Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  The manifesto the eight drafted while drifting through the Pacific Northwest was a compromise. Rather than placing blame directly on Jones, it instead faulted staff for everything because that was the only blame all eight could agree on. Unanimity was important, they felt; they did not want Jones, back in Ukiah, to be able to point to any division in their ranks. Besides, a moderate position might keep Jones uncertain as to whether he might command a modicum of loyalty from the eight. That way he would be less likely to do them—or their families—any harm.

  Sex was the first topic on the list of grievances. “A revolutionary, as you and staff would say, does NOT engage in sex.... However, who takes the privileged liberty to abuse such a decision? STAFF.” They illustrated their point with specifics, naming various high-ranking members, male and female, who had been penetrated by Jones.

  The letter said that members who made lots of money for the church got away with being racist, were elevated to staff and special projects, and became untouchables, outside the egalitarian standards of the Temple.

  “You said that the revolutionary focal point at present is in the black people. Yet, where is the black leadership? ... Black people are being tapped for money, practically nothing else....”

  The eight characterized staff as a nitpicking bunch of women “hungrily taking advantage of a chance to castrate black men” and freely tossing around “male chauvinism” charges. They said the meetings of the central church body were laughable. “All planning commission does is call each other homosexual, asking if each other suck cock, planning to plant dope on people. What a contribution to socialism! ...” Why was anyone who wanted to become an active socialist put down as a homosexual and belittled as “a big revolutionary”? the eight asked. “How does one half of Peoples Temple manage to know zero about socialism?”

  The defection of the so-called Eight Revolutionaries immediately set off Jones’s defensive reactions. Although other individuals and groups would leave the church, no other defectors would put Jones into such a tizzy until the late 1970s. And perhaps no single act of defection touched as many members in a personal way as that escape by eight young people with families and numerous friends. In that one night, Jones lost bodyguards and p.c. members; and the church lost a large segment of its would-be professionals, essential contributors to a would-be self-sufficient countersociety.

  Already the strategist had dispatched his search parties. He had Norman Ijames rent an airplane to scan the highways for the wayward members. While the search was on and eyewitnesses were being interviewed, Jones wrestled with his own feelings of rejection. Over the years, each defection would strike him as if he had been physically wounded. He would fly into terrifying rages at the slightest provocation, the slightest sign of wavering loyalty. Teeth gnashing, facial muscles ready to snap, he would unleash the most abusive, almost maniacal language against potential traitors. He would menace the potentially unfaithful; he would wave a pistol inside p.c., telling his followers not to dare leave him, not even to doze while he was talking. Losing even one person from the inner circle infuriated him. It was a failing, a punch to the groin.

  When he had learned enough facts, Jones called an emergency meeting in Redwood Valley, even summoning members from San Francisco. The minister branded the eight as Trotskyite adventurists, provocateurs crazed enough to take his teachings literally and plot something like the demolition of dams or the bombing of the Masonite corporation. He ridiculed them as “Coca-Cola Revolutionaries”—as pleasure seekers playing at revolution, as phonies and lightweights who wanted the easy romance of instant results rather than prolonged struggle through socialism. In one breath he called them terrorists; in the next, he painted them as cowards. He tried to make it sound as though the eight were running from trouble. “Their theory is this: ‘Father’s gonna be killed. We’re all gonna end up in concentration camps.’ ” He paused to let that sink in. “Well, even if it were true, does it justify what’s being done?”

  Angry vitriolic shouts of “No. No.”

  “I promised that if you kept my teachings and followed me, you couldn’t go to concentration camps,” said Jones, knocking down his own straw man. “I made that an unconditional promise. And I never have made an unconditional promise I haven’t kept.” Cheers and admiring applause, though restrained.

  Jones began working over his audience with guilt, to turn their love for him into hatred for the eight. He shared his feelings of betrayal, casting the eight as ingrates, as foolish to leave him: “If I had a leader —oh, how I would love to have a leader.... If I had a God—and oh, how I wish I had a God like you [do] ... because I’m the only one there is as far as I could see. And I have searched all over heaven and earth and I certainly looked through the belly of hell.”

  Talking almost in riddles, he pleaded with his people to be selfless. The eight, he concluded, had gone for selfish reasons—sex among them —and would be miserable. The message: don’t chase mirages, or you will be unhappy too. “Don’t love your life.” He paused for effect. “Move on like I have until you hate your life. Move on till you lose it, then you [really] find it. When people try to hold onto it through sex ...” He turned again to the eight, portraying them as casualties of their own rebellion. “They all teamed up in little couples [thinking] that they are gonna have romance now. Their romance has turned to bitter, bitter agony already. They’ve got a black and white suicide squad.... An accident looking for a place to happen.” He even pointed out a disturbing irony: that this rebellious group was better integrated than the Temple leadership. “How tragic it is for us to see black and white go fifty-fifty.”

  Hatred for the eight was promoted with a vengeance in meetings and in sermons. Fellow students and their relatives were enlisted in the purging as Jones made the Eight Revolutionaries a useful target for unfocused feelings of discontent. Jones used the affidavits of various members, accusing the eight of idolizing Che Guevara, displaying anti-white racism, conducting cruel catharsis sessions, discussing political terrorism, engaging in sexual misconduct and so on. As usual, the alleged crimes of defectors carried, at most, kernels of truth, or were activities encouraged by Jones himself.

  Defections of important members threatened the Temple walls from both sides. Inside, defections harmed morale and created danger of a domino effect. But the major concern was that defectors might go to the press or the police. Each prominent defector was a torpedo loaded with explosive secrets. Jones had to either get it back or disarm it somehow.

  Jones followed the same general strategy with most defections. First, he and his aides investigated the circumstances of the defection, looking for a way to level an allegation of theft or misconduct of any sort. Second, Jones decided whether to report the defection to other members or to keep it secret and try to get back the defectors. Third, he cast the defectors in villainous roles; he fed the membership’s genuine feelings of betrayal and loss by belaboring his own. In that climate, he was able to convince friends and relatives of the defectors to sign affidavits attesting to their dastardly past acts.

  Finally, Jones limited the damage. He partly closed off one avenue to the press and the law by documenting allegations and damaging the credibility of defectors. At the same time, he tried to reestablish contact with the defectors to induce them to come back or, failing that, never to harm the church. Sometimes he sent heavyweights to intimidate them or tried to blackmail them with their own false written confessions.

  But the Eight Revolutionaries were not intimidated or neutralized as easily as past or future defectors, as Jones discovered just a few months after launching his propaganda attack on them.

  The eight had learned, through phone calls to relatives and others, that Jones had been ridiculing them and telling lies about them. One day after three or four pitchers of dark beer at the pizza parlor where Lena worked, Pietila and Biddulph became infuriated with Jones’s lies. They went to the rest of the eight and developed a plan to set things straight with Jones.
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  In secrecy, Pietila and John and Vera Biddulph made their way back to Ukiah. From town, they placed a phone call to Pietila’s mother, Wanda Kice. Wayne said he was calling long distance. He asked her to call Jones and tell him to be at her house at 5:00 P.M. to take an important call from the eight. No one else was to be alerted, and no one else was to come.

  At about 4:30 P.M., the three defectors pulled up to the Kice house. While Vera stayed in the car as a lookout, the two men went around the back of the house, where they found Wayne’s mother washing dishes. She almost fell over with surprise and joy. Her son hugged and kissed her.

  The trap had been set, and for once Jim Jones was the prey. As they waited for the pastor, the two defectors were keyed up, ready to defend themselves if necessary with the pistols in the back of their waistbands.

  About ten minutes later, Jones drove up to the house with Carolyn Layton. Excited and for some reason disguised in a big trench coat and businessman’s hat, he almost trotted up to the house. Then, looking like Sam Spade, he pushed open the door and stepped into the lair. He found himself face-to-face with Pietila and Biddulph. He blanched then caught himself quickly. He spread a grin across his face. “I’m glad to see you, my sons.”

  But when he reached out to hug them, Jones felt a gun. His expression changed ever so slightly, as Pietila pushed him back an arm’s length and gave him a good handshake. “Good to see you, Jim.”

  The two traitors took command of the situation. They ordered Carolyn Layton out and told her under no circumstances to call anyone, especially not security or p.c. Jones, clearly concerned about the guns, told her, “Do everything they say.” He looked intently at the men and added, “They will not harm you.”

  Jones tried to assert his authority. It was not proper for Wanda Kice, who was not on p.c., to overhear serious discussions about secret church business, he said. But the two traitors insisted she stay as a witness; they did not want Jones to be free to distort what they said.

  Having won that point, Pietila and Biddulph pulled out the letter from the eight and read it to Jones line by line. The grievances were so sweeping and struck so close to the heart that Jones could not restrain himself. He tried to answer it item by item, disputing all but the part blaming his own staff. “You understand,” he said, “that in an organization like this, I can’t have complete control. People do things that I don’t agree with.”

  They were getting nowhere. Jones kept on arguing. Biddulph gathered himself and got serious, acting as if he were about to issue the ultimate verdict. Pointing his finger at Jones, he snarled, “And here’s another goddamn thing.... We hear you’re calling us the Coca-Cola Revolutionaries. And, dammit, we want you to know we’re the Pepsi Cola Revolutionaries!” The humor went past Jones. He stared straight ahead, frightened.

  Pietila deliberately turned so that Jones could see the gun tucked in his belt in the rear. Then they made their final point, which was really a message from all eight: we’re minding our own business in another state. We don’t want you to hurt us or our families who are still in the church, and we won’t hurt you. We have an intelligence network of our own and we will hear any lies you tell about us. We want the lies stopped.

  Jones tried to placate them with double talk. He admitted some past lies and tried to rationalize it all in terms of socialist ideology. “You understand that ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ means I have to go to these extremes. The end justifies the means. But I will not bother you, just so long as you don’t undermine the good name of Peoples Temple.”

  But the eight had vowed when they defected that Jim Jones never would forget them. They were right. Some would come back to torment him years later.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Playing with Fire

  Within a year of the Kinsolving series, the Temple was taking serious steps to build stronger inner-city bases of political and economic power. By shouldering into these dangerous and crowded arenas almost immediately after his near-catastrophe, Jones put all his urban aspirations into jeopardy. By seeking a forum of high visibility, he seemed to deliberately risk embroiling his organization and himself in conflicts that would show others that he indeed was under attack.

  By moving his focus to San Francisco and Los Angeles, Jones was transplanting the Temple into the political volatility of the early 1970s. This period saw remnants of the New Left rechanneled into everything from electoral politics to the prisoner rights struggle to terrorism.

  While the Black Panthers made forays into the political arena, a host of revolutionary cadres operated in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1973-74. The mysterious New World Liberation Front bombed banks and public utilities with a Robin Hood fervor. The Black Liberation Army, believed to be behind the political murders of police, infiltrated and took over at least one black community group. The Maoist group Venceremos carried out some sensational prison escapes. And a prison-spawned group called the Symbionese Liberation Army went on an outlaw odyssey with its November 1973 assassination of black Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster and the February 1974 kidnapping of Patricia Hearst.

  Since Jones empathized with the inner-city frustrations that nourished these guerrilla vanguards, he began condoning the violence he had once condemned. In church, he even took responsibility, for example, for the unsolved explosion of a Vietnam-bound munitions train in Roseville. He began to cast off his Mendocino County Republican image, but only up to a point. He still husbanded a liberal humanitarian image while playing dangerous games on the side.

  Two Los Angeles incidents in 1973 serve to indicate Jones’s recklessness. In one, the Temple was nearly exposed as a violence-prone militant organization. In the other, Jim Jones nearly was unmasked as a sexual exhibitionist.

  The first incident took place on January 7, 1973, outside the Moorish-looking brick temple building. An ambulance had been summoned to take away an elderly black woman who had fainted and was still feeling ill.

  When the ambulance arrived, a crowd of Temple members gathered to watch their “sister” being loaded by the attendants. The procedure was supervised by Temple security, all wearing policelike uniforms. Some, like Johnny Brown Jones, a San Francisco youth worker adopted by Jones, were wearing sidearms. All went routinely until the white attendants had the black woman sit on a bench inside the ambulance. “Let her lie down,” Johnny Jones demanded, protectively. Heedless of the demand, the attendants shut the ambulance doors. Young Jones opened the door and persisted. The ambulance crew shut the door again. Once again Jones pulled it open.

  Tempers sparked. Others joined in the argument. Temple members accused the ambulance attendants of treating the woman badly, of making racist remarks. The disagreement escalated. The attendants radioed for assistance. Quickly Johnny Jones and Cleveland Jackson jumped the attendants. The melee that followed continued as police squad cars roared up with flashing lights. Flailing clubs, officers waded into the nasty brawl. Temple members grappled with police and screamed as bodies tumbled and heads were bashed. Then, as a police helicopter circled overhead, Jim Jones defused the near-riot by ordering his members to drop to their knees.

  The police took three Temple members—public relations man Mike Prokes, Johnny Jones and C. J. Jackson—into custody. At nearby Ramparts Station, Jim and Marceline Jones attempted to intercede. Grabbing the arm of an officer, Jones proclaimed: “If you’re going to arrest anyone, arrest me.” He was detained briefly and cited, but the case was too weak for prosecution. However, Johnny Jones and Jackson were convicted of disturbing the peace.

  To outsiders, this incident came as the first and only clash between the Temple and law enforcement. To the Temple, it was yet another example of racism and police oppression.

  The Temple responded by inviting officials to make a presentation of their neighborhood anticrime programs. Prior to his speech, Captain Joe Marchesano met alone with Jones, who explained that the Temple was not militant or antipolice. During Marchesano’s address, the congregation roare
d approval at his every utterance, particularly his anticrime references. But Marchesano was disturbed by this experience and by the bodyguards stationed at various doors. As a result, he turned down a $250 Temple donation to the police youth program which was brought to him a week or two later.

  Despite his friendship gestures, Jones wound up seeing the police again before the year was out—to be exact, on December 13, 1973. That afternoon the Westlake Theater, a movie house across from MacArthur Park and about a mile and a half from the Los Angeles Temple, was playing the Clint Eastwood movie Dirty Harry. MacArthur Park was reputed to be a meeting place for homosexuals, and patrons of the Westlake had been complaining about homosexual solicitations there. In response, Ramparts Station had assigned two vice squad officers, Arthur Kagele and Lloyd Frost, to work the place in plainclothes.

  In the nearly empty balcony, a dark-haired man in a green coat motioned Kagele to join him in the rear seating section. Kagele had seen the same man in the restroom earlier. But he ignored the overture and went back to the restroom to check for activity.

  Within a minute, he heard the restroom door open, and the black-haired man strode back to the same toilet stall. The man’s right arm began moving, and he turned toward Kagele. He was holding his penis erect in his hand. Masturbating provocatively, the man approached the officer. By the time he reached the middle of the room, he had crossed the boundary of lewd conduct. Stepping outside the restroom, Kagele signaled his partner, and they made the arrest.

  At 4:00 P.M., while handcuffs were closed on the man’s thick wrists and his Miranda rights were read, the incident still seemed to be a routine bust. Things changed a little later when, driving along in an unmarked police car toward Ramparts Station, the remorseful arrestee said that he was a minister of a local church. But that did not matter; the case seemed airtight to Kagele.