army's Director of Operations in South America, Colonel William Gordon, left his station in the Panama Canal Zone to command the mission. Accompanying Colonel Gordon's troops were two doctors; Dr. Lynn Cook, a forensic pathologist from the University of South Carolina Medical Center, and Dr. Bruce Poitrast, an Army surgeon. This first official U.S. delegation arrived on the scene four days after the massacre. Since Jones had ordered that most of the dead be dragged outside the pavilion's roof, the four days of intense tropical sun, rain and high humidity had greatly accelerated decomposition. Most of the bodies were inflated like balloons near the bursting point. The first chore of the U.S. recovery team was to bayonet the bodies to release the internal gases. Over nine hundred corpses were stabbed, most split the length of their torso. (This may have been the basis of one claim that the stomach cavity of each of the Jonestown victims was used by the CIA to smuggle heroin into the United States). The U.S. medical experts on the scene did absolutely nothing because, according to Dr. Cook, "I didn't even have a pocket knife, no equipment and no preservatives for specimens." There is really no wonder in why the U.S. government waited so long to send only two doctors and no medical supplies or equipment to gather evidence. It was obvious, as it was to Dr. Mootoo, that Washington was trying to suppress any investigation into Jonestown. Acting on orders from the office of Zbigniew Brzezinski (President Carter's National Security Advisor) "all politically sensitive papers and forms of identification were removed from the corpses." The U.S. government had made it impossible to identify the victims that were then placed in bags and air-lifted by helicopter to the Georgetown airport for the flight back to the United States.
Shock wave after shock wave shook San Francisco as the headlines heralded an increasing death toll in Jonestown. First reports claimed 400 had died. Days later the figure was revised upward to 780 and finally, one week after the Event, the news media reported the total as 903. Jim Jones had claimed the lives of more San Franciscans than had the devastating 1906 earthquake. The U.S. and Guyanese troops sent to clean up the experiment explained that their confusion over the body count was the result of the fact that corpses lay concealed under other corpses and were not discovered until the bodies were removed. If this ludicrous explanation is to be accepted, then 503 bodies were hidden under a pile of 400. In the lowest common denominator, four bodies concealed another five. It is very unlikely.
There is one plausible, though purely speculative, answer to the mystery of the ascending death toll. U.S. troops sent to Jonestown expected to find what they were told were 1,200 residents. According to their reports, after the initial body count of 400, rather than look for more bodies around the pavilion, they spent much of the first few hours combing the surrounding jungle expecting to find the missing 800. Military helicopters were employed to fly low over the treetops and announce on loudspeakers that it was safe to return to Jonestown. Reportedly, no one answered their calls; no one emerged from the jungle. It is possible that only 400 residents committed suicide and the rest fled into the jungle. At first, 400 were reported dead because that was all that had died by the time that the military reached the settlement. As the escapees emerged from the jungle they were injected and their bodies dragged over to the pile. The revisions in the body count could have been made as the test persons were being located and murdered but this is only one possible scenario which would explain what has heretofore not made much sense.
Perhaps the mystery of the ascending body count was necessary to help cover-up the fact that, in the final analysis, the total count of 903 does not compare with the 1,200 that everyone, inside or out, agreed was the population of Jonestown. Approximately 300 people are missing. Some of these can be accounted for in the ranks of those top aides who "defected" from Jonestown just before the Event to escape any possible persecution for their association with the experiment. There were also those residents who had defected with the Ryan party or who were in Georgetown at the time for such questionable excuses as basketball games and dentist appointments. Even a meticulous study of Temple members who had recently defected, died, or for other reasons left Jonestown, accounts for less than 100 which should have left 1,100 to die in the Event that only claimed 903. The fate of the missing 197 is explored elsewhere in this work.
One of the basic misconceptions is that Guyana is in Africa. It is not. Guyana is an ocean away in South America, but to British Intelligence whose personnel trained mercenaries in Jonestown to fight in an African war, the project will always have legitimate (African connotations. So it is not surprising that British subjects like Gordon Lindsay, who played an active role in Jonestown, would also have had a history of involvement with British interests in Africa.
[FONT=Verdana]Gordon Lindsay's contributions to this story are too often underrated. He had been instrumental in the process of convincing Ryan to visit Jonestown and had single-handedly o...
Even with all the preparation and execution, the CIA's task was only half finished with the completion of the experiment. There were many loose ends that, if left untied, might expose the agency's sponsorship of Jonestown. The situation called for a small army of agency propagandists who embarked on a massive disinformation campaign designed to disguise the true nature of the experiment. Before one can understand the post-Jonestown propaganda campaign, the often misused word "propaganda" must first be defined. The word has its origin in the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith; a committee of Roman Catholic Cardinals in charge of the foreign missions. Propaganda refers to the activity of any organization or movement working for the propagation of particular ideas, doctrines or principles, or those ideas, doctrines or practices. By definition, every work published or promoted by a group is propaganda. In recent times, it has become synonymous with deception and distortion and it is in this context that the word propaganda is used in this chapter; a study of those who are responsible for the mostly false public opinion about Jonestown.
Jim Jones had always manipulated public opinion about his Peoples Temple but the State Department and the CIA did not begin their disinformation campaign until late in the story when they neglected to warn Congressman Ryan of the danger he would face in Guyana. In the wake of the tragedy, Prime Minister Burnham's CIA-installed government refused to allow FBI investigators into Guyana. The CIA, however, was allowed in. The U.S. military personnel who removed the bodies were allowed in. Even independent reporters and researchers were allowed in, but each was shadowed by an agent in a "buddy system" intended to direct and deceive those who would relay the story to the world. Yet the FBI was denied entry. There would be no official investigation into the assassination of Congressman Ryan or the death of over nine hundred Americans in Jonestown.
The CIA's stonewalling continued as exemplified by the experience of one Fielding M. McGehee. McGehee, a journalist with a "personal and professional" interest in Jonestown, petitioned the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act for all of their records on the Peoples Temple and Jonestown. There was an initial flurry of activity following his request in early December of 1978, but the agency was more concerned with investigating Mr. McGehee than in giving him access to their files. No reports were released. Two years later, McGehee filed suit in federal court and the CIA was ordered to respond by May of 1981. There were a total of eighty-four agency documents on Jonestown. In the end, only twelve were released in full. Eighteen additional documents were released but these were substantially edited. To this day the CIA refuses to comply with the court order to release the rest. In January of 1983, a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the CIA had acted in "bad faith" in denying McGehee's request. It had taken them two and a half years to release only a small fraction of the information they possessed from the very beginning. Their behaviour has been attributed to a desire not to disclose the identity of their operatives in Jonestown, but very few suspected that one of those operatives was Jim Jones. Fielding McGehee's experience was typical of the uncooperative stance taken by the CIA in the wake of the White Night.
There were so many books on Jonestown, published in the few years after its demise, that one writer's guide to book publishing used Jonestown as a prime example of why there should be a registry of works in preparation. Whether justified or not, the effect of this 1982 guide was to discourage writers and publishers from producing any further works on what the unnamed "senior editor" considered an overworked subject. To date, at least thirty books have been published on the subject of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple and/or Jonestown. Many are foreign or out of print and difficult to find. Together these full-length reports and lesser works on the subject comprise the database from which a false public opinion has been formed. This chapter will review each of the major works on the subject and attempt to provide a logical reason why all fell short of reporting the truth about Jonestown.
GUYANA MASSACRE: THE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT by Charles, A. Krause with exclusive material by Laurence M. Stern, Richard Harwood and the staff of the Washington Post. New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1978.
Charles Krause graduated from Princeton University in 1972 to join the editorial staff of the Washington Post, where he covered local Washington politics until 1978 when, just prior to Jonestown, he was promoted to Latin American Correspondent. Krause was one of the reporters in Ryan's Party. He survived the assault at the airstrip by hiding in
the baggage compartment of the Cessna. Krause and the Washington Post's writers' group, under the direction of executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee, published Guyana Massacre in December of 1978. Laurence Stern, who was the chief of the Saigon Bureau during the Vietnam War, contributed much to the book as did Richard Harwood whose career included covering the Kennedy assassinations and the Kent State killings. Though less noted, the contributions of former Washington Post reporter John Jacobs had a major influence on how The Guyana Massacre viewed Jones and Jonestown.
Krause's book is one of the best introductions to the subject but it is by no means a definitive work as it was compiled, written, edited and printed in less than a month's time. It was the brainchild of the Washington Post which intended to capitalize on the then-current news story by being the first to publish "The Eyewitness Account" when, in fact, Krause witnessed very little from the plane's baggage compartment (at the airstrip) and absolutely nothing of the events happening in Jonestown. As of this writing, Charles Krause is the Washington Post's Chief Correspondent in Latin America and is largely responsible for the print and electronic media's reporting about this politically explosive part of the world.
THE SUICIDE CULT: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE PEOPLE'S TEMPLE SECT AND THE MASSACRE IN GUYANA
by Marshall Kilduff and Ron Javers--staff correspondents of the San Francisco Chronicle. New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1978.
Marshall Kilduff and Ron Javers, along with their colleagues at the San Francisco Chronicle, published The Suicide Cult in December of 1978 as the West Coast counterpart to the Washington Post's Guyana Massacre. Both would later be referred to as "checkbook journalism." They were hastily prepared and shallow; concerned more with the financial timing of the work than the accuracy of the information it contained. In both cases, the time from conception of the book to availability in the book stores was less than a month.
Kilduff had been writing about the Peoples Temple for about two years, ever since Jim Jones had asked him to cover a story at the "Pink Palace;" a low income apartment house under Jones' control as director of the San Francisco Housing Authority. Ron Javers began his journalistic career in Philadelphia where he was one of the first reporters to recognize the importance of the "MOVE" organization formed there in 1972. (The Primarily Black organization was founded by Donald Glassey; a Caucasian who was the son of the national vice president of the Boy Scouts of America. Glassey had once admitted that he was a government informant.) Only months before the White Night, Javers was hired by the San Francisco Chronicle and subsequently assigned to the Ryan party. He was wounded but survived the airstrip assault. Following the massacre, the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle, including Kilduff, Javers and columnist Herb Caen wrote The Suicide Cult. As soon as the book was finished, as if it were the only reason Javers relocated to the West Coast, he returned to Philadelphia to accept a position as editor of Philadelphia Magazine where five years later he once again rose to national prominence as the authority on the MOVE organization. MOVE's headquarters had been stormed by the police in August of 1978, just three months prior to Jonestown, and nine members were arrested. This led to a second confrontation in mid-1985 when police dropped a bomb on their Philadelphia stronghold; a bomb that started a fire that would destroy over eighty houses in the neighbourhood and kill eleven people. Over the years, MOVE had protested for or against several causes. Most notable was their campaign against the Quakers and their stated purpose in working for the demolition and rebuilding of their neighbourhood. Ironically, in the end, the City of Philadelphia did their bidding by levelling the neighbourhood and, in their subsequent public humiliation at an act of government violence unprecedented since the fire-bombing of the SLA's headquarters in Los Angeles, they agreed to rebuild the neighbourhood, exactly what the MOVE people wanted, but at the cost of seven adult and four child members who died in the fire-bombing. Of MOVE, Javers has been quoted as saying, "They always seem to be on a death trip. It's a group that needs to feel the world is imploding on them to have inner group solidarity." Javers' description might better have been applied to the Peoples Temple. It is odd that Javers would be the "foremost expert" on two Black organizations that would both meet a questionable and violent demise.
The Suicide Cult, like The Guyana Massacre, is a good primer but too commercial to be considered anything but an "instant book" intended to capitalize on the topical interest.
THE BROKEN GOD by Bonnie Thielmann with Dean Merrill.
Elgin, Illinois: David C. Cook Publishing Co., 1979.
Little more can be said about author Bonnie Malmin Burnham Thielmann than has not already been reported. Briefly, Bonnie had conspired with Jones ever since their early days in Brazil. Her father had ordained the minister and Bonnie would remain very close to the story for years to come when she escorted Mayor Moscone to the Peoples Temple, Congressman Ryan to Guyana and Moscone to Ryan's funeral. Following Ryan's assassination and Moscone's funeral, Bonnie took the advice of a literary classic and got herself to a nunnery. The Broken God was written at the Cenacle Retreat House in Warrenville, Illinois. Under the protection of two Catholic nuns and with the help of professional writer, Dean Merrill, Bonnie composed the third instant Jonestown book which was first printed in January of 1979. The Broken God is not recommended reading but due to the author's lack of experience and short-term deadline, her true relationship with Jim Jones is easy to see without even reading between the lines. It is for this reason, and because Bonnie Thielmann lasted the full cycle of Jones' career, that her life is well worth publication and The Broken God is as good a place as any to start. It should be studied and only sometimes believed.
THE PEOPLE'S TEMPLE by Michael Prokes. Unfinished,
unpublished, previewed on March 13, 1979.
The People's Temple is a forty-two page partial manuscript of dubious intent that would become the author's last will and testament.
In 1972, Michael Prokes was a twenty-five-year-old reporter who covered the Stockton area for KXTV in Sacramento. He lived in a luxurious home on a golf course, complete with fancy cars and all the amenities of an upper income California lifestyle. Prokes was CIA and, when the agency called, he gave up his job , his family, and his home to join the Peoples Temple in Ukiah as Jones' press secretary. As the highly skilled mouthpiece for the Temple, Prokes worked closely with Terri Buford to develop a working relationship with columnist Herb Caen, reporter John Jacobs and investigative journalist David Conn as well as many others who professed an interest in the Peoples Temple. As the Temple's media propagandist, Prokes was privy to at least some of Jones' false public image as he was responsible for creating it. Minutes before the White Night in Jonestown, Jones sent Prokes on a mission to deliver a token amount of money to the Russian Embassy as his last duty as the Temple's disinformation minister. Prokes' job was in public relations, not medicine so he was not told about the experiment and, being so ill-prepared, was shocked and dismayed at the news of the death he so narrowly avoided. He would remain in Guyana for two months with John Jacobs and other American reporters.
Prokes returned to San Francisco in January 1979 to testify before the U.S. Grand Jury. His request for immunity was denied by U.S. Attorney William Hunter. Prokes appeared at the hearings but said nothing.
Disillusioned and depressed over being deceived into his part in the atrocity, Prokes called a press conference scheduled for March 13 1979 in room 106 at the Motel 6 in his hometown of Modesto. He had promised the press a good story. First he read a portion of his work for the electronic reporters and then circulated copies for all eight reporters in attendance. The statement was a confession of his work as a government informant and even detailed how he was paid two hundred dollars a week by a case officer he identified as Gary Jackson.
The question and answer period was too short. Prokes admitted to working for U.S. Intelligence and when asked if Jones was as well, he excused himself and went into the motel room's bath, closed the door and was never heard from again. A shot rang out and Prokes was found on the bathroom floor with a .38 calibre bullet in his head. A note read, "If my death does not prompt another book about the end of Jonestown, my life wasn't worth living." He died a few hours later. John Jacobs wrote his obituary for the San Francisco Examiner. No one reported what Prokes had said during the press conference. The New York Times did not even report his death. The only surviving copy of The People's Temple comes from conspiracy attorney Mark Lane who received the manuscript in the mail a few days after Prokes' alleged suicide. Lane's copy was an admission of Prokes' guilt but a defense of Jim Jones; a continuation of the work of the Temple's press secretary.
SIX YEARS WITH GOD: LIFE INSIDE REV. JIM JONES' PEOPLE TEMPLE by Jeannie Mills. New York: A & W Publishing, Inc., 1979.
Elmer and Deanna Mertle changed their names to Al and Jeannie Mills in 1975 when they left the Peoples Temple. They had become disillusioned with Jim Jones and with what they came to view as his mistreatment of the congregation. Al had been the Temple's chief photographer, while Jeannie directed publication of the Temple's literature. Both were in public relations which, in this case, might better be defined as propaganda. Because of their jobs and high rank in the Temple, the Millses knew at least some of Jones' secrets and their view of his false public image contributed to their discontent and eventual defection.
In what has been described as a rambling house in Berkeley, the Millses opened the Human Freedom Center, a group dedicated to helping former cult members readjust to life in mainstream society. They formed the Concerned Relatives and along with Tim and Grace Stoen, Bonnie Thielmann, Tim Carter, Deborah Layton and other ex-Temple members of dubious intention, they petitioned Congressman Ryan's help in securing the release of their family members living in Jonestown. There were two subgroups within the Concerned Relatives; those who, as the name implies, were honestly concerned about their relatives, and those who were using the organization to entice Ryan into a situation where he would be assassinated. If the Millses were of this second, covert, group, their cover was very deep as there is little evidence to even suggest they were co-conspirators.
It was Tim Stoen who encouraged Jeannie to use her skills as a writer publisher to produce a book about the Peoples Temple, which she began immediately following the tragedy in Guyana. Six Years With God was published in late 1979 by A & W Publishers, Inc. Jeannie is said to have used her $30,000 advance to purchase a Mercedes Benz. She did not hold the copyright which went instead to MBR/Investments; an unidentified entity that may have been her patron and the source of the rather generous advance for a previously unpublished author.
Six Years With God is a well-written account of life in the Peoples Temple with particular attention paid to Jones' manipulation of his followers. Though the book does not expose the true nature of Jones or his experiment in Guyana, it is believed to be accurate within the limited awareness of Al and Jeannie Mills. As somewhat of an autobiography, the book is tainted by the author's attempts to justify her involvement with Jones but, overall, it makes for interesting reading. The many photographs, especially those of Temple documents from Al's collection, are of particular value.
On February 26, 1980, about a month after Six Years With God first appeared in the bookstores, unidentified gunmen entered the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley and executed Al, Jeannie and their daughter Daphene. Al and Jeannie were each shot once in the head and died instantly. Their teenaged daughter was shot twice in the head and died in the hospital when doctors disconnected her life support system. There was no sign of forced entry. The house was not burglarized. The murders remain unsolved. At first, the police accused the couples' young son who was present in another part of the house but no charges were ever brought against him. Days later, an associate of the Millses reported to police that a former psychiatrist with The Human Freedom Center was responsible for the murders but again no warrant was issued. The case has been closed, unsolved.
Six Years With God did not contribute much to the story that had not already been published. It does not appear that the Millses were murdered for revealing some secret about Jones but their deaths did serve to seriously discourage other would-be writers lest they suffer the same fate as these two noteworthy Temple adversaries. A & W Publishers fared no better, declaring bankruptcy soon after publishing Six Years With God.
JESUS AND JIM JONES: BEHIND JONESTOWN by Steve Rose. New
York: Pilgrim Press, 1979.
Steve Rose had already established a reputation as a prolific religious writer, journalist, editor and composer when, in late 1978, a religious publisher commissioned him to write a book about Jonestown. Jesus and Jim Jones is half unedited documents related to the Peoples Temple, and for that it is a valuable record but this coldly logical presentation of the evidence does not carry through to the other half in which Rose attempts to draw irrelevant parallels between Jones and Jesus, using quotations from The New Testament to try to explain Jonestown. Actually, Jesus had nothing to do with the mind control experiment known as Jonestown, nor did Jim Jones have anything to do with Jesus, except to claim to be the reincarnation of Christ. He did not worship Christ or his Father whom Jones called "The Impotent Sky God." He often spat on the Bible and threw it down from his pulpit to show his disrespect for organized Christian religion. The Peoples Temple was not a religion. It was a social movement sanctioned under the tax-exempt laws as a religion. It was the Church's defense of that relationship that prompted the Pilgrim Press to publish Jesus and Jim Jones. It is recommended only as a good source of Temple documents or as a study in organized religion's attempts to disassociate itself from Jim Jones in the aftermath of the religiously-sanctioned massacre. Other works of the same genre include Deceived by Mel White and The Bible Said It Would Happen by Paul Olsen.
THE DEATH OF JONESTOWN: A CRIME OF THE CIA Moscow:
Yuridicheskaya Literatura.
Despite its rather intriguing title and the research abilities of the KGB, this Russian work fails to identify the true nature of Jonestown. It claims that the community was a legitimate experiment in socialism that was destroyed by CIA mercenaries from the outside and CIA infiltrates (like Mike Prokes) from the inside. It exposes individual agents but, is blind to the their collective project. Perhaps it was born out of their embarrassment at being deceived by Jones or perhaps, like other works, it relied too heavily on statements made by Jim Jones.
PEOPLE'S TEMPLE: PEOPLE'S TOMB by Phil Kerns with Doug Wead
Phil Kerns and his sister Jeanette lived with their father in Key West, Florida. Their mother Penny duPont and sisters Ruth and Carol lived in Redwood Valley, California where they were counted among the Caucasian members of the Peoples Temple. In 1967, at age fifteen, Phil moved to California to live, not with his mother, but in the home of assistant Temple Pastor Archie IJames. His sister Jeanette, who followed, was received with equal honor, being assigned to live in the Temple's showcase home with Tim and Grace Stoen.
Although Phil Kerns would later recount his teen-aged years in the Peoples Temple with some disdain, the "forced labor" he was subjected to was no more than a part time job and he and his family enjoyed many privileges granted to only the elite Caucasians of the cult. Phil graduated high school in 1970 and promptly left the Peoples Temple to join the U.S. Army, his rank and specialty have not been reported. He would later write that he left the Peoples Temple after he and his sister Ruth suspected foul play in the death of Maxine Harpe, the first of the 'H' file victims. Even though they suspected that he was capable of murder, Phil and Ruth left their family in the hands of Jim Jones. After serving in the Army, Phil married and along with his new bride, joined his sister Ruth in a "born-again Christian cult" living in a mansion in Northern California. Phil Kerns resided there for over a year yet failed to name the group in his book. Between growing up in the Peoples Temple, serving in the Army and voluntarily joining another cult, Phil Kerns had been brainwashed and trained by the best of them to the point where his history indicates a need for such external control of his life.
According to his book, Kerns continued to investigate Temple-related murders with a growing concern for the welfare of his mother and sister who remained in the cult. He had a few frustrating meetings with Joe Mazor: a private detective whose friend/foe relationship with Jim Jones warrants a study unto itself. Kerns called him "Mr. Mazzore" out of respect for his privacy or fear of a lawsuit. He also communicated regularly with Al and Jeannie Mills; which was not surprising as anyone seriously interested in the anti-Temple movement eventually gravitated to The Human Freedom Center. Since his mother, Penny duPont, and sister, Carol (who now called herself Karen Kerns) moved to Jonestown, Phil Kerns and his sister Ruth Reinhardt qualified as Concerned Relatives. Ruth was among a core group of twenty-five Concerned Relatives who signed a petition entitled, "Signatures of Petitioners for Elimination of Human Rights Violations in Guyana by Rev. James Jones." This April, 1978 document was followed by a second petition entitled, "Human Rights Abuses by Jim Jones" that was signed by Phil, Ruth, and fifty-five other relatives in early May. Whether intentional or not, the effect of both petitions was to help convince Congressman Ryan to visit Jonestown and assess the validity of their claims. Phil also corresponded with the White House and a presidential aide was dispatched to his Portland, Oregon home to question him about the Peoples Temple. These in-depth discussions with the White House aide , which included accusations of murder and the threat of mass suicide, took place before the massacre.
When news of Ryan's death in Port Kaituma reached Portland, Kerns immediately went to his telephone and, in the next two days, placed over one hundred phone calls. He made twenty-eight calls to the White House and the State Department and would later report that, despite his Washington contacts, he was shuffled from one federal agency to another in a vain attempt to enlist the government's help in preventing what he claimed would be a mass suicide in Jonestown. He failed, but later took credit for helping to avert a similar fate in the Temple's San Francisco headquarters. Though the bodies were never positively identified, Kerns' mother and sister were listed among the dead in Jonestown.
On November 20, 1978, in the midst of his reportedly near-frantic phone calls to Washington to save his mother and sister, Kerns made one long distance call to Logos International, a somewhat obscure New Jersey publisher. This was the birth of People's Temple: People's Tomb, written by Phil Kerns with the help of Doug Wead, a professional writer who specialized in political issues. It was published by Logos International in 1979. People's Temple: People's Tomb has its strong points, most notably an excellent appendix of reprinted data and at least a limited insight into the 'H' file homicides but, though it is an essential addition to any serious library, it is not recommended as an accurate history. Most of the book is devoted to Phil Kerns' life experience outside the Peoples Temple and a defense of his family's activities inside the Temple. One needs only to read other works on the subject to see that Kerns' portrayal of his mother and sister as totally innocent was not universally accepted. Like Steve Rose, Kerns too often quotes the Bible to explain the events surrounding Jonestown and, in the end he poses several questions calculated to imply that Jones may have been working for the Soviets. It is odd that Kerns could view Jones as a government agent but not from the United States where the preacher had such a powerful influence on government officials and agencies. People's Temple: People's Tomb may have been written to cover-up more than just the story of the Kerns family and Jim Jones.
Logos International disappeared as quickly as it had appeared; going out of business soon after publishing the book. Kerns and also Wead "are donating their royalties to provide ways for those who have been involved in cults to receive spiritual help." Like many of the other characters in this chapter, Kerns, Wead and Logos International could be either villain or victim but, regardless, their book People's Temple: People's Tomb contributed to the then-forming public opinion about Jonestown.
WHITE NIGHT: THE UNTOLD STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE AND BEYOND JONESTOWN by John Peer Nugent.
As described elsewhere in this work, John Nugent came from a background in African politics. He was Newsweek magazine's chief African correspondent in the early 1960's and wrote books like Call Africa 999 that earned him a reputation as an authority on the subject. Today he advises several elected federal officials on US African relations. Jonestown was born as a British-managed camp that sent mercenaries to Angola Africa and so it was in full circle that an authority on African conflicts would write a book about Jonestown. White Night does report an awareness of CIA influence in the politics of Guyana and other South American and African countries but it fails to see the obvious connection between Jim Jones and the CIA. Though Nugent's book falls short of the mark, it is recommended reading for any serious student of Jonestown.
BLACK AND WHITE by Shiva Naipaul. First published in England in 1980 and then in America by Simon and Schuster in 1981 under the title Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy
Like John Nugent, Shiva Naipaul was a journalist who specialized in African politics. He had written North of South: An African Journey and other works that had earned him a reputation as a gifted writer. Also like Nugent, Naipaul recounted the CIA's covert activities in Guyana as well as the U.S. State Department's protection of Jonestown, but neither viewed Jim Jones as an agent of the U.S. Government. Naipaul did go so far as to support suspicions that Jonestown was a CIA experiment in mind control, but in some twisted perspective he assumed that Jones was also drugged by the CIA and as much a victim as the others.
Under a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Naipaul left his London home for his native Trinidad and then on to Guyana and Jonestown to begin his assignment. In Georgetown, he was shadowed by a suspicious character who offered him money. Naipaul questioned the stranger's motives but passed him off as a small-time con man and not an escort to monitor the author's activities. Naipaul arranged for a military tour of Jonestown. Along with a group of fellow journalists (most of whom were escorted to the airport by their respective guides), Naipaul travelled to Jonestown where the Guyanese Defence Force conducted a "keep moving -- don't touch anything" tour.
Naipaul then flew to California searching for some logical reason for such an insane act. He found it in California, and would devote a large part of his book to detailing the bizarre aspects of life in San Francisco to explain the deaths in Jonestown. He failed to see that the Peoples Temple had its origins, not in San Francisco or even in Redwood Valley, but in Indianapolis. The Peoples Temple was not a "crazy California cult." Naipaul, born in Trinidad, educated at Oxford and residing in London, failed to accurately describe life in California. He ridiculed and belittled everything he saw in San Francisco, mainly because he endeavoured to seek out only the extremists in order to draw irrelevant geographical parallels with Jones. Naipaul's warped perspective of California might best be seen in his description of the unique town of Sunnyvale. Perhaps, after writing so many negative things about the California lifestyle, he felt it only fair to present what he termed "outwardly normal people." According to Naipaul, the residents of Sunnyvale are conservative, flag-waving patriots who hate big government and, between trips to grandma's house for apple pie and junior's Little League games, exude what he called the clean-thinking humanity known as Middle America. Sunnyvale is unique, and anyone who knows it would not recognize Naipaul's distorted description of the small city. Most of the city's professionals work in top-secret government jobs for the many defence contractors who have set up shop in the maximum-security corridor that surrounds Moffet Field, Ames Research Center and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. There are more CIA operatives per capita in Sunnyvale than in any other city or town in the United States. It is a community full of people who are not allowed to tell you what they do for a living. They do not hate big government, they work for it. There are noticeably few children in Sunnyvale to play Naipaul's Little League games as most adults are more concerned with advancing their careers than raising a family. The favourite local pastime is CIA infidelity. Since workers with security clearances cannot divulge anything about their work, even to their spouses, many use the blanket of national security to cover their extra-marital affairs. A phone call in the middle of the night is typical. The husband tells his wife that the office needs him and he leaves. She knows he cannot tell her why or where he is going or what he will be doing or even when he will return. Secrecy is part of his job and she has come to accept it just as he has come to use it as a benefit that was no doubt presented as such by his recruiter. The trend started centuries ago with the king of England who liked to host royal orgies but needed to maintain a holy image as the head of the Church of England. To solve the dilemma of his conflicting roles, the king would grant a special dispensation to those who grant participated in the orgies. It was called "Fornication Under the Consent of the King" or F U C K for short. There is really nothing new under the sun.
Sunnyvale wives are privy to at least the rumours about their husbands' work. Like the time that everyone was disappointed when job #388 was cancelled. All work is conducted under job numbers so as not to disclose the identity of the customer but, in this case, everyone knew the product was a reconnaissance satellite and the customer was Iran. The nearly completed project was cancelled when Iranian "students" kidnapped the U.S. embassy personnel. To the surprise of many, job #388 was reinstated during the ongoing Iranian Hostage Crisis. One night there was a phone call. "Flight #388 is up, report to work." In his amazement he drops his guard and tells his wife that they just shot the Iranian satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base. He leaves to track his "bird" from the "Blue Cube" at Lockheed. A few days later she reads the newspaper accounts of the aborted rescue attempt in Iran and wonders what part her husband's satellite played in the failure. She knows she will never be told the whole truth.
That is the real Sunnyvale. A Sunnyvale that Naipaul failed to see for reasons that fall somewhere between incompetence and collusion. More important than how he reported Sunnyvale, is why? He never gave a reason for visiting this small city that, until this work, was never reported as having anything to do with the story of Jim Jones or Jonestown. Jonestown's CIA arms supplier, Frank Terpil, operated a front business there but the major connection between Jonestown and Sunnyvale was Congressman Leo Ryan. Ryan's work in Washington was almost exclusively concerned with curbing or at least trying to control the illegal domestic CIA operatives in Silicon Valley and especially Sunnyvale. What possessed Naipaul to visit Sunnyvale and give such falsely glowing reports about the place remains a mystery. The missing piece to the puzzle is his true motive.
Soon after his return to London, Naipaul's account entitled Black and White, was published in England. A year later, it was published in the United States under a new title; Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy. Black and White was acceptable in the less-censored British market but it was too close to the true nature of the Jonestown experiment for the United States. The U.S. title strongly implies a fruitless, unexplainable journey while the subtitle places Jonestown in the "New World" or implied Third World arena. Naipaul fails to see that the tragedy was not born in an imaginary New World or the Third World or Guyana or even California. The tragedy was born in Indiana, in the minds of the "clean-thinking Middle Americans" he so articulately defended.
Under either title, Naipaul's book is more of an account of his own travels than those of Jim Jones. It is easy to see how he walked through his assignment and produced the equivalent of a "What I did on my summer vacation" school report. The book is extremely well written but that could be expected from Naipaul, whose command of the English language might have been enlisted by someone behind the scenes. After all, the Guggenheim Foundation had paid for Naipaul's tour of the Caribbean and California. His report (which should have been entitled The Impressions of a Gifted British Writer Who Was Hired To Write About Jonestown) was a corporate idea. Naipaul got a free trip and handsome book royalties, and his sponsors presumably got what they paid for. No library on the subject of Jonestown would be complete without a copy of Journey to Nowhere but, though many of Naipaul's observations are interesting, the readers must constantly question the author's motives.
THE CULT THAT DIED: THE TRAGEDY OF JIM JONES AND THE PEOPLE'S TEMPLE by George Klineman and Sherman Butler and David Conn with research by Anthony O. Miller. New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1980.
The Cult That Died was born in 1970 though it would not be completed and published for another ten years. Larry Lee Litke, an attorney for the San Francisco East Bay county of Alameda, was there at the Bay book's inception as was David Conn, an undercover operative for what he (and later his Washington contacts) would define only as an agency of the Federal government. Conn was ostensibly employed as a surveyor with Chevron Oil, though some reports claim he worked for Standard Oil. The generally accepted theory is that Conn was an undercover agent who allegedly worked for the Treasury Department but his rather flimsy cover might be an indicator that his actual employer was the CIA.
Under Litke's direction, Conn continued his unexplained investigation into the Peoples Temple until the fall of 1976 when he joined forces with his son-in- law, free-lance journalist George Klineman. Together they met with government officials and ex-Temple members to gather source material for atrticle that they claimed presented a case against Jim Jones. Actually, in the fall of 1976, Jones was preparing to depart for Guyana and the anti-Temple articles were just the evidence of public persecution he needed to justify, or at least help explain, his sudden move to South America.
In March of 1978, Larry Litke "helped lay the keel" for The Cult That Died (under a different title) when he enlisted the help of Sherman Butler, a literary friend who would edit and polish the rough drafts of Klineman and Conn. While Conn maintained communications with Tim and Grace Stoen, Al and Jeannie Mills, Mike Prokes, Deborah Layton and the other ex-Temple propaganda ministers, Klineman traveled to Indianapolis to research the early life of Jim Jones. He was in Indianapolis when news of the assassination and mass suicide reached the United States. With time now of the essence, Klineman hired private detective Anthony O. Miller to continue the research while he and Conn concentrated on feeding Butler near-finished copy.
The Cult That Died was published as a group effort in 1980. The authors would like the reader to think they were privy to classified or at least exclusive information and that they were in hot pursuit of the story from the beginning. To some extent they were, but even though they admit to knowing about the planned mass suicide as early as June of 1978, they did nothing to help avert it. These "experts" on the subject even failed to meet Congressman Ryan though there is some evidence suggesting that they fed information about Temple murders to the Concerned Relatives who forwarded it to Ryan's office where it was filed under "H."
David Conn will never publicly admit to working for the federal government nor will he give even a hint as to how an oil company surveyor came to recognize a major story in a then-obscure cult eight years before they were to make headlines. His motives are never stated. His ten years of research certainly were not for profit. The book royalties, divided four ways, would not have offset expenses. Why did Conn spend his time and money investigating the Peoples Temple? He had no relatives in the cult nor are there any reports that the Temple had ever touched his life. Since the motives for his long-term involvement are suspicious and undefined, one is left to wonder if Conn was, as many have said, an agent of the federal government; a CIA agent who wrote CIA propaganda about a CIA experiment. The histories of Litke, Klineman, Butler and their sources could prove as interesting as Conn's but that is speculation because little has been s published. Litke could have had contact with Tim Stoen as both attorneys worked for the same county, but that is only speculation. It is possible that The Cult That Died had its origin, not outside, but inside the Peoples Temple. Despite its dubious intent, the book is highly particularly for its accurate recommended, accounting of life in the Redwood Valley Temple.
THE STRONGEST POISON by Mark Lane. New York: Hawthorn Books
(A division of Elsevier-Dutton) 1980.
The story of Memphis attorney Mark Lane's relationship with Jim Jones warrants a book unto itself. Due to space limitations, it is presented here in outline form with the hope that someone else will give it the detailed attention it so deserves. More than any other character in this story, Mark Lane's presence strongly suggests the presence of the CIA. For years, Lane was recognized as the authority on CIA conspiracies to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He had represented Lee Harvey Oswald's mother and James Earl Ray and wrote several books on the subject. Whether he realized it or not, Lane's investigations were getting closer and closer to exposing the truth. Mark Lane was a problem to the agency; a problem that was solved when his last client, Jim Jones, killed a congressman.
When James Earl Ray was released from a Saint Louis prison, he had more to be thankful for than most new ex-cons. Ray had a generous sponsor, a mysterious benefactor who had given him more money than he had seen in years and instructions for a job that he did not fully understand. As ordered, he bought a gun and rented a particular room in Grace Walden's rooming house. Grace (who sometimes used the surname Stevens after her common-law husband) remembered Ray checking in with just a few possessions he brought from prison. She also remembers him leaving to go shopping for a car. She swears that while he was out, a stranger entered his room and gunshots were heard. The stranger quickly fled. The shots, said to have been fired from Ray's window to the balcony of a nearby motel, were those that killed Martin Luther King, Jr.
The police found Ray's gun, his toiletries and a radio he had brought from prison in the room. Ray was quickly picked up, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced and sent back to prison. No one questioned the identity of his mysterious benefactor or how Ray came to know that King would be staying in that particular motel, or even why he wanted to kill him.
Grace Walden could have proved him innocent and she tried. Following Ray's arrest, Grace insisted that the police had made a mistake, that Ray was not even in the room at the time of the shooting. Grace insisted for only a few days before she was kidnapped and, through alleged due process, declared incompetent and locked in the Tennessee State Prison Mental Hospital where she would remain drugged for the next eight years.
By 1977, Mark Lane had presented sufficient evidence supporting his conspiracy theory to prompt the House of Representatives to allocate six million dollars for an official investigation they entitled the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Their hearings, scheduled for November 1978, may well have dictated the schedule of the White Night.
Actually, Ryan's House International Relations Committee junket to Jonestown and Lane's House Select Committee on Assassinations were synchronized with the experiment or perhaps vice versa. Lane planned to call James Earl Ray and Grace Walden as his star witnesses and those a who really killed King were not about to let that happen.
Also in 1977, Ray escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary with the help of Larry Ed Hacker, a fellow inmate who masterminded the escape but remained behind to be released under an early parole from Tennessee Governor Ray Blanton. A month after the White Night in December of 1978, Governor Blanton and several of his aides were arrested by the FBI and charged with extortion and conspiracy to sell paroles. Cited in the complaint was the case of one Larry Ed Hacker, who may have been rewarded for helping Ray escape prison and, more importantly, the House Assassination hearings. Everyone agreed that Ray had fled the country but speculation differed as to where he had gone and how he got there. Some reports claimed s claimed he had gone to South America. If in fact he did, Guyana would have been the logical choice because it is the only English- speaking South American country. He may have even gone to Jonestown but, regardless of the route he took, he ended up at Heathrow Airport in London where he was arrested and returned to the United States. Many people questioned how Ray could have supported himself in his travels abroad. This question should have been asked years earlier regarding his unnamed sponsor who had instructed him to buy a gun, check into Grace Walden's rooming house and leave everything to go shopping for a car.
In early 1978, Lane secured legal custody of Grace Walden and she was released from the prison mental hospital into his care. Lane left assistant G. Robert Blakey in charge of the day-to-day affairs of his campaign while he took Grace into hiding in California. Where in California, no one would say, but the care of mental outpatients was one of the specialties of the Peoples Temple. While in California, Lane placed large ads in forty-two newspapers around the country requesting information about the assassinations of President Kennedy and Dr. King. One of the respondents was Terri Buford. Buford had an interesting tidbit of information about King's assassination to entice Lane. She promised that Jim Jones had much more and that he, too, the recipient of the Martin Luther King Humanitarian of the Year Award, was being attacked by the CIA. She paid Lane to fly to Jonestown and exchange ideas. He was to address the congregation in exchange for the privileged and private intelligence of Jones. Lane arrived in Jonestown in the fall of 1978 with colleague Donald Freed with whom the he had written Executive Action; a book about the conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. The six million dollar House Assassination hearings ultimately hinged on one man -- Mark Lane -- who, just weeks before the hearings was deep in the jungles of South America. Such was the importance placed on the information he was promised by Buford. Jones was a master in persuasion and that, combined with a $7,500 monthly retainer (paid in advance) convinced Lane to represent Jones in his imaginary fight against the CIA and other agencies of the federal government. Lane was also to suppress Gordon Lindsay's National Enquirer expose on the Peoples Temple and support pro-Temple articles he was to place in left-wing publications. In late September, as he was leaving leaving Guyana, Lane held a press conference in which he said...
There has been a massive conspiracy to destroy the People's Temple and a massive conspiracy to destroy the Rev. Jim Jones... that was initiated by intelligence agencies of the United States.
Lane returned to the United States by way of San Francisco where, on October 5th, he announced to the press his intention of filing suit against the CIA and other federal agencies on behalf of his new client Jim Jones. And so began the final days of his credibility.
On November 1, Terri Buford travelled from Jonestown to arrive at Lane's Memphis home where she would remain for several years to come. This trip is generally accepted as Buford's defection from Temple but Jones' number two aide traveling from Jones to his attorney could hardly be considered a defection.
On November 3, at Jones' insistence, Lane called the office of Congressman Ryan regarding his plans to visit Jonestown. Ryan was not in but his aide assured Lane that he would return the call. He did not.
On November 4, Lane received a return call from one of Ryan's aides. Lane explained that Jones had requested his presence during the Congressman's visit but that he would be in Washington for the House Assassination hearings.
On November 6, Lane wrote a letter to Ryan outlining the phone conversation and suggesting that they, "could no doubt work out a date which would be satisfactory to all of us."
On November 10, Congressman Ryan sent Lane a letter in which he expressed some token regret that their schedules did not coincide but that Lane's "own personal schedule" was not as important as that of the House International Relations Committee's. His congressional visit to Jonestown would proceed as planned but no firm dates had been established as yet.
On November 11 or 12, Lane received Ryan's letter.
On November 14, Lane appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He had been preparing for this opportunity for years but most of his work was in vain. The committee refused to permit James Earl Ray's testimony, perhaps because of his recent prison escape. Ray, who should have been the star witness, would not even be permitted to defend himself. Grace Walden was not banned from the hearings but it was obvious from the onset that the committee was out to discredit her. Most of the opening testimony came from a team of Grace's former doctors who described her behavior in the prison mental hospital more than just implied that she was mentally unstable and not to be believed. The newspapers reported that Walden's testimony would be "useless" an opinion reflecting the tone of the hearings. It was apparent that the committee was going to try to discredit Lane's witnesses even before they testified.
On November 15, Jean Brown (who had since assumed Terri Buford's job in the Temple) informed Lane that Ryan had left for Jonestown where Lane was needed immediately. In the midst of the doctors' testimony, lane screamed, "You people make me sick." He left his assistant G. Robert Blakey in charge of the duration of the hearings and stormed out, disgusted not only with the hearings, but with what he thought was fate for having scheduled two of the most important events of his career at the same time, but thousands of miles apart. Between Brown on the one side with the official Temple position and Buford on the other with the alleged opposing view of a Temple defector, Jones' two top aides had Lane right where they wanted him: on a flight to Guyana.
On November 17, Lane caught up to Ryan's party in Georgetown where they were delayed awaiting Jones' permission to enter Jonestown. Jones was waiting for Lane who he insisted be present during the Congressman's tour. When Lane arrived so did Jones' permission and the delegation boarded a chartered flight for Port Kaituma and Jonestown. There was several hours delay at the airstrip when Jones refused to allow the reporters and Concerned Relatives to enter Jonestown until he could talk privately with Lane and Ryan.
On November 18, it was Lane who helped wrestle the knife from Ryan's attacker. He was later guarded by that same man and allowed to escape about the time Jones called for the poison. He and Temple attorney Charles Garry made their way through the jungle from Jonestown to Port Kaituma, missing the carnage in both locations because of the planned scenario and timetable written by Jim Jones. Lane was not supposed to be killed. He was too famous a critic of the CIA and his murder, especially during his report on CIA assassination conspiracies, would have drawn too much attention to the truth. Lane was to be used and then discredited. He was. He was so shaken from the experience that he never returned to the House Assassination hearings. He would not have been believed anyway. In the past, he had been the foremost authority on the assassination conspiracies but only after the fact. This time, he was deeply involved in a political assassination before the fact. His career as a front line conspiratorialist lay in irreparable ruin. Despite his absence from the House hearings, the committee ended its investigation where it should have begun, with a statement that there probably was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and King.
If his well-publicized, two month association with Jones was not enough to totally discredit Lane, the media barrage that followed was. He was accused of knowing about the planned mass suicide months earlier and failing to warn Congressman Ryan of the dangers in Jonestown. It was reported that he traveled to Switzerland with Terri Buford to withdraw $13 million dollars from a Temple bank account in her name (or living in Lane's Memphis number). Buford was still home and, at last report, still is. Grace Walden is supposed to live there as well but no one had seen her since Lane checked her out of the prison mental hospital. A memo from Terri Buford to Jim Jones was discovered in the rubble of Jonestown. It was covered reprinted in the New York Times on December 8, 1978, under the headline, "Memo discusses Smuggling Witnesses into Guyana."
Jim, I got a message over here that you wanted me to tell Mark Lane that he should look into some alternative means of getting Grace Walden to Guyana because the C.I.A. might try to stop her from entering the country. Therefore Mark should try to get her another passport. I will relay the message to Mark and see what he says. I will do so in person as I don't feel it is wise to discuss this over the phone. If he doesn't have those kind of contacts -- do you think we might ought to offer the tampering of Maxine Swaney's passport -- we have her passport here and it might be something that would be similar to Grace Walden and also if it doesn't look like her, maybe we can swap the picture. The drawback of this would be of course if a traitor were to look at the immigration list, we would be caught in a minute. The good points of this would be we wouldn't run the risk getting caught by a passport on the white market. Teri.
The New York Times reported only that the memo, titled "Confidential -- Confidential," was dated earlier in that year, leaving many to question how much earlier. When was Mark Lane's first contact with Jim Jones? Was it, as has been recorded, in September or was it as early as Ray's alleged flight to South America? And what of Grace Walden? She never testified before the House Committee. She has never appeared in public. At last report she was living with Lane and Buford but could she have been among the unidentified corpses in Jonestown? Was Lane tricked into being an accessory to murder? Buford denies writing the memo found in Jonestown and any evidence left behind is suspect, but Lane admits that sending Grace to Jonestown was discussed.
With Terri Buford's help, Lane wrote The Strongest Poison, which is half her propaganda and half a defense of his personal involvement in the tragedy. The Strongest Poison does present an interesting perspective on the story, but Lane's , brief encounter with Jones is only too apparent in his often shallow interpretation of the man. The basic flaw in the work is Lane's inability to view Jones as a government agent. He concentrated his efforts on trying to prove a CIA conspiracy against the Temple and totally missed the point that the Temple itself was a CIA conspiracy.
There are several different ways to view Mark Lane's role in this story. Some investigators claim that ever since he was an Air Force Intelligence agent during World War II he has worked for the CIA. They compare him to a vacuum cleaner that sucks up any and all information on agency projects in order to identify security leaks and the individuals who possess evidence that could harm the CIA. Though there are agents provocateur who perform this function, it is unlikely that Lane is one of them because such an operative would never have pressed for a congressional hearing into the agency's conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and King. In the end, the only service that Lane provided for Jones was to tell the public that the CIA was an enemy of the Peoples Temple. For this, he was not rewarded but discredited.
It makes far more sense to view Mark Lane as the honest investigator he claimed to be. If he was guilty anything it was his greed. If he was of motivated by it was money; money that his anything self-appointed position earned him in book royalties and lecture tours. Lane probably had good intentions in beginning his work for Jones but was deceived or bought along the way. If the stories are true, Buford's $13 million dollars was more than enough to compromise a man whose main motivation was the acquisition of wealth.
Regardless of how one sees Lane's inclusion in the story, it obviously stems from his work on the King assassination. He was within days of proving his conspiracy theory when he was tricked into participating in yet another political assassination.
AWAKE IN A NIGHTMARE: JONESTOWN, THE ONLY EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT by Ethan Feinsod. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1981.
Odell Rhodes was born to poor Black parents, who after their divorce, sent the young boy to be raised by relatives in Detroit. Though he seldom saw his father, Odell followed in the footsteps of this career soldier when, at age seventeen, he quit school and joined the Army. In the spring of 1960, he was sent on the first of three tours patrolling the DMZ in Korea. Following his first tour of duty, Rhodes reenlisted and was assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado where he was trained in a special forces unit that was the pet project of President Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. When the company had completed its training, President Kennedy visited Fort Carson to inspect and congratulate his elite fighting men. Rhodes was selected to carry the company's colors past the President's reviewing stand. Rhodes claimed that soon after being honored as the best of the Army's best, he was court-martialed for a minor offense that he did not commit. After serving out some of his sentence at the Army's maximum security prison at Fort Leavenworth, Rhodes was released for retraining under an Army program to parole first offenders. His dishonorable discharge rescinded, he was assigned to the Army Chemical Corps at Fort McClellan, Alabama where his company stood ready to do combat with the civil rights demonstrators whom Dr. King had rallied in nearby cities. After additional training in jungle combat, Rhodes was sent to Vietnam in 1967 and then back to Korea during the politically tense period when North Korea seized the U.S. spy ship Pueblo. In May of 1968, after eight years in the Army, Rhodes was honorably discharged in Washington, D.C. He returned to Detroit where he claims to have done nothing with his life except become addicted to heroin. The Temple's traveling bus caravan is said to have discovered Rhodes struggling to exist on the streets of Detroit. He was transported to San Francisco where this alleged reformed drug addict was put in charge of a Temple foster home for several years before the children in his care were shipped off to Jonestown.
In the fall of 1977, Rhodes again boarded a Temple bus for a cross-country trip, this time to l Kennedy International Airport in New York for a flight to Trinidad and on to Guyana. He was met in Georgetown by Stanley Clayton, a Black ex-con who was his closest friend in San Francisco, and the two men boarded a Temple ship for the long journey into the interior-They arrived in Jonestown in the early morning hours to be welcomed by Jones who had stayed up all night to greet these two latest additions to his community. Both Rhodes and Clayton were unique as the only Black Temple members given positions of responsibility in Jonestown.
Clayton was a guard who worked in the kitchen. He was in the kitchen when the medical staff came to retrieve the vat used to mix the poison during the final white night. Being a guard himself he had little problem piercing the circles of armed men who surrounded the compound. He hid in the jungle until everyone in Jonestown was dead. He returned to the kitchen, made dinner for himself, changed his clothes, found his passport and left to spend the rest of the night in the home of a local Guyanese. The next day Clayton appeared in Port Kaituma.
Rhodes was much closer to the deaths. He walked among the dying with Marceline Jones, encouraging and comforting the victims, like his "good friends" the Mitchells and Judy Houston, who had been particularly close to Rhodes in Jonestown. According to his account, he was able to slip away from the pavilion area when Dr. Schacht called for a stethoscope. Rhodes offered to get it for him and passed through the armed guards and right into the jungle. He arrived in Port Kaituma about midnight with the first report of the mass suicide in Jonestown. Despite the fact that Port Kaituma was incommunicado, Rhodes was said to have relayed his eyewitness account to Cecil (Skip) Roberts, the Police Commissioner in Georgetown, who had a long history of dealings with Jones and the Peoples Temple. The next day, Roberts picked up Rhodes in a helicopter and the two men surveyed Jonestown from the air. Later, it would be Rhodes who identified those few corpses that were identified. Stanley Clayton moved to Georgetown where he met and married a Guyanese woman within the month so as to gain a dual citizenship in case he faced any charges in the United States.
[FONT=Verdana] Both Rhodes and Clayton soon joined forces with Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo; a Guyanese-born psychiatrist and a profes...
The Reverend Jim Jones is alive, wealthy, secure and conceivably sipping Pina coladas on the veranda as he reads this first published account of his escape from the carnage he created in Jonestown. The moment of truth was not a face- to-face, Stanley/Livingstone meeting in the jungle but rather a far less dramatic encounter in the local public library. I returned the proof of the preacher's survival to its rightful place on the shelf for any other adventurer who is willing to dig six years to discover for himself. For those not willing to make such a commitment, here is the abridged version of a very intriguing tale.
As any student of Jim Jones' career soon realizes, the man was not the paranoid schizophrenic he led historians to believe. There is a serious danger in pigeonholing him in clinical terminology and losing sight of the simple truth that Jim Jones is just plain evil. He is extremely intelligent, logical, calculating and exceptionally devious. A study of his public life is a study in successful criminal tactics. According to accounts, he was in total control of every situation with the exception of his arrest in Los Angeles in 1973 and his alleged death in Guyana in 1978. Aside from being his only two reported failure:, these two separate incidences share the adjectives unexplained and bizarre. It is only when they are considered together that one can appreciate the true genius of Jim Jones.
In the fall of 1973, Jones set in motion a masterful manipulation that would use the Los Angeles Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to establish a phantom identity. The story begins at an evening service of the Los Angeles Peoples Temple when Jones announced to his congregation, "I have had a revelation that something strange might happen tonight. No matter what happens, I don't want anyone to call an ambulance.[183] He said nothing more on the subject and continued his sermon until Pinky, an elderly Black parishioner, collapsed on the floor at the rear of the building. At first it appeared to be just the beginning of another one of Jones' fake faith healings but Jones' wife, Marceline, uncharacteristically countered his order and phoned for an ambulance. Temple guards, Cleveland Jackson and Jimmy Jones, the Reverend's adopted Black son, carried Pinky on a stretcher out of the building and into an adjoining alley.
Somehow, the two guards managed to provoke a fist fight with the ambulance attendants who had responded to Marceline's call for help. They refused to allow them to take Pinky to the hospital. Young Jones struck one of the attendants while the second one broke free to radio for police assistance. The Los Angeles Police Department responded with several squad cars and a dozen uniformed officers. The scene was chaotic with blaring sirens, flashing red lights, and even a helicopter overhead carrying police marksmen, whose long rifle barrels pointed at the crowd below.
The two Temple guards were arrested and Jimmy Jones promptly punched an officer in the face, reportedly breaking the policeman's nose. Meanwhile, Marceline and several additional guards entered the alley and Marceline began ranting and raving at the police, a technique of intimidation known to the exclusively Caucasian hierarchy as "crazy niggering." She, too, was taken into custody and, in the ensuing confusion, Temple guards helped Pinky off the stretcher aback into the Temple. The police and the ambulance left the scene without her. Marceline, Cleveland and Jimmy were remanded to the Ramparts Police Station. Inside the Temple, ushers were running up and down the aisles telling everyone to remain seated and calm, though most had no idea what had transpired outside. Jones proceeded to address the congregation outside in a low, serious tone,
Early this morning I had a revelation. I told everyone in this building that there was to be no ambulance called because I knew this type of trouble would happen. Someone didn't hear my instruction and called an ambulance anyway. Our sister, Pinky, had collapsed, but I knew that my power could take care of her. She is fine now, in an adjoining room. Through my power, she disappeared off the stretcher as the policemen and guards were arguing about her.[184]
Jones then appointed an assistant to complete the service and left for the Ramparts Precinct Station to rescue his wife and son. Upon his arrival, he was so abusive to the police that he too was confined to a cell. Cleveland Jackson and Jimmy Jones remained incarcerated for several days but the Reverend and his wife were released without being formally charged.
It is evident that Jones had prior knowledge of the incident with Pinky and the ambulance which suggests that he planned the scenario that resulted in the apprehension of his wife and the arrest of his son. Following the incident, Jones embarked on a vicious letter-writing campaign in which he demanded a public apology from the police officers involved. He did everything in his power to create a hostile attitude in the Ramparts Precinct Station. Jones was certain to be arrested the next time he stepped out of line in Los Angeles.
December of 1973 was a very busy month for Jones. He arranged to lease a large tract of land in Guyana and sent the first group of trail blazers to South America to carve a community out of the dense jungle, a community that five years later would be the site of the massacre. Also, about this time, he began rehearsing the White Night; the mass suicide ritual that would be his congregation's last supper. The five year plan was underway and Jones' first concern was for his own ultimate survival.
It was a well known fact in the Temple that Jones employed cosmetic doubles to impersonate him in situations he considered dangerous. Everywhere he travelled, he was accompanied by a contingent of cosmetologists and impersonators. Long time aide Rheaviana Beam or his personal servant, Rose Shelton, carried the suitcase containing the wigs and make-up they used to transform Wayne Pietila, Harold Cordell, Mike Prokes and at least one other unidentified Temple aide into clones of Jim Jones. The double deceit was relatively easy as the real Jim Jones was, himself, very "made-up." He dyed his hair jet black and used a variety of facial cosmetics. Since he was almost never seen in public without his CIA, aviator-type sunglasses, no one ever really got a good look at his face. The task was not to make the doubles look like Jones but to make the doubles and Jones look like the same person. It was easy.
On or about December 1st, 1973, Jones escorted his adopted son, Lew, to the Westlake Theater, located about six blocks up Alvarado Street from his Los Angeles Temple. After the movie, the two returned to the Temple to report to everyone there that Lew had been harassed by a man in the theater's men's room who Jones believed was an undercover vice squad officer. Reporting the incident was apparently important to Jones for, by doing so, he had to admit to breaking one of his own rules. Temple members were forbidden to attend movies. The incident accurately foretold Jones' own arrest two weeks later.
On December 13th, Jones was once again in Los Angeles for the weekly services but this time he remained locked in seclusion while an unidentified double was sent on a very important mission. The double was instructed to go to the Westlake Theater and entrap the vice squad officer in the men's room into making an illegal and embarrassing arrest. Jones told him that the purpose of the mission was to discredit the policeman as revenge for his harassment of Lew and also to discredit the entire Ramparts police force, which had continually harassed Temple members ever since the incident with Pinky and the ambulance. According to one published report, Jones told only his attorney, Tim Stoen, of his plan, "in case an emergency developed." The double set out on his mission, unaware that five years later, he would be murdered for his little masquerade.
The phantom Jim Jones walked the one mile up Alvarado Street to the Westlake Theater, across from MacArthur Park. Even in gaudy Los Angeles, he must have been rather conspicuous on the sidewalk as he was dressed in a bright green sport coat with a red and blue striped shirt and black pants. He bought a ticket at the box office, went inside and took a seat in the balcony for the matinee showing of "Jesus Christ Superstar." Sometime during the movie, he walked down to the men's room. As he entered the toilet stall , undercover vice squad officer A.L. Kagele was washing his hands at the sink. Both men returned to the balcony at about the same time and, according to Officer Kagele's statement,
...Officer observed the defendant sitting near the back of the balcony and (he) appeared to wave to officer to come up. Officer sat down for a few minutes, then got up to check the activity in the rest room. Officer entered the rest room, and within a minute officer heard the rest room door open and observed the defendant...go to the same toilet. Office observed the defendant's right arm moving, and at this time the defendant turned to officer. Officer observed the defendant's penis to be erect and the defendant, with his right hand, was masturbating and showing his penis to officer. The defendant then walked toward officer with his erect penis in his hand. Officer exited the rest room and signalled his partner of the violation.[185]
At 4 PM, the phantom was arrested for lewd conduct by Officer Kagele and his partner, Officer Lloyd Frost, and taken into custody to the Ramparts Division Station where he was booked, photographed and fingerprinted as "James Warren Jones." Tim Stoen posted the five hundred dollar bail and the defendant was released and ordered to appear in court on December 20th.
Tim Stoen immediately went to work on his client's defense. For the next few days he shuttled between Los Angeles and Sacramento, pleading his case to officials of the LAPD and the State Attorney General's office. Stoen exerted considerable influence for, aside from his Temple duties, he was Assistant District Attorney for Mendocino County, the bastion of the Peoples Temple.
On the day of the trial, Municipal Court Judge Clarence A. Stromwell granted a motion from an unidentified prosecutor from the city attorney's office to dismiss the case "in the furtherance of justice." Judge Stromwell stamped the court docket, "Defendant stipulates as to probable cause," that is to say the defendant agreed there was justification to presume that he was guilty as charged. No reason has ever been given for the dismissal, as required by law.
Six weeks later, on February 1st, 1974, Judge Stromwell ordered the court records, as well as the arrest records on file with the LAPD, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies to be "sealed and destroyed." The judge's action was highly irregular because his order was given in private, not in court in the presence of the arresting officer and prosecutor as is standard procedure.
Stoen had succeeded in getting the charges against his client dismissed and in keeping the story from the local press. He had done far more than the average attorney, even seeking the consultation of Mike Franchetti, later appointed Chief Assistant to the Attorney General of California, because, as Franchetti recalled, "I was an expert in records law; how they were sealed."[186]
Despite Judge Stromwell's order, Jones' records were evidently not destroyed. Stoen had somehow managed to pirate several photocopies of the records which he placed in his files. The copies were discovered about a year later as the Temple moved its headquarters from Mendocino County to San Francisco. A few months before the massacre in 1978, Stoen, who had since allegedly defected from the Temple prepared a motion in conjunction with the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times to have Jones' arrest records released to the public. Eventually, the records were unsealed and published in March of 1979, four months after the massacre. Since Stoen possessed copies of the records from the very beginning, his petition suggests he was only verifying that the LAPD had not destroyed their copy.
The events that transpired in Los Angeles had the earmarks of a Jim Jones master plan. They were bizarre, ironic, complicated and difficult for the average observer to understand. The previously accepted accounts leave many critical questions unanswered. Questions such as: If Jones had Prior knowledge of the episode with Pinky and the ambulance then why did he allow the situation to evolve unabated and result in the incarceration of his wife and son? And why would Jones go out of his to make an enemy of the LAPD. Why would he approach the vice squad officer in the theater when he had prior knowledge of the undercover stake out. Why would the FBI even have a file on such a minor misdemeanour as a lewd conduct charge. Why was the case dismissed? Why were the records ordered destroyed and why were they not destroyed. These and other important questions surrounding the arrest have never been addressed.
As with all of Jones plans designed to set the record wrong, posterity is provided with a glimpse of the preacher's off- beat sense of humor; it was his trademark. In this case there is an intense irony it a Christian minister committing a lewd act at the showing of movie about the life of Jesus Christ. Jones, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ, among other notable figures in history, had staged his own arrest and his true motives for doing so would not be appreciated until this work.
As Congressman Ryan and his entourage of Concerned Relatives and reporters prepared to leave Georgetown for their ill- fated trip into Guyana's interior, Tim Stoen's wife, Grace, who also claimed to have defected from the Temple, prepared the press for a cosmetic Jim Jones. Ron Javers, reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, later recorded his initial impressions of the preacher,
Jim Jones was sitting at the head of the table, dressed in a red shirt and khaki pants. He had black hair and long sideburns , and even though it was night, he was wearing sunglasses. He al- ways wore them, we learned. Immediately he looked to me like a man who was powdered and perfumed.[187]
Washington Post correspondent Charles Krause was more specific in his account:
I sat beside him [Jones] and watched him closely as he talked. Grace Stoen had told me that he used an eyebrow pencil to give an appearance of thickness to his sideburns. I was curious about that and, after looking at him for a while, decided she was right.[188]
Others in attendance, who had known Jones in the past said that he just did not look like the Jim Jones they remembered. He was much heavier and even his facial features were different. Some attributed this to reports that he had been ill, others that his illness was actually due to an overuse of illicit drugs; but most agreed that he did not look the same as their memory of him.
In the aftermath of the massacre, a corpse was discovered in front of the throne among the nine hundred others in and around the pavilion. It was tentatively identified as Jim Jones. Unlike most of the other victims, the body had not been poisoned but shot once behind the left ear. It was presumed that he had been murdered by a disenchanted follower as the gun was found some thirty yards away but this will never be established for certain because nitrate and neutron activation tests were not performed to determine if there were traces of gunpowder on Jones' hands. Such tests are standard procedure in deaths where there is a question as to murder or suicide. The absence of such simple tests exemplifies the very poor handling of the corpse and its identification.
The corpse, identified as Jim Jones, was allowed to rot in the jungle heat for four days before it was removed. No attempt was made to preserve the remains. The body was not refrigerated (not even in the temporary morgue set up at the Georgetown airport). This may be due in part to the U.S. State Department's original plan to bury all the dead in a mass grave in Jonestown, without identification or autopsy. Three days after the massacre, the Associated Press reported, "Douglas Davidson, an officer with the U.S. Embassy, said the bodies are in an advanced state of decomposition and authorities are considering burying them in Jonestown." Relatives of the dead protested the mass burial plan and petitioned the U.S. government to transport the bodies back to the United States. George Moscone, mayor of San Francisco, which was the hometown of many of the victims, telegraphed President Jimmy Carter to request federal assistance. His telegram, dated November 24th, read in part,
I respectfully request that you use your authority to underwrite the cost of bringing back those whose next of kin request that they be returned and who otherwise do not have the means to do so.[189]
Over nine hundred corpses were flown, via military cargo planes, from Georgetown to a military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Only seven autopsies were conducted at the federal facility and those were performed after embalming. No tissue samples or bodily fluids were saved for analysis. The chief undertaker, Charles Carson, destroyed all the evidence in what the medical profession almost universally recognized as the "ineptness" of the post-mortem investigation. The following conclusion of an article appearing in a forensic pathologist trade magazine was typical of the prevailing professional opinion,
The contradictions, inconsistencies and questionable truths related through these interviews leave many unanswered questions. In fact, the entire episode suggests government mismanagement or a cover-up of the true facts. The statements given by various government officials lend fuel to accusations made by people like Mark Lane, who served as legal counsel for Jones' Peoples Temple. Lane proclaimed that a U.S. conspiracy existed to destroy the cult and its leader. The totally unprofessional and questionable handling of the bodies and the failure to establish cause and manner of death do not dispute Lane's charges. Unfortunately, his claims are strengthened because there are so few facts about what actually happened. It is regrettable that professional medical personnel failed to do what the newest member of a laboratory would have known to do.[190]
Eventually, though posthumously, George Moscone was granted his request when 253 unidentified bodies were flown to California and buried together in a large pit dug in an Oakland Cemetery. The federal government paid the multi-million dollar bill but later confiscated known Temple bank accounts as repayment.
As soon as the news of Jones' alleged death reached the outside world, the Concerned Relatives and ex-Temple members proclaimed, in unison, that the corpse was not Jim Jones. The news media received various, yet consistent, reports that Jones did not intend to die in the White Night and that, in all the recent rehearsals, he planned to survive, return to the United States with a "hit squad", and kill all the enemies of the Peoples Temple. Former members described his use of cosmetic doubles or "look-alikes" as they called them, and were so adamant in their claims that Jones was still alive that the FBI was called in to identify the body.
A stainless steel coffin labelled, "Rev. Jimmie Jones" arrived at the military mortuary on Dover Air Base on November 23rd at 8:05 PM (EST). Up until this time no special effort had been made to identify the remains other than a visual identification by U.S. Embassy officials in Guyana who would only say they were "awfully convinced" the decomposed corpse was Jim Jones. The FBI immediately fingerprinted the body, which was in such an advanced state of decomposition that the technician had to surgically remove the fingertips and slip them over his own gloved fingers to effect the printing. Though the process was difficult and completed rather hastily, it was accurate. That same evening, William Webster, the Director of the FBI, announced that the Bureau had made a positive identification of the body of Jim Jones. The following day, the San Francisco Chronicle reported,
The identification of the preacher's remains was made soon after [arrival] by a team of ten FBI fingerprint specialists who compared Los Angeles police department records of Jones' prints with ones taken from his body, Webster said.[191].
The basic premise of this chapter that William Webster's statement was simply not true. The FBI was not positive that the body was Jim Jones, only that the body was the same man arrested as Jim Jones five years earlier. There were no other records of Jones' prints. The authenticity of the LAPD files was never questioned and the case was mistakenly closed.
Marceline's parents, Walter and Charlotte Baldwin, initially requested that the remains of Jim, Marceline and their adopted son Lew, be shipped back to their native Indiana for burial but they changed their minds the day after Webster's announcement. The Baldwins' final request was that the bodies be cremated and the ashes spread on the Atlantic Ocean. Charles Carson, chief undertaker at Dover Air Force Base, complied with their wishes. This, in itself, may be unprecedented as cadavers entrusted to the government are buried in a potter's field and never cremated and buried at sea. From the throne in Jonestown to the Atlantic Ocean, the body identified as Jim Jones had never left the control of the U.S. military, federal law enforcement agencies or their subcontractors.
In retrospect, Jim Jones was in complete control of all aspects of his master escape plan, from Pinky and the ambulance to Lew and the vice squad officer to his own faked arrest, the sealing of the records and ultimately the murder of his double. Tim Stoen had been very instrumental in getting the charges against his client dismissed and in keeping the story out of the news while, five years later, his wife prepared the press for a cosmetic Jones. The press, in turn, prepared the world for a cosmetic corpse. There is no doubt that this happened; the only question is whether or not the Stoens and others who helped establish the false identity of the phantom preacher were cognizant of the ramifications of their actions. Temple security was always on a "need-to- know" basis which was doubly true of this particular project as evidenced by the fact that Jones cast only his family members in key roles. Most participants were manipulated. Even the director of the FBI was deceived by this preacher who one day will be recognized as one of the foremost criminal minds of this century.
So what happened to the real Jim Jones? He escaped. Wherever he is, he is certainly not alone, there are others with him but they will never disclose his whereabouts. The best this researcher can do is to report the final few moments of his public life.
As the last of the congregation were poisoned, the few escapees hiding in the jungle heard the Jonestown guards cheer, "Hip, Hip, Hurray!," three times. All the guards had been told that they would escape with their leader, but one would not. The unidentified double, who had posed as Jones five years earlier, was called to the throne in the pavilion and shot. Before the remaining forty or fifty fled, Jones radioed the Albatross III (the Temples' seaworthy ship which was anchored at the Port of Spain in Trinidad) to pick them up at the mouth of the Waini River about thirty miles north of Jonestown. This coincided with recent rehearsals in which Jones said he would escape the White Night by sea. The radio transmission was intercepted and the Albatross was seized by authorities In Trinidad. The Temples' fishing trawler, the Cudjo, had been docked at Port Kaituma during the massacre but immediately after it was sent up river leaving Mike Prokes and the Carter brothers stranded. They were to rendezvous with the ship for their escape but were arrested on the docks. Why the ship was sent up river and who was on board has never been reported. It is only known that Guyanese authorities seized the vessel. A third Temple ship, the Marceline, was never found though there is some speculation that the Marceline was actually the Albatross or the Cudjo sailing under an assumed name.
The stated plan to escape by sea and the radio transmission to the Albatross were only diversions. Jones was well aware that the Federal Communications Commission and other government agencies were monitoring Jonestown radio transmissions after receiving numerous complaints that the Temple illegally used codes and frequency changes to disguise their messages. It was no accident that this all- important message was not in code. Jones wanted the authorities to overhear his last minute escape plan for, if anyone sought him out, they would certainly be looking on the Guyanese coast when in fact Jones and his guards had headed west for the thirteen mile hike to the Venezuelan border; a path they had previously blazed and patrolled.
The day after the massacre, a Venezuelan Air Force pilot patrolling his country's disputed border with Guyana reported seeing a group of forty or fifty armed men in a clearing as they entered Venezuela at precisely the place and time where Jones and his guards should have been. The Venezuelan government refused to confirm their pilot's report, making him the last person to see Jim Jones and live to tell about it.
As a postscript to the story, this chapter was first drafted in 1980, when it was believed that its conclusion was not shared by any other researcher. At the time no one else thought that Jones had survived. On May 12, 1981, the Globe published a one page article by William Harris entitled, "Jim Jones Still Alive in Brazil," which began, "Jim Jones, former cult leader and CIA agent, escaped the Peoples Temple massacre in Guyana and is now hiding out in Brazil, according to sensational new evidence." The article outlined the Ryan family's lawsuit against the State Department which named Phil Blakey and Dick Dwyer as CIA operatives and Jonestown as a "mass mind-control CIA experiment." It also included several quotes from Joe Holsinger, Ryan's attorney and long-time friend, who reportedly said,
The more I investigate the mysteries of Jonestown, the more I am convinced there is something sinister behind it all... There is no doubt in my mind that Jones had very close CIA connections. At the time of the tragedy, the Temple had three boats in the water off the coast. The boats disappeared shortly afterwards. Remember Brazil is a country Jones was very familiar with. He is supposed to have had money there. And it is not too far from Guyana. My own feeling is that Jones was ambushed by CIA agents who then disappeared in the boats. But the whole story is so mind-boggling that I'm willing to concede he escaped with them.
The article went on to quote a Guyanese official who said,
A lot of people here believe Jones had a double who died at Jonestown and that Jones himself is still alive.
Perhaps more important than the quotes was the author's recognition of what should have been obvious to everyone; namely the discrepancy between the 1,200 residents in Jonestown and the slightly more than 900 bodies found in its wake. Harris wrote, "Of course, some cult members were never found -- the holders of 300 U.S. passports found in the camp are unaccounted for. They may have fled to another country." Anyone who researches Jonestown would instantly recognize the uniquely different and dangerously true tone of the Globe article. The Globe is a sensationalist tabloid of the type sold at the supermarket check-out stands but, in spite of its monetary motives, its story was closer to the truth than any other. The difference between this article and others published in the United States is that the Globe is published in Canada and perhaps out of the range of the CIA's close scrutiny and control.
What all this brings to mind is, if Jones escaped Jonestown, where is he today? He wanted us to think he planned to travel the thirty miles northeast to the mouth of the Waini River but that was only a diversion. Likewise, the Venezuelan pilot's unconfirmed report that he travelled west might also have been a diversion. Jones would not have been well-received by the Venezuelan government after his community of Americans was used to trick their president into giving up any claims to the disputed territory. Brazil would appear to be his logical choice for sanctuary. He had money there. He had contacts there in the military government that he had helped into power. Also, his idol and possible mentor, Josef Mengele, was at the time living in San Paulo. But, moreover, the safest haven would have been Africa. Jonestown had secretly transported hundreds of mercenaries to the Dark Continent in its early days. One more unobserved flight from Caracas or San Paulo or any number of airstrips in South America would not have presented a problem.
The Central Intelligence Agency is not responsible for the Jonestown atrocity, but they are accountable for it. Any government agency or, for that matter, any government, is a concept and only as good or as bad as the people it employs. This is particularly true of the CIA, which lacks the chain of command that typically structures most organizations. The CIA is compartmental which enables each department to function independently. Certainly not everyone employed by the agency knows that the CIA sponsored the Jonestown experiment, perhaps not even the agency's director is aware that Jim Jones was an operative. Not even the agency personnel working in Jonestown knew the full scope of the experiment that was conducted by what the CIA will eventually term a renegade faction.
Following World War II, the CIA began its operation from several office buildings scattered throughout the Washington, D.C. area. Though contrary to the agency's name, this decentralized structure was necessary to compartmentalize the various activities of the U.S. and former Nazi German agents. Eventually, Congress granted 46 of the 60 million dollars the agency requested to construct a headquarters building on a isolated government reserve across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. In its initial presentation to the House Appropriations Committee, the agency reported,
The new building will consist of block-type wings, readily compartmented from one another, so that specially restricted areas can be established and special controls maintained in each section.
The Langley, Virginia headquarters houses untold numbers of self-contained departments that operate independently behind unmarked doors. Through one of those doors passed the truth about Jonestown.
While presidents come and go (from Washington to Reagan, they average only five years in office) the true power of the executive branch of government is carried from administration to administration by the different departments of the CIA. The best assessment of the threat the CIA presently poses to the American people comes from the president who helped establish the agency. In 1963, Harry Truman wrote in a syndicated newspaper article,
For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government...I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and- dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.
Even as early as 1963, Truman and many others recognized that the executive branch of government was no longer in control of the agency but no one questioned who was in control. Everyone assumed that the CIA had gone its separate way under its own power. No one could see that the Nazis who helped establish the agency had used the need to know security system to continue the Third Reich in the United States under the impenetrable cloak of national security.
The Nazis hiding in the CIA were relatively quiet for the first few years after World War II that it required to convince the American public that their true enemy was not fascism but communism. The success of the McCarthy Era propaganda campaign in the early 1950's marked a distinct change in U.S. intelligence. No longer satisfied with merely gathering information about world events, as was their chartered function, the CIA began to create events that shaped history.
With the formation of the National Security Agency in 1952, the CIA was relieved of most of the responsibility for gathering intelligence but even though it had outlived its original function, the agency continued to grow in personnel and budget. They were left with little more to do than play "what if" games; speculative contingency planning like, "Is there a pharmaceutical solution to the growing unrest among Blacks and Native Americans?" The experiment in Jonestown was conceived from just such speculation.
Jim Jones worked for the CIA but that does not exclude the distinct possibility that he only worked through the agency for his true employer, the Nazis. As a youngster he studied the Nazis, later he would employ Nazis in his Peoples Temple that was structured along fascist lines. When the FBI searched Jones' San Francisco office after the massacre they found that half the books in his personal library were about behavior modification and the other half were about Nazi Germany. The odyssey that ended in Jonestown, began some fifteen years earlier in Brazil when Jones received his life assignment, presumably but not necessarily, from his CIA employer. At precisely the same time that Jones moved to the Belo Horizonte suburb of San Antonio, Brazil, Josef Mengele, the infamous "Angel of Death" purchased a farm just south of him.
Josef Mengele was born to the wealthiest family in Gunzburg, Bavaria. He was raised a strict Roman Catholic, studied anthropology and eventually went to work for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. When Hitler declared that only anthropologists were qualified to separate Aryans from sub-humans, Mengele was appointed head of the genetic experiments at Auschwitz. In the death camp, Mengele preferred to experiment on young twins. He would use some new weapons or drug the SS was developing to kill one of the twins and then kill the other by some conventional means. Autopsies were then perfomed on both corpses for comparison. He also attempted to unlock the genetic secret that produces twins in an effort to double the output of the Lebensborn Program. Mengele was personally responsible for the death of 400,000 inmates at Auschwitz; four times the number killed by the combined nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Josef Mengele murdered more people than anyone else in history. After the war, Mengele was interred by the occupying Americans who transported him back to his native Bavaria where they released him under his own name. They knew who he was and let him go free. With characteristic Nazi arrogance, Mengele expected to continue his genetic experiments after the war but, despite obvious support from the Americans, he was not safe in Europe. In 1948, he travelled down the Rat Run to Genoa, Italy where, with the help of the Red Cross and the Vatican, he was issued a passport of the type intended to repatriate victims of the Nazis. Under the name Dr. Helmut Gregor, Mengele boarded a freighter for Buenos Aires, where President Juan Peron had welcomed thousands of Nazis fleeing persecution for their war crimes. The Mengele family had managed to retain the bulk of their fortune through the war and their financial support of Josef enabled him to continue his experiments in Argentina. He bought a pharmaceutical company and set to work analyzing the blood samples that he had brought with him from Auschwitz. In 1956, with a passport in his own name, Mengele traveled to Zurich, Switzerland where he visited his family and married his brother's widow. It would appear that he enjoyed a great deal of freedom for being one of the most wanted men in the world but this security was soon shattered when, after his return to South America, Israeli commandos kidnapped Adolf Eichmann in Argentina to stand trial in Israel. In 1959, Mengele fled to Paraguay where fellow Nazis helped him establish a false cover. For the next twenty-five years, most who hunted for Mengele believed he was hiding somewhere in Paraguay when actually he had moved to Nova Europa, Brazil in late 1960. His new wife left him in 1961 as his first wife had years earlier. In 1962, Mengele purchased a farm in Serra Negro, Brazil in partnership with a European couple who shared his fascist politics. At that same time, Jim Jones moved into a rented house in San Antonio, just a short distance north. Mengele was the foremost living authority on the Nazis' genetic experiments and Jim Jones would soon assume his title. The fact that the two men moved so close to each other during a pivotal point in both their lives suggests that they met. Jonestown could have been the "changing of the guard"; the Nouveau Nazi super-babies taking power from Himmler's SS. There may not be a Fourth Reich, only a continuation of the Third. It has been said that Jones traveled to Brazil after escaping Jonestown with the medical records. He may have delivered the results of the experiment to Mengele who had since moved to San Paulo. On February 7, 1979, just ten weeks after the Jonestown massacre, Mengele reportedly drowned in a swimming accident. His death was not revealed until 1985 when, in the midst of the greatest manhunt in history, Mengele's Nazi partners in Brazil announced that the Angel of Death was dead and buried. The body was exhumed but, after so many years in the dirt, the remains were not identifiable. Mengele's friends provided the authorities with samples of what they said was the dead man's handwriting and it was confirmed as the same as Mengeles' SS application on file since the early 1930s. That was the only identification made. Obviously, Mengele's business associates in Brazil would have copies of his handwriting but what is astonishing is that the world would believe that it was the handwriting of the dead man. The only people to claim to have proof that Mengele is dead are his family in Bavaria and his friends in Brazil.
It is time we realized the danger posed by Nazis who have infiltrated organizations in an effort to achieve world dominance. Their presence and influence is everywhere. In the early 1940's, a young Polish salesman, employed by I.G. Farben, sold cyanide to the Nazis for use in Auschwitz. Fearing for his life after the war, he took refuge in the Catholic Church and was ordained a priest in late 1946. In 1958 he was ordained Poland's youngest bishop. After the thirty day reign and assassination of his predecessor, he assumed the Papacy as Pope John Paul II. One of his first jobs in office was to canonize a Polish priest who was allegedly killed in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
It has recently been disclosed that Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, who was Secretary General of the United Nations from 1972 until 1982, was in fact a Nazi intelligence officer who helped identify and execute thousands of non- military personnel in German occupied countries during the war.
There was once a woman with a dream, a dream to give underprivileged women a choice through inexpensive or free birth control. The woman was Margaret Sanger who, in the conceptual stages of her Planned Parenthood organization, consulted with several of Hitler's social architects who saw her plan as a viable means to curb the birthrate of U.S. Blacks, which was, and still is twice that of Whites.
Recently, the U.S. extradited Nazi war criminal Andriya Artukovic to stand trial in Yugoslavia where he was sentenced to death by firing squad for ordering the execution of over 231,000 residents of the Nazi puppet state of Croatia. For the last 36 years, Artukovic has lived an affluent lifestyle in Seal Beach, California , while the U.S. government made every excuse imaginable to prevent his extradition to Yugloslavia. They even declared him senile and legally blind but that did not stop the Yugloslavians' pursuit and finally he was turned over to his executioners. The release of this 86 year old, terminally ill Nazi was just a token effort by the U.S. government to disguise the truth that, even to this day, over 26 Nazis are living in the U.S. under the protection of Washington. These Nazis are only the ones who have been identified as war criminals and who have survived the forty-one years since the end of World War II.
Soon after the war, two Nazis hiding in the United States were facing extradition, trial and almost certain execution for their crimes against humanity when a brilliant young lawyer came to their defense. The lawyer instructed them to establish a business on paper only. He then arranged through his contacts in government for this phony company to be granted a military contract to supply some minor piece of hardware that was classified top secret. He then approached the courts with a defense that his Nazi clients should not be extradited because their company was necessary for national defense. The courts agreed and the Nazis were permitted to remain in the U.S. even though their shell of a company could not and did not fulfill the contract. The young lawyer went on to work with Senator McCarthy to compile a list of Hollywood performers suspected of being "communist sympathizers." Prominent on the Hollywood blacklist was the name of an actress whose family history would not seem to warrant her inclusion. Her mother had even worked as an undercover agent for the FBI. She was reportedly despondent over the prospect of never again being cast in one of her minor movie roles but actually she was about to embark on the most important theatrical performance of her life. Citing what she said was unfair treatment, she complained to the head of the Screen Actor's Guild who empathized with her problem and found that they had more than just a career in common. He and his ex-wife had worked as FBI informants who spied on their fellow actors. The two married only a few weeks after this first meeting. The young lawyer was Richard Nixon. The newlyweds were Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Nazis have attempted to control every political, social, economic, and religious power structure in the world today. They have infiltrated every major organization from the Holy See to the United Nations, from Interpol to the atomic energy community, from Washington to Moscow. It is logical to assume that when the Nazis sold their spies in Russia to the CIA that they also sold their spies in the United States to the KGB.
The Nazis' influence over the U.S. federal government has not gone unnoticed. In early 1979, just a few months after the Jonestown massacre, President Carter established a commission on the Holocaust that among other duties, was to receive reports of any new attempts at genocide. Carter said, "Never again will the world stand silent or look the other way in the face of genocide." Carter was well aware of the modern-day Nazi threat but his concern might have stemmed from the embarrassment or responsibility he felt since the largest attempt at genocide since World War II occurred under his administration. In any event, the commission never investigated Jonestown. Toward the end of his term, Carter helped establish a judiciary agency to ferret out Nazi war criminals in the United States. Until 1983, the chief Nazi-hunter in the U.S. government was Allen Ryan but, by this third year of the Reagan administration, most attempts to identify Nazis in government and particularly in the CIA) were circumvented by President Reagan and Vice President Bush (a former director of the CIA). Reagan gave the agency sweeping new powers to spy on American citizens at home, operate domestic front companies and prosecute anyone who identified Agency personnel. He increased their budget and approved construction of a new wing on their headquarters. The recent growth of the CIA is indicative of a fascist, right wing wave that is presently rampant in the United States. For our democracy to survive into the 21st century, Americans need to understand that their lives and freedom are in danger from an enemy that most believe was defeated over forty years ago. We are now only fifty years into Himmler's plan to purify the race of man in the first one hundred twenty-five years of the Thousand Year Reich. It would seem that the plan is still on schedule. Fifty years ago, the Nazis had to manually identify homosexuals and drug addicts, transport them to the death camps that they had to build, pay for the guards, the cyanide and the disposal of the corpses, all under public scrutiny and the chance that eventually they would have to answer for their genocidal crimes. Today, the very inexpensive AIDS virus performs the same function without the risk that the architects of the epidemic will never be brought to justice.
A concerted effort must be made to remove these fascists from the federal government and particularly from the CIA. The Nazis must not be permitted to continue their genocide in the United States. There is no justification for ignoring or condoning their influence in our society.
The Himmlers, Mengeles, Laytons, and Joneses of this world have planned a "war" very different from the nuclear demise that most envision but nonetheless devastating. Just as the Crystal Night began the first Holocaust and the second World War, so too the White Night began the second holocaust and your future. It is very important. Millions of lives are in the balance.
EPILOGUE
My only regret is in allowing too much valuable time to pass before completing this project. I bear some of the responsibility for the long delay because I selfishly put my own survival ahead of society's. For this, I apologize but many factors in my tardiness were out of my control. Aside from the monumental task of extracting and compiling the data, there was the ongoing problem of summarizing a story that had not yet reached its conclusion. Too often, Just when I thought a particular aspect was complete, some new development would alter the ending and send me back to the outline and rough draft stage. Just staying current with the violent deaths of the characters and witnesses after the massacre was extremely time-consuming. I soon came to the realization that the White Night was not the end of the story but the beginning of an open-ended history that will remain topical for many years to come. I decided to conclude this primer to the conspiracy in December of 1987, not because the story is finished, but because I wanted to make my findings a matter of record before what I predict will be the cataclysmic events of November 9, 1986; the Golden Jubilee of the Crystal Night. I encourage others to continue this work and welcome any and all comments and information.
Do you have any more details of the work Richard Nixon did to prevent the extradition of the 2 Nazis? Names, dates, etc?
"All that is necessary for tyranny to succeed is for good men to do nothing." (unknown)
James Tracy: "There is sometimes an undue amount of paranoia among some conspiracy researchers that can contribute to flawed observations and analysis."
Gary Cornwell (Dept. Chief Counsel HSCA): "A fact merely marks the point at which we have agreed to let investigation cease."
Alan Ford: "Just because you believe it, that doesn't make it so."
Thanks much for posting that. Interesting read. Could have been a bit better written, but he gets the points across. Would have been great to have footnotes and an index, but suffices. I'm currently researching [and have for a long time] about the Nazi-OSS/CIA nexus. While he is not wrong, he slightly overstates the case in some places, IMO.
I wrote in detail about what I know of Mengele - research done by a friend who was a professional Nazi hunter after the War and Free Dutch Intelligence Forces during the War. It was posted in a long thread at EF, but of course that and all of my many thousands of posts were obliterated after I was falsely accused and never given a chance to challenge the claims against me. I don't have the energy at this moment to repost it all, perhaps some other time. Suffice it to say, that Mengele was CIA connected - at a distance - and didn't die when he was widely reported in the media as his bones being found in a grave. My friend Tony and his wife were hired by a Jewish group and given information from Israeli intelligence. They found Mengele alive and well, but not at the location reported by Meiers - though Mengele moved around a lot at the end of his life. Tony's wife lay on the beach nude in front of Mengele's beachside home and was eventually invited to the house for wine and meal. This was the plan, and she left with spy photos and voice recordings of the man and switched glasses when he was inside the house, so his fingerprints could be matched. It was Mengele and the press fury about the exhumation of 'Mengele's' bones happened just weeks before. Tony came back to the USA with all of his evidence, including witness testimony of those who knew the man, going under another name. He met with those who hired him for the mission, but was told the CIA didn't want the information out and to 'forget what you know'. He then went to a reporter he knew at the LAT and asked if he'd write the story. The up and coming reporter was excited. It was a great story, fully documented, and could make his career. he wrote it up and told Tony it would be in the coming Sunday edition - multi-page, with photos, et al. Tony bought the paper and found nothing...he waited - perhaps it wasn't ready and would be the following week. Nothing. Then he called the reporter to find out he had been fired. Contacting him at home he learned that it was actually in press, when the Executive Publisher called the print room and told them to destroy all papers printed with the story and run another story in the space. It never appeared. I think the CIA played a hand in this matter. I have no evidence that Mengele was ever in contact with Jones and personally doubt it; however, his influence was certainly there in much of the mind/body/will control over humans done under the Nazis and later under CIA and their sister agencies in the Americas and elsewhere. Mengele is reported to have had contacts with Colonia Dignidad in S. Chile, as well. Another CIA/Nazi enclave.
The book has a lot of interesting material and much food for thought. I think there is no doubt that Jones was CIA connected and/or controlled - as were many around him in his top levels of guards and leaders. Sadly, the public mostly bought the story of a cult gone crazy and committing mass suicide, although all the evidence shows otherwise. Likely another CIA Mockingbird operation to obscure the truth. Were we lied to? We are ALWAYS lied to! Only those with independent minds and unwilling to blindly accept Government/Media/Propaganda lies can begin to see the real truth and history of so many incidents such as this one.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Anthony Thorne Wrote: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.
This is one part that I wonder about. Why would the CIA-installed Burnham start nationalizing the mines and kicking the US corporations out of Guyana? Normally, foreign leaders seem to be installed by the CIA to enable corporate exploitation of their country.
