Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  Even families without immediate plans to escape could not easily push aside their familial bonds. The Cobbs, for example, stuck together. When Christine, the mother, received a photograph of Jim Cobb’s son, they were all as delighted as any family could be about the new addition and proudly displayed the photo—even though the father was considered a Temple traitor. Christine was called up before a meeting for doing so.

  During their Jonestown stay, Charlotte and Walter Baldwin heard no one asking to leave Jonestown. Nor did they see their son-in-law again until November 9, when he called them to his house. They knew he was unpredictable. But they were far too cloistered, physically and emotionally, to foresee Jones’s violent intentions from their guest accommodations.

  Jones looked better than he had that first night at the pavilion, but he told them how concerned he was about the impending Ryan trip. The Baldwins tried to calm Jim and even suggested letting the congressman into Jonestown. “You have nothing to lose. It’s a nice place,” they told him. But they got nowhere. He was too distressed for reasoning. Mrs. Baldwin thought he was worried that he would lose John Victor Stoen.

  After a few uneventful days, the Baldwins arose early on Monday the thirteenth, looking forward to the boat trip out, to seeing Amerindian villages and beautiful tropical wildlife. Their bags were packed and waiting behind Marceline’s cabin for the truck ride to Port Kaituma. Then Jones suddenly announced over the public address system that he had canceled the boat trip. No one was allowed to leave, not even sick people scheduled for Georgetown hospital treatment.

  “Jim won’t let the boat leave,” Marceline told her parents after investigating. “So you can get a plane out today. I’m going to order a Land Rover to take you to Matthews Ridge....”

  The Baldwins flew home on Wednesday—only hours after Ryan’s party had landed in Georgetown. One of the last things their daughter had told them was: “I have lived, not just existed.”

  After his in-laws departed, Jones allowed the Cudjo to sail for Georgetown, anyway. There, it picked up its cargo and headed back to Port Kaituma on Wednesday, the fifteenth. Harold Cordell, the longtime church accountant and now Edith Bogue’s paramour, was one of the dock workers waiting to meet it. Checking off the cargo list, Cordell suddenly spied a hundred-pound plastic drum wrapped in paper. The shipping manifest listed equipment, animal feed and bags of supplies for the settlement —but no drum of chemicals. No one seemed to know anything about it. The chemicals had been purchased in Georgetown outside normal church channels.

  In Jonestown, the Temple agronomist, Russell Moton, examined the drum and said it was a very dangerous chemical that should not be stored in the central supply area. “That stuff is highly toxic,” Moton said. “Mixed with water, it can be fatal to people.” It was a cyanide compound.

  Cordell wondered if Jones had some secret plan to poison the congressman. He also knew it could be easily slipped into the water supply, their few wells. Cordell already knew that a chemical engineer was researching explosives, and that Jones had said bombs were being built to blow up buildings—and themselves—in case of an invasion. But the discovery of the poison really shook Cordell: he was now convinced that Jones had gone completely insane. His thoughts turned to ways to leave.

  With Ryan’s party pushing for a visit, Jones dispatched an order to the basketball team at the snake man’s house: he wanted them back in Jonestown immediately. Stephan Jones thought the order stupid, and the rest of the team implored him to dissuade his father. Using the Lamaha Gardens radio, he told his father: “You want to make good p.r.? Well, we’re doing it. Every place we go, we talk to people. They’re getting to like us. They razz us, see that we don’t get mad, that we’re good guys. ... We’ve got a game tomorrow with the national team.”

  “I told you,” his father broke in, “that I want you to come back.”

  Thinking his father might have called a White Night, another drill, Stephan insisted. “No. We’re doing too much good here.”

  Jones put Marceline on the radio, hoping they would listen to her. But Stephan knew his mother always took the White Nights more seriously than he did, so he did not believe there was any real danger in Jonestown.

  “Steve, I think you should come back,” she said. “You don’t know what’s going on out here. We really need you.”

  That plea helped convince Stephan Jones not to return. He thought his father had put the words in his mother’s mouth. Stephan had watched Jones before, standing over people in the radio room, telling them what to say, word by word. With his son, Jim Jones had cried wolf once too often.

  The team wanted to stay not only to avoid the miserable experience of another White Night but also to have fun in Georgetown. Using money Stephan swiped from his father’s house, they ate well and played basketball, having a great time, anticipating the tournament, even thinking ahead to a triumphal return to Jonestown.

  Stephan had guessed correctly. Marceline had only repeated Jones’s orders; she really wanted her son to stay away. But she was not trying to save the basketball tourney; she was warning him away from danger. In Mike Carter’s presence, Jones yelled at her for being indifferent to what was happening and overprotective of her sons.

  “Hell,” Marceline snapped back, “I’ve been keeping this place together [recently], not you.” With that, she turned and stormed back to her cottage.

  A little while later, Stephan got back on the radio to repeat his earlier message: the basketball team was not returning. When Jones got that message, he wanted Marceline to take to the radio and fight her disobedient son. She refused. On the eve of a momentous visit, Jones’s authority was shaken. His wife and son had disobeyed him; his security guards preferred to play basketball.

  As Friday the seventeenth dawned, Jim Jones was resigned to another failure: he could not keep Leo Ryan out of Jonestown. He reacted predictably, by calling a White Night.

  Marceline Jones was infuriated by his counterproductive actions. “Are you out of your mind?” she cried. “You want these people to stay in Jonestown, and you’re talking about suicide right before this congressman comes in!”

  Surprisingly, Jones accepted her logic. But before he relented, he commanded some people to ambush the Ryan party on the road to Jonestown—if the plane managed to land. “It looks like they’re coming after all,” he told the frightened crowd. “Maybe the plane will just fall out of the sky.”

  Jones had hoped Sharon Amos would board that plane; in fact, the Temple had told local police officials that she would be accompanying the Ryan party. But there had been no room for her. When she returned to Lamaha Gardens from the airport, she was near hysteria. Had Jim Jones ordered Amos on a kamikaze mission to shoot the pilot and bring down the plane? It was known that Amos would do anything Jim Jones ordered. In less than twenty-four hours, she would give her life for him.

  FIFTY-ONE

  En Route

  At first, Ryan’s staff and the Concerned Relatives had cloaked the Guyana trip in great secrecy. Even after a relative tipped me about “something big” in the air, Tim Stoen refused to supply any information. However, I called Ryan’s office on an informed hunch and invited myself and the Examiner along. Ryan seemed to want news media to help force open the Jonestown gates, to publicize the findings and to afford a measure of protection. But he limited the number.

  His total media complement consisted of the Examiner; Gordon Lindsay, who had written an unpublished expose for National Enquirer; an NBC news team and the Washington Post, both of which had been put on the story by Lindsay. The Examiner’s competitor and neighbor, the Chronicle, learned about the trip from a Ryan aide and decided to go along. So the congressman wound up with a national television network, the two major newspapers in his congressional district and the most prominent newspaper in the nation’s capital.

  After the congressional inquiry became public in November, I called Charles Garry to get a reading on my chances for entering Jonestown. Garry perfunctorily read me
a Temple statement he had found on his desk. Essentially, it said that Ryan would not be admitted. As for me, the attorney warned that I was considered a Temple enemy and, given the church’s paranoia, should expect to be barred from Jonestown, whether Ryan was admitted or not. According to Garry, I had written “prejudicial stories.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion, Charlie,” I said. “But please put in a good word for me. Make a pitch.” I assured him that I would be open-minded.

  Despite my dim prospects, the Examiner decided to stick with me, a veteran of the Temple story, rather than send another reporter. After consulting with Garry, the Chronicle, however, decided to send someone other than Marshall Kilduff. They chose Ron Javers, a Philadelphian who had never written a word about the Temple.

  On the night of November 13, while I was home packing and hoping to have time for a nap before the red-eye flight to New York, the Examiner phoned with an “urgent” message to call Al Mills at the Human Freedom Center in Berkeley. When I called, Mills expressed grave concern for the safety of Tim Carter. He was afraid the Temple might have kidnapped him. I then learned for the first time that Carter had come to former members seeking shelter, telling them he had escaped Jonestown on the pretense of getting dental work in the States. Because Carter spoke convincingly against the Temple, swore hatred for Jones and cried with longing for his baby in Guyana, the Millses and other defectors believed him. They treated him as one of their own and found him an apartment in Oakland. Now he had disappeared.

  I asked Mills a series of questions:

  “Did Carter’s mouth appear to be swollen?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “Was he seeing a dentist regularly here?”

  “No.”

  “Did you tell him anything about Ryan’s trip?”

  “Yes,” admitted Mills. “He asked about it Friday afternoon. We set up an appointment for him on Saturday [to have his oral surgery stitches removed] and he didn’t show up. We checked his room, and he had left behind a half bottle of wine and a half loaf of bread.”

  “I think he’s a plant,” I said, and gave him my reasons: no one with two root canals would likely stray far from his dentist; he had disappeared immediately after securing information on Ryan’s trip and right before a dentist could check him. “I’ll bet gathering information was his mission.”

  Suddenly realizing he and his wife had been duped, and that security had been breached, Mills excitedly expressed fear for the Ryan party. The Temple might put a bomb aboard the plane, he said. Though I thought he was overreacting, he said he would call the FBI or Ryan’s office.

  On the way to San Francisco International Airport, Greg Robinson and I got better acquainted. It was our first assignment together in my nearly two years at the Examiner, and we were both charged with anticipation. For both of us, it was also a first overseas assignment, and for Greg, the subject was foreign as well. When the twenty-seven-year-old photographer had come by my desk a few days earlier, he had thought we were going to see Rev. Moon. But he had done his homework since then.

  With his great zest for work, he was the sort of young photographer who would answer the photo department phone with a rapid-fire “Hello hello hello,” then dash for the door with the cry, “I’m gone!”

  Steering the photo car south on Highway 101, Greg said he loved travel assignments and spoke of one particular action photo he had taken recently of the salmon wars on the Klamath River. Greg was disappointed that Life magazine had rejected it. But he hoped with characteristic optimism, Life might be interested in Jonestown photos. It all depended, of course, on whether the story attracted national attention.

  As the airport lights loomed, Greg told me that, after the Jonestown trip, he planned on spending Thanksgiving on Trinidad or another Caribbean island. There he could bake on the white sand beaches, swim and sample the local rum and the women. He smiled to himself at the thought of it. As he parked the photo car, he said, “In case you end up coming back first, I’ll put this money here. Use it to pay for the parking, and take the car into town.” He slipped $35 into the visor.

  Neither of us had taken the assignment lightly. We were as well equipped and as mentally prepared as anyone could have been for the unknown and potentially hostile future. In preparation, Greg had consulted with a well traveled photographer friend who happened to be a doctor. In addition to giving advice about the proper shots and malaria medicine, he had warned Greg that Guyana was a dangerous part of the world. Though we discussed the Temple and the severity of the allegations, the major concern was not personal safety. We were most worried that, after traveling six thousand miles and spending thousands of dollars, our effort would fall short of Jonestown. As a contingency plan in case I was locked out, Greg would carry my tape recorder inside. No one even considered the possibility that I would have to use his camera.

  In addition to clothes and toilet articles, we each had packed a poncho (on the chance that we would camp out in the rain forests), insect repellent, foot powder, candy, a pocket knife, water purification tablets and antimalaria pills. Greg must have stowed twenty-five pounds of cameras and equipment into his canvas shoulder bag. My rucksack was crammed with a half-dozen notebooks, a fistful of tapes, the recorder and a compact personal camera.

  Though we carried passports and a “to whom it may concern” letter of introduction from the Examiner, we lacked entry visas. The Guyanese Embassy in Washington had given me incorrect information about visiting requirements, and absolutely no assurance that we would be allowed to enter the country at all. And, as for getting into Jonestown, Ryan’s office promised only to do their best. An aide frankly admitted, “It’s a game of chicken between us, the Temple, the State Department and Guyanese government.” A State Department official had told me, “If the Temple doesn’t want you in, you won’t get in. It’s that remote and inaccessible.”

  By the time Greg and I toted our bags to the boarding areas, a crowd had gathered. Not everyone was there to wish us bon voyage. Besides West Coast Ryan staffers and Concerned Relatives, we spotted a small contingent from the Temple, staring at us sullenly. Their pretext for being there was to return some belongings left behind by the NBC crew. Though I was unaware of it at the time, the Temple had invited NBC and Javers to the Geary Boulevard church for a chicken dinner and a chance to interview Temple members and Garry and Goodlett. I was excluded from this final bit of public relations, most likely because the Temple considered me a hopeless case.

  Near the boarding ramp escalators, NBC reporter Don Harris greeted me like an old friend, though we had only talked briefly on the telephone. He was happy, he said, to see that I stood six feet four, in case we ran into trouble. The feelings were mutual. Just before the trip a fellow journalist had told me this about Harris and the burly producer accompanying him, Bob Flick: “I can’t think of two better guys to be along on a dangerous assignment. Flick would take on a tank, and Harris, lean as he is, is a tough sonofabitch. Nothing will stop him.”

  Both Harris, a fortyish Clint Eastwood lookalike from Georgia, and Flick, a craggy and burly six feet three, were veterans of Vietnam war coverage.

  Cameraman Bob Brown, a swarthy handsome man, seemed to have traveled everywhere and done everything. Brown, who also had logged time in Vietnam, oozed confidence yet had an underlying kindness. Soundman Steve Sung, a muscular and compact Asian-American, was delightful company He kept a cheery face but later would speak more bluntly about the assignment. When I would ask him whether NBC had balked at spending money for extra television equipment, camping gear and a $50 Smith and Wesson “survival knife,” he would say, “What’s a little money to NBC? This is a dangerous assignment.”

  Having a well seasoned network news team with many thousands of dollars in equipment provided comfort in this open-ended assignment. From the start, it was apparent that NBC provided our best alternative ticket to Jonestown, if Ryan failed to deliver. If necessary, the tight little network crew planned to hire a plane,
then hike to Jonestown, possibly with an entree from Carlton Goodlett. I offered to split the cost of any charter plane.

  On board the eastbound airliner, I met the only other Temple “enemy” among the reporters. Gordon Lindsay served as NBC’s unofficial guide, having gone through the frustration of gathering material in Guyana for an ill-fated Enquirer piece. The Britisher said he had been initiated as a reporter at age seventeen, while covering African uprisings. Now in his forties, he free-lanced, chasing stories around the world. Stalking the aisles impatiently, smoking, drinking and talking nonstop, he openly derided the Temple and Jones.

  Javers dropped into a neighboring seat. “I’m the new kid on the block,” he said. “I just spent three days reading your stories in our Temple clips....” Slight and bearded, he looked younger than thirty-two, though he came across as a sharp, experienced reporter. Frankly, I would have preferred Marshall Kilduff instead of a recent arrival from the Philadelphia Daily News; I respected Kilduff’s work and thought it only fair that he, if anyone from the Chronicle, should be there. The final press addition was Charles Krause, Buenos Aires correspondent of the Washington Post. Krause would join us on the last leg of the trip, even more poorly prepared than Javers. To him the Temple was, as he would later put it, “a kooky cult,” and the assignment in large part an entree to Guyana.

  The flight from San Francisco to New York allowed us reporters to get acquainted. For me, it also was a reunion with Concerned Relatives whom I had used as story sources. As Greg and I roved the aisles, socializing and getting material for an in-flight story, the relatives immediately took to Greg. “You look like brothers,” one commented, noting our brown hair and mustaches. Beyond his amiable personality, Greg seemed to be everywhere all at once, eagerly shooting every minute, without being obtrusive.

  Tim Stoen had paired off with a mystery woman, a blonde with a beehive and makeup that made her appear older than her early thirties. Stoen introduced her as Bonnie Thielmann—a name that meant nothing to me. I did not realize that this woman, the daughter of Rev. Edward Malmin, represented yet another part of Jones’s past converging on him. She said merely that she had lived with the Joneses in Brazil and still remained a close friend to Marceline. If the Joneses would see anyone, they would see her, she said. Stoen sounded determined, vowing that he would not stop until he got John or got killed. I was not aware until then that he had written the State Department a month earlier saying he would use “any means necessary” to get the boy.