Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  “It’s impossible,” replied Touchette. “We don’t have the wood for housing.”

  Pacing again, obviously irritated, Jones persisted: “How many people could we accommodate now?”

  “About 150 to 200 people at the maximum.” Touchette explained that the Jonestown crews had been hampered by the financial bureaucracy and by the rainy season. Although to date only one permanent structure had been built—a dormitory—Jones pressed ahead with his plans to bring a thousand Americans to the jungle. From April 27 through May 1, 1977, Jones and his top aides—Stoen, Gene Chaikin, Hastings law student Harriet Tropp, Teri Buford, Carolyn Layton and, occasionally, Marceline Jones—met for sixteen to twenty hours a day in the master bedroom of the Lamaha Gardens headquarters.

  The other church leaders echoed the worries of their leader. They had agonized over their problems so much that they were becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. The only handwriting on the wall, in May 1977, was their own. Marshall Kilduff had yet to locate a single damaging informant and had not even found a publication to print his story. That did not matter to Jones. He was a prophet, and he had foreseen it all. Of course, no one suspected that the apparent machinations of the church’s enemies really were plotted—at least invited—by Jones. In fact, the exodus to Guyana would follow in almost every detail the organizational blueprint drawn up four years earlier, prior even to acquisition of the Caribbean sanctuary. Jones’s contagious paranoia—not enemies—was driving them out of the United States.

  The threats could have been survived, but through tactical blunders and overkill, Temple leadership would aggravate their existing problems and create new ones. Though they fretted about government investigations, government agencies in reality were uninterested in them. The FBI, still smarting over disclosures of its antileftist campaigns in the 1960s, was not involved and would not be until it was too late. The Federal Communications Commission was monitoring Temple amateur radio transmission but only for minor infractions of amateur radio rules that could easily have been stopped. Some defectors were talking to the Treasury Department, but efforts to intercept smuggled weapons would be feeble and ineffective. The IRS was only questioning whether the Temple’s political activity exceeded standards for tax-exempt organizations—and only after the church wrote repeatedly asking whether it was under investigation.

  Fear of the unknown played upon Jones’s fixations. He returned to San Francisco in a morose mood. The future looked grim. Of course no one on the outside knew of the plans for an exodus. But, by coincidence, the Temple was asked a short time later to participate in a Golden Gate Bridge demonstration opposing suicide. The organizers called the rally to dramatize their objective: the installation of suicide barriers along the span to prevent people from climbing the low railing and jumping off.

  On Memorial Day, 1977, Jones and some six hundred of his followers showed up at the Golden Gate, each wearing an armband bearing the name of one of the bridge’s victims. With local news media and wire services looking on, Jones delivered a generalized appeal of concern for suicide victims. Then abruptly his tenor changed: suddenly he was the one being driven to the brink: “Suicide is a symptom of an uncaring society,” he said. “The suicide is the victim of conditions which we cannot tolerate, and, and....” He paused, realizing he had misspoken. “I guess that was Freudian because I meant to say, ‘which he cannot tolerate,’ which overwhelm him, for which there is no recourse.”

  Jones then became even more direct: “I have been in a suicidal mood myself today for perhaps the first time in my life, so I have personal empathy for what we are doing here today.” Then he ended with an abrupt “Thank you.”

  While Tim Stoen and others took notes, the Georgetown group considered various plans for the evacuation. About 450 people could be transported in each of two large trips, with the remainder trickling down; or 100 a month could be brought down, fully populating Jonestown by February 1978; or 250 a month could be transported for a completion date of August 15, 1977.

  A rapid exodus entailed certain disadvantages. It would take time to prepare members so they would not rebel or tattle to reporters or the government. Also, the plan required that the church sell off its stateside properties; if the process were rushed, prices would be lower. Finally, by moving everyone to Guyana too quickly, the church would lose job income and some government payments, not to mention offerings at services.

  Workers and people on fixed incomes would come first, it was decided. Maria Katsaris would be sent early because the Temple believed her father might try to get conservatorship over her, a tactic used by parents of Moonies. But generally key people would stay behind in the United States to hold together the organization and present a front of business-as-usual. Jim McElvane, whose sister owned a Los Angeles real estate office, would sell off stateside properties—including the Los Angeles and San Francisco temples—producing an estimated $1.2 million.

  For hours, the hierarchy debated whether Jim Jones should return to the United States or hide in Guyana. By staying, he would confuse defectors and news media. But staying also would create a higher risk of violence—either to Jones or from him. Furthermore, in Guyana Jones could avoid the threat of arrest over the John Stoen custody matter. Jones decided to go back to San Francisco, but only temporarily.

  The arrival of the immigrants was planned: everyone, no matter what his status, first must work two weeks in the Jonestown fields to become conditioned to the regimen of jungle life, to give leaders time to assign jobs, and to save money by allowing the layoff of local Guyanese field workers.

  The housing plans did not jibe with the earlier visions of Charlie Touchette—of nice cottages housing two couples each, or three in a pinch. The church leadership now wanted cabins that would hold twelve people; they wanted five dormitories to hold forty-two people each, and a mess hall. Sitting in that spacious Georgetown house, the leaders allocated jobs to people by name and set their daily schedules. Work would begin at 6:30 A.M. and continue until 6:00 P.M. seven days a week, with an hour for lunch —“but try to limit to one half [hour],” added Stoen’s note. The nights were filled too: on Sunday a meeting, Monday a movie, Tuesday free time or a meeting, Wednesday a meeting and socialist classes, Thursday free time, Friday children’s night with wieners, Saturday farm night.

  Though Stoen helped plan the mass migration, other members viewed him with mounting suspicion. Jones did not trust him; he felt nagging concerns about Stoen’s short-lived defection and wanted to know step by step what he had done in his travels. He soon found the answer. One day while the lawyer was out on business, Jones and his aides stood staring at the small leather briefcase Stoen had left behind. “I wish there was a way to open that,” Jones said. It took a member ninety minutes to pick the combination lock. Two staff women took a quick inventory, then relocked and replaced the briefcase before Stoen returned. Stoen was none the wiser.

  The conclusion drawn from their examination, as expressed in a memo to Jones from “T.B.”: “I am convinced that Stoen is so absolutely dual that it is not funny.” The inventory took note, facetiously, of a love letter to a woman named Beverly; more important, it noted that Stoen was carrying a picture of him with Grace, and many pictures of him with John. A few other items were bound to exacerbate Jones’s paranoia, too. One was a newspaper clipping about Stoen’s arrest in East Germany, and his strange anticommunist diary from that period—these alone would be enough to allow Jones to say that his attorney was a government infiltrator. The second item was the diary Stoen kept during his brief defection —in that, Jones discovered indications that Stoen held various private bank accounts. The kicker was Stoen’s new, secretly obtained passport, dated February 9.

  With the rifling of Stoen’s briefcase, Jones had come to believe that his chief attorney might well be a government agent and potential thief. Stoen was certainly a potential enemy. And his later explanation—that the East Berlin affair had happened years ago and he merely had neglected to mention it
—did not ease Jones’s fears. Nevertheless, Stoen kept on working for the church. He and other top aides joined Jim and Marceline Jones and their four sons on a May 7, 1977, flight to Grenada, a newly independent Caribbean nation with a fragile economy which desperately needed investment dollars. The Temple contingent met with Prime Minister Eric M. Gairy to discuss Temple plans to put one million dollars in banks there. The group, in turn, received government assurance that land could be made available for establishment of a mission. Before leaving, the Temple leadership explored the purchase of the Grenada Holiday Inn.47

  Back in Georgetown, under the watchful eyes of other members, Stoen continued helping with preparations for the influx of new settlers. It became clear that continued Temple membership held hazards for the attorney. In fact, he composed for himself a memo outlining “factors” in his future. Under “PT/JJ,” he noted: “Publication negative article, removal tax exempt status, prosecution of individual members....” Under “Personal Factors” he wrote, “Indictment, divorce, new job, remarriage, protecting John, helping Jim.”

  Such prospects weighed on Stoen, and it began to show. One of his compatriots at Lamaha Gardens reported his disenchantment in a memo to “Mr. Hill” (code for Jones). “Mary Ruth” said that “George” (Stoen) had hinted at unhappiness, had said he would be useless to the church if Guyana authorities did not allow him to practice law or teach at the university. “He is completely detached from everything going on here,” Mary Ruth went on. “He leads our organization meetings but ... he is detached, and before a point is settled, he wants to go on to the next item.”

  “I think George is making groundwork to split,” she concluded. “He has his passport, he has money, and he has enough freedom of movement....”

  On June 12, Paula Adams reported to “Mr. Hill”: “George left in the van at approximately four-thirty this morning without letting anyone know where he was going.”

  The Lamaha Gardens staff checked all flights and found no reservations for Stoen to New York. Stoen did return, briefly, only to vanish again later that very day. Two days later, Debbie Touchette was able to confirm that he had slipped out of Georgetown, most likely aboard a Pan Am flight for New York, with his friend Mike V. The last Guyana sighting of Stoen was Sunday at the Tower Hotel, where he had mentioned to a clerk that he was in a rush to catch a plane.

  By way of New York, Stoen returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to see the love he had left behind. He was stunned to find her engaged to someone else. Shaken, he retreated home to Colorado for a while, then made another trip to Europe to straighten out his thoughts and make decisions. He did not want to turn against Jim Jones publicly, but he did want to help Grace retrieve John from the jungle. In July, with Kilduff’s Temple expose about to appear in New West magazine, Stoen met with his estranged wife in Colorado and discussed strategy for getting John back. They disagreed. She wanted to use the courts; he wanted to negotiate. He still identified with the Temple.

  Stoen later would say that his departure had been triggered by the noblest of motives. Citing the guards around John, he would deny abandoning the boy. In fact, he would say that his flight from Guyana had been designed to bring the boy ultimately home to his mother: he could serve as an agent of reconciliation between Jones and his enemies back in the United States—and in return for his loyalty, he could demand the child. But Stoen would be in no position to act as intermediary. He too would become a primary target of press and government attacks.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Scandal

  While the Temple leadership, afraid of Marshall Kilduff’s story, secretly drew up their evacuation plans, they anxiously watched each frustrating step that the reporter took in search of a publisher. In about March 1977, New West magazine finally gave Kilduff the go-ahead for his story. When he requested an interview with Jim Jones, however, a Temple spokesman wanted a pre-interview interview to size up the reporter. Several church members, including Mike Prokes, tried to put him on the defensive, pressuring to make him to write either a favorable story or no story at all. “We hear you are very conservative....”

  Kilduff assured them he would be objective, but they argued that even positive coverage hurts church work and invites racist attacks. The Temple promised to call Kilduff soon with a verdict on his interview request. Instead, a delegation visited Kevin Starr, then editor of New West, and convinced him that a story would harm their humanitarian work.

  Again without a publisher, Kilduff went to San Francisco magazine. They became interested, so Kilduff began writing and further researching the story. The Temple watched his moves and reported everything to Kilduff’s boss at the Chronicle.

  Soon Gavin called in Kilduff, told him the church was very upset with his story and admonished him not to identify himself as a Chronicle reporter or to do the article on company time.

  Kilduff’s finished story for San Francisco fell miles short of Jim Jones’s fears. It did not even include the allegations from the days of Kinsolving. Not a single defector was quoted. It was an admittedly muddy story about a peculiar public official. San Francisco’s editors rejected the piece because Kilduff had neither proved his suspicions nor drawn a concise portrait of Jones.

  The news was disheartening. Kilduff felt beaten. Almost as if to flaunt its victory, the Temple carried the following item in the April issue of Peoples Forum, without naming Kilduff: “To date he has not been able to get any periodical to ally with him. However, he continues to make the rounds, trying to convince different periodicals that a ‘smear’ of a liberal church that champions minorities and the poor would make ‘good copy.’ ”

  Within a few months of New West’s refusal Kilduff went back to the magazine. In the interim, Rosalie Wright had replaced Kevin Starr as editor, and on the second go-around, New West agreed to publish a revised story with new material. Furthermore, it also assigned one of its own reporters—Phil Tracy, who had become interested in the church while living with the brother of Temple member Carolyn Looman. This time the writers concentrated on the political rise of Jones. The new story raised questions about Temple guards, hostility, paranoia, secrecy. It asked: Why is it that a politically important group is unwilling to talk about its inner workings?

  In fact, there was little explosive material even in this revision, and the story would have inflicted minimal damage, if any, were it not for the Temple’s overreaction. As the church called in debts and pushed its friends forward, New West began receiving dozens of letters and phone calls from prominent citizens. Politicians contacted the owner, Australian publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch, on Jones’s behalf. Dozens of the magazine’s advertisers were encouraged by callers to drop ads in protest. At the height of the campaign, the magazine’s editorial offices received as many as fifty phone calls and seventy letters a day.

  The letter-and-phone campaign proved to be a godsend to Tracy and Kilduff. San Francisco Examiner political columnist Bill Barnes had heard about it, and decided to write up “the story behind the story,” inevitably raising the question: What exactly did Jim Jones have to hide? As advance interest was building, defectors in the Bay Area were alerted that someone was willing to listen to their stories.

  The holes in the Kilduff-Tracy piece were soon filled in by defectors who started to call New West two days later, some anonymously. Their allegations, though not dissimilar to those in the Kinsolving stories almost five years earlier, went far beyond that article’s charges of eccentricity. They included beatings, mysterious deaths and sexual deviations. Suddenly the story had spread into something much broader than the profile of a politically well-connected church.

  But the reporters needed sources to make public their allegations. So one night in the home of Jeannie and Al Mills, Tracy and Kilduff met with a group of a dozen or so defectors—Grace Stoen, Walt Jones, Jim Cobb, Wayne Pietila among them. The reporters convinced them that their safety could best be ensured by going on the record with photographs; if any harm then came to them, the Templ
e would be blamed.

  Meanwhile, the Barnes article had struck a personal chord in me. Since my conversations with Sammy Houston in the fall of 1976 and the first few months of 1977, I had moved from the Associated Press to the Examiner. A short time later, by coincidence, my AP news editor Jim Willse joined the Examiner as city editor. We both remembered Sam’s story and thought the Examiner should take a look at the church. Willse pulled me in from the East Bay bureau to San Francisco to work full time with veteran reporter Nancy Dooley. Now the church faced two major news investigations.

  Before either the Examiner or New West could publish a word about internal church activities, the Temple received another blast of adverse publicity: on July 17, New West reported a break-in at its San Francisco offices. It took four days for the police to issue a report finding no evidence of a burglary after all. The Temple labeled the episode a publicity-generating ruse, and Temple friends took solace, convinced that the story was going to be an irresponsible broadside.

  While the Temple pushed its prominent supporters to commit themselves publicly and battered New West with harassing calls and letters, Jones made flight plans. One day in July 1977, Cecil Williams took a phone call during a counseling session. It was Jones, sounding far away. “I’m at the international airport in Los Angeles. I’m getting ready to leave the country for Guyana. I wanted to talk to you first. Should I go or shouldn’t I ...?” Jones explained that the news media were destroying him with false accusations, and that he expected the government to gang up on him too. “The motherfuckers don’t have the power, and I’ll show them.”

  “You don’t have the power if they can make you run,” Williams said. “They have the power.”