59. With troubles mounting throughout the period, the demands on Garry’s law firm probably consumed a tremendous amount of time beyond the $37,000 worth which they billed.
60. Stoen had asked Grace to sign it, he said, but she thought it was ridiculous and refused. She later would deny even having seen it during her Temple days. As stated earlier, Stoen did not tell Grace that he signed it.
61. Perhaps Jones was reacting to the April 11 press conference called by “concerned relatives” in San Francisco.
62. Amos and Debbie Touchette also discussed the Stoen case with Fred Wills and Home Affairs Minister Mingo on at least several occasions.
63. “When we told him, Mingo, about Barker’s negative reactions to us,” Amos reported to Jones, “he told us he’d have a talk with Barker and explain the official government position toward us. The next time ... Barker ... was extremely nice, making a very pointed effort to say hello and smile ... ”
64. A month after Kathy Hunter’s ordeal, free-lance reporter Gordon Lindsay came to Georgetown while doing a story on the Temple for the National Enquirer. After immigration officials inexplicably ordered him out of the country, he and his photographer chartered a plane in Trinidad and made eleven sweeps over Jonestown. They spotted not a single person in the camp until the plane climbed and banked away; then people poured out of the cabins to watch the intruders leave. The Temple complained to U.S. Consul Richard McCoy, wrote an informational memo on the violation of Jonestown “air space” and later claimed that the plane buzzed the camp, causing an elderly resident to have a heart attack.
65. No one in the Embassy felt it was worth several days to take a boat trip in, though little else should have been more compelling in a country of such small size and minor strategic importance. Ambassador Burke, who later would say he was too busy administering a $6 million aid program and tending to other duties, chose never to visit in person because he was afraid Jones might somehow exploit the trip, claiming it as proof of the Embassy’s approval.
66. If the agency were searching for the perfect coercive drug, it would not have left other coercive techniques—sensory deprivation boxes, beating and humiliation—in plain sight of everyone which would have defeated the purpose of the drug. And by all accounts, the CIA had abandoned the program before 1970 at the latest.Joe Holsinger, former aide to Leo Ryan, is the chief proponent of the MK-ULTRA theory, based partly on a speculative and unpublicized paper by an unnamed Berkeley psychiatrist and based on circumstantial arranging of certain facts—including an apparent mistake by Jones on the last tape in Jonestown. Proponents of the theory allege that Embassy official Richard Dwyer was a CIA agent and was in fact present at the murder-suicides-and their proof is Jones’s command, “Get Dwyer out of here.” Most likely Jones had incorrectly assumed that Dwyer was in the camp, and not at the airstrip with the Ryan party. Dwyer had planned to accompany Ryan to the airstrip, then return to Jonestown to process any additional defectors. But the airstrip shooting intervened, and he was wounded there.
The first apparent mention of the CIA and MK-ULTRA was in a Black Panther newspaper. The paper also said that the Jonestown killings were caused by the American government with a neutron bomb, since black people tend not to commit suicide.
When asked by House Foreign Affairs Committee investigators about CIA infiltration of Peoples Temple or a government conspiracy against it, Temple insider Teri Buford and her lawyer, Mark Lane, perhaps the foremost conspiracy theorist in the world, could offer only scant evidence. Buford, in secret testimony, said she had suspected Edith Roller of being a CIA agent because of the voluminous diary she kept, day by day, for years. Roller, who died in Jonestown, was sixty-three. Lane could refer for evidence only to Tim Stoen and Joe Mazor. And when asked if anyone connected to the Embassy could have been part of a government-CIA conspiracy against the Temple, Lane did not mention Dwyer—his only contact and the man most commonly linked in other conspiracy theories—but said McCoy’s conduct was “almost unexplainable.” Dwyer later was asked by reporters, including Jacobs, if he worked for the CIA. He said his terms of employment with the foreign service forbade him either to confirm or deny it.
As a reporter for the Washington Post, John Jacobs spent three months investigating the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program, wrote several dozen articles on the subject for the Post in the summer and early fall of 1977, and personally reviewed thousands of pages of CIA MK-ULTRA documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
67. Temple recipients of Supplemental Securities Income (SSI) for the aged, blind and disabled of limited means were not permitted by law to receive those benefits while living overseas. Yet Temple records showed that more than 100 checks were received incorrectly at Jonestown between July and Dec. 1977. Later, Social Security officials tried to stop the forwarding of such checks, but postal officials, apparently erroneously, stopped all social security checks, even those receivable overseas. Rep. Phil Burton and actress Jane Fonda came to the Temple’s aid. When the regular social security payments resumed, so did some of the illegal SSI payments. About 102 more SSI checks worth $18,691 reached Jonestown, and after the holocaust the church returned them. A later agency investigation showed that 23 of the 160 Jonestown residents who ever had collected SSI were overpaid a total of 93 checks worth $17,549. Officials found that 17 percent of the Jonestown residents had been on SSI, compared with a 2 percent national average.A November 1979 “Investigation Report on Peoples Temple,” prepared by the California Department of Social Services, found that of 992 Temple members checked, 550—about 55 percent—had a history of receiving public assistance of some sort. According to the report, 109 of the 550 continued to receive assistance in Guyana, and 51 of those cases were “potentially fraudulent.” Fifteen cases involved forgeries on checks and 36 cases involved parents, spouses or grandparents fraudulently signing public assistance checks after the rest of the family had migrated to Guyana.
Twenty children in Guyana had a history of receiving foster care payments from California, but the report said all but one payment was discontinued and returned to the natural or adoptive parent or legal guardian before the child migrated. The one exception, payment for a nine-year-old, was discontinued in September 1977.
68. Goodlett insisted that Jones go to a hospital in New York, Cuba or even the Soviet Union, for a better diagnosis. But Jones refused to budge from the jungle, instead sending Goodlett sputum samples by overseas courier.
69. The truth behind all this is something else altogether: odds are there was never more than one mercenary—Joe Mazor—and that he did his stalking from San Francisco, not the Venezuelan jungle. Perhaps, inspired by the prospect of a $25,000 movie consultancy fee, Mazor was gilding and padding his “movie role.” His stories—in Jonestown and later to reporters—were far-fetched and contradictory. Mazor was careful to avoid saying directly that, among other things, he had fired on Jonestown, or that the supposed expeditionary force had intended to assassinate Jim Jones, though he said as much by implication.Later, Mazor would claim that he had accepted the Temple’s invitation in 1978 not because he was working for them, but just to “see the place,” hardly an explanation if he had spent two days spying on it a year earlier. And, if he had seen shotguns during those two days, as he claimed, why did he now tell Jones the camp needed better security, and why did he offer to come back to train members in security and volunteer to send Jones a bulletproof vest?
70. In a Feb. 4, 1979, article in the New York Times, reporter John Crewdson quoted Bob Levering as saying Mark Lane expressed an interest in the Enquirer article during lunch. Levering told Crewdson that Hal Jacques of the Enquirer had responded that the newspaper “had canned it, or words to that effect.” Both Lane and Jacques deny that. If it were true, that would mean that Lane already knew that the National Enquirer article was dead when he accepted Temple money to counter it.Lane told Los Angeles Times reporters Henry Weinstein and Robert Scheer that he never accepted money to get an article ki
lled but did not see anything wrong with such an act. In their Dec. 4, 1978, Los Angeles Times story, Lane is quoted as saying that he met with Temple members in Los Angeles “about refuting or investigating statements that were made in various articles,” including the Enquirer. The Los Angeles district attorney’s office investigated the matter but did not find grounds to prosecute Lane.
71. On February 24, 1978, only seven months before the Jones letter was sent, State Department spokesman Hodding Carter III had written to Jones thanking him for sending his views on United States-Guyana relations. “While it is impossible for President Carter to respond personally to all of the correspondence ... every communication is carefully read and noted, and the contents are reported to the Secretary of State....”
72. Temple lawyer Gene Chaikin described the problem of Garry’s continuing representation in a November memo to Jones: “Charles is a liberal. If he had any intimate knowledge of the situation here, or to some extent in the USA, he would not approve ...”
73. All those missing did in fact survive.
74. Lane later would deny both publicly and in a Feb. 2, 1978, letter to Jackie Speier that he had any knowledge about the cheese sandwiches being drugged. In a Nov. 24, 1978, article, Charles Krause of the Washington Post wrote, “Lane says now that he knew strong depressants and tranquilizers were used to keep the people at Jonestown against their will.... Lane also says that he was warned beforehand that the grilled cheese sandwiches served out Saturday by the Peoples Temple to Ryan and others in his party may have been laced with tranquilizers or other drugs. ‘I brought along some cough drops, which have a lot of sugar in them,’ Lane said. ‘I sure as hell wasn’t going to eat the cheese sandwiches.’ ” In an interview with Reiterman, however, Stanley Clayton, who worked in the kitchen that day, said he never had prepared grilled cheese sandwiches at Jonestown and did not believe the sandwiches were drugged.
75. John Russell, spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department, told Reiterman in 1979 that Jones’s death was caused by a gunshot wound to the head, a contact wound, meaning the gun barrel was pressed against his skull. Annie Moore, he said, was killed by a shot to the head too. Only one other Jonestown resident was reported killed by gunfire, an unidentified man found on a path.A U.S. Air Force autopsy on Dec. 15, 1978, concluded that Jones died of a gunshot wound to the left temple but could not determine the manner of death. The autopsy report stated, however, “The manner of death is consistent with suicide because of the finding of a hard contact gunshot wound to the head. The possibility of homicide cannot be entirely ruled out because of the lack of specific and reliable information.”
The autopsy found no evidence of prior disease. Although concentrations of pentobarbital in the liver and kidneys were within “the generally accepted lethal range,” the drug level within the brain—the most critical indicator—was not within the lethal range. The cause of death was not thought to be barbiturate intoxication because the brain level was low; tolerance can be developed for barbiturates and the lethal levels vary from individual to individual.
76. The authors had intended to include a complete list of the Jonestown dead but discovered that no such roster had been compiled. A list supplied by the court-appointed Peoples Temple receiver in February 1982 contained only 883 names—those 660 people whose bodies were positively identified and 223 who were presumed to have died at Jonestown. Receiver Robert Fabian said there was no way to account for the other 30 bodies found at Jonestown but suggested that many were children who had been born there. The authors decided against using the list, however, because it contained many omissions, some inaccurate entries, and other errors in the case of adult membership.
77. Additionally, there was an unconfirmed report of a radio message to Temple members elsewhere in the Caribbean that six people from Jonestown soon would be flying to meet them. Who would the six have been? The Carters and Prokes, plus Jones. Was Larry Layton the fifth? Would Jones have added Maria Katsaris as a copilot, Annie Moore as nurse, or Carolyn Layton as his most valued mistress and adviser? If so, would he have brought along John Stoen or Kimo Prokes?
Sources
PROLOGUE
INTERVIEWS
Sam and Nadyne Houston; Joyce Shaw; James Berdahl, U.C. band director; Tom Tuttle; Garry Lambrev.
MATERIALS
Peoples Forum newspapers, 1976-77; San Francisco police and coroner’s reports on Bob Houston’s death; the Houston family photo album.
1. A SCRUFFY START
INTERVIEWS
Two residents of Crete, including Alicia Heck; Donald Foreman; George Fudge; Thelma Kennedy Manning; three of Jones’s former schoolteachers in Lynn; Frank Beverly; Stephan Jones; several Lynn residents, including Bill Townscend and Oliver Thornberg; Dick Reynolds, Richmond Palladium Item reporter-columnist who provided background on the region.
MATERIALS
Lynetta Jones’s poem, entitled “The Molder,” and dated Jan. 23, 1977, from Peoples Forum newspaper and document HH6A obtained from FBI under Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); Lynn School records and Jones’s report cards; assorted Richmond Palladium Item articles about Crete, Lynn and Jim’s background; historical information from The Glory and the Dream, by William Manchester (Little, Brown, 1973); Lynetta Jones’s personal papers from Peoples Temple files in San Francisco; Nov. 1978 wire service stories quoting Lynn residents Wallace Fields and Vera Price on Jones’s boyhood; Lynetta Jones’s family background from her personal papers and from Nov. 1978 stories by the Indianapolis Star News; Lynetta’s tape-recorded reflections on her background and on Jim’s childhood, from Peoples Temple files recovered at Jonestown and released by the FBI under FOIA; school photos of Jones from Don Foreman; Jones childhood photos from the family photo collection; and Jim Jones’s own reflections on his childhood, from tapes in Sept. 1977 in Jonestown, obtained under FOIA from the FBI.
2. BREAKING AWAY
INTERVIEWS
Don Foreman; Bill Townscend; Thelma Manning; Violet Myers; George Fudge; several unnamed teachers and classmates; Frank Beverly.
MATERIALS
Lynn School records and class photos; accounts of Jim and Lynetta in tapes and written documents obtained from the FBI under FOIA; William Manchester’s Glory and the Dream.
3. MARCELINE
INTERVIEWS
Walter and Charlotte Baldwin; Marceline’s sister’s, Sharon Mills and Eloise Klingman; Marceline’s cousin Ronnie Baldwin; Evelyn Eadler and a few unnamed fellow nursing students at Reid; Dick Reynolds of the Richmond newspaper; Tom Lowry, Reid Memorial Hospital spokesman; a Richmond High School spokesman; Kenneth Lemmons; Jim Green, Indiana University spokesman; I.U. Alumni Association; a Methodist Church information center spokesman; Russell and Wilma Winberg; Don Foreman; George Fudge.
MATERIALS
Marceline Jones’s accounts of their courtship and early marriage, some dated May 20, 1975, and some undated, though probably written in the late 1970s, in document HH-61 obtained from FBI under FOIA; Reid Memorial Hospital records on Jim and Marceline; photos of Marceline’s nursing class; Indiana University records of Jones’s attendance and curriculum; Richmond High School yearbook; Methodist Social Creed; wedding photos.
4. THE CALLING
INTERVIEWS
Russell and Wilma Winberg; Archie Ijames; Rev. Ross Case; Jim Cobb; various people attending a Winberg revival meeting December 1979; Stephan Jones; Charlotte and Walter Baldwin; Rev. Edwin and Audrey Wilson; Rev. R. T. Bosler and Mercer Mance, who recommended Jones for the Indianapolis Human Rights post.
MATERIALS
Richmond Palladium Item, March 1953 article on Jones; Butler University school paper’s article on Jones; Marceline Jones’s undated account of their early marriage obtained from the FBI under FOIA; Jim’s account of early marriage from the Sept. 1977 tape recovered at Jonestown, from FBI document called “Letters from Jim Jones” and from the Dec. 6, 1978, transcript printed in the Guyana Chronicle; accounts of then-Temple members Rick Cordell, Rh
eaviana Beam and Esther Mueller regarding early Temple obtained from the FBI under FOIA (document HH-6); May 1956 Herald of Faith article by Jones; Temple photos of the free restaurant, with captions, obtained under FOIA from FBI; Loretta (Stewart) Cordell’s account of her conversion, called “No Haloes Please,” from church files in San Francisco; April 10, 1954, Indianapolis Star and Jan. 4, 1957, Indianapolis News stories on Jones.
5. NEW DIRECTIONS
INTERVIEWS
Russell and Wilma Winberg; Edwin and Audrey Wilson; Mother Divine and several followers by San Francisco Examiner for a story by Tim Reiterman and Ken Kelley, 1979; Charlotte and Walter Baldwin; Archie Ijames; Bonnie Thielmann ; Ross Case.
MATERIALS
Philadelphia Inquirer stories on Divine, including Dec. 6,1979; numerous stories from San Francisco Examiner clipping file on Divine including Reiterman-Ken Kelley story April 18, 1979; tape of Jones’s 1959 sermon obtained under FOIA from FBI; March 25, 1979, story about Carlos Foster and Cuban recruitment written by Joseph B. Treaster, New York Times, appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1979; Tim Stoen letter of Jan. 24, 1977, to Castro regarding Jones’s first visit; accounts of the auto accident were based on an AP story May 11, 1959, Audrey Wilson’s recollections, and Jones’s account (document SO-1) obtained under FOIA; the song “Black Baby” from Peoples Temple song book, courtesy Ross Case; written releases from the Peace Mission regarding its contacts with Jones.
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