by Tim Cahill
About nine p.m., it was time for Russian class. Such phrases as "Good day, comrade," were practiced for an hour and a half. People paid attention, because supposedly they would someday visit Russia, a "paradise on earth" where the government "helped liberation movements."
At about eleven p.m., the community could knock off and fall exhausted into bed. Unless there were problems (and there were problems on the average of three times a week), at which point Jones would sit on his "throne" and ask leaders to describe them. Complaints about the food were always dealt with harshly. There were maggots in the rice, and you either ate in the light and picked them out or, if too exhausted, sat in the dark and ate a lot of maggots.
Jones's answer to the problem with the inferior rice had something to do with the CIA. They couldn't allow an interracial socialist experiment to flourish. And to complain about the food was to fall into the CIA's hands, to be in league with them, to be a traitor.
Beatings were often severe enough to require a stay in the infirmary. People wept uncontrollably on the floor as they confessed their crimes and negative attitudes. Some were whipped with a leather belt. Jones encouraged senior citizens to strike others with their canes. Victims lay unconscious on the ground until coming to, at which time they were expected to apologize to the community at large.
The Peoples Forum meetings might last until three a.m. Undernourished and exhausted, people took their three hours of dead, dreamless sleep.
"/w her opinion, the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily .. . were probably fired by the government ... itself, just to keep people frightened. "— 1984
Jim Jones said he was in constant danger. And he felt it was necessary the community know this. Once, he in-
formed them that a curse had been put on his life. He confiscated all the children's dolls and later, burned a passport onstage. He said the passport belonged to the traitor who put the curse on him. The next day, an old man was found dead. Some of the survivors believed the old man died the day before and that Jones took the opportunity to display his omnipotence.
Sometimes, Jones would stumble and slur his words onstage. He'd go back to his cottage for an hour, somehow collect himself, and return full of fire. One day he stumbled out of his house in pain. He'd been poisoned. An infiltrator, a traitor or the CIA, had gotten to his food. Jones managed to heal himself.
In September 1977, shots were fired at Jones from the bush. They were real shots. Tim Carter, who was standing with Jones at the time, swears to it. The shots were said to come from mercenaries, mercenaries hired by the Human Freedom Movement (the Berkeley group of Temple defectors). The Human Freedom Movement, Jones told the community, was funded by the CIA. They were out there, in the bush. He could hear their military vehicles, could see white men in uniforms at the tree line, hear them on the shortwave radio.
It seemed absurd on the face of it. Mercenaries, hired by the shadowy hand of the CIA, make their way to Jonestown, level their sophisticated weapons, take one shot, and miss? Jim Bogue and Harold Cordell concluded that the shots were "self-inflicted," that they were fakery and theater.
Nevertheless, the atmosphere of fear was such that people rose in the morning, checking the tree line for mercenaries. Jones said there were sophisticated bugging devices on the trees. There weren't enough children's shoes because, as Jones explained, the customs department had broken into a shipment on the docks in Houston and taken them. The rains came early, and Jones told the community that the CIA had seeded the clouds. He reminded them of the time he was driving in California and a driverless car tried to run him off the road. Who has a device that sophis-
ticated? The answer was obvious. And now there were mercenaries in the trees.
Jones despaired of defending the town. Originally, during alerts, people were to ring the perimeter with guns, crossbows, pitchforks, and hoes. But what could they do against trained mercenaries? Jones began to talk of revolutionary suicide as a final statement. The early suicide drills, most people felt, had been loyalty tests. But now he was talking about reincarnation, about how death was only a step to a higher plane. Suicide was tricky. If you did it selfishly, by yourself, you'd revert five thousand years to the Stone Age. But killing yourself for and with Father, that would be a glorious protest against repression.
Medically, paranoia refers to extreme cases of chronic and fixed delusions that develop slowly into complex, logical systems. A paranoid system may be both persecutory and grandiose. "I am great, therefore they persecute me; I am persecuted, therefore I am great. " True paranoids sometimes succeed in developing a following of people who believe them to be inspired. An essential element in the paranoid personality is the ability to discover "proof '" of persecution in the overinterpretation of actual facts.
In the past, Jim Jones had real enemies. They were, for the most part, louts, bigots, and segregationists: the kind of people who referred to him as a "nigger lover" and who spat on his wife when she appeared on the street with one of their adopted black children. Sickened by racist attacks, Jones moved his ministry from the Midwest to Brazil, then to northern California, where the hostilities began anew. Vandals shot out the windows of the Redwood Valley temple, and dead animals were tossed on the lawn. In August 1973, a mysterious blaze devastated the San Francisco temple.
Legitimately harassed, Jones began making connections between events, part real, part delusion. In 1976, Unita Blackwell Wright, a black woman and mayor of Meyers-ville, Mississippi, spoke at the San Francisco temple. Two men were seen holding a satchel outside the temple. When approached, they got in a car and sped away. The
license plate was traced to a Sacramento rental agency, and the names to a Mississippi air force base. Jones concluded that Mississippi Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was spying on him. The story was released to a newspaper. The fact that no one would print it seemed to confirm the awesome power of the senator.
"All our troubles," one of Jones's aides tried to convince me, "stemmed from taking on Stennis. After that, the attacks on us seemed more coordinated." The temple was being bugged. A couple of reporters started nosing around for information for a smear campaign. One of the reporters was named George Klineman, and, according to Jones, he came from a big-time German "Nazi" family.
(George Klineman is a freelance reporter, a former student activist whose parents were born in America. He got wind of the story through the man who was to become his father-in-law, David Conn. Conn was an elder in the Disciples of Christ, a loose confederation of churches that included the Peoples Temple. In the early seventies, Conn heard strange rumors about Jones: guns at the Redwood Valley temple, beatings, fear in those who left the Peoples Temple. Klineman interviewed temple defectors and took the information to one of his sources in the Treasury Department, which encompasses the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Klineman had simply asked his source if he knew anything about a northern California religious organization that was arming itself.)
The Nazis hated the Temple. They sent notes, on their letterhead, with ugly messages, such as: "What we did to the Jews is nothing compared with what we'll do to you niggers and nigger lovers." Now, somehow, Stennis had turned the Nazis loose on the temple.
The connections were made: Stennis, Nazi reporters, the Treasury Department. Now, an even more sinister force was against Jones. A group of Temple defectors were telling "lies," speaking to the "Nazi" reporters, and for publication.
Klineman provided research material for another "Nazi"
reporter, Marshall KildufF, who, along with Phil Tracy, wrote a blistering expose of the Temple in the August 1, 1977, issue of New West magazine. Various defectors told stories of false healings, humiliations, beatings, and financial improprieties. The article contained a sidebar arguing that the temple should be investigated. Jones used all the political clout at his disposal in a vain effort to kill the story. He fled to Guyana shortly before it was published.
The Art o
f Brainwashing According to experts, the following six techniques are commonly employed on political prisoners.
1. Isolation from all vestiges of former life, including all sources of information.
2. An exacting daily regimen requiring absolute obedience and humility.
3. Physical pressure, ranging from deprivation of food and sleep to the possibility and reality of severe beatings.
4. The engineering of situations in which freedom and approval by the group are contingent on successful reform.
5. "Struggle meetings" in which recalcitrant members are interrogated and required to confess. Interrogation could be gentle and polite, but more often involves harassment, humiliation, and revilement.
6. Doctrinaire daily study groups.
The phenomenon 0/folie a deux was noted in medical literature as early as 1877. It is a "psychosis of association, " most often paranoid in nature, occurring frequently among people who live together intimately and in isolation. Folie imposee is a kind of folie a deux in which the delusions of a dominant individual infect
one or more submissive and suggestible individuals who are dependent on and have a close emotional attachment to the infector.
In the isolation of the jungle, in the intimacy of the pavilion, Jim Jones raged against the defectors. They were organized now, and the traitors called themselves the Concerned Relatives. They were plotting against him, smearing him in the media, and in league with the shadow forces arrayed against him.
One of the defectors, Grace Stoen, had a six-year-old son, John Victor, living in Jonestown. Jones claimed he had sired the boy and that he would never give him up. Stoen hired a lawyer to start custody proceedings. For Jones, it was just another measure of how far they would go. Traitors were playing with children's lives, using a six-year-old as a pawn in their plan to bring down the Temple. They would take a boy away from his Father.
He was Father to all of them. He had taken the junkies and prostitutes off the street. He took in lonely old folks and fed the hungry. The young idealists had been floundering, unsure of how to make a better world. And he showed them. Without him there was nothing. Without him they would be back on the streets or lying on a slab in the morgue. The community was totally dependent on him. Without him they were nothing, and he told them so. It frightened them to realize he was ill.
Jones told the community he had cancer, a kidney disorder, diabetes, hypertension, and hypoglycemia. He was God, "God manifested a hundredfold," the only God they'd ever known. The God of the Bible had been used to oppress people for centuries. He was building a socialist Utopia, providing economic and social equality to the oppressed and scorned. And now traitors were killing him with their plots. One top aide saw him "crying hysterically, as if his whole life was a failure."
His hate and fear were contagious. Elderly women united to kill the defectors. He held his hands up for the people to see, and they were running with blood. "I'm bleeding for the people," he said. ("Ground glass," a surviving Jonestown nurse told me later.)
Sometimes during Peoples Forum, when members spoke of being homesick or wanting to leave, Jones would have a "heart attack." The community could see what it was doing to Father, and they'd turn on the speaker in a fury. It wasn't just people leaving. That might be acceptable. But no one ever left and remained neutral. They sold out. They told lies. They joined the traitors. Perhaps those who spoke of leaving were infiltrators. Everyone could see what their words did to Father. He had to protect himself. "No one leaves Jonestown unless they're dead," Jones said.
In May, Deborah Blakey, one of Jones's top aides, left the Georgetown temple headquarters, obtained a temporary passport from the American embassy, and fled to the United States. The day was May thirteenth, Jones's birthday. When Father heard of the betrayal, he called a "white night," a crisis alert, and the community sat stunned in the pavilion as he raged. They were betrayed. Wasn't it better to die? He challenged anyone in the community to speak for life. When they did, he battered them with arguments. He said he was "the alpha and the omega," the beginning and the end. He said it over and over again. The white night lasted twenty-eight hours. No one was allowed to go to the bathroom without an armed guard. Anyone who tried to run, he said, would be shot. Meals were brought into the pavilion. Finally, everyone in Jonestown voted to die.
Harold Cordell told me most of the details of this meeting. I asked him if he too had voted to die. He nodded glumly and said, "I figured if we just quit arguing with him, we could get some sleep."
The Temple hired Mark Lane, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist, in the hope that he could help unravel the mystifying web of harassment. But by early November, it seemed as if it was already too late. The shadow forces were squeezing the lifeblood out of Jonestown. The National Enquirer was preparing an article. It would be another smear, like the one in New West, full of lies. Jones became more isolated, and his dependence on drugs increased.
On November first, Leo Ryan wired Jones and informed him he would be visiting Jonestown on a fact-finding mission. Ryan had been talking to traitors all summer.
Shortly after the wire arrived, Terri Buford, Jones's most trusted aide, left the Temple. She had been working in San Francisco and told Jones, by shortwave radio, that she "had some conflicts." Jones had often said that Terri was "the smartest person in the organization, besides me." It was three days before he could bring himself to talk about it, and then all he said was, "Someone left." All the survivors I talked to, from those in leadership positions to dissenters, agreed that Buford's defection had a devastating effect on Jim Jones.
The conspiracy came to a head on Saturday, November eighteenth, during Ryan's visit. Some Temple members had deserted in the morning, when security was concentrating on the Ryan party. Now others were saying they wanted to leave with Ryan. Whole families—the Parkses, the Bogues—had turned traitor. They had lied on the floor, lied in front of the entire community when they confronted a father or mother or child. They were more concerned with blood relations than with the cause and Father. Jones looked beaten, defeated. A man named Don Sly flew into a rage and menaced Ryan with a knife, but he was subdued. Newsmen were present. There'd be more smears. Ryan
would report to Congress, and the full weight of the United States government would fall on Jonestown.
When Ryan and his collection of traitors left for Port Kaituma, gunmen followed. The shadow forces had won.
An alert was called and the community rushed to the pavilion. Jones told them the congressman's plane would "fall from the sky." He could do things like that. Hadn't he killed the man who put a curse on him simply by burning a passport? At Port Kaituma, a Jones loyalist named Larry Layton, who left with Ryan, pulled a gun. Although Layton later denied it-—saying it was his idea to go after the congressman's plane—Jones may have instructed him to shoot the pilot when the plane was airborne. But the party was too large and they were going to take two planes. Layton wounded two, leveled the gun at Dale Parks's chest and fired. Dale fell back, thinking he had been shot, but the gun had jammed. He jumped Layton, and, with the help of another man, wrestled the gun away.
Meanwhile, gunmen arrived from Jonestown and began firing at the other plane. Ryan, Patty Parks, and newsmen Bob Brown, Don Harris, and Greg Robinson were killed. Others were wounded. The gunmen retreated to Jonestown.
"Those people won't reach the States," Jones told the community. Then he said it was time for all of them to die. He asked if there was any dissent. An older woman rose and said she didn't think it was the only alternative. Couldn't the temple members escape to Russia or Cuba? The old woman continued to plead with Jones. She had the right to choose how she wanted to live, she said, and how she wanted to die. The community shouted her down. She had no such right. She was a traitor. But she held her ground, an elderly woman, all alone.
"Too late," Jones said. He instructed Larry Schact, the
town doctor, to prepare the poison. Medical personnel brought the equipment into a tent
that had been used as a school and library. There were large syringes, without the needles, and small plastic containers full of a milky white liquid.
Jones told the community that the Guyanese Defense Force would be there in forty-five minutes. They'd shoot first and ask questions later. Those captured alive, he said, would be castrated. It was time to die with dignity. The children would be first.
A woman in her late twenties stepped out of the crowd. She was carrying her baby. The doctor estimated the child's weight and measured an amount of the milky liquid into a syringe. A nurse pumped the solution into the baby's mouth. The potassium cyanide was bitter to the tongue, and so the nurse gave the baby a sip of punch to wash it down. Then the mother drank her potion.
Death came in less than five minutes. The baby went into convulsions, and Jones—very calm, very deliberate—kept repeating, "We must take care of the babies first." Some mothers brought their own children up to the killing trough. Others took children from reluctant mothers. Some of the parents and grandparents became hysterical, and they screamed and sobbed as their children died.
"We must die with dignity," Jones said. "Hurry, hurry, hurry." One thirteen-year-old girl refused her poison. She spit it out time after time and they finally held her and forced her to take it. Many people in the pavilion, especially the older ones, just watched, waiting. Others walked around, hugging old friends. Others screamed and sobbed.
Jones stepped off his throne and walked into the audience. "We must hurry," he said. He grabbed people by the arm and pulled them to the poison. Some struggled, weakly. One girl put up a fight and she had to be injected.
After an individual took the poison, two others would escort him, one on each arm, to a clearing and lay him on the ground, face down. It wouldn't do to have bodies piled up around the poison, slowing things down.
