American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  That doesn’t quite make sense, but maybe there’s a reasonable explanation. But this next one is impossible to explain away: Dr. Leslie Mootoo was Guyana’s chief medical examiner and the first forensic specialist on the scene. This man was no fly-by-night doctor down in South America; he was very well-educated, trained in London and Vienna. Dr. Mootoo examined scores of the bodies within the first couple of days, taking specimens. And he thought that in at least 700 of the cases, it wasn’t suicide but homicide. The doctor observed puncture wounds on the shoulders of a lot of the victims—a bodily location where they couldn’t possibly have injected themselves. So were they forcibly held down and injected with poison against their will? He also found the presence of cyanide in bottles that were labeled as Valium, which probably meant that’s what some people thought they were taking.6 A tranquilizer, not a deadly poison.

  Dr. Mootoo did find evidence of cyanide in most of the victims’ stomachs, and he passed along his samples to a representative of the American Embassy in the Guyanese capital of Georgetown, fully expecting they’d be forwarded on to American forensic pathologists. Except, somehow, they disappeared.7 A study seven months later published in the New England Journal of Medicine found six leading medical examiners describing the handling of the bodies by the U.S. military and others as “inept,” “incompetent,” “embarrassing,” and so on, with only circumstantial evidence of “probable cyanide poisoning.” The prestigious Journal added that only one third of the bodies could be positively identified, and that a medico-legal autopsy should have been performed on each one.8

  It turns out that only seven autopsies were ever performed—and not until a month after the bodies were embalmed! Some of the pictures from the scene showed victims wearing ID bracelets, but these also vanished somewhere between Jonestown and the U.S. air base where the bodies got shipped. The order to remove the medical tags is said to have come from the National Security Council’s staff coordinator for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs, Robert Pastor.9 (Adding to this macabre story, three bodies actually got lost and turned up years later in storage lockers in Southern California!)10

  Shortly after the massacre became public, a psychiatrist and anti-cult activist named Dr. Hardhat Sukhdeo came to Georgetown to talk with the survivors. There were 33, most of them having run off into the jungle. Sukhdeo called Jim Jones “a genius of mind control, a master,” a statement that was widely quoted in the press and framed the official Jonestown story from then on. Although a native of Guyana, Sukhdeo lived in the U.S. He admitted later that his trip had been paid for by the State Department, and when he returned he met privately with FBI agents. So did Sukhdeo also secretly “debrief ” the Jonestown survivors on behalf of the government, trying to find out what they might have seen? Why were Dr. Mootoo’s conclusions ignored by the media, while Dr. Sukhdeo’s speculation was trumpeted?

  It’s also curious that “virtually every survivor of the Jonestown massacre was eventually treated” at the Langley-Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco,11 where Jones himself had once been under psychiatric care. Except, despite attempts to obtain Jones’s medical file, it’s never been released. A lot of the research done at Langley-Porter happens to be classified, much of it by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It’s known, though, that some of this research involves the effect of electromagnetic fields on human beings, and behavior-modification techniques including hypnosis-from-a-distance.12

  Before he went to Jonestown, Congressman Ryan had already been making a name as a government watchdog. One amendment that he cosponsored required the CIA to get congressional approval before it could undertake any covert activity. Stories about MK-ULTRA had appeared in the press and Ryan wrote a letter to the Agency, “requesting confirmation or denial of the fact of CIA experiments using prisoners at the California medical facility at Vacaville,” from which Jones was reportedly getting members of his church as part of a rehab program.13 Ryan wrote he was especially interested in a former inmate, Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze, who’d ended up leading the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) group that kidnapped Patty Hearst. The CIA responded that, yes, it had sponsored tests on some volunteer inmates at Vacaville—but not involving DeFreeze, “in so far as our records reflect the names of the participants.”14 Of course, most MK-ULTRA records had already been destroyed. A month to the day after this correspondence, Ryan ended up dead on the tarmac in Guyana.

  So the central thesis of one investigative writer, Jim Hougan, is that Jones “initiated the Jonestown massacre because he feared that Congressman Leo Ryan’s investigation ... would uncover evidence that the leftist founder of the People’s Temple was for many years a witting stooge, or agent, of the FBI and the intelligence community.” Also, that the congressman’s probe “would embarrass the CIA by linking Jones to some of the Agency’s most volatile programs and operations.”15

  That makes a lot of sense to me. But none of that was brought out in the mainstream media. It was almost like they had a cleansed “bio” on Jim Jones. Who was he really? What did he do and who did he work with? When you start following this guy’s trail, he’s got intelligence community stamped all over him. He’s working for the alphabet agencies.

  Jones was born in a small town in Indiana in 1931 and, by the age of nineteen, became a faith-healing, anti-communist-spouting preacher. By the late fifties, his charisma drew a congregation of more than 2,000. At the same time, Jones may have been a police or FBI informant gathering “racial intelligence”—as quite a few of his congregation were black and he’d taken to making pilgrimages to the headquarters of Father Divine.16

  One of Jones’s boyhood friends was Dan Mitrione, later an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs. In 1970, he was taken hostage and murdered by Uruguay’s Tupamaros guerrillas. Jones admitted having stayed friends with Mitrione. He even referred to him several times in taped speeches at Jonestown.17

  The CIA claimed after Jonestown that its file on “the Rev. Jimmie Jones” was almost empty. Actually, the CIA’s Office of Security had opened a 201-file on Jones in the early 1960s, when he took off for Rio de Janeiro. Agency records showed that file stayed open for ten years, only being closed for no explained reason after Mitrione was killed. So it seems pretty likely that Mitrione had recruited Jones into the CIA, using the State Department as his cover.18

  By the time of his 201-file, Jones had already been to Castro’s Cuba in 1960. What was he there to do, preach to them and bring the heathens over to our side? Well, he stayed at the Havana Hilton where the Soviet Union had some Sputnik satellites on display, which the CIA would have been happy to get pictures of. While in Cuba, Jones definitely took photos of some crashed small planes that had carried mercenary pilots. He also encouraged Cubans he met to emigrate to the U.S. Yet somehow, on that trip or another one later, he and his wife had their picture taken with Fidel Castro himself!19

  Also in 1960, Jones got a passport toward making a several-week-long “sightseeing/culture” visit to Poland, Finland, the USSR, and England. That was a very similar journey to the one Lee Oswald made a year earlier, including the USSR part. It raises the question whether both Jones and Oswald were dispatched on some kind of government spy mission. Later the State Department identified this as the first passport Jones ever had. The problem was, a few months earlier he would’ve needed one to go to Cuba, unless he went there covertly. This again raises cloak-and-dagger type questions.

  Jones first visited Guyana in 1961, preaching against Communism. His whereabouts for a six-month period then are unknown. Somebody applied for a new passport in his name, and it looks like Jones was being impersonated on occasion, because he was said to be in Hawaii when he was actually in Guyana. Again, shades of Lee (or Harvey) Oswald! Two passports ended up being issued to Jones, one in Chicago on June 28,
1960, and another in Indianapolis on January 30, 1962.20

  Brazilian Federal Police records show that Jones and his family arrived in Sao Paolo by plane in April 1962 and traveled on to Belo Horizonte, where his boyhood chum Mitrione was an adviser at the U.S. consulate. People there remembered Jones leaving his house early in the morning and coming back late at night, carrying a big leather briefcase. “Jim Jones was always mysterious and would never talk about his work here in Brazil,” according to Sebastian Rocha, an engineer who lived near the Joneses. Rocha assumed he was a spy. Jones socialized regularly with Mitrione during his eight months in Belo Horizonte.21 Then Mitrione moved to Rio, and Jones ended up in the same neighborhood not far away.22 In Rio, Jones worked doing commission sales jobs for a “suspected CIA conduit” called Invesco.23

  Jones “is reported to have been fascinated by the magical rites of Macumba and Umbanda, and to have studied the practices of Brazilian faith-healers ... [and] conducted a study of extrasensory perception. These were subjects of interest to the CIA in connection with its MK-ULTRA program. So, also, were the ‘mass conversion techniques’ at which Jones’s Pentecostal training had made him an expert.”24

  Returning to the U.S., Jones became a formally ordained minister and started his People’s Temple, first in Indiana and later in Ukiah, California. Espousing socialism, talking against racism, his following grew. The FBI’s COINTELPRO and the CIA’s OPERATION CHAOS were going strong in the sixties, at the same time that Jones’s Temple went out of its way to forge alliances with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and Angela Davis of the Communist Party.25 A congressional report showed that various agencies had “target populations” in mind for individual and mass control including blacks and young people.26

  By 1972, Jones had brought his preaching talents to San Francisco. Four years later—at the same time he started putting Temple funds into Panamanian and Swiss banks—Jones leased some 4,000 acres from the Guyanese government. Forbes Burnham, the prime minister who’d come to power with help from the CIA, approved the deal. Weirdly, the location in Guyana’s Northwest district was virtually the same place where, back in 1845, a Reverend Smith had brought together the native population to tell them that the end of time was at hand. When this didn’t happen, 400 of Smith’s followers committed mass suicide, supposedly believing they’d be resurrected as white people.27 Whether Jones was aware of this, nobody knows. It was a place of either bad karma or heavy voodoo, I’m not sure which.

  Jones became a fairly prominent figure, even getting appointed to San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission, with a testimonial dinner in his honor. At the same time, though, there were rumors of heavyhanded cult tactics being employed. He didn’t head for Guyana with his nearly one thousand followers until July 1977, when New West magazine was putting together an exposé of the People’s Temple. Things soon got mighty strange in the jungle compound. Jones set up loudspeakers all over and would do long readings and speeches. A State Department officer who paid a visit reported that members seemed “drugged and robot-like in their reactions to questions and, generally, in their behavior towards us visitors.”28

  Congressman Ryan first heard rumblings about abuses of Americans in Jonestown from Deborah Layton, who’d been in charge of the finances in Jones’s inner circle before she “defected.” She was the daughter of Dr. Laurence Layton, former chief of the army’s Chemical Warfare Division. 29 When Ryan decided to have a personal look, at first the State Department stonewalled him. After he arrived along with a national news crew, he was met by Richard Dwyer, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy. Dwyer accompanied Ryan to the compound for a twoday visit, and was present when the congressman and his party were later ambushed at the airport—also at the massacre itself. Jones, in the “Last Tape” transcribed by the FBI, can be heard amid wailing and screams exhorting his followers to take their lives and also saying: “Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him!”30

  For a long time, Dwyer was assumed to be the CIA’s station chief in Guyana. But this was really a man named James Adkins—who turns up later approving CIA pilots to resupply the Nicaraguan Contras, against U.S. law. It was Adkins who, monitoring radio transmissions in the middle of the night, was the first outsider to hear about what one Jonestown escapee called the “suicides and murders.”31 As for Dwyer, he may still have been keeping tabs on Jonestown for the State Department; in a later court proceeding, Justice Department attorneys kept him from being questioned.

  Before Congressman Ryan left the Jonestown compound, he was attacked by a fellow wielding a knife. A death squad was then waiting for him back at the airstrip. Witnesses described the killers as walking mechanically and emotionless, “like zombies” and “looking through you, not at you.”32 Larry Layton, Deborah Layton’s brother, was one of Ryan’s executioners. He ended up the only individual ever prosecuted and sent to prison.

  Within hours of the airstrip killings came the mass deaths at Jonestown. Later, an autopsy on Jones’s body concluded he didn’t take poison, but had killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The pistol, however, was found about 200 feet away from his body. Other researchers think the body identified as Jones couldn’t have been him, because it didn’t mesh with his essential physical characteristics.33 One raised these questions: “Photos of his body do not show identifying tattoos on his chest. The body and face are not clearly recognizable due to bloating and discoloration. The FBI reportedly checked his finger prints twice, a seemingly futile gesture since it is a precise operation. A more logical route would have been to check dental records.”34 None of the survivors were around to witness what actually happened.

  And here is what Congressman Ryan’s friend, Joe Holsinger (the father of William, who raised the “broader conspiracy” idea), once wrote: “The more I investigate the mysteries of Jonestown, the more I am convinced there is something sinister behind it all. There is no doubt in my mind that Jones had very close CIA connections. At the time of the tragedy, the Temple had three boats in the water off Brazil. The boats disappeared shortly afterwards. Remember, Brazil is a country that Jones is very familiar with. He is supposed to have money there. And it is not too far from Guyana. My own feeling is that Jones was ambushed by CIA agents who then disappeared in the boats. But the whole story is so mind-boggling that I’m willing to concede he escaped with them.”35

  Holsinger is deceased now, so there’s no way to pursue what he based his conjecture on. But almost three years after Jonestown, some of the survivors filed a $63 million lawsuit against Stansfield Turner, CIA director when the massacre occurred, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. The lawsuit alleged there had been a conspiracy to “enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones” in conducting “mind control and drug experimentation.” The suit was dismissed for “failure to prosecute timely,” and all requests for an appeal were turned down.36 The surviving children of Congressman Ryan also sued the government, charging the State Department with knowing of the dangers ahead of time but failing to warn him; also, that Jonestown was a CIA mind-control experiment and the community was heavily armed and infiltrated by the CIA. The lawsuit was later dropped, for reasons that never got explained.37

  “Bo” Gritz trained a special forces team that went into Jonestown afterwards, which he says was needed “after it had reached a point where they had to destroy the evidence.” Gritz believed Jonestown “was an extension of MK-ULTRA from the CIA and there are probably other experiments going on.”38

  Will we ever know what actually happened at Jonestown? At this point, I doubt it. Since this was the time MK-ULTRA was coming to light and there could possibly be investigations into it, maybe Jonestown was “collateral damage.” By that I mean, if they had a camp going that was part of mind-control experimentation and you needed to destroy the evidence of that, what better way to do it than the “mass suicide” of a brainwashed cult?

  After studying Jonestown, I think sometimes of the large, hand-le
ttered sign that was found in front of all those bodies. It said: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”39 Whether that was a reference to MK-ULTRA is impossible to know, but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  The government should release all its files on Jim Jones and how he may have been tied into the spy network or even the mind-control program of the CIA. The Jonestown story should also give us pause, when it comes to the standard thinking that any group with a strong leader is necessarily a “brainwashed cult.” Would we say the same thing about the founder of Christianity?

  CHAPTER NINE

  ″OCTOBER SURPRISE″: THE FIRST STOLEN ELECTION

  THE INCIDENT: On the same day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, January 20, 1981, Iran released the American hostages it had been holding in our embassy there for 444 days.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: The timing was coincidental.

  MY TAKE: Reagan’s people had cut a deal with Iran to keep the hostages beyond the presidential election, to ensure that President Carter’s negotiations with Iran failed and that he lost to Reagan.

  “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”

  —Ronald Reagan

  “How can a president not be an actor?”

  —Ronald Reagan

  If you’re like me, maybe you wondered a little about the timing. Within an hour after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president on January 20, 1981, the government of Iran released all but one of the 52 American hostages they’d been holding for 444 days. The American people rejoiced. The long ordeal that began when militant Muslims took over the American Embassy in Tehran was over.