Chapter 132. Jonestown: The Peoples Temple, Political Power and the White Night of 18 November 1978

On 18 November 1978, at a remote agricultural settlement in north-western Guyana, more than nine hundred followers of the Reverend Jim Jones died, most of them from cyanide mixed into a fruit drink. The reference shelf describes it as the largest loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act before 11 September 2001. A few hours earlier, Temple gunmen had killed Congressman Leo Ryan and members of his party at the Port Kaituma airstrip [Wikipedia: Jonestown]. Few events in the history of new religious movements have produced so many incompatible interpretations. In the dominant American reading, Jonestown is the definitive example of cult mind control and a leader’s paranoia. Soviet authors writing in 1987 described a CIA massacre of a socialist commune that wanted to emigrate to the USSR. A third school, represented in the library by Michael Meiers, holds that the settlement was itself a CIA experiment in behaviour control. This chapter sets out these readings side by side, each with the evidence its authors give.

From Indianapolis to San Francisco: a Pentecostal-socialist church

The sources disagree on the founding date. An anonymous psychology handbook says Jones “started a church in 1954 called the Peoples Temple that stressed egalitarian ideals, providing for the poor, and integrating African Americans into the congregation”. It adds that healings and conferences “attracted thousands”, and that “in 1960, the organization started a soup kitchen” [Anonymous, Unbrainwashing Yourself, #62457, “The Rise and Fall of the Peoples Temple and Cult Definitions”]. Ben Hubbard writes that “Preacher Jim Jones set up his first Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955” [Hubbard, Poison, #64244, “The Jonestown Massacre”], and the reference shelf also gives 1955 [Wikipedia: Jonestown].

Jim Willis traces the religious genealogy. Jones was a Methodist minister friendly to the Latter Rain healing movement, and William Branham was often his guest at the Laurel Street Tabernacle. “One of Jones’s backers for these meetings was the Reverend Orval Lee Jaggers, an editor for William Branham’s books and publications. Jaggers … wrote about the zodiac’s influence on Christianity, for instance, and he believed strongly in UFOs. These were both doctrines that became part of the Peoples Temple dogmas” [Willis, American Cults, #63203, “Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church”]. Willis says Jones preached racial integration, directed the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in the early 1960s, and moved the congregation to California in 1965 “because he thought God had told him a nuclear war was coming” [Willis, #63203]. Sylvia Browne describes the doctrinal end-point: “the more he rejected the Bible as a pack of lies and taught that he himself was the messiah, the Second Coming of Christ. Only he, he claimed, stood between his congregation and the imminent destruction of the world in a nuclear holocaust” [Browne, End of Days, #42246, “Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple”].

According to the reference shelf, the Temple practised what it called “apostolic socialism” and preached that “those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment – socialism” [Wikipedia: Jonestown]. Its turnout helped George Moscone win the San Francisco mayoralty in 1975, and Moscone then appointed Jones chairman of the city Housing Authority. Jones gained access to Walter Mondale and Rosalynn Carter, and Governor Jerry Brown attended a 1976 testimonial dinner for him [Wikipedia: Jonestown]. Meiers devotes chapters to this period (“Moscone, Milk and Murder”; “Publicity, Provocateuring and Political Power”). He also argues that the Temple “was financed almost exclusively by agencies of the federal government through tax-funded jobs, poverty programs and give-aways” [Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment, #62471, Table of Contents; “A California Concentration Camp”]. The Romanian police author Traian Tandin likewise notes that Jones had enjoyed favour with the powerful and headed the “Comisia Locuinţelor” (Housing Commission) before resigning his posts and moving to Guyana [Tandin, Secte criminale, #23557, “Aprecieri nemeritate”].

Guyana, the Concerned Relatives and the “government campaign”

Willis writes that Jones, facing investigations into the diversion of members’ income, moved the community in 1977 to Guyana. There he “confiscated their passports”, controlled millions of dollars and “staged some rather bizarre rehearsals wherein the people practiced how to conduct a mass suicide” [Willis, #63203]. Browne describes the opposition group: “It was called the Concerned Relatives, and its purpose was to liberate loved ones from the ‘concentration camp’ of Jonestown and the grip of Jim Jones” [Browne, #42246]. The psychiatrist Joel Dimsdale reports the Temple’s reply through its lawyer, Charles Garry: “This is an organized, orchestrated, premeditated government campaign to destroy a politically progressive church.” Garry visited the settlement in November 1977 and reported favourably [Dimsdale, Dark Persuasion, #62993, Part II, “Jonestown”]. Dimsdale himself describes residents exhausted by all-night alarms and jungle labour and “required to attend socialism classes two nights a week and take weekly exams”, leaving “no time to themselves for that precious and dangerous commodity—individual thought” [Dimsdale, #62993].

The Soviet journalists B. G. Antonov and A. N. Itskov reprint the case made by the Temple’s other lawyer. They quote a Sun Reporter article of 5 October 1978 in which “Attorney Mark Lane says he has investigated the charges and found them to be false and part of a government-inspired plot to destroy this unique experiment in socialist living”. They also reproduce the Temple’s list of “reasons behind the conspiracy”, including “smear articles”, Treasury harassment and bribes offered by agents [Antonov & Itskov, The Jonestown Carnage, #64942, “Mark Lane: Conspiracy Against the Temple”; “Charged”].

The Soviet option

Antonov and Itskov print facsimiles of Temple letters to the Soviet embassy in Georgetown. One is headed “March 17, 1978 … URGENT APPEAL!” and another is dated “March 19, 1978”. The Temple wrote that it was “seeking to transfer our endangered assets to a bank within the Soviet Union”, so that its resources “would not be confiscated or otherwise expropriated by the enemies of the people”. It also declared: “We look to the Soviet Union as our symbolic homeland” [Antonov & Itskov, #64942, “Peoples Temple and the USSR”; “Our Appeal for Help”]. The authors quote testimony that on 17 November a Temple member “saw the Ryan visit as a method of preventing the emigration of the Jonestown commune to the Soviet Union”. They argue that the killings came “43 days after the publication of a report about the forthcoming suit against the US government and about the negotiations on the community’s emigration to the Soviet Union” [Antonov & Itskov, #64942, Introduction]. Their book announces itself as “strictly documentary” about “the murder, on November 18, 1978, of 918 US citizens by CIA agents”. It refers to weapons “brought by the CIA murderers who had landed at Jonestown”, and argues that “the intention of the Temple’s members to resettle in the Soviet Union caused serious concern in Washington” [Antonov & Itskov, #64942, Introduction; “Mass Murder”].

18 November 1978

Ryan flew to Guyana on 14 November with his aide Jackie Speier, reporters and relatives [Dimsdale, #62993]. Willis says Jones, fearing their report, “ordered the assassination of the entire entourage, but only Representative Ryan and four others, three of them reporters, were killed” [Willis, #63203]. Antonov and Itskov describe the defectors who left with the party (“the Parks and Boggs families, Vernon Gosney, Monica Bagby, and Larry Layton”) and write that on the second plane “Layton … fired his pistol and killed Monica Bagby and Vernon Gosney” before the gun jammed [Antonov & Itskov, #64942, “With Exclusive Material”]. Here their text departs from the encyclopedic record, which lists the five dead at Port Kaituma as Ryan and four others, Temple defectors among the wounded [Wikipedia: Jonestown].

The means had been rehearsed. Hubbard writes that at earlier White Nights members “were given a red liquid to drink and told it contained a poison that would kill them in 45 minutes. When no one died, Jones explained it was just a rehearsal”. He says Jones obtained potassium cyanide with a jeweller’s licence, on the claim that he needed it to clean gold [Hubbard, Poison, #64244]. Willis stresses that the drink was “not Kool-Aid, as it happens, but Flavor Aid” [Willis, #63203]. The reference shelf records that Jones and others called the act a “revolutionary suicide” on the death tape, and that “seventy or more individuals at Jonestown were injected with poison”. It adds that a third of the victims were minors and that armed guards had orders to shoot anyone who fled [Wikipedia: Jonestown].

Antonov and Itskov reprint a protest describing how officials first announced 409 dead and then “503 additional bodies, supposedly hidden under the 409”. They also quote U.S. Air Force Captain John Moscatelli as saying that “it was possible that someone had rearranged the bodies” [Antonov & Itskov, #64942, “New Jersey Protests Against Cremating”]. Tandin, writing from a Romanian police perspective, calls Jones “the most tragic figure” among false prophets. He gives 925 dead on “29 noiembrie 1978” and refers to Ryan as a “senator” [Tandin, Secte criminale, #23557]. These figures and titles differ from the other sources and are reported here as he gives them.

Meiers: the CIA-experiment thesis

Meiers’s book is organised as an argument: “Heil Hitler!”, “Deep Cover”, “From the Cradle to the Company”, “Three Countries, Three Commissions”, “A California Concentration Camp”, “The ‘H’ File Homicides”, “Moscone, Milk and Murder”, “Publicity, Provocateuring and Political Power”, “The Experiment”, and “The White Night”. His prologue sets the Nazi Kristallnacht beside the White Night and states the thesis plainly. “Jonestown was a medical field test in mind control designed to evaluate two auspicious behavior modification drugs on a representative cross-section of Black and Native American citizens”. He describes three groups of about three hundred: drug A, drug B and a control. Jones then staged “the only definitive test of his control; he asked his followers to commit suicide”. Meiers continues: “Jones and several of his top aides were in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the experiment; making the White Night the first U.S. government sanctioned persecution of a native minority in peacetime” [Meiers, #62471, Prologue]. He gives the Layton family a central role: “No one, not even Jim Jones himself, contributed more to the Jonestown experiment than did the family of Lisa Philip Layton”. He also points out that at Larry Layton’s trial “defense lawyer, Tony Tamburello said he wanted to find out whether Dwyer was actually a CIA operative in Guyana” [Meiers, #62471, “Deep Cover”]. This is Meiers’s thesis; none of the other sources cited in this chapter makes the same claim.

Mind control, memory and meaning

For the anti-cult movement, Jonestown was the decisive event. Hassan dates broad public awareness of cults to the middle and late 1970s and recalls Jonestown, where “Leo J. Ryan and others died”. His book’s foreword is signed by Margaret Singer, “Recipient of the Leo J. Ryan Memorial Award” [Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, #64506]. Dimsdale treats the settlement as a case study in coercive persuasion within his history of brainwashing [Dimsdale, #62993, Part II]. Willis reads it as a lesson in unchecked charismatic authority: “It was not without reason that the American Founding Fathers built checks and balances” [Willis, #63203].

Catalin Negru’s judgment of “revolutionary suicide” is direct: “What happened in Jonestown was not a revolutionary, respectable or inspiring death, but a waste of life and a suicidal massacre instrumented by a delirious mind”. He then compares it with the Order of the Solar Temple [Negru, A History of the Apocalypse, #62383, Part II “Christian Apocalyptic”]. The interpretations divide most sharply on who was responsible. The mind-control school places it with Jones. Antonov and Itskov place it with the U.S. state, which in their account was hostile to a pro-Soviet commune. Meiers places it with a CIA that he says employed Jones.

Key points

• The Peoples Temple began in Indianapolis (1954 in one source, 1955 in Hubbard and Wikipedia) as an integrated, healing-centred church. It later preached “apostolic socialism” and was described in Marxist terms [Unbrainwashing Yourself, #62457; Hubbard, #64244; Wikipedia: Jonestown].
• Willis traces Temple ideas about the zodiac and UFOs to Orval Lee Jaggers, Branham’s editor. Browne says Jones came to call the Bible “a pack of lies” and himself the Second Coming [Willis, #63203; Browne, #42246].
• In San Francisco the Temple was a political force. It helped elect Moscone, and Jones chaired the Housing Authority [Wikipedia: Jonestown; Tandin, #23557].
• The Concerned Relatives called Jonestown a “concentration camp”. Garry and Mark Lane described a government plot to destroy a progressive church [Browne, #42246; Dimsdale, #62993; Antonov & Itskov, #64942].
• Antonov and Itskov reproduce March 1978 letters to the Soviet ambassador and testimony linking Ryan’s visit to the planned emigration. They attribute the 918 deaths to CIA agents [Antonov & Itskov, #64942].
• Willis counts 913 dead, including 304 children, plus Jones, for 918 with the airstrip dead. The drink was Flavor Aid, and White Night rehearsals came first [Willis, #63203; Hubbard, #64244].
• Meiers argues that Jonestown was a CIA behaviour-drug field test, and he raises the question of whether Dwyer was a CIA operative [Meiers, #62471].
• Negru calls the event “a suicidal massacre instrumented by a delirious mind”, not a revolutionary death [Negru, #62383].