The Letters, Reports and Diaries of Paula Adams

Paula Adams was one of the first members of Peoples Temple in Guyana – according to Temple and passport records, she arrived in Georgetown in April 1974 – and didn’t return to the United States until December 1978, with the rest of the returning survivors of the Jonestown tragedy. As the principal liaison between the Temple and Guyana officials, she spent most of her time in the Temple’s Georgetown headquarters in Lamaha Gardens. Virtually every memo, set of meeting minutes or description of contacts with local governmental agencies includes her name as either a recipient or the writer.

Paula Adams played another role for the Temple. Whether by assignment or by her own choice – accounts differ – she became sexually, and later romantically, involved with Guyana’s Ambassador to the United States, Laurence “Bonny” Mann.

It was a tempestuous relationship. Mann was married and did not leave his wife to permanently join his mistress for a number of years. The ambiguity, uncertainty and periodic volatility of the affair haunted Paula to the point of considering suicide.

As part of her responsibilities – again, whether assigned or voluntary is not known – Paula filed numerous reports of her conversations with Mann, both about their personal relationship and about what he revealed of his interactions with the Guyana government.  Many of these reports had the tone, style and content of a personal diary, rather than of a formal report, a difference she herself noted on numerous occasions. She also secretly recorded many of the conversations.

Paula Adams died in October 1983 – almost five years after the deaths in Guyana – when Ambassador Mann shot her and their child before turning the gun on himself in their Washington-DC area home.

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The PDFs and transcripts below of these meetings derive from Section BB-1 of the FBI’s release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents have been arranged in chronological order, not in the order as they appear in the section itself.

The citation for these documents should open with the FBI’s official designation of these records, which is “RYMUR 89-4286.” Each individual page in these records has a unique number. The first page of this section, for example, is marked “BB-1-f”. The complete citation for that page, then, would be “RYMUR 89-4286-BB-1-f”.