21-08-2015, 05:27 PM
[quote=Anthony Thorne]The book (the Jonestown book) might take an extra day or two, which will make it more likely to appear early next week, maybe by Tues or Wed. I have the whole volume but need to take care of a couple of miscellaneous things first.
As a taster though, here's an eye-opening (and somewhat standalone) chapter from late in the book, where Meiers - following his analysis of Jones and Jonestown - casts his eye over the other Jonestown volumes that have appeared to date, and discusses them in some detail. Mark Lane's work on the subject, in particular, is discussed in some depth. This chapter appears near the end of WAS JONESTOWN A CIA MEDICAL EXPERIMENT?, and follows the main narrative, so it doesn't spoil the book to read it beforehand. Alternatively, folks can wait until I have the entire book ready sometime next week.
A couple of the reviews written by Meiers here make mention of events called the "'H' file homicides". The reference might not make sense here out of context, but it is explained in detail in Meiers' book, and it is one of the most haunting parts of that volume.
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WAS JONESTOWN A CIA MEDICAL EXPERIMENT?
Chapter 14 - VARIOUS VILLAINS AND VICTIMS
[size=12]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.
[FONT=Cambria] Rhodes was much closer to the deaths. He walked am...
As a taster though, here's an eye-opening (and somewhat standalone) chapter from late in the book, where Meiers - following his analysis of Jones and Jonestown - casts his eye over the other Jonestown volumes that have appeared to date, and discusses them in some detail. Mark Lane's work on the subject, in particular, is discussed in some depth. This chapter appears near the end of WAS JONESTOWN A CIA MEDICAL EXPERIMENT?, and follows the main narrative, so it doesn't spoil the book to read it beforehand. Alternatively, folks can wait until I have the entire book ready sometime next week.
A couple of the reviews written by Meiers here make mention of events called the "'H' file homicides". The reference might not make sense here out of context, but it is explained in detail in Meiers' book, and it is one of the most haunting parts of that volume.
....................
WAS JONESTOWN A CIA MEDICAL EXPERIMENT?
Chapter 14 - VARIOUS VILLAINS AND VICTIMS
[size=12]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.
[FONT=Cambria] Rhodes was much closer to the deaths. He walked am...
