The Conspiracy. With the warm reception and the toothsome victuals, I almost had forgotten that I was alleged to be part of some vicious conspiracy. Almost as though on cue, the band eased off enough that we could hear Jones rant softly about the conspirators—Tim and Grace Stoen, Jeannie and Al Mills, the gang of eight “violent revolutionaries,” and other followers-turned-antagonists. To document his conspiracy claim, Jones ticked off incidents that made my head spin—arson fires, assassination attempts in the States, threats on his life, shots fired at Jonestown. Even Garry felt compelled to raise the question: “What I don’t understand is, who is doing it and why? It baffles me.”
“Charlie,” Jones rasped, “it’s the government. They will not let us live in peace because we’re socialists.”
As the band was playing, the print media reporters interviewed Jones in earnest while NBC shot film around the pavilion, interviewing relatives. Jones lost his thread of meaning several times. He would grope for a word or a sentiment, then jump to another subject. He attributed all that was humane to himself, and all that was evil to his enemies. His aides squirmed. Garry did not intrude. I felt embarrassment and pity for Jones, as he stumbled and sometimes almost slurred words. I wondered whether he was drugged by fever or by medication or was mentally ill. And an uneasy feeling came over me when he moaned, “Sometimes I feel like a dying man.”
The child John Victor Stoen and Tim and Grace Stoen were obsessions that surfaced sporadically throughout a few hours of conversation that night. When asked why he did not honor the California court order or fight through legal channels for custody of the boy, Jones said helplessly, “What can I do? Could I kill a child? ... He said he’d commit suicide if he was given back to his mother.”
Behind the whole sickening affair was the life of an innocent child, but Jones obviously was most intent on vengeance. Tim Stoen was behind everything, even the false incriminating statements signed by members, Jones said. “I have no desire to hurt that man, though he would want to kill me.”
At the conclusion of the meal, Marceline Jones introduced Ryan to a rousing cheer. He bounded onto the stage and took the microphone with aplomb. Graciously accepting the boisterous reception that he knew and we knew was standard procedure, Ryan waited until the applause died. “I’m glad to be here,” he began, adding parenthetically, “And already I’ve met one of my former students.”
Sounding as friendly as a political stumper, he said, “This is a congressional inquiry and ... from what I’ve seen, there are a lot of people here who think this is the best thing that happened in their whole life.” An explosion of hand-clapping cut off his declaration as the entire nine hundred settlers, Jones included, took to their feet and sustained the applause for what seemed an eternity. The metal roof nearly shook, and those of us at the head table looked around in amazement.
When the clapping abruptly ceased, as though on an invisible cue, Ryan quipped, “I’m sorry you can’t all vote in San Mateo County.” Jones jumped up: “We can, by proxy.” Then he added more quietly, “You have my vote.” Again a roar of approval reverberated through the pavilion, a slightly intimidating roar.
After the congressman stepped down and the entertainment resumed, I leaned over to Jones and asked why he allowed us to visit now, a year after my first request. “What have we got to lose?” he said confidently. “There’s no barbed wire here. We don’t have three, let alone three hundred, who want to leave.”
Interviews by Ryan and Jackie Speier since their late afternoon arrival tended to support that conclusion. Not a single relative of the Concerned Relatives in Georgetown had accepted an invitation to leave with the Ryan party.
When Ryan first strode into the pavilion that afternoon, a Temple member had asked, “Who do you want to see?”
“I want to see Brian Bouquet,” he said, keeping his promise to Brian’s mother. The Temple people chuckled, because Brian stood on stage just fifteen feet away, with his saxophone. When Harriet Tropp told the gaunt-looking musician to come over to talk to the congressman, Ryan objected, saying he wanted to meet in private. So they walked away together for a short interview, away from Temple eavesdroppers.
When the congressman returned to the pavilion, he told Dwyer of the Embassy that Brian did not want to take the time to visit his mother in Georgetown. “Well, what about your mother coming here?” Ryan had asked. “Would you be willing to see her?”
The response, Ryan reported, was something like: “The only way I want to see her is through the sights of a gun.” Temple members who overheard the statement were pleased that Brian rebuffed his mother using the very language Jones had specified earlier.
Hours later, on Friday night, Brian took a far different tone as other Temple members listened to him talk directly to his mother on the radio. He did not try to discourage her when she said she planned to travel to Jonestown on Saturday aboard the plane coming to pick up the Ryan party. Proudly he told her how he had played for the congressman. “I wish you could have been here to see me.”
“I wish I could have been there, too,” she replied. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“I look forward to seeing you.”
“I love you, Brian.”
“I love you too, Mom.”
Those few words set Clare Bouquet’s hopes running high: tomorrow they would be reunited in Jonestown.
When Leo Ryan got on the radio, however, he put a damper on her plans. Dwyer opposed bringing more Americans out to Jonestown and complicating the situation, so Ryan told her that the Embassy wanted no relatives on the incoming flight because of some technicality. “I can’t tell you what to do,” he said, but he strongly discouraged her and the other Concerned Relatives from coming. Since Ryan seemed obviously upset, Mrs. Bouquet decided to wait until the congressman returned to Georgetown. She figured she could fly to Jonestown on Monday instead.
That night, another message reached Jonestown via the radio from Lamaha Gardens. It was rushed to the stage in the pavilion. Someone grabbed the microphone and announced proudly, “Our Jonestown basketball team just beat the national team by ten points.” Above the thundering applause, Jones shouted toward Annibourne, the Guyanese information official, “That’s a coup,” and graciously shook his hand, claiming the triumph made the Temple team one of the best in the Caribbean. It seemed so improbable that the Temple could whip the national team that I made a mental note to check the score. Later, my hunch would be confirmed.
Repeatedly, with no prodding at all, Jones took the offensive, addressing allegations against the church before we could bring them up. He even pretended to want to know who was playing dirty tricks on the Temple’s enemies. “We’re not violent. We don’t do violence to anyone.” He said he wanted to know who hoaxed reporter Kathy Hunter into coming to Guyana, who made bomb threats and set small fires in her hotel.
While performers from thirteen years of age to their seventies did song and dance numbers on stage, Jones said piously, “Ageism, sexism and racism have been eliminated and elitism is almost eliminated. Each of us takes our turn in the fields.” But Jones and the white leadership around him, I noted, had indoor complexions.
“I’m a little nervous,” called out an elderly black woman billed as “Jonestown’s Moms Mabley.” Jones called back, “So am I.”
As she spread laughter with a saucy down-and-outer’s soul song, Jones turned to us. “When will this dialogue stop and we can have some peace?” he asked rhetorically. “I didn’t speak [to the allegations before this] because I was advised not to.”
Why, if nothing was amiss in the Temple, did his former followers turn against him? “The love-hate syndrome.” He quoted Tim Stoen saying that destroying Jones was his mission in life, and he referred to the Eight Revolutionaries. “It was they [defectors] who advocated violence, blowing up bridges, cutting of telephone lines. If they don’t want us in America, why not let us live in peace?”
With Lew Jones singing in a clear tenor voice, Rev. Jones spoke
of his many children, still promoting the “rainbow family” concept. But in recent years, some had questioned whether the Temple was, in reality, a church. It is a church, Jones said, explaining that Jesus also had commanded his followers to sell their possessions.
When another reporter asked whether the Temple was Marxist, Jones’s affirmative answer seemed vague, almost confused. So I asked him, “In what sense is it Marxist?” He paused. “That’s a very perceptive question.... We’re Marxist in the sense of sharing work, in the distribution of goods and services.” His apparent difficulty in relating his avowed political philosophy to Jonestown’s operations and structure caused me to ask whether the Temple embodied his personal philosophy, theology and priorities.
Jones replied, simply and curiously—and I believe accurately—“It’s a reflection of what I thought was best.”
His admission of ultimate control made it more distressing to see him suddenly lapse into moods of self-effacing self-pity, of near-surrender to his enemies. “I curse the day I was born,” he lamented. “I don’t know why these people hate me so. They can have me, but leave these people in peace. ”
“I don’t want anything in life,” he added sadly. “Some people say I wanted to be President, but I had no illusions of....” After that ill-disguised grandiose notion, he apparently lost his thought for a moment then began rambling about Joe Mazor. “Mazor told us he was here [earlier] with rocket launchers ready to blow out our transmitters and radio,” Jones confided with the voice of a vindicated man. So, I thought, Mazor had indeed switched his allegiance, and perhaps he had tried to set me up.
Though the gravity of the message was not transmitted at the time, Jones signaled us, telling those investigating him that he was feeling ill, trapped, despondent.
Would he ever return to the United States? The question that had caused him to collapse whenever it was broached in Brazil nearly twenty years earlier made him muse: “That’s where I belong; though I love Guyana, I’m not Guyanese. We built a model here and [it’s known] in every part of the world. People come in here every day. It’s the easiest place in the world to get out of.”
His answers proved what I had suspected: that jungle life—cut off from the world of social and political conflict, and power—did not appeal to him. His needs for stimulation and ego satisfaction were too great. “Power?” he scoffed in response to a question. “What kind of power have I got walking down a path talking to little old ladies? I hate power, just as I don’t want money. I wish I never had been born, because [that way] I never would have made mistakes. I brought 1,200 people here.”
He spoke of himself as a prisoner. He said he needed the medical treatment ordered by Dr. Goodlett, but could not leave Jonestown for fear John Victor would be kidnapped, for fear things would collapse in his absence. “In some ways, I feel like a dying man,” he said. And again the child custody matter surfaced like a bloated body. “This is very painful,” he said. “Now he doesn’t know who his mother is. He forgets his mother. I haven’t taught any hate to the child.”
He denied outright that John Stoen had been turned systematically against his mother. “We teach love,” he said as the seven-year-old in a brown and yellow striped T-shirt was brought to his left side. The handsome olive-complexioned child appeared bashful and a little uneasy, yet curious about the television equipment that suddenly appeared. He squinted into the lights.
“We have the same teeth and face,” Jones said, baring his teeth and pulling off his tinted glasses for the first time. Taking the boy’s chin between his thumb and fingers, Jones squeezed gently, making John show his teeth for comparison. The child was being treated like a show dog on parade. It was grotesque.
“He’s very bright,” Jones said, stroking and holding him. The passive child projected no warmth.
“John, do you want to go back to live with Grace?” Jones asked.
“No,” the boy replied softly.
“See?” Jones said approvingly. “It’s not right to play with children’s lives.”
As John was led away, Jones addressed all our questions about conditions in the settlement. He denied that sex was banned, pointing to the birth of thirty-three babies since 1977. He said social security recipients could choose to keep their checks, yet only one did. “I don’t have a dime, or control over any money,” he added, though he estimated several million dollars had been poured into the project. Jonestown workers, he maintained, were never subjected to sixteen-hour days under guard, nor corporal punishment; the only punishment was denial of sweets, of television time or of the privilege of working with other communards. As for the Temple’s infamous thrashing sessions in the United States, the preacher said, “No more. We had our periods ... I hated it so bad and said, ’You spank me first.’ I told the kids to hit me hard. I said, ‘I want you to realize you’re hurting me by your behavior.’ ”
As the hour got late, and Temple aides milled around anxiously, Jones was asked about the alleged threats of mass suicide. Acting grossly misunderstood, he said, “I only said it is better that we commit suicide than kill. Why hurt social progress?” But he talked much of death, suicide and murder as he recited attacks on him and his church. It made me uncomfortable. He also railed against the “smear campaign” against him, declaring finally, “It would have been easier if someone had shot me as they did Malcolm X or Martin Luther King.”
Given Jones’s appearance and morbid talk, I was glad to already have conducted one interview; it seemed conceivable that he might plead illness Saturday and become unavailable to talk further.
Then, when Jones’s aides made noises about terminating the interview, I told Jones, “On the way through town, your people checked for accommodations and found room only for the women. So we wonder whether we could spend the night here.”
The request startled Jones. “We don’t have accommodations for you. So it’s not possible. There’s no place for you.”
“We don’t need rooms,” I said. “We could sleep here on the tables and benches or on the stacks of tin out by the road.”
“No. No. We couldn’t have you do that.” Jones looked pleadingly to McElvane and Johnny Brown Jones, who had hovered over us since the first talk of departure.
“You can find them a place to stay in town,” Jones told his aides. But why, I asked myself, did Jones prefer the inconvenience of trucking us into town? I had expected him to view our willingness to stay as a hopeful sign of trust. Was he afraid, I wondered, that we would snoop around during the night or that shabby accommodations would prejudice our visit? I did not expect anyone to come to us reporters during the night, asking to be taken out.
As we bade good night to Jones and the rest, a clean-cut young man appeared at my elbow wearing a broadly striped sports shirt. I had seen the same man with a thin wavering mouth standing near Jones during dinner, watching us. “Can I help you with your bags?” he said introducing himself. He was Tim Carter, the infiltrator Al Mills had told me about.
“It’s only a backpack,” I said, shouldering it. “Quite a place you’ve built here. I’m really happy to be seeing it finally.”
He responded with enthusiasm. “I hope you’ll see through all the lies about us.”
“What lies?”
“The lies being put out by the people at the Human Freedom Center, by people who hate Jim. I’ve heard them with my own ears, saying this place was a concentration camp. You can see for yourself that it isn’t.”
“I heard you were at the Human Freedom Center last week. Were you spying on them?”
“I was at the Center,” he said coyly, as we crossed the darkened playground area, approached the truck and parted company.
As the truck bounced and slid along the moonlit road, we hugged the sideboards. Although my skepticism ran high about the truthfulness of Jones in some matters, the people appeared happy, the camp well run. Only in retrospect could I see special tensions in the adolescent faces of Sam Houston’s two granddaughters at dinner, ski
ttishness on the faces of elderly women, the burning concern of Jones’s aides as he forged foolish statements, the duties of those silent and brooding young men watching the reporters.
That night, two things tempered my generally favorable impressions of the settlement. While making every effort to pass the most difficult trial of his life, Jones appeared unhealthy and obsessed with death. He had cried for peace and to be left alone, yet, in his eyes, we were hounding him in his faraway refuge. The second problem really was a feeling of inadequacy. Knowing that politicians and other reporters had been duped in the States with similar demonstrations of brotherhood and talent, I feared that we might be waltzed through another day’s visit without uncovering the truth. Given the isolated setting and Jones’s demonstrated ability to condition and intimidate people, it seemed probable that we would fly out of the jungle Saturday afternoon without conclusive answers. As things stood, I could not be convinced the place was either a concentration camp or a humane social experiment. Jones’s answers did not dispel the accusations by dozens of former members.
During the forty-five-minute truck ride, we reporters talked quietly. Javers and Krause shared my misgivings about Jones and agreed he seemed paranoid, if not crazy. Yet they were more favorably impressed with the encampment. Javers suggested the Temple might have been assailed, as Jones said, for its socialist politics, and its need for an authoritarian system to keep ex-convicts and former street denizens in line. Krause said wistfully that the people appeared to be happy. Javers seemed perturbed that I repeatedly led Jones into the sordid paternity fight over John Victor Stoen—an issue which, whether it was a smoke screen or not, had assumed dire importance. And the three of us agreed that most likely no one would defect and that none of the Concerned Relatives would be satisfied their loved ones really were happy in Jonestown.
Raven Page 73
