For the last several years of its existence, members of Peoples Temple believed that they were the victims of a conspiracy – or perhaps, multiple conspiracies – dedicated to bringing down the church and its leader.
The conspiracy hydra had several heads. The government threats were perhaps the most tangible: both federal and state revenue authorities challenged the Temple’s tax-exempt status; the Post Office held up Social Security checks to which senior residents of Jonestown were entitled; the FCC seemed poised to revoke the HAM radio license of the group, which would have crippled communications with Jonestown; and the U.S. Customs Service delayed shipments of supplies and materiel bound for Guyana. But Peoples Temple also recognized the threats posed by disaffected former members and relatives, who coalesced into the Concerned Relatives group and who were later championed by former Temple attorney Tim Stoen. Finally, there was the increasingly-negative press coverage, including the New West article of August 1977 and what the church perceived as a “hatchet job” by Kathy Hunter of the Ukiah Daily Journal in May 1978.
The Temple documented all of these threats, collecting them into what it termed “The Conspiracy Book.” The introductions to each chapter were written primarily by Teri Buford, but most of its contents comprises the evidence supporting the Temple’s claims.
While the supporting materials date back several years, the book was written mostly in 1978 in San Francisco.
While copies of book chapters appear in several places among the materials recovered by the FBI in Jonestown’s aftermath, the first 455 pages in one section of the FBI’s release under the Freedom of Information Act – Section X-4 labelled in the Guyana Index as “Miscellaneous” – may represent the complete volume. Jean Brown Clancey, who worked in the Temple’s San Francisco office and who retained possession of the book after Teri Buford left the church, recalls it as “a very large three-ring notebook [with] documents aimed at proving the Temple and Jones were being investigated.” The number of areas of Jones’ concern only grew as he became more paranoid, and he eventually “hired private investigators to snoop around for corroborating evidence.”
Certainly its subject matter became well-known by many Temple members, especially those in the leadership. Ultimately, though, as Jean Brown Clancey wrote in 2025, “the book served mostly to alarm members and emphasize the ‘us against them’ fear that Jones cultivated. Maybe it made him feel important and noticed. Maybe government was on to him in some way, and there was a real threat to Temple status as a church and his credibility.”