Others would charge, much later, that the CIA had not only infiltrated Jonestown, but also that Jones and his top assistants were CIA tools using the settlement as an experimental base for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program involving mind control drugs. (That program, begun in the late forties, employed a multitude of experimental drugs and coercive techniques designed to gain information from enemy agents.) It is extremely unlikely that Jones was in any shape to administer such a program, even if he had suddenly turned sympathetic to the CIA. Moreover, the CIA would have wanted a controlled situation to monitor test results, not the chaos and uncertainty of Jonestown.66
While the Debbie Blakey defection did not aruse much excitement at the State Department, news articles about her allegations did prompt worry at the Social Security Administration. On October 13, 1978, SSA official Ted Girdner, director of the Division of International Operations, requested that the State Department determine whether social security recipients had full control of their checks or were not coerced into signing them over to the Temple. The State Department, which had conducted about a dozen such interviews earlier in the year, agreed to conduct new interviews in January 1979. But January would be too late for approximately two hundred social security recipients who were receiving about $40,000 a month in government checks in Jonestown.67
FORTY-SIX
The Downward Spiral
One late night in spring or summer of 1978, while Stephan Jones was lying in bed, he heard the shots. When he charged barefoot down to his father’s house, he was greeted by the business end of a shotgun. Joe Wilson, a young black security guard, had not recognized him at first.
Al Simon was already there too. “I was on security,” said Simon, “and I heard these shots. From the sound of them, I’d say they were from a .22.”
“It doesn’t seem strange to you they’d be using a .22?” Stephan asked.
“Naw,” said Simon. “It happens all the time.”
Stephan thought Simon was a know-it-all, and he did not like the fact that Joe Wilson had moved into the hierarchy to a top security guard post. He thought Wilson was unbalanced and did not know how to use firearms properly.
Stephan turned to his father as they headed toward the pavilion. “Do you think,” he said, “that if anyone was going to attack you, he’d run up on a whole group of you with a .22?”
Ignoring his son, Jones scanned the bush beyond the dorms and pavilion. “We need to give the people some inspiration. They feel we’re losing because our enemies have the upper hand. We need somebody to go out there and act like they’ve had a fight, and have killed [the enemy] and come back and say, ‘I got ‘em.’ ” Then he offered the bait: “I’ll get Joe Wilson.”
Stephan’s pride was too great; he volunteered to help pull off the hoax.
“I don’t know....” His father was hesitant.
“Look,” said Stephan, “Joe Wilson doesn’t know anything about the bush. He’ll get himself killed. I can do it better.”
The plan was for Jones to point out in the field, to call over Larry Schacht and say, “Hey, do you see that?” Schacht was to acknowledge an imaginary mercenary. Then Stephan was to run into the fields and eliminate him.
All went according to plan. Stephan took off, barefoot and armed with a hunting knife, through one windrow, past a field and past another windrow. He stayed out for a while, then cut his own chest slightly. When he walked back into the radio room, he felt like a fool.
With Dr. Schacht working on Stephan, Jones announced over the loudspeaker, “Well, we got one of them. It was a mercenary.” Everybody cheered. Schacht continued the fiction by pretending to go out into the bush to bury the mercenary. But later, when someone asked what happened to the body, Jones replied, “Oh, we put him in the soup. You ate him last night.” Some people believed him and became ill.
Despite his youth, Stephan Jones at eighteen had enough insight to realize he could not challenge his father very often. Yet Stephan did stand up publicly to Jones on occasion. Once it happened during a White Night. Jones sat erectly in his wooden armchair facing the congregation assembled on benches in the pavilion. Behind Jones, Stephan leaned on a small wooden table awaiting results of a test of his own:
Jim Jones sometimes counted on the combined opposition of Stephan and Marceline to prevent White Nights from going too far. This time Stephan wanted to see when his father would stop it on his own. So he had urged his mother earlier in the evening to go along with anything that Jones was saying.
But suddenly the plan backfired. Carolyn Layton gave a long speech exhorting everyone to die, leaving little room for squirming out. Poison was the next step. As she wound up her harangue, Stephan muttered, “Oh, fuck.” Jones lunged for the opening: he wheeled around to face his son. “Obviously, you’re afraid to die,” Jones said, in a loud voice.
“No, I’m not,” Stephan said. “You know better than that. Come on. I’ve proven I’m not afraid to die.”
“I say you are afraid to die.”
“Bullshit.”
The reaction was immediate. People stood up and yelled, “You can’t talk to Father like that.” Jones signaled to Marceline to control her son.
“Stephan ...” she reproved.
“Fuck you, too,” he said, knowing he should show no less public disrespect for his mother.
This time the crowd began to heap abuse on him. Eventually, the White Night was called off.
It was difficult for Stephan to feign respect for a man he saw at his most childish, petulant, eccentric and perhaps delusional. Once he was summoned urgently to Jones’s house. At the house, he felt a heavy weight against the door. It was Jones, pretending he was a Russian Bolshevik during the days of the 1917 October Revolution. On this day, his enemies happened to be Carolyn Layton and Maria Katsaris, and evidently he had been scuffling with them for a while before they called for reinforcements. Jones was babbling in an awful Russian accent. Carolyn was visibly angry, Maria confused. Stephan grabbed the revolutionary around the waist, just as he raised his feet in the air. It felt to him as if his father weighed 230 pounds. Stephan could not hold him for long. He dropped his load and kicked him away, sending him sprawling onto the floor.
When Jones scrambled to his feet, he went after the two women again, spouting pseudo-Russian. Stephan threw him on the bed and dove on top of him. “You’re very strong,” Jones told his son. “Don’t waste your time on this. It’s not what you think.”
As Stephan relaxed his grip, Jones kicked him clear across the bed and rose to his knees. Now angry, Stephan came after him, hitting Jones full force with a shoulder tackle, sprawling him again. The young man pinned him, and this time Jones could not move at all.
“Let me go,” Jones babbled. “I don’t want to use what I know on you. You’re too young. I don’t want to hurt you.” Finally, the revolutionary bumped his head on the back of the bed and came to his senses.
Not only was Jones under emotional stress, he was also experiencing physical problems, and taking drugs, alcohol or both. He could not urinate at times; as edema swelled his body, his mind seemingly showed the ill effects and his behavior became more erratic. Even so, Stephan was convinced that, since he pulled such stunts only in private, most of it was theatrics. Within a few days of the Russian Revolution, Jones, dressed only in pajamas and a silly-looking hat, dashed into the bush with his .357 magnum. It was his reincarnation act again. This time he was being held prisoner. But as he trudged over a rotten bridge, it collapsed, and he wound up stuck in a tangled heap of termite-and-scorpion-infested logs. Stephan, thinking his father would be bitten, rescued him.
“Where am I?” Jones asked.
“You’re in the bush,” Stephan replied.
“How’d I get here?”
When Stephan told him, Jones made unconvincing sounds, as though he were coming out of a trance. Jones explained his miraculous recovery by saying that he must have sweated out all the accumulated body wastes and poisons on his jungle jaunt.
/>
Feigned or not, Jones’s illnesses made him a recluse in West House, where his tyranny, not only unchecked, would also be unobserved. He no longer performed even symbolic physical labor, such as hauling a little wood. He spent his days at home or in the radio room, often not emerging until nightfall. In a halting, increasingly slurred voice, he would use his house phone to relay information to the radio operators or to announce the world’s news to the community. He told his people he was too sick to preside over the meetings, which by midsummer of 1978 had become nightly and often lasted until early morning.
The meetings were lengthened in part by a new addition—Russian language classes. Feodor Timofeyev of the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown would be paying a visit soon, and Jones wanted to impress him with the group’s knowledge of Russian. But no one learned more than a few conversational Russian phrases, and those only because of constant repetition.
Because of his poor health, Jones also announced that Johnny Brown Jones would conduct the nightly meetings from the stage, while Father addressed the congregation from his house. Johnny always would try to dispense with the catharsis sessions first. But sometimes Jones would come to the pavilion during the middle of a meeting and repeat the criticism session, rehashing it, dragging it out, churning people’s hostilities toward each other.
After spending May and June in Georgetown, Mike Carter took the Albatross—a second Temple boat, purchased to make money carrying freight in the Caribbean—to Port Kaituma, then traveled overland to Jonestown. To his dismay, Jonestown had come to a standstill. There were no signs of growth or progress; people were demoralized. Bureaucracy had completely taken over, and Jones was too irrational to make intelligent decisions about day-to-day life. Time and effort went to waste everywhere.
Carter’s department was electronics, and he was luckier than most. He managed six to seven hours sleep. After breakfast, he made tapes of news broadcasts from Radio Moscow, Radio Sweden, and, when he could get them, Voice of America and BBC. He relied on Radio Sweden, because he considered the others biased. Carolyn Layton or Maria Katsaris culled the hard news and transcribed it. Jones made news broadcasts based on these transcripts and his own opinions. He went on the air at 6:15 A.M., so people could listen during breakfast.
About three in the afternoon, Carter would fire up the radio for about ten straight hours of transmission to the States and Georgetown. As in the past, top aides such as Harriet Tropp and Karen Layton sent most of the messages. But now ordering supplies and discussing strategy took twice as long, because radio operators had switched to Morse code to deter eavesdropping. A typical message to the States, with reply, would consume forty-five to ninety minutes.
Whenever the Concerned Relatives did something noteworthy or newsworthy, Jones reacted with a strategy session and a counterattack. On one occasion, he assembled people in the Jonestown radio room and, with considerable prompting, had them make almost laughable statements, branding their relatives in the Concerned Relatives as addicts and pushers, violence-freaks, terrorists and sex perverts. And these were sent to the news media gathered in lawyer Charles Garry’s San Francisco offices.
On another tape, at the urging of Jones, people described imaginative plans for torturing or killing their relatives, while in the background he injected his high-pitched chortles. Like the testimonies in the States, their statements were designed to please Father—and were not necessarily true feelings. One girl, for example, said, “I’d like to string my father up by his nuts and stick a hot poker up his ass and make him realize what he’s doing.” Added Jones, after a good laugh, “I’m sure he will realize....” Joyce Touchette said this about her daughter who had fled with the Eight Revolutionaries: “I gave Mickey up as a daughter years ago. I’d be willing to go back and shoot her. I talked to her on the radio, and she sounded like a robot.” Finally, John Stoen came on the tape with all the enthusiasm of a six-year-old child pleasing the adults who had trained him:
“I’d like to kill Grace Stoen and Tim Stoen. I’ll go back and do it right now.” Maria Katsaris was with him. She elaborated: “He says he wants to tie a rope around Grace’s titty and hang her down in the water until she drowns. He’s six years old and [is] this imaginative.” Jones cackled: “She wouldn’t like that.”
One day in July, Dick Tropp sat down to write a letter to Jim Jones. It was not a casual note, but an intensive critique of himself, in keeping, almost, with a Maoist concept of revolutionary self-criticism. A New Yorker of Eastern European Jewish heritage, a former instructor of English at Santa Rosa Junior College, Tropp was Jones’s chief propagandist and author of press releases. In fact, the professor currently was gathering material for an authorized biography of Jim Jones.
Jones considered this self-critical letter from one of the Temple’s resident intellectuals to be brilliant. He praised Tropp lavishly. Over the loudspeaker, Jones announced that he wanted self-criticisms from everyone within the week. For Jones, here was another chance to evaluate and increase his control. By ordering people to bare their souls to him in print, he could identify potential troublemakers and measure the effectiveness of his conditioning. He wanted certain topics addressed: the eight-hour day, elitism, anarchy, nostalgia for the United States and thoughts of returning home—also, feelings about Dad, defending Jonestown, past waste of money or personal problems and failings.
The results were mixed, in some cases pathetic. Many letters were barely literate, grim recitations of people’s dreary lives before they met Jim Jones. Many simply told him what they thought he wanted to hear. They confessed sinning back in the States by spending money on Big Macs and other junk food, money that then went to corporations that killed babies and murdered Allende in Chile and Lamumba in Africa. They often repeated exactly what he had drilled into them, day after day, in his reading and analysis of the news: the world according to Jones.
People confessed to homosexuality, even though some said they had abstained from sex for years. Children who could not spell the word “elitist” admitted their elitism. Many thanked Dad for rescuing them from fascist America. Some agreed with Dick Tropp’s assertion, appropriately tinged with self-loathing, that all intellectuals should be shot once the revolution came.
In the most honest attempts at self-evaluation, thoughtful people revealed their agonizing unhappiness with Jonestown life. Yet Jones’s conditioning was working on them too. Rather than blaming him for the hardships and the frustrating emotional climate, they blamed themselves for not living up to his ideals and his example.
Jane Mutschman was one of the rank and file, a thirty-one-year-old white woman, pudgy at five-feet six and 155 pounds. She had been a Temple secretary in San Francisco, answering phones and writing letters. In Jonestown, she helped care for seniors and did guard duty at the front gate. Her letter mirrored the agony of life in Jonestown and her regret for having once left the Temple:
“My main thought since returning to PT has been to get life over as quickly as possible without committing suicide,” she began. “That basic notion running through my brain has made me feel like a burned out cinder. I have no right to communicate this to Dad, who obviously feels like he wants to die and has every right to.... I think constantly about why Debbie [Blakey] and others left, why I left and came back, and on and on. I’m sick of analyzing. I don’t even want to think. I know I have the same elitist pattern Dick [Tropp] does....”
This was the crux of it. Jones had so twisted people with guilt that to think at all was to be elitist. To perceive that not all was right in Jonestown was to be anarchistic. Even without Jones’s constant reminders of Jonestown’s beauty, these people had conditioned themselves to shut out the bad. They had given up so much to come to Jonestown that to even contemplate trouble in paradise would be incapacitating. It was far easier to blame themselves for failing to be contented amid impossible surroundings. And yet, when things did not improve, when decisions were announced that seemed crazy or arbitrary, when more and more people were cra
mmed into tiny living spaces and the food deteriorated, these doubts were impossible to dismiss. Some, like Jane Mutschman, hoped that by their giving voice to the doubts, Jim Jones could reassure them that their tremendous sacrifices were not empty gestures.
“Where is my goddam energy,” Mutschman’s letter continued. “Does the term battle fatigue accurately describe my non-actions? ... but how can I write a note to Jim Jones and say, ‘I’ll go through the motions,’ when he deserves so much more? So I renew my commitment here and now. This movement doesn’t need another lazy ass-hole. If I have to, I’ll put the ‘barrel of the gun’ up my butt and start a self revolution.”
Tish Leroy, a middle-aged woman, had been a temple accountant and notary public for years. Her job in Redwood Valley and San Francisco, among other things, had been to affix her seal to documents she knew to be false, forged or made under duress. Her letter captured precisely the dilemma of perceptive people in Jonestown:
“I observe a lot in silence, and though I can always justify the lies that get told, I deeply resent being told them—I understand the ends justify the means. The undersurface of me resents terribly being stifled and stopped in expressing—we are not allowed to give honest opinions, for these are dictated as policy and it is treasonous to have differing thoughts. Yet, I can also give you a whole list of ‘wrong’ thoughts I did express, to the tune of being blasted and humiliated for it and told how wrong I was—only to watch events prove me right....
“If we must ‘conform’ our thoughts, I’ll never make it. I must say yes with my mouth if it’s good for the collective, but my mind will scream ’no’ till my dying breath. I feel at times like a misfit, but I know I’ll never leave. I love what we have too much. It’s far more important than me or mine.”
As with Mutschman and Tish LeRoy, Larry Layton repeated the general pattern—honestly stated criticisms and/or expressions of self-hate and a death wish, followed by a renewed dedication.
Raven Page 63
