The Jonestown Massacre CIA Mind Control Run Amok?

Excerpted from 50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, Copyright) 1995,
By Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen A Citadel Press Book --------------
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On November 18, 1978, in a cleared-out patch of Guyanese jungle, the
Reverend Jim Jones ordered the 91 members of his flock to kill
themselves by drinking a cyanide potion, and they did.

The cultists were brainwashed by the megalomaniac Jones, who had named
their jungle village after himself and held them as virtual slaves, if
not living zombies. Jones himself was found dead. He'd shot himself in
the head, or someone else had shot him. Square-jaw, jet black hair and
sunglasses, looking like a secret service agent on antipsychotic
drugs, Jones takes his place alongside Charles Manson in America's
iconography of evil.

But was Jones really a lone madman as Americans are so often advised
about their villains? Is it plausible that more than nine hundred
people took their own lives willingly, simply because he told them to?
Or is there another explanation?

Not long after the slaughter in Jonestown, whispers began--strange
hints of human experiments in mind control, even genocide, and the
lurking presence of the CIA. At the very least. these stories
maintained, the U.S. government could have prevented the Jonestown
massacre, but instead it did nothing. At worst, Jonestown was a CIA-
run concentration camp set up as a dry run for the secret government's
attempt to reprogram the American psyche. There are suggestions of
parallel "Jonestowns" and that the conspiracy did not end with the
deaths in Guyana.

Jim Jones was born May 13,1931, son of a Ku Klux Klansman in Lynn,
Indiana. His mother, he claimed, was a Cherokee Indian. That has never
been verified.

An unsupervised child, Jones became fascinated by church work at an
early age. By 1963 he had his own congregation in Indianapolis: The
People's Temple Full Gospel Church. It was an interracial
congregation, something then unheard of in Indiana. Young Jim Jones
crusaded tirelessly on behalf of blacks. He also suffered from
mysterious fainting spells, heeded advice from extraterrestrials,
practiced faith healing, and experienced visions of nuclear holocaust.

Certain that Armageddon was imminent, that Indianapolis itself was to
be the target of attack, Jones sought guidance. He found it in the
January 1962 issue of Esquire  magazine. An article in the
occasionally ironic men's mag named the nine safest places in the
world to get away from the stresses and anxieties of nuclear
confrontation. One of those retreats was Brazil. Intimations of
Jones's link to the CIA begin all the way back there.

According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News, Jones's
neighbors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (where he lived before moving to
Rio De Janeiro), remembered his claim to be a retired navy man who
Rreceived a monthly payment from the U.S. government.S They also
remembered that Jones--who later claimed that he was forced to sell
his services as a gigolo to support his family--"lived like a rich
man."

"Some people here believed he was an agent for the American CIA, " one
neighbor reported.

Neighbors' recollections notwithstanding, Jones's biographer Tim
Reiterman says that the Jones family "lived simply" in Brazil,
subsisting on rice and beans. When he returned to the United States,
shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Jones told
his followers that he had spent his time in Brazil helping orphans.
Eventually, he moved his church to Ukiah, California, then to San
Francisco, where it became a fundraising force courted by local
politicians.

Before Jones arrived in Brazil, he'd stopped in Georgetown, Guyana.
Though his stop there was a quick one, he managed to garner some ink
in the local media by publicly charging churches with spreading
communism. According to Reiterman, it appeared a calculated attempt to
"put himself on the record as an anticommunist."

Fifteen years later, he would tantalize his Jonestown flock with
promises to move the People's Temple from Guyana to the Soviet Union.
In a 1979 book, one former Jones devotee, Phil Kerns (whose mother and
sister died at Jonestown), raises the possibility of a Soviet
conspiracy behind Jonestown.

"Jones was a Marxist," Kerns wrote, "who had numerous contacts with
officials of both the Cuban and Soviet governments." Among other
suspicious facts, Kerns notes that shortly before the massacre two
People's Temple members spirited $500,000 out of the cult's colony to
the Soviet embassy.

Jones's deputies did meet frequently with Soviet officialsQso
frequently, in fact, that they became a running joke in Guyana's
diplomatic circles. Jones told his followers that the CIA had
"infiltrated" Jonestown.

Later, as we'll see, others raised the possibility that Jonestown was
the CIA.

The temple's dalliance with the Soviets, however, is a wholly
plausible point of contact between the cult and the Agency. Reiterman,
a skeptic of the conspiracy theory, points out that "the CIA's
presence in socialist Guyana...could be assumed." They certainly would
have taken an interest in the temple's Soviet contacts.

Why exactly was Jones interested in the Soviets? He must have known
that his professed dream of moving the temple to the U.S. S.R. was
only that, a dream. He dropped it quickly in favor of mass suicide (a
follower asked Jones, shortly before the suicides, if it weren't
possible to forget the whole thing and escape to Russia; Jones said it
wasn't). If the CIA had infiltrated the temple, or if the temple was,
even in part, a CIA operation, then members' sojourns to the Soviet
embassy would have had a more pragmatic purpose.

The CIA was first with news out of Jonestown, reporting the mass
suicides. The suicides followed an attack, ordered by Jones, on a
party led by Congressman Leo Ryan, in Guyana to investigate alleged
human rights abuses at Jonestown. The gunmen struck at Port Kaituma
airfield, as the Ryan party was preparing to depart. Ryan was
assassinated in the attack. Four others died as well. Several more
were shot, including Reiterman, then a reporter for the San Francisco
Examiner. Among the wounded was U.S. embassy official Richard Dwyer.

Wounded, but ambulatory.

Did Dwyer stroll back to Jonestown after the airstrip assault? Was he
there during the massacre? Reportedly, at one point on a tape recorded
as the killings began, Jones's own voice commands, "Get Dwyer out of
here!" Reiterman assumes that this was a "mistake" on Jones's part,
that Dwyer was not actually there. If he was, however, the
implications are chilling.

Dwyer was an agent of the CIA.

For his part, Dwyer neither confirms nor denies that he was a CIA
agent, but he was identified in the 1968 edition of Who's Who in the
CIA. A month after the massacre the San Mateo Times, a Bay Area
newspaper (hometown paper of Leo Ryan), reported that "State
Department officials acknowledge that a CIA agent was dispatched to
Jonestown within minutes of the airstrip assault." Dwyer denied to the
Times that he was there at the time. According to one report, Dwyer's
next stop after Guyana was Grenada.

Nor was Dwyer necessarily the only intelligence-connected character in
Guyana. The U.S. ambassador himself, John Burke, later went to work
for the "intelligence community staff" of the CIA. Richard McCoy,
another embassy official, has acknowledged his counterintelligence
work for the U.S. Air Force. The socialist government of Guyana had
piqued the interest of U.S. intelligence for years. If there were
covert operations going on there, no one should be surprised.

Leo Ryan's aide Joseph Holsinger feared that the CIA might have been
running a covert operation there so sinister it would shock even
hardened CIA-watchdogs. In 1980 Holsinger, who'd already discovered
Dwyer's presence at Jonestown, received a paper from a professor at
U.C. Berkeley. Called "The Penal Colony," the paper detailed how the
CIA's mind-control pro- gram, code-named MK-ULTRA, was not stopped in
1973, as the CIA had told Congress. Instead, the paper reported, it
had merely been transferred out of public hospitals and prisons into
the more secure confines of religious cults.

Jonestown, Holsinger believed, was one of those cults.

There were large amounts of psychoactive, i.e., mind-control, drugs
found on the site of the suicides. Larry Layton, the Jones lieutenant
who became the only person charged in any of the killings (he was in
the airstrip hit team, and somehow survived the Jonestown massacre),
was described as sinking into a "posthypnotic trance" as he sunk ever
deeper under Jones's spell. Layton's own father called him "a robot."

Layton's brother-in-law, the man who arranged the lease on Jonestown
with the Guyanese government for Jones, was reportedly a mercenary for
the CIA-backed UNITA rebels in Angola. Layton's father, according to
Holsinger, was the biochemist in charge of chemical warfare for the
U.S. Army at its Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.

Jones himself, the supposed Soviet sympathizer, was once a fundraiser
for Richard Nixon, around the same time Jones declared himself the
reincarnation of both Jesus and Lenin.

Then there was the problem of the bodies. The Jonestown body count
jumped by about four hundred within two days after the suicides,
leading to speculation that escapees may have been hunted down and
killed. In any case, Guyanese coroner Leslie Mootoo testified that as
many as seven hundred of the dead appeared to have been forcibly
killed, not "suicides" at all.

"I believe that it is possible that Jonestown may have been a mind-
control experiment,S Holsinger said in a 1980 lecture, "that Leo
Ryan's congressional visit pierced that veil and would have resulted
in its exposure, and that our government, or its agent the CIA, deemed
it necessary to wipe out over nine hundred American citizens to
protect the secrecy of the operation. "

The "operation," if there was one, may have continued after the
suicides. There have been attempts to repopulate Jonestown with
Dominican and Indochinese refugees, backed by the Billy Graham
organization. There was a Jonestown doppelganger in Guyana even while
Jones was still in business. Self- styled "Rabbi" David Hill, with his
eight thousand-member Nation of Israel cult, was powerful enough to
earn the nickname "vice prime minister" in his travels through the
country.

One final, weird note: A memo that allegedly passed between Jones and
People's Temple lawyer Mark Lane (who escaped the massacre) showed the
two pondering the relocation of Grace Walden to Jonestown. Walden was
a key witness to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Lane
represented King's accused assassin, James Earl Ray. When the memo
turned up, Lane denied that he had discussed moving Walden. (He claims
that the memo was part of an "army intelligence coverup" of the King
assassination, ostensibly an attempt to discredit him and, through
him, Walden.) Most of the People's Temple rank-and-file were black.
Most of the leadership was white. Joyce Shaw, a former member, once
mused that the mass suicide story was a coverup for "some kind of
horrible government experiments, or some sort of sick, racist thing. .
. a plan like the GermansU to exterminate blacks."

In 1980, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
announced that there was "no evidenceS of CIA involvement at
Jonestown.

MAJOR SOURCES

Kerns, Phil. People's Temple, PeopleUs Tomb. Plainfield, NJ: Logos
International, 1979.

Kilduff, Marshall, and Ron Javers. The Suicide Cult. New York: Bantam
Books, 1978.

Krause, Charles. Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Account.  New York:
Berkley Books, 1978.

Moore, Rebecca. A Sympathetic History of Jonestown. Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellon Press, 1985.

Reiterman, Tim. Raven: The Untold Story of the Reverend Jim Jones and
His People.  New York: E.P. Dutton, 1982.

This chapter owes a debt to research assembled by John Judge.

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