I posted you tube clip on MK Ultra debunking in six minutes,
I dont realy know what to think about the Mk Ultra program on going?
But if you look close at events and players in Jonestown mass murder
you might just begin to wonder if this may have been some kind of MK Ultra
play.
I lived in San Francisco at that time of mass murder, Knew Melvin Beli who was laywer for Peoples temple sueing U.S Govt for harrasing Church.
I would often find propaganda leaflets on the munie buses Id ride in SF threating Peoples Temple members, leaflets claimed to be from Neo nazis???
I found leaflets interesting, I collected propaganda leaflets when I spent a year in south Korea, they came from north Korea.
The leaflets threating Jones town churh members seemed strange. The real sorce???
Congressman Leo Ryan was not a friend of the CIA.
I dont by a lot of the conspiracy bunk thats out today,
But the Jones town mass suicide I feel certian was a mass murder,
And Jim Jones the fall guy.




WAS THERE A C.I.A. CONSPIRACY

TO DESTROY JONESTOWN?

DISINFORMATION

The rumors persist. For twenty years, rumors that no one can ever trace to the source, nor produce a single document, a single witness, a shred of evidence. "Jim Jones was C.I.A." "Jonestown was a C.I.A. mind control experiment." "Jonestown was MK Ultra." "The assassins from Jonestown were like Manchurian candidates."

When rumors persist and persist and there is no basis, no evidence, no documents, no witnesses..... Does it get you wondering? Who planted the rumors out there? Have you ever been given even ONE source?

As is detailed in "SNAKE DANCE: Unravelling the Mysteries of Jonestown," these stories were spread as part of an ongoing disinformation campaign. Why was such a campaign even needed? Both media and government had succeeded in claiming that "insane cult leader" covered this situation quite nicely. Why make anything up, when this story already served so well?

There was just one serious loose end. Understand, the C.I.A. had a major problem regarding the assassination. Congressman Leo Ryan was so passionately anti-C.I.A., that his aides and family immediately thought that the C.I.A. had killed him. And as likely as not, they did.

Yet the assassins were supposed to be from Jonestown, not the C.I.A. There was only one "solution." Turn Jim Jones into the C.I.A. No longer enough to methodically detach the monster from the real world, much less realpolitik, he must now be linked with the suspect intelligence agency. An agency Jim Jones would undoubtedly rather have had his eyes gouged out than join.

Joseph Holsinger, a Ryan aide, was making noises to look into the C.I.A. So was Jackie Speier, the aide who accompanied the Congressman to Jonestown, who specifically suspected Richard Dwyer. Patricia Ryan, a Ryan daughter, became so enmeshed in the C.I.A. stories, that she turned into an anti-cult activist, sporting wild charges allegedly linking Jim Jones with the C.I.A.

Disinformation hell was born, complete with Dracula Jones and demons of the deep. That the stories were devious, illogical, easily disproved, unimaginably "perfect," mattered not. People were vulnerable. They wanted answers.

The disinformation stories hinged on two lies: 1) Jonestown was a violent place with a violent leader, who "ordered" the assassination as a logical extension of "hundreds of guns" and "hit squads"; 2) Whatever brave anti-C.I.A. crusader Leo Ryan had been against, Jim Jones was for.

The tales about a violent place with a violent leader were based upon lies by defector Deborah Layton about "hundreds of guns" in Jonestown. In point of fact, both Guyanese and American authorities discovered all of thirty-nine small weapons at Jonestown, mostly .22 caliber – barely enough to defend 1,200 people against the natural hazards of the jungle. Peoples Temple had been historically non-violent for twenty-five years, including life at Jonestown. Its small smattering of weapons was only brought in after the community had already been attacked by mercenaries in September, 1977. The community was virtually defenseless.

Yet the premise of violence was considered "already proven," in that both media and government went with the "Jim Jones ordered…" story straight down the line, evidence not even entering in. There was no need to "prove" what you have already persuaded the whole world to believe. The jungle was thousands of miles away. No one would touch disassembling the story with a ten-foot pole.

Violent intent thus "proven," no one even NOTICED that NBC’s Bob Brown’s filming of the assassination on site at the airstrip, revealed a highly trained team of professional assassins, or questioned whether the attack was even within the capability of anyone living at Jonestown.

The question now became merely, could this extremely violent, "brainwashed" group of people have been orchestrated by the C.I.A.? The shadowy disinformation mongerers concocted the perfect tale to personify "Yes."

First, who was "the C.I.A. plant" within Jonestown? Well, that was charged to Philip Blakey, who "recruited mercenaries for the C.I.A. in the 1975 Angolan Civil War." Wow. It took me years to track down why, of all C.I.A. misdeeds, they chose that. It turns out that Leo Ryan’s original crusade against the C.I.A. was the expose, through newsman Daniel Schorr, of the C.I.A. recruiting mercenaries for the 1975 Angolan Civil War!

As for Philip Blakey, he first came to Peoples Temple as a British teenager, to marry Deborah Layton. He was one of the first settlers at Jonestown, who ferried supplies up and down river. He was continually both visible and indispensable. This was a bizarre and preposterous choice of "C.I.A. plant," but his inaccessibility as a foreigner, his having been the former brother-in-law of Larry Layton (who went off as a lone vigilante with a gun), and his role as captain of the Temple boat (which was used to concoct completely baseless "rumors of the escape of Jim Jones" were undoubtedly factors that led to an otherwise arbitrary choice of Philip.

It was also undoubtedly thought that if the Ryan family and aides were fed something as inflammatory as involvement in the 1975 Angolan Civil War, Leo Ryan’s first crusade, they would be so horrified, they would fall for it hook-line-and-sinker, and never look anywhere else. This proved true.

The second "hook" into Ryan’s various anti-C.I.A. crusades, was the C.I.A.’s notorious MK Ultra project – a sinister mind control experiment. No one ever even noticed that the main source pushing this disinformation was the Cult Awareness Network, featuring Louis Jolyon West, long suspected to be in on the MK Ultra program!!!

One only has to glance at the cover of SNAKE DANCE, a collage of smiling photos from Jonestown, to see how preposterous this disinformation was. There was never any evidence, much less proof for this charge, and had the newspapers only been willing to print the materials in RAVE REVIEWS, materials that all went through my own hands, the MK Ultra mess would never have taken hold.

Yet the Ryan family wound up pressing a suit against the federal government with all those wild, false charges: Philip Blakey, MK Ultra, mind control experiment, "Manchurian candidates," and the like. Naturally, it was an impossible suit to press, its premises having been designed by dead-end specialists to go nowhere.



THE REAL STORY

Yet we are still left with a probing question: Was there a C.I.A. connection to Jonestown? Why, after all, would such false, convoluted stories be invented, were there not something at stake to protect?

Within Peoples Temple, there was always suspicion of intelligence agency involvement in the high-powered campaign to destroy the church. Those suspicions may have indeed created "paranoia," but the bases for the suspicions were all too real:

PLANTS, PROVOCATEURS, GOVERNMENT HANDLERS

Up until the Spring of 1977, Peoples Temple was a church highly-acclaimed for humanitarian service. Then a fierce smear campaign burst on the scene, in the Murdoch and Hearst presses in San Francisco. It pursued the church relentlessly, with smears, innuendoes, insinuations, and unsubstantiated charges accusing the church of fraud, coercion, irregular notarizations, misuse of government funds, break-ins, intimidation, to implications of murder! All investigations that were whipped up were later dropped for lack of evidence. Every attempt to rebut the charges in the press was met with a refusal to print a word.

These attacks were not launched by amateurs. No "disgruntled ex-member" had the resources, funding or connections to launch a relentless, one-sided campaign, which also included the foreign press, especially cities known to have large concentrations of Guyanese immigrants, like London and Toronto. Intensive lobbying campaigns in both Washington and Georgetown (the Guyanese capital) ensued.

Who would have the power and clout to do this? The tiny but influential group had three components: disgruntled ex-members, without power, resources or funding; government plants in the group who later "defected"; non-member government-based "handlers."

The smear campaign, first line of attack, was launched by a couple named Elmer and Deanna Mertle, who changed their names to Jeannie and Al Mills for publicity purposes. They were veterans of the far-right-wing John Birch Society, having claimed a political conversion to the left when they joined the church.

It turned out that there was no "conversion" at all. It was discovered that they had been coordinating all along with a man named David Conn, who admitted to the Berkeley Barb in the Fall of 1977 that he had been "investigating Peoples Temple all the (six) years his friends the Mertles were members." David Conn also tried to bribe/blackmail Native American leader Dennis Banks into denouncing Jim Jones publicly, under threat of being extradited back to a South Dakota jail. Although Banks, a man with nineteen children, feared he could be killed in jail, he swore out an affidavit and went public with the tale. In his affidavit, he also swore that Conn had bragged of his ties with the Treasury Department.

David Conn and his ex-wife Donna, had also bragged of "high priority Treasury Department numbers" in secretly taped conversations. Indeed, in just the second smear against Peoples Temple, the I.R.S. tax code was quote chapter and verse, as to what it would take to remove the federal tax exemption of a church. Their specific grievance was listed as political – that the church was secretly involved in politics.

It is likely that the Mertle/Mills and Conn were F.B.I. agents, common enough for infiltrators of left-wing groups by J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO in the 60’s and early 70’s. Jim Jones was swiftly gaining a reputation as a political dissident, setting up Peoples Temple as a public forum for a whole host of leaders and causes on the left.

But the Mills and Conn were only the kernel of a more menacing group of personnel. Joseph Mazor, whom the Temple discovered was an agent of Interpol, through a document authored by a known Interpol agent, Louis B. Sims, told the Berkeley Barb that it was he who hired the expensive P.R. firm of Russom, Lowry & Leeper, to launch the smear campaign against Peoples Temple, as confirmed with one of their account executives, Bob Kenney. Mazor refused to disclose his source of funding, but said that they were "not present not past members of Peoples Temple," i.e. an outside government source.

Mazor had also been mysteriously granted a State investigator’s license (including bonding) in May, 1977, "just in time to investigate Peoples Temple," even though he sported a recent prison record for fraud and bogus checks. A letter from the State of California claimed that high-level recommendations had overridden their normal strictures against bonding a convicted forger.

It was also Joseph Mazor who claimed to have led the mercenary raid into Jonestown in September, 1977, claiming that his original assignment had been to kidnap children and then "kill all the adults," i.e. mass extermination.

Just days following the tragedy, Mazor was paraded across the t.v. screen, claiming that "It was considered that Jim Jones would become a major political force in the Caribbean within five years." Was this his motive for involvement all along? And what of the known planned move to the then-Soviet Union? Would that have lessened the concerns? Undoubtedly not. But the key here is that these concerns were now international.

Indeed, the concerns were very international, beyond the province of the F.B.I. and into the province of the C.I.A. In fact, this was turned into an international matter nearly as soon as it began. In the Fall of 1977, just a month or two after the original smear in Murdoch’s New West magazine, duplicate smears appeared in newspapers thousands of miles apart, in the Toronto Star, where there was known to be a large concentration of Guyanese immigrants, and in the New Times weekly in the Soviet Union, with the interest of discreditation in a camp we wanted as "friends." The headline of one was "Profits of a Prophet" and the other, "A Prophet Heads South With Profit," with the corresponding texts similar. This was an expression never used in any other press coverage. The articles appeared within two weeks of each other, and could not have originated from any standard U.S. news service.

From there on in, scores of "dirty tricks" pursued Peoples Temple at every turn: anonymous threatening phone calls falsely blamed on the church, phony break-ins, even physical attacks on individuals. A reporter, Kathy Hunter, was lured to Guyana by a phony call claiming to be the Prime Minister, then when she arrived, she was taken in hand by one Pat Small, a woman thought to be C.I.A. by the Guyanese government. The rest was a series of bomb threats and fire alarms, disruptions of the Guyanese Parliament, and finally a government invitation to leave. All the press in the U.S. blamed Peoples Temple, although the church had nothing to do with it.

The person coaching reporter Kathy Hunter through this entire fiasco was one Timothy O. Stoen. Stoen had been the church’s top attorney, strategist and close confidante and friend of Jim Jones. It was Stoen who appeared to be a classic agent provocateur, compliments of the U.S. government, during his years in Peoples Temple, pushing terrorist ideas as extreme as building bomb factories and poisoning the water supply of Washington, D.C. Thank God no one followed through.

Stoen came to Peoples Temple claiming to be from the far left, but later information surfaced that he was really a far right wing ideologue who had run spying missions to East Berlin in the early sixties.

Stoen was in a favored position in the church, had no personal grievance to force his departure, and no relatives left in the church. Yet upon leaving, he falsely claimed paternity of Jim Jones’ own son, John Victor, by his wife, Grace Stoen. Scores of people had known for years the truth of the child’s paternity, which had been repeatedly admitted and discussed by both Timothy and Grace Stoen.

Stoen set up lobbying offices in Washington to push his false causes, and shuttled back and forth between Washington and Guyana. The source of his funding (being out of work, and having lived "communally" in Peoples Temple) has been undisclosed to this day, though Stoen was discovered to have secret accounts in countries where the church had never done any banking.

Stoen’s false vendetta was pushed ferociously through the courts, and shortly after the Stoen’s attorney came to Guyana to file court papers, a mercenary raid on Jonestown ensued. Thereafter, Stoen lodged repeated mercenary threats, even being recorded in a Ukiah Daily Journal editorial, and the State Department log in Georgetown, Guyana. This documentation appears in "SNAKE DANCE."

Just days before the tragedy at Jonestown, Stoen told a Temple member that he had "vowed to destroy Jonestown" and that he was "counting on Jim [Jones] to overreact."

Stoen also used the false paternity claim to lure Congressman Leo Ryan to Jonestown, to his death. The Congressman’s aid had been secured as early as a whole year before the tragedy when, on November 18, 1977, Ryan unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Justice Department to force the child’s return to the States. The Congressman arrived in Guyana long after the matter had already been decided in Jones’ favor in the Guyanese courts, yet he wrote the San Francisco Temple that he was indeed going to Jonestown to "retrieve Tim Stoen’s son."

Stoen knew this was a "non-issue," cruelly pushed to destabilize Jim Jones personally, to justify military threats against a peaceful community, and to force the disbandment of Jonestown. Yet he augmented his campaign by soliciting false affidavits from two spiteful young women, Yulanda Crawford and Deborah Layton, to brand Jonestown as "a concentration camp" and provoke a Congressional investigation he knew he could not fairly win.

This extreme, false, and dangerous vendetta went yet one step further. Why was it Leo Ryan who was targeted for the deadly mission overseas? Look at Ryan’s record. He was the most vocal anti-C.I.A. critic in the entire U.S. Congress at the time! Leo Ryan and the C.I.A. had an ongoing hatefest. There would have been no one more tempting for the C.I.A. to target for death than Congressman Ryan.



AN UNSOLVED ASSASSINATION

The killing of the Congressman at the airstrip had all the earmarks of a professional military hit. How do we know? The eyewitness journalists who wrote of the assassination described it as "silent, calm, brutal, carefully planned and mercilessly executed’" by well-trained killers.

There were never any reliable eyewitness identifications of the assassins. The official government eyewitness, Jim Cobb, admitted to the press that he never even had the shooters in his line of vision! The final tape at Jonestown repeatedly denied any knowledge of the identity of the Congressman’s assassins, and probing further, it said of the people who brought the report from the airstrip, "They saw it happen, and ran into the bush…" In other words, the people from Jonestown were not the shooters, but witnesses. And given the layout of the airstrip, they would have been looking at the shooters’ backs, not their faces. To this day, the assassins have not been identified.

Other complicating, unexplained factors involve that the shooters came from a second vehicle that had suddenly barrelled on in, and that dum-dum bullets were used in the assassination. The killers were so expert, that they easily disarmed Guyanese police on site, shot out the tires of the plane, and calmly walked through the wounded killing them.

The film taken by an NBC newsman on site also survived. It shows a sophisticated military formation called a "diamond" perfectly and professionally executed. Jonestown was not a paramilitary camp in any way, shape or form. Contrary to the lies about "hundreds of guns," the authorities discovered only the thirty-nine small weapons in tragedy’s wake. There was no military training whatsoever in Jonestown. There was no capability to pull off this professional "hit." So we must consider the most logical suspect for the killing of the Congressman: the C.I.A.



MORE MURDERS

Nor were these the only murders. In February, 1980, the notorious Mills announced publicly to a group of Marin College students, that they wanted OFF the anti-Temple circuit and were "anxious to build a normal life." A mere five days later, they were found dead in their Berkeley home. The police described the killings as "professional," using dum-dum bullets and leaving no traceable clues. There were no signs of forced entry or burglary, and the police surmised the killings were done by "someone they knew." These killings, and their highly suspicious timing, have remained unsolved to this day.

Shortly later on, the Guyanese Ambassador to the United States, Laurence Mann, and his young wife Paula, a survivor from Jonestown, were found murdered, along with their infant child. Relatives who had seen him just the night before, said "nothing was wrong." Yet the murders were portrayed as a "murder/suicide" from distress over Jonestown. Ambassador Mann had never been a member of the Jonestown community at all. Why was this family really massacred? What did they know that could not come out? And who did these murders?

This and other information surrounding the Jonestown Tragedy is so suspect and inflammatory, surely it is long overdue to investigate putting the blame for numerous deaths where it appears to belong: at the feet of the C.I.A.



AFTERMATH AT JONESTOWN RAISES

MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

The suicides at Jonestown were a psychologically complex and tragic episode, analyzed at length in another piece on this site, "Jonestown: The Human Story" (HUMAN STORY). There is no doubt that Jim Jones was destabilized, as well as gravely ill by the end, that he personally believed a military force would be closing in, and that most believed him when they took the plunge towards death. On the final tape made at Jonestown, there is mostly support of Jim Jones. One dissenter, Christine Miller, is listened to carefully and at length, but others do not take her side. Since the tape was so heavily spliced, and the world only looked to damn Jim Jones, opposition would be in tact were it there, and support left out.

Incomprehensible though it may seem, and the horrifying anathema of suicide, it is likely that support really was high. People loved their homegrown community, felt persecuted, and were fiercely intent to stay. Whatever their qualms, Stoen, Ryan, and their media circus were hardly viewed as "rescuers" to all but the tiniest few.

What we cannot tell from the tape however, is what actually happened in the death process beyond that it began with poisonings. Disturbing facts later emerged from the Guyanese coroner, Leslie Mootoo, and others on the scene. If we believe even half the claims, hundreds of bodies were forcibly injected from behind while trying to escape, shot with guns or arrows, and generally leaving a far more gruesome mess than would happen from poisonings alone.

Is this how it really happened? If it was not, who had an interest is making it appear that way, and what personnel were in Jonestown in the hours following the deaths, who could have disturbed the death scene?

First, the receiving doctors in the United States were completely dismayed at the negligence and botching of even the alarmingly few autopsies (seven) that were performed. One of those doctors, Rudiger Breitenecker, complained that not a single body was even tested for cyanide poisoning, that the bodies autopsied were embalmed before being shipped to the States, and that they were told to look for needle marks which they never found.

Nevertheless, these were the claims of coroner Leslie Mootoo, according to Freedom Magazine: "Many died from injections of cyanide. After 32 hours of nonstop work in stifling heat… in Mootoo’s words, ‘We gave up.’ By that time, 187 bodies killed by injections had been examined by Mootoo and his team. Victims had been injected in portions of their bodies they could not have reached themselves, such as between the shoulder blades or in the back of the upper arm. ‘Those who were injecting them knew what they were doing’ [i..e. medically] Mootoo said."

The horrifying thought conveyed in that quote, suggesting that half of Jonestown was like a Nazi security force who forcibly killed the other half, does not even meet tests of logic or reason. This was a peaceful, non-violent community, moreover, with a limited medical staff, and security staff with no military training and (according to interviews) uncomfortable around guns. Although the final tape could certainly qualify as emotionally coercive, there is no suggestion of being physically coercive.

The last person to leave the scene alive, Stanley Clayton, told the coroner’s jury in Matthews Ridge (an adjoining town) that when he left, only 100-200 people were still alive, and that although the scene was gruesome, it was peaceful, with Marceline Jones hugging people saying "I’ll see you in your next life." Indeed, there was an explicit final letter left at Jonestown (see FINAL WITNESS), which is specific about people passing on in a peaceful, if grief-laden procession.

So who was it who desecrated the bodies at Jonestown in such a gruesome manner? First, what might be the motive? One motive is clear: Make Jim Jones look like a brutal murderer of his own people, to bolster the claim that he had "ordered" the assassination of the Congressman. That would deflect investigation of the facts, much less consideration of a frame. Surely Jim Jones was responsible for everything. Case closed.

Who was responsible for the desecration? Who arrived at Jonestown before the coroner; before, indeed, anyone else arrived "officially"? Had forces arrived clandestinely, and if so, who were they, and how much time did they have to make the scene appear as they wanted?

The answer to these two questions appears to be, respectively, "Yes" and "A lot of time." First, the tragedy happened the night of Saturday, November 18th. The first team brought in "officially" was the Guyanese Defense Force, along with survivors from Jonestown brought back to identify bodies. That did not happen until Monday morning, November 20th. For the entire day of Sunday, November 19th, presumably no one was at Jonestown at all.

Yet two completely separate sources confirm that U.S. Special Forces (Green Berets) were in Jonestown within five or six hours. The first was a source from within the U.S. military, one Charles Huff from the U.S. Army Special Forces in Panama. According to FREEDOM Magazine, he was "one of the Green Berets who were the first American troops on the scene following the massacre." He said they were into Jonestown within about five hours. Indeed, Clayton told the coroner’s jury of the community falling completely silent following the deaths for 45 minutes, and that then, suddenly, there was a chorus of shouts, as well as gunfire. The source of the sounds and the gunfire, has never been identified.

Huff elaborated that "’We saw many bullet wounds as well as wounds from crossbow bolts." Huff noted that those with fatal bullet or bolt wounds appeared to have been running towards the jungle that surrounded Jonestown. Huff said that the adults who had not been shot had been killed by injections between the shoulder blades." Then enigmatically, "The killers escaped before the arrival of Huff and his team." Huff also claims that of the troops early into Jonestown, sixteen of them later "committed suicide." Given that only two Peoples Temple survivors committed suicide in the wake of the tragedy, sixteen "suicides" amongst trained combat personnel defies believability. But sixteen "suspicious deaths" is indeed a high figure, which compels investigation.

Who desecrated the bodies? Nearly no one "escaped" from Jonestown except for the tiny handful of people who ran into the jungle, and who were surely not responsible for any carnage. How could one not suspect that it was the Green Beret force itself who inflicted the purported damage?

An unexpected confirmation of U.S. troops clandestinely on site just showed up recently in a Russian book called "The Jonestown Carnage: A CIA Crime" printed by Progress Press in Moscow. Their claim was that "At about 18.00 [that’s 6 p.m. on November 18th], several S-141 military transport planes took off from military bases in Panama and Dover [Delaware] and headed for Guyana. The estimated time of flight was 3 hours 40 minutes. … Two hours later, without notifying the local authorities in the area of Venezuela where the Americans had their private missions (which served as a front for C.I.A. secret operations), three helicopters took off in the direction of Jonestown, which was 1 hour 10 minutes away."

What is startling in the Russian account, is that both their account and the American account of the arrival of Green Berets, designate the country of origin as Panama. The two independent reports tally with each other perfectly.

Equally ominous, the A & E special this past November, called "Jonestown: Mystery of a Massacre" revealed that the deaths at Jonestown were originally confirmed via a CIA radio channel, NOIWON, at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of Sunday, November 19th. The producer speculated that Richard Dwyer, the alleged C.I.A. plant in the State Department who had accompanied the Congressman to Jonestown, was the only one on site who could have made this call. But now we can see that it could have just as easily been made by U.S. Green Berets already on site, and undoubtedly under the control of the C.I.A.

What were Green Berets doing at Jonestown in the middle of the night? The C-141 MEDEVAC plane to assist the survivors of the airport shooting, according to official State Department records, did not even arrive at Georgetown from Charleston, SC until 7:55 a.m.! The Green Berets, meanwhile, were flown in immediately, before the situation at Jonestown had even been officially ascertained. They arrived in the middle of the night, but not to assist medically – rather for secret, classified work specifically at Jonestown, leaving the injured at an airstrip only seven miles away, completely unattended. Meanwhile, the MEDEVAC plane shows up on the official State Department log, but the Green Berets do not.

Was there any real concern for the people of Jonestown – their deaths, rapid evacuation of the bodies, possible survivors? Medical personnel such as the Guyanese coroner, were not sent into Jonestown for two more days! This bizarre reversal of priorities, involving moreover clandestine forces under separate command, is unsettling if not appalling, and requires investigation. Even the fact that confirmation of the suicides was received at 3:29 a.m. on the morning of the 19th, yet the incoming MEDEVAC personnel were not sent to investigate the death of over 900 people a mere seven miles away, implies not just lack of coordination between open and secret military commands, but utter disregard for human life.

Lastly, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty (also uncovered by Freedom Magazine), claimed that "The Joint Chiefs of Staff had prepared air shipments of hundreds of body bags. … Within hours, they began to shuttle them down to Georgetown, the main city. They couldn’t possibly have done that without prior knowledge that it was going to happen. It shows that there was prior planning."

What was there prior planning for? If the desecration was indeed deliberate by an invading military, what would have been done to the people of Jonestown had they still been alive when the military arrived? This author has never condoned suicide. It is nevertheless clear that the situation faced by the people of Jonestown was terrifying that night, even if they had simply waited for the military to arrive.



DOES IT ADD UP TO A C.I.A. CONSPIRACY?

None of these many, many factors singly, may constitute "proof" of a C.I.A. conspiracy to first smear Jonestown, persecute it through government and the press, frame the killing of the Congressman on its people, then brutally cover it up in a mass of desecrated bodies and spliced tapes. But there are too many pieces to possibly ignore!

It is long overdue to hold public hearings, a measure that was never taken. It is time for Washington to realize that the true assassins of the Congressman likely went free, as did the government agency who sent them there. America finally deserves the truth. It is the intention of the authors of this site to press forward with that investigation.

Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple

Chapter 16 – “McGehee v. CIA” (Excerpts)

by Rebecca Moore


On November 21, 1980, Fielding M. McGehee III filed a suit in U.S. District Court in Washington asking the Central Intelligence Committee to respond to his Freedom of Information Act request of December 6, 1978. In two years the CIA had not responded to McGehee’s request, in clear violation of FOIA law.

Fielding, better known to the Moore family as Mac, wanted information from the CIA concerning Peoples Temple. Members of Peoples Temple suspected CIA interference with the group; a few weeks after voicing their suspicions to the Moore family in letters, they were dead. The CIA seemed like a logical place to look for files on 900 ex-patriate Americans who threatened to move to the Soviet Union.

The following excerpt from A Sympathetic History of Jonestown: The Moore Family Involvement in Peoples Temple (Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1985) provides details of the lawsuit as well as CIA connections to Guyana, to Jim Jones, and to Peoples Temple.

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Carolyn and Annie believed that the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to destroy Peoples Temple. Don Freed and Mark Lane fueled that belief by uncovering a conspirator. In addition, Freed said that an official in the Guyanese Ministry of Justice knew of a CIA agent working in Jonestown. Annie’s last letter to me reflects Freed’s influence:


Mom and Dad have probably shown you the latest about the conspiracy information that Mark Lane, the famous attorney in the M.L. King case and Don Freed the other famous author in the Kennedy case have come up with regarding activities planned against us — Peoples Temple.

A few weeks after I received her letter, Annie was dead. Her words about conspiracy still fresh, my husband Mac and I immediately thought of the CIA. It wasn’t farfetched to believe the CIA might have been interested in Peoples Temple. A group of 900 Americans, mostly black, had moved to a socialist country, taking millions of dollars with it. The group espoused socialist ideals. Its leaders talked of emigrating to the Soviet Union, and met with Soviet officials in Guyana.

We decided to get some evidence from the agency itself through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). On December 6, 1978, nineteen days after the suicides, Mac asked the CIA for all documents in its files relating to:
1.The Peoples Temple which was founded in Indianapolis in the 1960’s and which had subsequent addresses in Ukiah, Redwood Valley and San Francisco, California, and Jonestown, Guyana;
2.The Agricultural Project, or Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, in Jonestown, Guyana;
3.Jonestown, Guyana;
4.The late Rev. James Jones, minister of Peoples Temple;
5.The late Carolyn Moore Layton, who died in Jonestown on November 18, and who has been described by several newspapers as the coordinator of Peoples Temple in Rev. Jones’ absence;
6.Information on Peoples Temple “defectors,” “hit squads,” and “assassination teams.”

An FOIA caseworker at the CIA told us it was one of the most thorough requests filed on Peoples Temple.

We made the request under the auspices of the Military Audit Project, the public research organization where Mac worked. We thought the organizational affiliation would give us more credibility and speed along our request. It did neither.

An unbelievable series of delays and deceptions followed. The CIA had already made at least two searches for records on the church, one in August 1977, and one on December 5, 1978 — the day before Mac wrote his request. Conducted in response to Congressional inquiries, both searches turned up documents. When we talked with CIA employees that December, however, no one told us of those searches.

Instead, the Information and Privacy officer assigned to our case persuaded Mac to limit his request to Peoples Temple. Mr. Rochester said some categories would duplicate documents in the general Peoples Temple files. Faced with a $55 computer search on each item, we agreed to narrow the request to one subject: Peoples Temple.

As a result, we did not receive all the relevant documents we initially asked for. This later became an issue in the lawsuit. The date we limited the request, December 22, would also become a critical factor.

Mr. Rochester estimated the request would take three months to process. Mac called him in March 1979 and every three months thereafter to see how our request was progressing. In October 1979, Mr. Rochester gave us an encouraging reply. The agency was examining the records, he told us, and processing our request.

We outlasted Mr. Rochester. A year after Mac wrote his initial letter, he talked to “Frieda.” Frieda refused to give him her last name. “It isn’t important,” she explained. “Everyone here knows who I am.” She said she wasn’t an FOIA caseworker, but wouldn’t say what she was. We concluded her name was an acronym for Freedom of Information Act, and that she was assigned to handle troublemakers like us.

Frieda’s mystique grew when she reported that nothing had been done on our request. She added that Mr. Rochester had left a note in our file saying we’d been informed of that in our last call. When Mac asked when we could expect the agency to act, Frieda refused to speculate. More than 550 requests stood ahead of ours, waiting to be processed first. Although Mac pressed her — “1981? 1982? 1984?” — she declined to say anything.

Mac asked her to transfer his call to someone in authority with a surname who might be able to answer some questions. He talked with the Acting Information and Privacy Coordinator, Charles Savige. Mac asked if anyone had ever sued the CIA on the issue of excessive delays, hoping the threat of litigation might stir the agency into action. It didn’t work. Savige said 20 such suits had been filed in 1979, and 17 others were filed in the first two months of 1980. Savige casually added that Mac could sue that minute, since the CIA had, in effect, denied his request by exceeding the 10-day statutory time limit. Without elaborating, Savige said some litigants were able to convince the courts that their requests should be expedited. Others weren’t.

Savige could afford to be smug. The CIA still had the case of Open America v. Watergate Special Prosecution Force to excuse its delays in handling FOIA requests.

One of the 1974 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act required federal offices to answer requests within ten working days of receipt. The agencies were also to decide administrative appeals of initial denials within twenty working days. Congress added a qualification, however, by allowing agencies to exceed the time limits if “unusual circumstances” caused unavoidable delay.

The amendment plugged a loophole in the original law. The 1966 Act contained no statutory timetable whatsoever. As a result, agencies could — and did — ignore FOI requests until the information sought lost its value.

The first significant attempt to enforce the new time limits failed. A public interest group seeking access to files compiled by the Watergate special prosecutor’s office in the Justice Department learned that Justice had a backlog of over 5000 requests. Having received no response from the department within ten days, Open America filed an administrative appeal. Twenty days later, the group sued the Justice Department in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

In October 1976, eighteen months after the amendment went into effect, the court decided that the sheer number of requests pending before an agency could represent the “unusual circumstances” anticipated by Congress when it adopted the extenuating language.

The CIA guaranteed that it would always have a backlog by keeping the number of employees working on FOI requests to a minimum. That gave the agency a reason for its lengthy delays. In 1978, for example, the year Mac made his request, the agency acted upon 1254 others, a number which fell noticeably short of the 1608 it received. And there was already a substantial backlog of 762 cases when the year began. The result: the agency ended 1978 with 1116 unanswered requests. The magnitude of the CIA’s backlog persists to this day, and the intent of the 1974 amendment remains unfulfilled.

In a 1982 report to Congress, CIA Deputy Director for Administration Harry E. Fitzwater admitted that the CIA rarely meets the ten-day statutory limit. “In almost all instances, ” he wrote, “the deadline for responding to requests and appeals expired prior to our actually working on them.” But Fitzwater failed to note the irony of blaming delays on litigants when he observed that:


Some requesters, understandably impatient over the lack of response, file administrative appeals or go into early litigation, thereby further slowing the process as we move resources to meet the priority demands of litigation.

As a result of his conversation with Savige, Mac decided to make a few more requests. He asked for all the information the CIA had already released on Peoples Temple. Savige assured him the agency hadn’t given out anything, not even a press release after the suicides. He added that the policy of the FOI office was to pool all requests on the same subject, and to answer all of them at the same time, regardless of the date the office received them. We wanted to get that policy in writing, and to make sure our request was traveling with the others on the Temple.

The CIA answered the second request quickly. “To date,” Savige wrote on March 20, 1980, “no information has been released by this Agency concerning the Peoples Temple.” This was somewhat misleading. The CIA had in fact located documents in response to the two Congressional inquiries, but had not released them.

That summer we began to consider suing the CIA. The second anniversary of Jonestown, and of our FOIA request, would pass in a few months. During those two years we had learned a number of things which strengthened our conviction that the CIA had some involvement in Peoples Temple. We didn’t know the extent of the involvement, but we believed that it existed. The recent history of Guyana proved that.

In 1953, while still a British colony, Guyana held its first elections based on popular vote. Cheddi Jagan, an Indo-Guyanese dentist, and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) won in a landslide. But the PPP was Marxist, and an independent Marxist or communist government in Guyana was intolerable to British and American interests. The British ousted Jagan and suspended the constitution.

The movement for independence soon split along personal and ideological lines. Linden Forbes Burnham, a former Jagan ally, took a faction of the PPP and formed a new party, the People’s National Congress (PNC).

Jagan continued to win the popular elections in 1957 and 1961. But turbulent strikes and demonstrations marred the stability of his government in the early 1960s. In 1964, columnist Drew Pearson wrote that the CIA and British security forces had fomented the violence. An account by P. I. Gomes, author of a chapter on Guyana in New Mission for a New People: Voices from the Caribbean, said:


The conservative-led TUC [Trade Union Congress] engaged in an 80-day strike against the Jagan government, and their strike costs of over $1,000,000 were paid by the C.I.A. through the Guyana representative of Public Service International, with the connivance of the British Prime Minister, Colonial Secretary and head of security of the British government.

The CIA also used an American trade union to provoke confrontations between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese as well as labor unrest. Two CIA operatives ran the International Division of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), funneling money and assistance to Jagan’s opponents in the labor movement. According to a 1967 New York Times article:


The agents gave advice to local union leaders on how to organize and sustain the strikes. They also provided funds and food supplies to keep the strikes going and medical supplies for pro-Burnham workers injured during the turmoil.

At one point, one of the agents even served as a member of a bargaining committee from a Guiana dike workers union that was negotiating with Dr. Jagan.

In 1964, newly-elected AFSCME President Jerry Wurf disbanded the International Division and cut all ties with the CIA. The severance came too late, though. The strikes had left 200 Guyanese dead and hundreds more injured. And Forbes Burnham had a vehicle to bring him to power.

Frustrated with an electorate that continually chose Jagan over Burnham, the British government changed the voting system to ensure Burnham’s success. In the 1964 election, Jagan and his party captured 46% of the total number of votes. But under the rigged scheme, the PPP picked up only 8.6% of the “proxy” votes required by the British. Burnham finally won an election in Guyana. [Jagan was eventually elected prime minister again in the 1990s. He died in office in 1997.]

Britain gave Guyana its independence two years later.

Unwilling to risk defeat in the 1968 election, the CIA provided the Burnham government with a new voter registration program. The Shoup Registration System International, a CIA-front organization, made up the registration lists. According to Covert Action Information Bulletin, a publication devoted to exposing CIA interference in foreign countries, the lists “were heavily padded by including horses, deceased citizens and hanged criminals.” Shoup also coordinated the 1966 voter registration drive in Viet Nam. The Pennsylvania-based company has since disappeared.

Burnham won the election, but his party did not have the two-thirds parliamentary majority required by Guyana’s constitution. To make sure he wouldn’t fail in the 1973 election, the Guyana Defense Force seized the ballot boxes and held them for twenty-four hours. Burnham got his majority, and it gave him the strength to declare the “paramountcy” of the People’s National Congress — the ruling party — over all agencies of the government.

To avoid embarrassing problems in the future, the PNC, and Burnham, passed the Referendum Act in the summer of 1978. The Act proposed a national mandate for a new constitution which, among other things, would create an “executive presidency.” In effect, Burnham could become president for life.

Widespread opposition led to a boycott of the election, and independent observers reported a twelve to fourteen per cent turnout. Burnham, however, claimed that 75% of the electorate gave him a victory. That election postponed future elections for fifteen months while the Guyanese parliament rewrote the constitution.

Burnham delayed elections again in October 1979, since effective opposition was growing. The People’s Progressive Party and the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), a new party, shared the support of eighty per cent of the Guyanese. Popular dissatisfaction with Burnham made the prime minister escalate the violence begun in the 1960s by the CIA. Political assassinations started.

As early as 1973, gunmen shot and wounded a University of Guyana biologist who was active in the WPA in its infancy. Police traced the getaway car to Hamilton Green, the Health, Housing and Labor Minister. Green also happened to be Burnham’s cousin. There were no arrests.

The successful assassination attempts came in 1979 and 1980, after Jonestown. They included the fatal stabbing of Catholic Standard reporter Father Bernard Darke in full view of the police; the shooting death of Minister of Education Vincent Teekah; the murder of two WPA activists within days of each other; the firing and disappearance of Security Chief James Mentore; and the assassination of WPA activist and Marxist historian Walter Rodney in a bomb blast.

The death of Rodney climaxed a year of civil unrest and protest over the growing repression of the Burnham government. The July 1979 anniversary of the rigged election on the referendum triggered mass protests and demonstrations. After one rally, Burnham’s party headquarters were burned; the country’s records on Jonestown burned with it. Witnesses claimed that men in Guyana Defense Force uniforms set the fire.

Burnham blamed the opposition, and arrested eight leaders in the Working People’s Alliance. Police charged three with arson: two lecturers from the University of Guyana and Dr. Rodney, a former lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Rodney had been asked to teach at the University of Guyana in 1978. When the Pan-Africanist returned to Guyana, however, his position at the university vanished.

The arrests, followed by Father Darke’s stabbing at a protest demonstration, precipitated a major strike among bauxite workers — those Afro-Guyanese who had been Burnham’s primary supporters. Clerical workers, the National Association of Agricultural, Commercial and Industrial Employees, and the Staff Association of the University of Guyana joined the bauxite workers. One quarter of the nation’s 80,000 workers went on strike.

Aside from demanding that the government honor its promise for increased wages, the workers requested that the United Nations send observers to monitor the elections scheduled for October. Strikers accused the prime minister of corruption, mismanagement and dictatorship, according to an article in The New York Times. The prime minister responded by sending his goon squad, the House of Israel, to break up the strike. He postponed the elections as well.

The trial of Rodney and the others on arson charges did not begin until almost a year after their arrest. Lincoln van Sluytman, a member of the WPA’s support committee in New York, described the opening of the trial this way:


The worldwide publicity surrounding the case led a group of international observers to attend the trial proceedings which began June 2, 1980. As a result, Burnham’s chances of quietly locking away his enemies seemed very slim.

The enemy had to be silenced.

On June 13, as Walter Rodney sat in a parked car with his brother Donald, a bomb concealed in a walkie-talkie exploded in Walter’s lap, killing him instantly. Although injured, Donald escaped and hid with friends. He explained that his brother was supposed to test the walkie-talkie from inside the Georgetown prison. on instructions from Timothy Smith, a GDF electronics expert, Walter Rodney was to look for a signal light on the radio before trying to speak. The government’s first description of Rodney’s death followed this preplanned script for the assassination. “Official accounts first said that a man had been killed outside the walls of the Georgetown Jail,” reported Covert Action,


when a bomb he was carrying to blast the prison detonated. The government claimed that the corpse was not immediately recognizable because the face had been blasted away.

But Rodney died a block away, in his car. And, unfortunately for the government, he was recognizable. Additionally,


further evidence of the government lie comes from witnesses at a Georgetown cocktail party who recall that [GDF] Chief of Staff [Norman] McClean excused himself at 8:45 p.m. on the 13th — within minutes after it happened — to meet with Burnham and others, saying Walter Rodney had been killed in an explosion. This was despite official allegations that it was not known until much later who had been killed.

Coincidentally, McClean and Health and Labor Minister Green traveled to Washington, D.C. twice during May, the month before Rodney’s death. McClean allegedly confided that their purpose was to acquire “electronics communications equipment.” Sgt. Timothy Smith disappeared.

That December, Burnham finally held the election he had postponed for two years. An international team of observers went to Guyana to monitor the process, and came away charging the police with harassment. Eric Avebury, chairman of the United Kingdom Parliamentary Human Rights Group, claimed police confiscated his notes, tapes, camera and film, detaining him twice. Other irregularities included a day’s delay in the vote counting.

On December 17, 1980, the PNC declared itself victorious. The party’s success at the polls was “fraudulent in every possible respect,” said Avebury. Forbes Burnham, newly-made Executive President with enormous police and veto powers under the new constitution, got five more years.

Things have deteriorated still further since then. The Nation reported in 1983 that:


Members of opposition groups are frequently detained, and the once-independent judiciary is now firmly under Burnham’s thumb. A parliamentary delegation from Canada recently described the human rights situation in Guyana as “repugnant”. The delegation found that citizens were being tortured and reported the existence of death squads.

The House of Israel, another group of Americans based in Guyana, does the dirty work for Burnham and the People’s National Congress. Led by an American criminal David Hill who jumped bail and ended up in Guyana, the House of Israel operates as a paramilitary organization. The “cultists” — mostly unmarried young men between the ages of 16 and 25 — wear the colors of the PNC as they break up strikes, harass demonstrators, and in some cases, assassinate Burnham’s opponents.

It is a mystery how David Hill, a convict wanted by the FBI, made it to Guyana in the first place. Still more mysterious is why he was never extradited. In any event, the press has established that House of Israel thugs stabbed Father Darke to death and beat up other protesters at the same demonstration; that their headquarters also serves as a bomb factory, which the country’s insurance director refused to insure; that they have supplied manpower as strike breakers; and that they terrorize the families of strikers in their homes.

Certainly the role Jim Jones played in the Burnham regime was curious. The Peoples Temple hierarchy maintained frequent, and even intimate, contact with government officials, discussing problems like the John Victor Stoen custody case, visits from unfriendly relatives, and, of course, Congressman Leo Ryan’s trip. One Temple member was the mistress to Guyana’s ambassador to the United States, Laurence Mann. Many Guyanese citizens we talked with felt that something was going on between officials in the Burnham government and the church. A reporter told us, “The whole story of the relationship won’t come out until Burnham’s out.” [This did not prove to be the case.]

Some have claimed that Jim worked for the CIA. We received an anonymous letter, postmarked Oakland, California, which charged that:


[Jones] said he was working for the government — the CIA people, who were using the Peoples Temple members as guinea pigs in a mind control experiment. That if this worked, it would later be used elsewhere on a massive scale after the terrible depression came, on those who would not do what the government ordered them to do.