The issue came to a head in early 1978. A team of four education officials inspected the Jonestown school, and Education Minister Vincent Teekah made a personal visit, before which Fred Wills had advised the church to make Teekah feel “as if he runs education in Jonestown.”
The strategy paid off. On March 8, Wills had good news—the “merger” of Jonestown’s school system with Guyana’s would be only a technical one, with no intrusion by Guyanese students or teachers.
Dr. Schacht’s medical certification presented a stickier issue. Guyana’s chief medical officer, Dr. George Baird, wanted to stop Schacht, who had served only a few months of a prestigious internship program at San Francisco General Hospital, from practicing without clinical experience. Baird showed some flexibility and even suggested that the Matthews Ridge doctor could treat Jonestown patients while Schacht was doing a Georgetown internship. But Jones again refused to buckle. And Baird never forced the issue.
The Temple’s standard public relations gimmicks worked even better in Georgetown than they had in the United States. In this impoverished nation, many people were delighted with the cakes on their door-steps and other gratuities. Sharon Amos mentioned in a note “the monthly booze to Barker,” a reference to Police Commissioner Lloyd Barker, never known to be sympathetic.63
Another recipient of Temple kindness was Eileen Bollers, a short, rotund woman of East Indian ancestry, who just happened to be married to Sir Harold Bollers, Guyana’s chief justice of the Supreme Court, the man reassigning the Stoen custody case. Sharon Amos and other Temple public relations people took a sudden liking to her.
The Bollerses first met the Temple contingent at a Lamaha Gardens open house. Along with other prominent Guyanese guests, they saw a film of Jonestown and heard Marceline Jones’s narration. Mrs. Bollers was surprised to learn such a group was trying to settle the interior. How could these friendly Americans, she asked herself, give up so much—chocolate, television, other luxuries—to develop land spurned by even the most hardy Guyanese? Soon after that, Mrs. Bollers took a Barbados vacation and contracted an illness the Georgetown doctors could not diagnose. While visiting her, Sharon Amos suggested she go to Port Kaituma to see Larry Schacht, but Mrs. Bollers was too weak to travel.
One day Amos appeared at her house, a beautiful home opposite the prime minister’s residence. She brought along Jonestown nurse Joyce Parks, who accurately diagnosed Mrs. Bollers’s problem as viral pneumonia and prescribed the correct medicine. During Mrs. Bollers’s long recuperation, Amos would drop by twice a week, bringing her books and providing company. Sometimes, Amos brought over her children—Martin and Christa—to play with Mrs. Bollers’s son. Several times the Bollerses were invited to visit Jonestown, but Sir Harold, who also became friendly with Amos, was always busy.
There were also hints and rumors floating about the capital that the Georgetown Temple women were using their bodies to win friends and influence people. It was true that for two years Paula Adams had been carrying on a rather public affair with “Bonny” Mann, Guyana’s ambassador to Washington—and Jones did brag about his public relations women in Georgetown giving all for the cause. But Stephan Jones, for one, felt his father exaggerated: Jones wanted his women to flirt but not deliver.
Aside from official and unofficial public relations, the Georgetown staff had plenty of other duties. They had put behind them the enormous job of clearing everyone through customs during the 1977 mass exodus. But now, in 1978, the task of keeping Jonestown supplied became monumental. They shipped everything from diesel fuel to underwear to the free Gideon Bibles that Jones ordered for toilet paper. And some staff also handled the logistics for smuggling contraband—guns, drugs and American currency—into Guyana.
Although payoffs to customs officials helped safeguard firearms and plentiful drugs that came in as medical supplies, the most valuable import, American cash, usually entered Guyana quite legally. Everyone was allowed to bring up to 5,000 American dollars. On the black market, an American dollar could bring between five and seven Guyanese dollars —two to three times the official exchange rate of about 2.5 to 1. And Guyanese officials preferred their payoffs in hard American dollars.
Keeping the project well stocked with essentials was a herculean task for the Georgetown crew. All goods ordered by radio from San Francisco were shipped through the capital. There was, for example, a $2,938 order of truck and tractor tires. There was a $5,690 order for 67,000 pounds of wheat. And the Jonestown Express band, which was gaining popularity and making money, needed an emergency $835 order for uniforms and instruments.
Keeping more than nine hundred people in clothes and toiletry articles was a huge job. And contrary to the image of bare survival, the Temple purchased “frivolous” items, such as art materials for adult drawing classes. One order included $150 worth of bobby pins, $500 of Toni Perm Wave, $1,500 of Afro straight combs with handles, and $110 for a hundred boxes of Clairol Black, presumably not all for Jim Jones. Hundreds of pairs of briefs were ordered at a time, as well as jeans, T-shirts, rain gear, thongs, work shoes and rubber boots, and the amounts went into the tens of thousands of dollars per monthly order list. And, despite the claims of some defectors, special individual needs were sometimes filled, such as the “RIGHT AWAY! RUSH!” order of six 42 DD bras for Patty Cartmell.
Some commodities were ordered for the store operated upriver by Patty Cartmell and Rheaviana Beam. One order noted that $2.50 (U.S.) bedsheets could be sold for $50 (Guyanese) each. Because the Guyanese were so starved for imports, they would also pay, in their own currency, $50 for dolls, $20 for T-shirts, $150 for used watches and $50 for jeans. The Temple bought these items at United States prices, sent them down, then turned a tidy profit of several thousand dollars a week.
As the summer of 1978 wore on, the public-relations crew in Georgetown, like the rank and file in Jonestown and the faithful in San Francisco, succumbed to exhaustion. The Concerned Relatives’ relentless pressure meant more strategy sessions, and longer hours on the radio transmitting messages. Without adequate sleep or relief from the constant crisis mentality, morale declined. Moreover, the staff rebelled against public relations chief Sharon Amos’s strong-arm tactics. At one point she wrote Jones: “My type of p.r. seems to raise a storm with almost every person who comes in new to it or who works with me.... Paula thinks we should use techniques for crisis only in a crisis. I think that when anyone says anything that is hostile... we have to let them know we don’t sit by and take it.”
In July, depressed and upset, Amos took to the typewriter to complain about the condition of the house and the two vans. “People are abusive and treat things like shit,” she reported to Jones. Things were falling apart.
In passing through, Marceline Jones realized the problem was in large part due to unnecessary pressures Jones was placing on the Georgetown staff. His “strategic messages” over the radio sometimes kept the staff awake until 4:00 A.M. He insisted that his every word—and sometimes repetitive or contradictory orders—be transmitted. If carried out, some of his craziest orders would totally backfire. “Communication is a very difficult thing,” she wrote her husband, “especially if under pressure ... I have told those here to not carry out an instruction unless it makes sense to them. Questioning it does not mean they are questioning your wisdom....”
FORTY-FIVE
No News Is Good News
From late 1977 on, a number of very determined relatives and journalists had tried to answer the serious questions about Jonestown. The U.S. government was not much help. Even after the defection of Debbie Blakey in May 1978, Washington essentially adopted a waiting attitude. While the U.S. Embassy kept finding excuses not to visit Jonestown, two U.S. reporters landed in Guyana in May and June, hoping to see the settlement and find out about the lives of a thousand Americans. Both failed because of Temple resistance.
For one of these, Kathy Hunter, the trip was pathetic from the start. The former Ukiah Daily Journal reporter landed in poo
r shape, hobbling and in pain from a recent hip operation. Her mission was to chase down the story that had eluded reporters on larger papers—the real Jonestown. She tried to get backing from a number of publications, including the San Francisco Examiner, before leaving California. But she and her husband George, editor of the Journal, ended up financing the trip.
Having written so favorably about the Temple in the past, Hunter believed she had the perfect entree to Jonestown. The church previously had told her it would welcome a visit. Moreover, she embarked after getting a phone call from Prime Minister Burnham, whom she had interviewed years before in California. But Hunter learned upon arrival in Georgetown that the call had been a hoax and that the Temple had withdrawn the welcome mat, angered by her sympathetic recent stories about Tim Stoen and Steve Katsaris.
By her third day, May 19, 1978, three anonymous bomb threats had been called into her hotel, the Pegasus. Temple members had followed her everywhere. She had chatted with Tim Carter, Mike Prokes, Debbie Touchette and others, who demanded to know why she had not contacted the church in advance. After more bomb threats and delaying tactics, Hunter told the Temple crew she had come with an open mind, but that they were rapidly closing it. Her May 20 journal entry began:
“The plot sickens. What a script for a ‘B’ movie. Seems as if a lot of people, including the hotel management, believe I’m the target [of the bomb threats]. I’m being moved from room to room and under security 420 guard with strong ‘suggestions’ that I not leave the hotel if I don’t want to risk a permanent ‘disappearance.’ ”
After several minor fires at the hotel, Hunter found herself whisked into an immigration office and informed that her visa was canceled and that she would be leaving on the Wednesday plane. “Do you understand?” the official said. “You will be on the plane.” Upon discovering there was no Wednesday plane, Hunter became so paralyzed by fear that she began vomiting uncontrollably in her room. A doctor came and gave her shots.
Meanwhile, four Temple members, staking out the Pegasus lobby twenty-four hours a day, were picked up for questioning by police. One had been discovered wandering near Hunter’s room upstairs. The four were interrogated at police headquarters from about midnight to 6:00 A.M. and some were reportedly slammed against the wall. None confessed, and they were released without being charged.
The day after the detainment, Temple members complained to Skip Roberts. “What gives you the right to do private surveillance?” he demanded. They replied, “She’s an evil woman.”
Dick McCoy of the U.S. Embassy helped Hunter obtain a visa extension, and ten days later, she limped aboard a plane, sick and defeated. The Temple had repelled the threat, but it paid the price in bad publicity—California newspapers published accounts of Hunter’s frightening experiences.64
U.S. Consul Dick McCoy’s last consular visit to Jonestown had been in May, only a few days before Debbie Blakey defected and signed an affidavit alleging mass suicide rehearsals. This affidavit was now gathering dust in the Embassy safe, although McCoy repeated his conversations with Blakey to Ambassador John Burke. This information would not be forwarded to the State Department in Washington until early November. And McCoy, though armed with all of Blakey’s information, never managed to make it back to Jonestown to even inquire into her horrifying allegations. In fact, no one from the Embassy would enter the camp for six months, even though they had set up a quarterly visiting schedule. There were always excuses to defer the trip, the usual one being the unavailability of aircraft.65
Communications among State Department personnel and divisions were handled ineptly and carelessly. No one, neither from the Embassy, the consulate, the Guyana desk of the State Department in Washington, nor the consular section there, ever had all the information at his fingertips at one time. In fact, neither the Georgetown Embassy nor Washington ever was certain what the other knew about the Temple. Embassy officials assumed that Jones was using the threat of apocalypse only to maintain control—which is serious enough in itself.
They knew as much about the true conditions in Jonestown as any outsiders did. They had heard the allegations from ex-members, two escapees, relatives and the news media. They had placed the New West article and other negative California newspaper articles in the Embassy files. But they were getting contradictory information from the Temple, as well as bully tactics designed to keep them on the defensive. Embassy officials, acutely aware of Temple mail campaigns to Congress, the State Department and elsewhere, had severe constraints of their own. For one, they could not exercise any authority over a group of Americans in a foreign country.
Another constraint handcuffed them: their limited understanding and sometimes misunderstanding of the Freedom of Information and the Privacy acts, two recently enacted laws. It was enough to know that between October and December 1977, the Temple filed multiple FOIA applications, requesting all information the State Department (and other government agencies as well) had gathered about the church. The inhibiting effect of the FOIA requests, intended or not, was dramatic. Burke and others feared that any written reports about the Temple might later be read by church members. As a result of their caution, Embassy reports of Temple activities lacked analysis, conjecture, texture and—as others later would report—a healthy dose of skepticism. Washington never fully understood the implications of them.
The misinterpretations, communication breakdowns and excessive caution probably did their most severe damage when Burke sent a cable to Washington on June 14, 1978, nearly a month after the Blakey defection. The ambassador tried, under his perceived limitations, to convey his concerns to Washington superiors. His precisely drafted cable noted the isolation of Jonestown, the press inquiries and congressional interest, as well as accusations against the group. He said, “the settlement’s autonomy seems virtually total,” and that the “rather primitive administrative machinery” of Guyana was already overstrained without having to police the community.
“What we have, therefore,” the cable stated, “is a community of American citizens existing as a self-contained unit in a foreign land.”
Burke was asking for guidance. He wanted to know if his Embassy was doing the right thing in treading middle ground, in never identifying the Temple as the problem. Did the Embassy, given the widespread revelations, have any authority at all to probe? And could he ask the Guyanese to see that their laws were being enforced and to tell Jonestown residents they were free to leave the settlement?
Burke was sure that State would give him a go-ahead to approach the Guyanese. Yet because the cable was so carefully drafted—without even bare mention of the Blakey defection—it never set off alarm signals. Those who received the cable at the Special Consular Service Office (SCS) were annoyed by it and assumed that Burke, like a good bureaucrat, was papering his files to protect himself. A junior officer drafted the reply, essentially telling Burke to do nothing. To Burke’s consternation, the cable concluded that any approach by the Embassy could be viewed as American interference in Guyana’s internal affairs.
Washington’s Guyana Desk Officer Frank Tumminia—who was familiar with the Temple problems and had personally visited Jonestown —was perturbed by the reply, but he took no exception to it. Neither did Burke. Within two weeks, he returned to Washington for consultation and, significantly, never brought up the matter.
The Temple was convinced that CIA agents not only worked in the U.S. Embassy but also had infiltrated Jonestown. Jones’s fears were not entirely fantasy. The CIA’s presence in socialist Guyana—a major producer of bauxite, an ingredient of aluminum—could be assumed. Although the CIA had been legally proscribed from spying on American citizens overseas since 1976, the Agency almost certainly was monitoring the Soviet Embassy—and would have noticed weekly visits by Temple aides. It is also likely that the CIA came in contact with Temple members at the U.S. Embassy, where at least some intelligence operatives would be based.
Beginning in early 1978, Sharon Amos, Debbie Touchette,
and other public relations people met with Soviet official Feodor Timofeyev to discuss sending an exploratory delegation to Russia, and later possibly relocating the entire Temple colony there. Amos and Touchette kept Jones informed via lengthy memos which made clear that Timofeyev heard more than he wanted to know about Jones’s health problems, the “conspiracy” and past Temple troubles. The prospect of allowing a thousand dissident Americans into USSR began to appear unattractive.
Though Timofeyev would open the sessions by turning on the radio in his office to counter any bugging equipment, news of their meetings circulated all over town. The gossip even reached the U.S. Embassy. In late May, U.S. Consul McCoy told Amos he knew about these meetings. If the church was so peaceful and only wanted to be left alone, why, he asked, was it seeing the Soviet, Cuban, Yugoslav and even North Korean missions?
Another time he actually ribbed the Soviet consul at a cocktail party. “I understand you’re letting Peoples Temple go to the Soviet Union,” he teased. “How could you... ?”
“We’re not going to,” the Russian grumbled. McCoy got the feeling the Russians were wary, but also appreciated the eventual propaganda value of such a move.
But whatever the Russians thought, they did not want their contacts with the Temple spread around. During a September 22, 1978, meeting, the Russian diplomat lost his temper. He told Amos and Touchette that Dwyer had approached him at a cocktail party at the Yugoslav Embassy and had jokingly asked about Soviet-Temple contacts. Timofeyev said the entire Soviet Embassy was extremely upset about Dwyer’s chance remark, and he warned Temple people to practice absolute secrecy. He said they divulged too much over the phone when they called the Soviet Embassy, and said he would have to report the carelessness to Moscow.
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