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What follows is a work in progress about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. In so far as it has a central thesis, it is that Jones initiated the 1978 massacre at Jonestown, Guyana because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan's investigation would disgrace him. Specifically, Jones was afraid that Ryan and the press would uncover evidence that the leftist founder of the Peoples Temple was for many years an asset of the FBI and the CIA. This fear was, I believe, mirrored in various precincts of the U.S. intelligence community, which worried that Ryan's investigation would embarrass the CIA by linking Jones to some of the Agency's most volatile programs---including "mind-control studies" and operations such as MK-ULTRA.
This is, I believe, why Jones's 201-file was purged by the CIA immediately after Jones's case-officer, Dan Mitrione, was murdered in Montevideo, Uruguay. [
1]
What I believe and what I can prove are, in some instances, two different things. There is no smoking gun in the pages that follow. But I think the reader will agree that there are certainly a great many empty cartridges lying around---enough, perhaps, to stimulate further investigation by others.
Having said that, it should be added that I am hardly the first to suggest that the Jonestown massacre was the outcome of someone's secret machinations. The affair is inherently mysterious, and conspiracy theories abound---the most prominent among them that "Jonestown" was a CIA mind-control experiment.
This is a view that has been put forward in a number of venues. Congressman Ryan's close friend and chief-of-staff, Joe Holsinger, is persuaded of it. The respectable Edwin Mellen Press has gone so far as to publish a book on the subject.[
2] And professional conspiracists such as John Judge have embraced the thesis wholeheartedly.
In my view, they're probably mistaken. The truth is darker, the evil more banal.
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I.1 RYAN AND THE NUMBERS
In the Fall of 1978, with Thanksgiving less than two weeks away, Congressman Leo Ryan (D-CA) flew to Georgetown, Guyana accompanied by a contingent of "Concerned Relatives" and members of the press. The purpose of the trip was at once simple and difficult: to determine whether or not American citizens were being abused or held against their will at the Peoples Temple agricultural settlement in Jonestown.
Reports to that effect had been received from a number of sources, including Temple "defectors," relatives of those in Jonestown, and investigative journalists. Whether those reports should be believed was a separate matter. An American-based political organization that used the trappings of religion to attract members and avoid taxes, the Temple was a controversial institution---a personality cult that presented itself as a vehicle of "apostolic socialism." Though its membership was predominantly black, the group was run by a white matriarchy that was, in turn, under the spell of a Bible-hating, charismatic sadist named Jim Jones.[
3]
Escorted by Richard Dwyer, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy, Congressman Ryan and a part of his contingent visited the remote commune on the afternoon of November 17, a Friday.
Though the visit was an unwelcome one and filled with tension, Temple attorneys Charles Garry and Mark Lane arranged for the delegation to be given a tour of the settlement, food and a place to sleep. Accordingly, members of the Ryan party met with Jones and spoke with many of the organization's rank-and-file. Speeches and entertainment went on until late in the eventing.
By Saturday afternoon, November 18, though Ryan himself had spoken favorably about several aspects of the settlement, a number of "defectors" had declared themselves, saying that they wanted to leave under the congressman's protection. It was then, as Ryan and his cohort were preparing to depart, that the congressman was suddenly, freakishly, attacked by a knife-wielding man. Though the scuffle was quickly broken up, and Ryan uninjured, the provocation put an end to the uneasy truce that both sides had cultivated.[
4]
Driven to the airstrip at nearby Port Kaituma, where two small planes waited, Ryan and his party were ambushed by a contingent of Templars, driven to the scene on the back of a tractor. When the shooting ended, five people, including the congressman, lay dead on the tarmac. Nearby, and in the surrounding jungle, survivors of the congressional delegation, having fled from the shooting, hid from sight, tending each other's wounds. Meanwhile, the death-squad returned to Jonestown as one of the small planes, its engine damaged, took off for the capital carrying both flight crews and news of the ambush.
As night descended on western Guyana, both the wounded and the well concealed themselves in a rum shop at Port Kaituma, awaiting evacuation in the morning. Five miles away, unknown to anyone in Port Kaituma, a holocaust unfolded in Jonestown.
Guyanese defense forces arrived at the airstrip the next morning, shortly after dawn. Securing the runway, the troops turned toward Jonestown, marching down the long, rough road to the commune. They reached the settlement at mid-morning, and were horrified to find a field of cadavers---men, women and children lying in an arc around the settlement's central pavilion.
Some two-hundred bodies were quickly counted, but the numbers of dead climbed ever higher in the days that followed. Revisions to the toll were continual, and sickening: 363, 405, 775, 800, 869, 910, 912, 913... To newspaper readers and watchers of the evening news, it seemed almost as if the slaughter was on-going, rather than a fait accompli.
Amid the confusion and horror, the escalating body-count provoked suspicions, though explanations abounded. It was said, for example, that the count was consistently low because the bodies of children lay unseen beneath the corpses of adults. Skeptics, however, pointed out that some of the earliest reports listed 82 children among 363 dead.[
5] It seems fair to say, then, that the children's presence was known from the beginning, and ought to have been taken into account. Moreover, even if the dead had been counted from the air, and even if one assumed that all of the children had been hidden from sight---which, as photos attest, was not the case---the body-count should have been more than 600 from the very first day.
But it wasn't.
Of course, conditions were primitive, and the circumstances ghastly. Mistakes were inevitable. Even so, 789 American passports had been found at Jonestown within a few hours of the troops' arrival.[
6] This discovery, coupled with the low body-count, had somehow caused those at the scene to believe that hundreds of "cultists" were "missing." Indeed, it was to find these supposedly missing Templars that military search-parties were sent by foot, plane and helicopter to earch the surrounding forest.
Meanwhile, incredibly, the dead lay in plain sight---nearly a thousand of them in an area the size of a football field.
It was a a week, then, before the body-count stabilized at 913 and, when it did, skeptics wondered how it was possible that 363 bodies had concealed 550---particularly when 82 of the 363 were said to have been small children.
Even mathematically, and from its inception, "Jonestown" did not make sense. Something was wrong with the reports from the very first day.
I.2 THE CAUSE AND MANNER OF DEATH
More than 900 men, women and children were suddenly, violently dead under circumstances that, even at this late date, remain mind-boggling.
The official view, as it emerged in newspapers and instant-books,[
7] was that upwards of 1000 brainwashed religious fanatics committed suicide in the jungle because their leader, Jim Jones, told them to. One by one, they'd come forward without protest to drink cyanide-laced "Kool-Aid" from a vat.[
8] It was as simple as that, the public was told. Jonestown was proof-positive of the effectiveness of "brainwashing," and of the dangers inherent in the new religions.
In reality, what was presented as news was only a theory and, as it turned out, an inaccurate one. Viz.:
Seven months after the massacre, the
New England Journal of Medicine commented on the handling of the bodies at Jonestown.[
9] Citing the criticisms of forensic experts and organizations, [
10] the Journal noted that:
six months after the massacre, only one-third of the bodies at Jonestown had been positively identified;
no death certificates had been obtained for any of the people who'd died in Guyana;
a medicolegal autopsy ought to have been performed on every body to establish the cause and manner of death in each case.
In fact, only seven autopsies were carried out among the 913 victims---an appalling figure. (As one forensic expert, Dr. Cyril Wecht, remarked: every American who dies under suspicious circumstances has a right to an autopsy.) Even then, the autopsies that were carried out were hardly conclusive: all of the bodies had been embalmed in Guyana, using a procedure that "ripped up" the internal organs, almost a month before the autopsies were conducted. [
11]
This was unfortunate, to say the least.[
12] Indeed, six leading medical examiners described the handling of the bodies (by the military and others) as "inept," "incompetent" "embarrassing," and a case of "doing it backwards."[
13] Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker, who assisted at the seven autopsies, agreed. There had been "a series of errors," he said. "We shuddered about the degree of ineptness." [
14]
Despite the difficulties, "probable cyanide poisoning" was listed as the cause of death in five of the seven autopsy reports---though, as it happened,
only one of the five bodies (that of Maria Katsaris) showed any traces of cyanide ("although carefully searched for..."). [
15]
Still, the suspicion of cyanide poisoning in the absence of cyanide itself is not as strange as it sounds. As one of the examining physicians pointed out, cyanide is unstable in "the postmortem interval." Perhaps, then, it broke down in the victims' tissues. In any case, the "relevant body fluids" may have been contaminated by the embalming process itself or, in the course of that procedure, the fluids may have been diluted or discarded. The fact that Diphenhydramine was found in the stomachs of several victims and in the "poison-vat" as well, suggested that the victims had partaken of the vat's contents. That the contents of the vat included cyanide could not, however, be proven from an examination of the vat itself---which, upon study, betrayed no traces of the poison. [
16] (The explanation was offered that the vat had an acid pH at which cyanide is unstable. The assumption, then, was that the poison broke down in the days after the massacre.)
"Probable cyanide poisoning" was, therefore, a conclusion based upon circumstantial evidence: i.e., reports, including press reports, from the scene. These accounts noted the presence of cyanide salts in the inventory of Jonestown's medical dispensary; and, also, the discovery of cyanide in syringes and bottles on the ground around the pavilion. Finally, there was the account of Dr. Leslie Mootoo, chief medical examiner and senior bacteriologist for Guyana, who examined scores of bodies
in situ within a day or two of the disaster. According to Dr. Mootoo, who labored long and hard, taking specimens and samples from many of the dead, cyanide was present in the stomachs of most of those whom he examined. Unfortunately, evidence of his findings disappeared soon after it was collected. According to Dr. Mootoo, his specimens and samples were given to "a representative of the American Embassy in Georgetown, expecting that they would be forwarded to American forensic pathologists." They weren't. No one seems to know what happened to them.
Of the two remaining bodies (of the seven) that were autopsied, Jim Jones was found to have been killed by a gunshot wound to the head. As for Temple member Ann Moore, her death was attributed to
two causes, because it was impossible to say which came first. She had been shot in the head; and, unlike the others, a massive quantity of cyanide was found in her body's tissues. (Why the poison should have broken down in the bodies of the other victims, but not in the body of Ann Moore, is unknown.)
In the end, physicians were able to certify the cause of death in only two of the more than 900 cases---though Dr. Mootoo's field-work lent considerable weight to the conclusion that most of the victims had been poisoned.
As for the
manner of death, whether suicide or homicide, the best evidence was again Dr. Mootoo's. The Guyanese physician, trained in London and Vienna, concluded that
more than 700 of the dead had been murdered. This conclusion was based on several observations. In the case of the 260 children, for example, they could hardly be held responsible for their own deaths. So they'd been killed by others. As for the adults, Dr. Mootoo reported that 83 of the 100 bodies that he examined had needle-punctures on the backs of their shoulders---suggesting that they had been forcibly held down and injected against their will.[
17] (A second possiblity is that they may have been given
coup de grace injections, perhaps to guard against the possibility that some of the victims might have feigned death in hopes of escape.) Moreover, Dr. Mootoo noted, syringes containing cyanide, but lacking needles, lay everywhere on the ground at Jonestown---a circumstance which led him to conclude that the syringes had been used to squirt poison into the mouths of those (children and others) who'd refused to drink. Still other victims seem to have been duped into thinking that they were taking tranquilizers: bottles containing potassium cyanide, but labelled "Valium," were scattered on the ground around the pavilion. [
18] Based upon this evidence, Mootoo concluded that as many as 700, and possibly more, of Jonestown's victims were murdered.
No other conclusion seems reasonable. Once Dr. Mootoo's findings are accepted with respect to the
cause of death, cyanide poisoning, we have little choice than to accept his judgment upon the
manner in which the vast majority of the victims died. As the only physician to gather evidence at the scene and to examine the dead where they lay, Dr. Mootoo based his findings upon the best (and, sometimes, the only) evidence that was available.
An eye-witness account would help to answer some of the lingering questions, but few witnesses survived. Those who did survive---Charles Garry, Mark Lane, Mike and Tim Carter, Michael Prokes, Odell Rhodes, and Stanley Clayton---did so because they were able to flee the scene.[
19] The only exceptions to this were an elderly woman named Hyacinth Thrush, who slept through the massacre and remembered nothing of it; and a man named Johnny Cobb, who hid through the night in a tree. [
20]
Just as the cause and manner of death were obscured by the decision to embalm the corpses before they could be autopsied, the identities of those who died were also encrypted. Why this was so is a mystery in its own right.
"Lots of people had identification tags on their wrists, usually their right one," said Frank Johnston, an American magazine photographer who toured the commune shortly after the massacre. [
21] Some of these tags were hand-made, apparently by the communards themselves, while others had been issued by the medical clinic at Jonestown. Still other victims were identified on the ground by Hyacinth Thrush and others who'd known them. Once identifications were made, the military tagged the bodies. Relatives of the dead, including Johnny Cobb, saw the tags. So did anyone who glanced at the cover of Newsweek, in which the massacre was reported.
But then the tags and i.d. bracelets were removed, prior to the bodies' return to the United States.
In a real sense, therefore, the bodies were dis-identified, though no one seems able to say why. According to Newsweek, however, the order to remove the tags was issued by Robert Pastor, the National Security Council's staff coordinator for Latin American and Caribbean affairs. Asked about this, Pastor denies that he gave such an order, adding that it would have been senseless for him to have done so. He's right, of course, but...there it is.
A great deal more could be said about the mishandling of the bodies. It may be enough, though, to call attention to news reports published nearly a decade after the massacre. According to UPI and the
Los Angeles Times, three of the Jonestown dead were discovered in January,
1986 stacked in caskets inside a Storage-R-Us facility in Southern California. [
22] They'd been forgotten, and were still awaiting burial.
I.3 THE NOIWON ALERT
As Dr. Mootoo's evidence established, most of the people at Jonestown were murdered. How is it, then, that Jonestown has become synonymous with "mass suicide"? An "After Action Report" of the Joint Chiefs of Staff helps to establish the chronology of the myth.
According to the Pentagon, which took responsibility for transporting the dead back to the United States, the National Military Command Center (NMCC) was first notified of an incident in Guyana at 7:18 P.M. on Saturday, November 18. [
23] This information, apparently based upon the reports brought back from Port Kaituma by the escaping small plane, was that Congressman Ryan had been shot at the jungle airstrip. [
24]
At 8:15 P.M., a Department of Defense MEDEVAC was requested by the State Department. Its mission: to evacuate the wounded from Port Kaituma, and to return the bodies of those who had been killed at the airstrip.
At 8:49 P.M., the State department relayed a request from the Prime Minister of Guyana, Forbes Burnham, asking that a pathologist accompany the MEDEVAC. Why Burnham should have requested a pathologist from the U.S. is uncertain. The information available to him at the time would seem to have been restricted to the news that Congressman Ryan and others had been ambushed by small-arms fire.
Six hours later, at 3:04 A.M. on November 19, the C-141 MEDEVAC left Charleston, N.C., bound for Guyana.
Barely 25 minutes afterward, at 3:29 A.M., the JCS chronology indicates that "CIA NOIWON reports mass suicides at Jonestown." [
25]
All entries in the JCS chronology are Eastern Standard Time. In Guyana, however, it was one hour and fifteen minutes later than in Washington, D.C.---which means that the CIA notified the Defense Department of the "mass suicides" at 4:44 A.M. (Guyana-time).
But how did they know?
How did the CIA know that
anyone was dead in Jonestown---let alone so many as to justify the notion of "mass suicides"? And how could the CIA be so mistakenly certain of the manner in which the dead had died: that is to say, suicide rather than murder?
Somehow, the Agency learned of the mass deaths while it was still dark, hours before the Guyanese Defense Forces arrived at the commune. According to the "narrative summary" of the JCS report:
At approximately 1800 that same evening (November 18), Reverend James Warren Jones, the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple cult, held a meeting of all members. He convinced them that they and their children would have to die. The members of the cult lined up and began receiving a poison drink. Guards were stationed around the compound to insure that no one left the camp..." [
26]
But how did they know?
This has been a mystery for than 25 years. Until recently, I was of the opinion that the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy, Richard Dwyer, had returned to Jonestown after the ambush at Port Kaituma. What made me think so was an excerpt from the so-called "Last Tape" that Jim Jones made, while sitting on the dais at the pavillion in Jonestown, cajoling his followers to kill themselves. [
27] Against a background of wailing and screams, we hear the following: one hears
JONES: "And what comes, folks, what comes now?"
UNMAN [
28] [in background]: "Everybody...hold it! Sit down right here..." [loud background noises, agitated]
JONES: "Say peace, say peace, say peace, say peace...what comes, don't let...take Dwyer on down to the middle (?) of the East House. Take Dwyer on down."
UNWOMAN: "Everybody be quiet, please!"
UNMAN: "Show you got some respect for our lives." [29]
UNMAN: "Let me sit down, sit down, sit down."
JONES: "I know... (Jones begins to hum, or keen.) "I tried so very very hard... Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him."
UNMAN: "Jjara?"
JONES: "I'm not talking about Jjara, I said
Dwyer."
The tape is anything but indistinct, and there would seem to be only one way of making sense out of it. Dwyer, however, always denied that he returned to Jonestown that night---and one would like to believe him.
But there has always been reason to doubt Dwyer's veracity (though not his courage---he behaved heroically at the Port Kaituma airstrip). According to Dr. Julius Mader, an East German academician with ties to the Stasi intelligence service, Dwyer was actually a CIA officer. [
30] This opinion would appear to have been based on analysis of Dwyer's background, which included his enlistment in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, followed by service in the fly-blown capitals of Syria, Egypt, Bulgaria and Chad.
In other words, Dwyer looked like a spook. And Mader wasn't the only one who thought so. Kit Nascimento, Guyana's Minister of Information at the time, has stated flatly that Richard Dwyer was the CIA's Chief of Station in Guyana when the Jonestown massacre occurred.
But Mader and Nascimento were mistaken.
The real CIA station chief was a colleague of Dwyer's who worked with him under State Department cover in the American embassy. Upon learning of the ambush at Port Kaituma, and of the deaths of two children and their mother at the Temple's Georgetown headquarters, it was this person who got on the radio---and stayed on the radio into the early morning hours of the next day. [
31] Desperate for information, he eventually tuned in a transmission from the police station at Matthews Ridge, a few miles from Jonestown. The man at the other end was Odell Rhodes, who'd just escaped from the settlement. It was Rhodes who got out the news that Jonestown was devouring itself.
Footnotes:
1. As we'll see, Mitrione was, first, a policeman in Indiana, and then a counter-insurgency expert in South America.
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2. Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?, by Michael Meiers, Studies in American Religion, Volume 35, Edwin Mellen Press, 1988. Meiers answers the question affirmatively, relying upon circumstantial evidence that is not entirely convincing.
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3. My description of Jones is intended without rancor. That he was charismatic is obvious to any who have ever heard him. That he was a sadist is apparent from his mistreatment of dissenters at Jonestown, and from the homosexual attacks that he so often carried out upon his followers. That Jones was Bible-hating, as well as Bible-thumping, is clear from his instruction that the Good Book should be used as toilet paper. Other evidence of Jones's hatred for the Bible abounds in a Journal found at Jonestown. In its pages, the anonymous diarist quotes Jones as saying that "The Bible will be used to put you back into slavery." "...the white man used the Bible to keep blacks in slavery." "That God up there doesn't look after the good people down here.... If Harriet Tubman hadn't torn it up, we'd still be in slavery. We've got to get rid of the Bible or the white man will use it to lead us back into slavery." On the same page, the writer notes that "Jim claimed superiority to Jesus." Elsewhere, we are told that "Jim led the congregation in singing, 'The Old Bullshit Religion Ain't What It Used to Be.'" And, by no means finally, the writer quotes Jones to the effect that "Religion is the opiate of the people....Jim told of God's creation of Lucifer, who led away one-third of the angels. God fouled up. 'Some of you get nervous when I say that.' He said religion was used by the ruling class to control us. 'They" steal, 'they' lie, but they tell us niggers, 'Nigger, don't lie.' They kill all the time, but 'thou shalt not kill.'"
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4. Credit for stopping the attack is usually given to the attorneys. In fact, it seems that one of the Templars, Tim Carter, was the first to intervene. Interestingly, Carter reports that Don Sly's attack on Ryan, was most, best half-hearted. "It was like he wanted to be stopped," Carter said. The implication is that Sly's attack was a command performance that Sly himself hoped would fail.
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5.
Baltimore Sun, November 21, 1978. A subsequent report, by the Associated Press on November 25, listed 180 children among 775 cadavers. The final count, recorded by the Miami Herald on December 17, reported that 260 children were among the dead.
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6.
Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1978.
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7. It is literally true that, even before the dead could be buried, both the
San Francisco Chronicle and the
Washington Post had published books about the massacre.
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8. In fact, the sweetener used was Fla-Vor-Aid.
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9.
New England Journal of Medicine, "Law-Medicine Notes: The Guyana Mass Suicides: Medicolegal Re-evaluation" by William J. Curran, J.D., LL.M., S.M. Hyg., June 7, 1979.
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10. Among them: the National Association of Medical Examiners and the Reference Organization in Forensic Medicine and Sciences.
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11. It was Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker who commented on the procedure used in Guyana (trochar embalming). Dr. Breitenecker was the only civilian who participated in the seven autopsies conducted by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology team at Dover Air Force Base. Those autopsied were: Laurence Schacht; William Castillo; James Jones; Violatt Dillard; Maria Katsaris; Carolyn (Moore) Layton; and Ann Moore.
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12. But it was also understandable. The dead were infested and putrefying in Guyana's heat, which made their handling exceedingly unpleasant, and their identification difficult.
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13. "Medical Examiners Find Failings By Government on Cultist Bodies," by Lawrence K. Altman,
New York Times, Dec. 3, 1978.
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14. Op cit.,
American Medical News. See also, "Coroner Says 700 in Cult Who Died Were Slain," by Timothy McNulty and Michael Sneed (Chicago Tribune Service story),
The Miami Herald, Dec. 17,1978.
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15. The quote is taken from the autopsy report on Carolyn Moore, prepared by Dr. Robert L. Thompson.
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16. With respect to the absence of cyanide in the vat, see page 4 of the autopsy protocol (AFIP #1680274) for Laurence E. Schacht.
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17.
American Medical News, "Bungled Aftermath of Tragedy," by Lawrence Altman, MD, p. 7.
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18. "Some in Cult Received Cyanide by Injection, Guyanese Sources Say," by Nicholas M. Horrock,
New York Times, Dec. 12, 1978.
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19. In interviews with this writer, Clayton and Rhodes emphasized the presence of armed guards, some with rifles and others with crossbows, who formed a perimeter to prevent people from escaping the encampment. (The street-smart Clayton and Rhodes escaped using pretexts.)
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20. According to Cobb, he heard screams and gunshots throughout the night, and saw flashing lights.
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21.
Miami Herald, "Army to Identify Bodies of Cultists," 22 Nov., 1978, p.1.
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22.
Los Angeles Times, 9 January, 1986, I:2:5; UPI, 9 January, 1986, National/Domestic News, PM cycle, Los Angles.
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23. "Guyana Operations," After-Action Report, 18-27 November, 1978, prepared by the Special Study Group, Operations Directorate, USMC Directorate, Joint Chiefs of Staff (distributed 31 January, 1979). All times are taken from Appendix B, "Chronology of Events."
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24.
Ibid.
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25.
Ibid. The JCS chronology cites the following reference: "CIA 191138Z Nov 78". NOIWON is the National Operations and Intelligence Watch Officers Network.
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26. Ibid., p. 6.
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27. The tape was obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). I've quoted from the FBI's transcript of that tape.
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28. "Unman" = Unidentified Man.
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29. On the tape-recording that I have, it appears that this is actually Jones's voice, and that he says, "Keep Dwyer alive!" and then adds, "Sit down, sit down, sit down."
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30. Mader is the author of
Who's Who in the CIA. It's in that book that Dwyer is named as a CIA officer.
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31. Because of the circumstances under which I learned of his identity, I am awaiting the former Chief of Station's permission to make his identity known.
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I.4 DR. SUKHDEO AND DR. HERSH
Still, we're not done with CIA. Its relationship to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, and therefore to the Jonestown massacre, is an important issue that will be discussed in subsequent pages.
Here, however, we are concerned with the initial reports of the massacre. And, in particular with those responsible for labeling the disaster a "mass suicide"---contrary to the evidence being gathered by Dr. Mootoo. The person who seems to have been most responsible for spinning the story in that way was Dr. Hardat Sukhdeo, a psychiatrist.
Dr. Sukhdeo is, or perhaps was, "an anti-cult activist" whose professional interests (according to an autobiographical note) were "homicide, suicide, and the behavior of animals in electro-magnetic fields." His arrival in Georgetown on November 27, 1978 came only three weeks after he had been named as a defendant in a controversial "deprogramming" case. [32] It is not entirely surprising, then, that within hours of his arrival in the capital, Dr. Sukhdeo began giving interviews to the press, including the New York Times, "explaining" what had happened.
Jim Jones, he said, "was a genius of mind control, a master. He knew exactly what he was doing. I have never seen anything like this...but the jungle, the isolation, gave him absolute control." Just what Dr. Sukhdeo had been able to see in his few minutes in Georgetown is unclear. But his importance in shaping the story is undoubted: he was one of the few civilian professionals at the scene, and his task was, quite simply, to help the press make sense of what had happened and to console those who had survived. Accordingly, he was widely quoted, and what he had to say was immediately echoed by colleagues back in the States.
That Sukhdeo's opinions were preconceived, rather than based upon evidence, however, seems obvious. Even so, it is clear that he was aware of the work that Dr. Mootoo had done---which, as we have seen, contradicted Sukhdeo's statements about "mass suicides."
In an interview with Time, Sukhdeo refers to an "autopsy" that had been performed on Jim Jones in Guyana. This can only have been a reference to Dr. Mootoo's somewhat cursory examination, in which Jones's body was slit open on the ground. It is difficult to understand how Sukhdeo could have been aware of that procedure without also knowing of Mootoo's finding that most of the victims had been murdered.
Dr. Sukhdeo was himself a native of Guyana, though a resident of the United States. He claimed at the time that he'd come to Georgetown at his own expense to counsel and study those who had survived. But that is in dispute.
According to his attorney, Robert Bockelman, Dr. Sukhdeo retained him to prevent his having to testify at the Larry Layton trial in San Francisco. (Layton was a member of the Peoples Temple who participated in the events at the Port Kaituma airstrip.) Dr. Sukhdeo's primary concern, according to Bockelman, was that it should not be revealed that the State Department had paid his way to Guyana. You see the issue: was Doctor Sukhdeo there to help the survivors---or to debrief them on behalf of some other person or agency? [
33]
Nor was this all. Prior to retaining counsel in San Francisco, Dr. Sukhdeo had himself been retained by Larry Layton's defense attorneys and family. (Indeed, he testified in Layton's trial in Guyana, where "most of his testimony concerned cults in general and observations about conditions at Jonestown.") [
34] During the time that he was helping Layton's defense, it appears that Dr. Sukhdeo was also meeting ---surreptitiously, according to his own lawyer---with FBI agents. Asked about this, Sukhdeo says that at no time during these meetings did he disclose any confidential communicatins between himself and Layton. [
35]
The suggestion that Dr. Sukhdeo may have secretly "debriefed" Jonestown's survivors on behalf of the State Department (or some other government agency) may seem unduly suspicious. On the other hand, a certain amount of suspicion would seem to prudent when discussing the unsolved deaths of more than 900 Americans who, in the weeks before they died, were preparing to defect
en masse to the Soviet Union. The government's interest in this matter would logically have been intense.[
36]
It is true, of course, that not every psychiatrist agreed with Dr. Sukhdeo's analysis. Dr. Stephen P. Hersh, then assistant director of the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), commented that "The charges of brainwashing are clearly exaggerated. The concept of 'thought control' by cult leaders is elusive, difficult to define and even more difficult to prove. Because cult converts adopt beliefs that seem bizarre to their families and friends, it does not follow that their choices are being dictated by cult leaders." [
37]
That said, there is more at stake here than public perceptions. Investigators of the Guyana tragedy have a responsibility to both the living and the dead: to find out what actually happened, and to make certain that it cannot happen again.
II.1 THE DOG THAT DIDN'T BARK
To understand the fate of the Peoples Temple, one must first understand why the intelligence community seemed (against all odds) to ignore the organization for so long---appearing to become interested only when Congressman Ryan began his investigation. Consider:
The Peoples Temple was created in the political deep-freeze of the 1950s. From its inception, it was a leftwing ally of black activist groups that were, in many cases, under FBI surveillance. [
38] During the 1960s, when the Bureau and the CIA mounted Operations COINTELPRO and CHAOS to infiltrate and disrupt black militant organizations and the Left, the Temple went out of its way to forge alliances with leaders of those same organizations: e.g., with the Black Panthers' Huey Newton and with the Communist Party's Angela Davis. And yet, despite these associations, and its ultra-left orientation, we are told that the Temple was not a target of investigation by either intelligence agency.
In the early 1970s, suspicions began to surface in the press, implicating the Peoples Temple in an array of allegations including gunrunning, drug-smuggling, kidnapping, murder, brainwashing, extortion and torture. Under attack at home, and feeling the pressure abroad, Temple officials undertook secret negotiations with the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown, laying the groundwork for the en masse defection of more than a thousand poor Americans. According to the CIA, it took no interest in these discussions.
Under the circumstances, only the most naive could fail to be skeptical of the disinterested stance that the FBI and the CIA claim to have taken. But what does it mean? Why would the FBI and the CIA give the Peoples Temple a pass?
The answers to those questions are embedded in the contradictions of Jones's own past and, in particular, in that most mysterious period in the preacher-man's life: the 1960-64 interregnum that his biographers gloss over. As I intend to show, the enigmas of Jones's beginnings do much to explain the bloodshed at the end.
II.2 JONES AND MITRIONE IN RICHMOND
Jim Jones was born in Crete, Ind. in 1931. When he was three, he moved with his family to the town of Lynn.
His father was a partially disabled World War I vet. Embittered by the Depression and unable to find work, he is alleged (without much evidence) to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Jones's mother, on the other hand, was well-liked, a hard-working woman who is universally credited with keeping the family together.
Jones's religious upbringing took place outside his own family. Myrtle Kennedy, a friend of his mother's who lived nearby, saw to it that he went to Sunday School, and gave him instruction in the
Bible. While not yet a teenager, Jones began to experiment, attending the services of several churches. [
39] Before long, he came under the spell of a "fanatical" woman evangelist, the leader of faith-healing revivals at the Gospel Tabernacle Church on the edge of town. [
40] (This was a Pentecostal sect of so-called "Holy Rollers," a charismatic group then believed in faith-healing and speaking in tongues.) Whether there was more to their relationship than that of a priestess and her protege is unknown, but it is a fact that Jones's association with the woman coincided with the onset of nightmares. According to Jones's mother, he was terrorized by dreams in which a snake figured prominently.[
41]
Whatever the nature of his relationship to the lady evangelist, Jones soon found himself in the pulpit, dressed in a white sheet, thumping the
Bible. The protege was a prodigy and, by all accounts, he loved the attention.
In 1947, 15-years-old and still a resident of Lynn, Jones began preaching in a "sidewalk ministry" on the wrong side of the tracks in Richmond, Ind.---sixteen miles from his home. Why he traveled to Richmond to deliver his message, and why he picked a working-class black neighborhood in which to do it, is uncertain.
What is certain, however, is that, while in Richmond, Jones established a relationship with a man named Dan Mitrione. Like the child evangelist, Mitrione would one day become internationally notorious and, like Jones, his violent death in South America would generate headlines around the world. As Jones told his followers in Guyana,
"There was one guy that I knew growing up in Richmond, a cruel, cruel person, even as a kid, a vicious racist---Dan Mitrione." [42]
Myrtle Kennedy has confirmed that the two men knew one another, saying that they were friends. [
43]
That Jones knew Mitrione is strange coincidence, but not entirely surprising. A Navy veteran who'd joined the Richmond Police Department in 1945, Mitrione worked his way up through the ranks as a patrolman, a juvenile officer and, finally, chief of police. It is unlikely that he would have overlooked the strange white-boy from Lynn preaching on the sidewalk to blacks in front of a working-class bar on the industrial side of town.
What is surprising about Jones's statement, however, is his description of Mitrione as a "vicious racist." There is nothing anywhere else to suggest that Mitrione held any particular views on the subject of race. Communism, certainly---but race, no. [
44]
Which is to say that either Jones was wrong about the Richmond cop, or else he knew something about Dan Mitrione that other people did not.
If Mitrione were to play no further part in Jones's story, there would be little reason to speculate any further about their relationship. But, as we'll see, Jones and Mitrione cross each other's paths repeatedly, and in the most unlikely places. Neither family friends nor playmates (Mitrione was eleven years older than Jones), their relationship must have been based upon
something. But what?
Two possibilities suggest themselves: either Mitrione was counseling in Jones in the way policemen sometimes counsel children, or their relationship may have been professional. That is to say, Mitrione may have recruited Jones as an informant within the black community. This second possibility is one to which we'll have reason to return.
II.3 JONES IN THE FIFTIES
Very little research seems to have been carried out by anyone with respect to Jones's early career. It is almost as if his biographers are uninterested in him until he begins to go off the deep end. This is unfortunate---particularly in light of the possibility that Jones may have been a police or FBI informant, gathering "racial intelligence" for the Bureau's files.
What is known about his early career is, therefore, known only in outline.
He graduated from Richmond High School in about January, 1949, and began attending the University of Indiana at Bloomington. [
45] He was married to his high school sweetheart, Marceline Baldwin, in June of the same year.
In the Summer of 1951, Jones moved to Indianapolis to study law as an undergraduate. While there, he began to attend political meetings of an uncertain kind. Ronnie Baldwin, Marceline's younger cousin, was living with the Joneses at the time. And though he was only eleven years old, Baldwin recalls that Jones sometimes took him to political lectures. On one such outing, Baldwin remembers, he and Jones went to a "churchlike" auditorium where "communism" was under discussion. They didn't stay long, however. Soon after they'd arrived, someone came up to Jones and whispered in his ear---whereupon Jones took his ward by the arm and exited hurriedly. Outside, Jones said "Good evening" to a man whom Baldwin believes was an FBI agent. [
46]
It's a peculiar story, and Jones's biographers don't seem to know what to make of it. What sort of meeting could it have been? The assumption is made, in light of Jones's later politics, that it was a leftist soiree of some kind. After all, they were talking about communism. But that makes very little sense. Indianapolis was a very conservative city in 1951. (It still is.) Joe McCarthy was on the horizon, and the Korean War was beginning to take its toll. If "communism" was being discussed in anything other than whispers, or anywhere else than a back-room, the debate was almost certainly one-sided and thumbs-down.
It was at about this same time that Jones gave up the study of law and, to everyone's surprise, decided to become a minister. By 1952, he was a student pastor at the Somerset Methodist Church in Indianapolis and, in 1953, made his "evangelical debut" at a ministerial seminar in Detroit, Michigan.
By 1954, Jones had established the "Community Unity" Church in Indianapolis, while preaching also at the Laurel Tabernacle. To raise money, he began selling monkeys door-to-door. [
47]
By 1956, Jones had established the "Wings of Deliverance" Church as a successor to Community Unity. Almost immediately, the Church was christened the Peoples Temple. The inspiration for its new name stemmed from the fact that the church was housed in what was formerly a Jewish synagogue---a "temple" that Jones had purchased, with little or no money down, for $50,000.
Ironically, the man who gave the Peoples Temple its start was the Rabbi Maurice Davis. It was he who sold the synagogue to Jones on such remarkably generous terms. A prominent anti-cult activist and sometime "deprogrammer," Rabbi Davis is an associate of Dr. Sukhdeo's.
II.4 JONES AND FATHER DIVINE
By the late 1950s, the Peoples Temple was a success, with a congregation of more than 2000 people. Still, Jones had even larger ambitions and, to accommodate them, became the improbable protege of an extremely improbable man. This was Father Divine, the Philadelphia-based "black messiah" whose Peace Mission movement attracted tens of thousands of black adherents and the close attention of the FBI, while earning its founder an annual income in seven figures.
For whatever reasons, beginning in about 1956, Jones made repeated pilgrimages to the black evangelist's headquarters, where he literally "sat at the feet" (and at the table) of the great man, professing his devotion. With the exception of Father Divine's wife, Jones may well have been the man's only white adherent.
It was not entirely inconvenient. Living in Indianapolis, Jones could easily arrange to transport members of the Peoples Temple by bus to Philadelphia---where they were housed without charge in Father Divine's hotels, feasted at banquets called "Holy Communions," and treated to endless sermons. [
48]
That Jones made a study of Father Divine, emulated him and hoped to succeed him, is clear. The possibility should not be ruled out, however, that Jones was also engaged in collecting "racial intelligence" for a third party.
Whatever else Jones may have picked up from his study of Father Divine, there is reason to believe that it was in the context of his visits to Philadelphia that he was introduced to the subject of mass suicide. Among Jones's personal effects in Guyana was a book that had been checked out of the Indianapolis Public Library in the 1950s, and never returned. In the pages of
Father Divine: Holy Husband, the author quotes one of the black evangelist's followers:
"'If Father dies,' she tells you in the calmest kind of a voice, 'I sure 'nuff would never be callin' in myself to be goin' on livin' in this empty ol' world. I'd be findin' some way of gettin' rid of the life I never been wantin' before I found him.' "
If Father Divine were to die, mass suicides among Negroes in his movement could certainly result. They would be rooted deep, not alone in Father's relationship with his followers, but also in America's relationship with its Negroe citizens. This would be the shame of America." (Emphasis added.) [
49]
II.5 JONES GOES TO CUBA
In January, 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista dictatorship, and seized power in Cuba. Land reforms followed within a few months of the coup, alienating foreign investors and the rich. By Summer, therefore, Cuba was in the midst of a low-intensity counter-revolution, with sabotage operations mounted from within and outside the country.
Within a year of Castro's ascension, by January of 1960, mercenary pilots and anti-Castroites were flying bombing missions against the regime. Meanwhile, in Washington, Vice-President Richard Nixon was lobbying on behalf of the military invasion that the CIA was plotting.
It was against this background, in February of 1960, that Jim Jones suddenly decided to visit Havana.
The news of Jones's visit to Cuba---one is tempted to write "the cover-story for Jones's trip to Cuba"---was first published in the New York
Times in March, 1979 (four months after the massacre in Guyana). The story was based upon an interview with a naturalized American named Carlos Foster. A former Cuban cowboy, Baptist Pentecostal minister and sometime night-club singer, Foster showed up at the New York Times four months after the massacre. Without being asked, he volunteered a strange story about meeting Jim Jones in Cuba during the Winter of 1960. (Why Foster went to the newspaper with his story is uncertain: news of his friendship with Jones could hardly have helped his career as a childrens' counselor). [
50]
Nevertheless, according to the
Times story, the 29-year-old Jones traveled to Cuba to expedite plans to establish a communal organization with settlements in the U.S. and abroad. The immediate goal, Foster said, was to recruit Cuban blacks to live in Indiana.
Foster told the
Times that he and Jones met by chance at the Havana Hilton. That is to say, Jones gave the Cuban a big hello, and took him by the arm. He then solicited Foster's help in locating forty families that would be willing to move to the Indianapolis area (at Jones's expense). Tim Reiterman, who repeats the
Times' story, adds that the two men discussed the plan in Jones's hotel-room, from 7 in the morning until 8 o'clock at night, for a week. More recently, Foster has elaborated by saying that Jones offered to pay him $50,000 per year to help him establish an archipelago of offshore agricultural communes in Central and South America. Foster said that Jones was an extremely well-traveled man, who knew Latin America well. He had already been to Guyana, and wanted to start a collective there.
After a month in Cuba, Jones returned to the United States (alone). Six months later, Foster followed, on his own initiative, but the immigration scheme went nowhere. [
51]
The anomalies in this story are many, and one hardly knows what to make of them. Foster's information that Jones was well-traveled in Latin America, and had already been to Guyana, comes as a shock. None of his biographers mentions Jones having taken trips out of the United States prior to this time. Could Foster be mistaken? Or have Jones's biographers overlooked an important part of his life?
An even greater anomaly, however, concerns language. While Reiterman reports that Foster was bilingual, and that he and Jones spoke English together...
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
![[Image: photo22.jpg]](http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/images/photo/photo22.jpg)
