Editor’s note: I have transcribed the original documents as closely as possible. Where hand-written annotations have been made, I have indicated these by the use of footnotes. Where text has been scribbled out with a pen, I have included the original text followed by a footnote indicating its correction. Formatting has been followed as closely as possible, and where spelling errors have been made, I have corrected these. Where footnotes have been included, I have indicated the number within squared brackets for reference, so as to keep them separate from my own editorial footnotes.
– Connor Ashley Clayton
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Foreword
Conspiracies are no longer fashionable on the U.S. scene. In the 1960s, the impact of the Vietnam War, the foment of the New Left, and the vitality of the Black liberation struggle kindled a consciousness of the possibilities for wide-scale government disruption of dissident organizations and individuals. The trials of the Chicago Seven, the Berrigan brothers, and Angela Davis; the deaths of Jonathan and George Jackson; police and governmental repression of urban riots and campus uprisings, culminating with the deaths of students at Kent State University: all of this under-scored the potential for political persecution. The recognition of this ability to shatter those who challenge the ruling power structure of society reached its apex with the revelation of Water-gate and the subsequent publication of books and articles on the domestic and international activities of the CIA and FBI.
These revelations presented a challenge to the American people as a whole – not just the “radical fringe” – a challenge to re-think their values, to re-assess their acceptance of a system that could self-righteously defame, discredit, and even destroy those who dared to openly question that system’s functioning. But the American people have not been fed on a diet of commercialism and illusion to no effect. As in the case of similar challenges presented in the past, reality proved too stark, and the responsibility too great for a people made apathetic and sluggish by ease, comfort, of the false promise of success around the corner. In view of the fact that conditioning had made Americans unable to confront the grim implications of objective reality, they came up with the classic American solution: they made reality into an illusion. Munching popcorn, Americans watched Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman defeat the modern day “bad guys” and promptly forgot that Enemies’ Lists, character assassination, surveillance, and systematic destruction were not the product of a scriptwriter’s imagination, but part and parcel of the fabric of American capitalist society.
It is, perhaps, in this failure to separate reality from illusion that America has been blinded to the forces that are eroding its moral sense, and provides[1] a way for us to understand the 1970s. It is also that same failure that can help us understand
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[…] the efforts to silence another principled and outspoken voice for sanity and reality: Jim Jones.
(end of Foreword – begin the next part on a separate page)[2]
Book I – Foundations: The Reasons Why…[3]
Introduction[4]
In recent weeks the outlines of a massive conspiracy against Jim Jones and Peoples Temple have begun to emerge. The effort involves U.S. Treasury Department informers, Interpol, paid-off government officials, and a host of individuals who have been coerced (and in some cases blackmailed) into supplying false testimony to an unusually eager and co-operative tribe of sensation-mongering yellow journalists. There even have[5] been assassination attempts. The object of it all is a Disciples of Christ minister who has adopted children of all races,[6] lives very modestly, and who has devoted his life to breaking down racial barriers and helping poor and destitute persons. Moreover, Jim Jones is one of the most outspoken and fearless critics of American society. Thousands of people have joined his church, which, in its fervor[7], unity, and activism, can be more properly called a movement ________.[8]
Currently Jim Jones is in Guyana, where has been building a huge co-operative community that has nearly one thousand residents, and is growing.[1] Despite the attempts to destroy him and his movement, he remains today more determined than ever to persevere in his work.
[9]Before entering into any detailed discussion of the particulars of the currently conspiracy against Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, it is necessary to take the time to put some of the basic issues of his life and work into perspective, and to explain why some of the most powerful reactionary forces in America are going to great lengths to[10] stop him.
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Origins[11]
Jim Jones grew up in the grinding poverty of the Depression-scarred Midwest. He knew from personal experience the misery of hunger and want. More than anything else, it was this experience that made him determined to do something about conditions that, even in times of “prosperity,” have continued to leave millions of people impoverished and neglected in the midst of a nation of vast wealth. It would be to the perennial “losers” who never could seem to overcome their plight that Jim Jones would turn; to those who never had the educational opportunities to realize their talents and potential; to those who suffered job discrimination because of race or ethnic background, or who were stuck permanently in the vicious cycle of poverty, unemployment, or slavish labor; or who turned to drugs, drink, or crime as a means of escape, or even survival… it would be to such desperate and rejected people that Jim Jones would devote his life and his ministry.
He is convinced that the answer to the conditions of gross inequity can be found in the creation of co-operative, communal social structures in which people work together on a basis of total equality, for the common good and for an end to the seemingly ineradicable conditions of poverty, war, and racism plaguing man-kind. While still in his ‘teens, he became a partisan of social justice causes. One of his heroes[12] was Mao Tse-tung, who was still struggling to free the Chinese masses from horrible oppression and abuse. The young Jim Jones was not “religious” in the conventional sense, though[13] he found a kind of second home in the Pentecostal church, where he received a measure of care, help, understanding. He became particularly drawn by the communism[14] of the earliest Christians, capsulized in the Acts of the Apostles, where it is written that, on the day of Pentecost, “All that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2: 44-45). To Jim Jones, such a form of social organisation pointed the way to the self-overcoming of humanity. It was this theme of sharing and communal living that he saw underlying the teachings of not only[15] Jesus, but a long series of religious leaders, moral philosophers, and revolutionary social thinkers down through the
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Centuries, many of whom were severely persecuted for their ideas, though more for their efforts to implement them.[2]
It was during the post-war and early McCarthy period that Jim Jones became a communist.[16]He believed strongly that the capitalist system was the root of practically all of America’s social problems as well as the economic and human exploitation of scores of nations that had, in effect, become colonies of corporate greed for profits. He deeply agreed with the Marxist analysis of human misery bred by a profit system that benefitted a few through the abuse of the many, and that placed[17] monetary and commercial values above human values. He was determined to do what he could to translate his radical vision of society – in which there would be no want, no unemployment, racism or privilege – into reality. It is here that one can find the roots of the persecution that Jim Jones is currently undergoing, and which has followed him for some twenty-five years.
His concern for humanity led him, in the early 1950’s, to found a church[18] on the “apostolic” model of total sharing and equality, that would strive for the communalistic ideal of the disciples of Christ. His Peoples Temple would be nothing less than an attempt to reclaim the original, revolutionary birthright of the primitive church which, over the centuries, had lost its way and actually had become a reactionary force, abandoning the communism of the Acts of the Apostles for a watered-down, self-centred, dogma- and ritual-ridden faith, more concerned with pious rhetoric than acts. Instead of challenging (as did Jesus and many of the early Church Fathers) a society predicated on competition and exploitation, the church had become, in effect, its weekly apologist. For the oppressed it had become an “opiate”, providing a convenient rationalization for people to endure their misery by offering gilt-edged promises of realise and liberation… in the hereafter. Jim Jones deeply[19] realized the truth of what many social scientists, like Max Weber, had clearly demonstrated: Christian teachings had been modified into a “protestant ethic” to justify the economics of morality of personal gain and materialism (the “spirit of capitalism”) of the ruling and ownership classes that was[20] the consistent target of Jesus throughout his life. Christianity had become Antichrist.
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Peoples Temple, then, would be no ordinary church; its minister, likewise, would be no ordinary one. Through Peoples Temple, Jim Jones attempted to actualize the old Christian ideal of caritas — a kind of loving, compassionate force that reaches out from one individual to another, binding people into a community, overcoming the separateness and egocentricity that is the disease of human society. Through such a basic principle is sought a realization of our collective identity, our essential oneness beyond all seeming differences of race, creed, educational background, ‘culture,’ individualisms and idiosyncrasies that create division, antagonism, fear, mistrust, hatred. Jim Jones saw the critical factor in this ideal of self-overcoming as human service. He emphasized that the highest service to any God or deity can only be measured and determined by one’s service to fellow human beings. Without this nothing else mattered. This followed the ideals that Jesus propounded throughout his life, but which are perhaps most eloquently and dramatically spoken in Matthew 25:35-40 where Jesus makes a judgement of his disciples, finding them guilty of not serving Him (their spiritual leader and principle-bearer) because they neglected to serve people who were in desperate need.[3]
The Early Years of Peoples Temple[21]
[22]Jim Jones became well-known in Indianapolis for his consistent attempts (along with his church members) to live according to that difficult standard. Peoples Temple opened up a free restaurant, dispensed clothing to the needy, and even money. The young minister sought out the most wretched, hopeless situations, paid people’s rent who[23] were about to be evicted, got them medical assistance, toom people into his home, fed them, got them jobs, and decent clothing. But this was nothing new for Rev. Jones. Even as a child during the worst of the Depression, he would befriend total strangers and help them out with whatever meagre resources he could gather. Throughout his formative years he was looked upon almost as an eccentric for his insistence on giving, as well as for his brash, sometimes outrageous challenges to hypocrisy and selfishness.[4][24]
Understandably,[25]many persons were attracted to Peoples Temple who, because of racism and/or economic oppression, found themselves
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In destitute circumstances, unable to secure the basic necessities of life for themselves or their families. Yet, in founding his church, Jim Jones made a bold promise to his congregation: AS LONG AS THERE IS FOOD ON MY PLATE, THERE WILL BE FOOD ON YOURS; AS LONG AS THERE IS A ROOF OVER MY HEAD, THERE WILL BE A ROOF OVER YOURS.[26] The church, then, would be the insurance of sustenance and nourishment to its membership. Its minister would, by his own practice, set an example of selfless living for the congregation which, if followed, would make good his personal guarantee.
Through overwhelming obstacles, Rev. Jim Jones kept his promise as his ministry grew over the years, and the membership of the church burgeoned into the many thousands. First of all, he had to set a consistent example of selfless living and utter frugality to show that he meant to live by his precepts. He turned everything he owned over to the church – to the “household of the faith” – inspiring others to do likewise.[27] This initial act of charity was key to the success of the now vast Peoples Temple organization. As people saw what was being done with the resources they donated, they soon came to feel secure in their giving. They saw that their donations were not going to the ministers, or to some nebulous or spurious program or fund that did not relate to their own lives: they were helping to build and support a structure that would support them for the rest of their years. This was a far cry from what many of his parishioners were used to in their former churches, where the minister had a fine home, expensive clothes, and a brand-new luxury car. Meanwhile, they would see nothing of their giving (except in the minister’s opulent life-style), and when they would become ill or get into difficulty and need help, would receive only a sanctimonious word (if that) from their reverend “man of God.”
In Peoples Temple that was all changed. Each person’s living necessities, including education and health care, were guaranteed – from cradle to grave. This is the promise made to every member of the Peoples Temple “family,” no matter if they
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Have much or little or nothing to contribute in terms of property or finances. The Temple has been the “source of supply”, the nourishment of its members and, to a significant extent, the community at large, meeting educational, medical, recreational, and a variety of emergency needs. No member need fear hunger, homelessness, or destitution. And there are many benefits: vacations, special programs for children and adults, trade-tech training, a cheap credit union, job placement services, and perhaps most valuable of all, the support of a group of people, a “family” that really cares about each individual and will “go to bat” for them, a family led by a man who is an outstanding exemplar of care and concern, a friend at all times who will never let his people down.
But to those who know him, words are inadequate to convey the total dedication, selflessness, and sacrifice of Jim Jones, the moving force behind Peoples Temple, a man who has devoted his life to the struggle for human liberation. He would take homeless and destitute people into his house until there were, at times, upwards of thirty people living under his roof. He[28] took in ex-convicts, orphans, homeless persons, evictees. He wouldn’t buy any clothes for himself, not even at “goodwill” stores, but took only what people had rejected. He adopted children of all races, including the unwanted offspring of American servicemen and teenage prostitutes in Asia. He saved persons[29] from jail, foreclosures, evictions, starvation, all kinds of trouble, his life a perpetual act of giving without asking for anything in return.[5]
In the heart of the squalid ghettos of a dismal midwestern city, Jim Jones was reviving the original, revolutionary concept of the church as a communistic, supportive, and liberating body, energized by compassion for the rejected and outcast, giving them a home, a sense of worth and pride, a voice … power over their own lives. Peoples Temple was proving that such an ancient concept was not archaic: on the contrary, it was particularly viable and relevant to the problems facing individuals attempting to cope with the alienating and often cruel realities of modern industrial capitalist society, where the institution of the family is being
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decimated by the commercialistic and competitive values intrinsic to that society, and where its larger expression, that humanising sense of community (the sine qua non of civilization itself) has been supplanted by what David Riesman has aptly characterized as “the lonely crowd.”
III.[30]
Understandably, Jim Jones did not go very far in his work without encountering the fiercest opposition, harassment, and persecution. He was introducing into society an institution that challenged racism, elitism, selfishness, and the smug anti-collectivism of middle America. Beyond that, Peoples Temple[31] a kind of institution that has always been hateful to the wealthy classes whose prosperity depends upon the economic oppression of the masses – an institution that was building collective strength and a sense of power among the disenfranchised. In the Marcarthyistic language of the of theprotectors of vested interests, Peoples Temple was a “subversive” organization. And American working-class history is full of examples demonstrating a sad truth: organizations that function on principles of collective support, that tear down racial and economic barriers, and are able to show that social problems are indeed soluble IF SOCIETY WOULD ADOPT A COMMUNAL MODEL OR PROGRAM OF SHARING WEALTH, will be seen as a threat to established structures and, hence, targeted for destruction. One need only think of the fraternal, union, civil and welfare rights organizations, socialistic intercultural and interracial groups such as the IWO (International Worker’s Order) which were successfully building such programs. They have all been either bought off, subverted, made to compromise their principles and demands, or persecuted to extinction as part of the “communist conspiracy.”
Today Jim Jones is regarded as a very dangerous man by the defenders of the power elite. He is outspoken, articulate, thoroughly convinced of the rightness of his cause. And people who have met heard Jim Jones speak his mind know that he possesses the kind of magnetic, arresting personality, stemming from his convictions and dedication, and a lifetime of struggle, that makes people listen when he talks. They know his dynamism, his refusal to compromise on injustice, racism, inequality, and his thoroughgoing contempt for a[32] system that
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not only won’t do anything[33] about these terrible realities beyond mere token gestures, but which perpetuates, breeds, and thrives on them. Combine all this[34] with the paranormal abilities Jim Jones has demonstrated for nearly three decades in the area of what is termed “spiritual healing” or “mind power” (which have attracted literally hundreds of thousands of people over the years to hear his message), plus his superb administrative and organizational abilities that have made his Peoples Temple grow and prosper. Together they have made Jim Jones a most disturbing, dangerous, and infuriating presence to many people who are opposed to his radical Christian ideology (he is, more properly, a Marxist), and the communist church which translates it into practice. Besides, Jim Jones has always been a “white nigger” (and part Indian – a veritable and self-declared “American mongrel”) who just won’t “stay in his place,” and who cannot be bought off at any price. While still in his 20’s he got himself[35] appointed, through sheer perseverance, as the first Executive Secretary of the Human Rights Commission of Indianapolis, under Mayor Boswell. He proceeded to integrate everything in sight, while the many well-entrenched racists in the city’s business, government and media establishment went through a series of apoplectic fits. He was offered a post in another area of civic service, that would have quadrupled his salary, just to get him out of his position. He refused it.
The Indianapolis years were years of continuous harassment.[36] His home was firebombed, he was beaten up by paid thugs, knifed,[37] shot at. His small adopted children could not be left alone in the house. They had to be escorted to and from school. He and his church members received harassment from the IRS, and were the object of constant surveillance. Life became so difficult for his integrated “rainbow” church family, as well as for his own children, that, desiring a more favourable climate for them to grow up in, Jim Jones moved to California in 1965, where over 100 of his church members followed him. He re-established the Temple in a tiny hamlet, Redwood Valley, 110 miles north of San Francisco. The church flourished there, though the racism of rural California was to prove every bit as pernicious, persistent, and virulent as in Indiana.[38] A ghetto dweller throughout his years in Indianapolis, Jim
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Jones felt uncomfortable living in the relatively peaceful surroundings of out of the way Redwood Valley.[39] He felt responsible, not without some guilt, about some people trapped and oppressed in America’s urban ghettos. Soon, he began to hold meetings in San Francisco, and attracted a large following there, especially in the black community. He opened a church in Los Angeles, and thousands came every week to hear an apostle[40] of justice, a man who fearlessly and ruthlessly excoriated the political, economic and social establishment of the nation for its corruption, greed, insensitivity; its racism, militarism, and international gangsterizing. He also tore into his particular, special target: organised religion.
To “Cry Aloud and Spare Not”[41]
There has perhaps never been a voice from any American pulpit that has so comprehensively, so totally exposed the smug corruption, the hypocrisy, the blatant abuses, disgraces, contradictions and abominations of the American clergy. Week after week, Jim Jones targeted the self-seeking, ostentatious preacher class, and their cynical use of religion as an “opiate” to keep people oppressed, content with their misery. He ridiculed the pie-in-the-sky promises of a religion that co-operated, sometimes directly, sometimes subtly, with the racism and repression that he has fought tooth and nail all his life. He believed in “crying aloud and sparing not.” His hard-hitting, often thunderous evangelistic style, which was the vehicle for blistering attacks on a number of sacred cows, outraged the mouthpieces of conventional religious and moral claptrap. His language was strong; his tone could be stern and denunciatory, bitingly sarcastic. He didn’t spare the “paper idol” – the Bible itself, which he exposed as a confused and confusing, obscure and contradictory hodge-podge of history, myth, legend, conflicting codes, bombast and archaism, riddled with monumental silliness and compendious enough to provide ready-made justification for practically anything. He brought out, however, its many pearls of wisdom, its universal truths that can be found in the so-called “social gospel” of Jesus: the teachings of selflessness, sharing, and compassion.
But Jim Jones did not see Jesus as a passive weakling: on the
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contrary, he was a social revolutionary who would, with his teachings of “letting the oppressed go free,” overthrow the established order of greed and abuses, of corruption and wickedness in high places. Jesus was one of a line of great rebels of history, which Jim Jones felt intimately part of, and energized by. He preached the revolutionary Jesus, and liked Jesus, he relentlessly cursed the priest class, the pushers of ecclesiastical opium. But his attack was much broader.
Everywhere he has gone, Jim Jones has insisted on challenging people’s conscience with a relentless persistence. He is a specialist at tearing down the elaborate yet baseless rationalizations and compromises that permeate our materialistic, self-centred social ethos. He is particularly incensed by[42] people with even liberal and progressive views can live in circumstances of relative comfort and luxury while giving only symbolic and token concern for the great injustices and undeserved human misery bred by American capitalism. He is unwilling to countenance this sort of hypocrisy, which makes him an uncomfortable person to be around for[43] many people who suffer from it.
Further, Jim Jones has been able to convince many privileged people that they have been living well only at the expense of the underprivileged. He does this in terms of the revolutionary religious teachings that people either ignore or, grudgingly and self-consciously, give mere lip-service to in church. And, using the same arguments, chapter and verse, he has convinced great numbers of poor people that they not only should refuse to be content with oppressive conditions, but that they can do something about them. In fact, this is what Jesus Christ was all about. He pointed the way by establishing a socialistic community of sharing that was the primitive[44] Church. The church was actually conceived AS AN INSTRUMENT FOR ORGANIZING THE MASSES FOR FUNDAMENTAL SOCIAL CHANGE, for the elimination of privilege through establishing a social order based upon economic equality, itself an expression of a radical compassion and identification among men of their common condition, their responsibility to one another.
Predictably, some have criticized Jim Jones for involving his
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church in what they loosely term “politics,” as if this were in some way sinful.[45] Throughout his ministry, however, Jim Jones has relentlessly and fearlessly exposed and attacked the reluctance and outright refusal of the contemporary church to challenge prevailing economic and social inequities and injustices. He has charged that the church’s silent complicity and even defense of these conditions amount to a total betrayal, a perversion of its revolutionary origins, and a travesty – indeed, a crucifixion – of the life, example, and purpose of its martyred founder. He has denounced many of the churches as perpetrators of a cruel hoax, deliberately designed to oppress the poor, concocted, as we have mentioned, out of a demeaning “opiate” of pie-in-the-sky theology and deferred dreams. Not only has the “preacher class” of apologists for the materialistic status quo been a favorite target, but also the politicans and “pillars of society” who invoke God on the one hand while giving their blessings to (and even instigating) the most ungodly, inhumane exploitation of their fellow man on the other.
He has pointed out, further, that the almost exclusive preoccupation of Christians with the Crucifixion and final days of Christ is a symptom of an only thinly-veiled recognition of complicity in that symbolic murder – whose moral equivalent is the collective refusal of “Christians” to accept the responsibility, the sacrifice of emulating His life, thus perpetuating the crime down through the centuries. The established church, then, instead of fulfilling its original mission as a revolutionary, collective body that testifies to the gospel of equality, unity, and liberation of mankind, has become, according to Jim Jones, a tragic/ironic symbol of guilt and betrayal — focusing, predictably, on the death of its founder. Clearly, such an analysis does not endear him to conventional church-persons, or to those for whom the Christian religion has been perverted in order to protect them from what is almost self-evident: that, by the standards of its founder, Christianity is totally incompatible with the capitalist economics that permeate America, and which give form to its politics, social institutions, mass media, and its exploitative control over the economies of other nations.[46]
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Thus, throughout his ministry, Jim Jones has used his pulpit to deliver blistering attacks on the abuses and corruption of American institutions and the forces of American capitalism as wielded by its “power elite.”[47] For many years, he[48] has followed a gruelling schedule, speaking five and six times weekly at services lasting several hours each. Hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps as many as two or three million – have heard his message. Most have been ghetto dwellers. He has spoken in churches and auditoriums in major cities in every area of the nation, though he has concentrated his ministry in California, San Francisco, and several other cities.
He has inveiged heavily against the military-industrial complex, corporate rip-offs, corruption of all sorts, war-profiteering, the politics of neglect and genocide, treatment of American Indians, blacks, welfare mothers, the elderly, and a host of other issues. He has reserved his most pungent and devastating attacks for the ruling elite that runs the economy, and dehumanizes millions of people in its profit machines. Jim Jones is a foe of the “affluent society.” He has verbally attacked the “masters of war” who rob ordinary people of decent health care, housing, schools, safe working conditions, and adequate social services, in a massive conspiracy with politicians, to build frightful arsenals of mass destruction that threaten the world. He has charged neglect of safety standards in America’s factories, fields, and mines; and condemned the lassiez-faire[49] attitude of government toward organized crime and dope-dealing. He has waged a comprehensive attack upon the superficial, commercialistic TV-culture and how it has shackled and fired the brains of millions of people, rich and poor alike. He has scored the failure of the American educational system, police brutality, crime in the suites, corruption in the treatment of children, the elderly, and the mentally ill, exposing the massive inequities that characterize every area of American society. No words are spared by Jim Jones as he analyses, dissects, and thoroughly denounces the abysmal failure of the American system to live up to its promise of “liberty and justice for all.” He scours newspapers and magazines, giving copious illustrations of every point he makes.
But he analyses are never complete without pointing the way out of the morass, the seemingly bottomless pit of corruption,
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waste, neglect, and deceit bred by the profit system. The answer is, for Jim Jones, socialism – a system of social organization based on entirely different premises and priorities, where the health and well-being of all people is put first, and the disease of profiteers, landlords, and conniving politicians is extirpated, rooted out. Jim Jones speaks with the voice and conscience, the outrage and articulateness of a champion of the oppressed. He advocates an alliance of all races, poor and working-class people with all people of conscience, in a struggle against the class of exploiters and all who serve them. His compelling language, and the answers that he not only has clearly formulated and enunciated, but which, in the mass movement of Peoples temple, he has incarnated and institutionalised,[50] proving their righteousness and validity, making him one of the most dangerous men in America. He is clearly and deliberately a subversive, using the church for its original purpose: to organize the masses towards building a poor people’s collective… a socialistic movement to challenge and hopefully alter or abolish the prevailing social order which has, in the language of Jefferson, become destruction of the universal Rights of Man.
Yet, in spite of the thousands of hours he has preached, to the point of practically ruining his voice, Jim Jones has never been content with or limited by the role of a mere man of words. By inclination, he is an activist. From his youth, he has always been a mover, a shaper, an organizer, an instigator. His childhood is replete with anecdotes of a Huck Finn-like rebel, a mischievous, outrageous schemer who used his ingenuity to stir up all kinds of trouble in his native Lynn (Indiana) where he grew up, the only child of a disabled and unemployed war veteran and a mother who worked two jobs to support her family.
Let us, at this point, take a closer look at the central focus of his activism: Peoples Temple. As we have said, Jim Jones’ conception of the “Temple” was not that of an ordinary church. It would be the seed-model, the germ of a new, revolutionary society that transcended privilege, class, race, generation gaps, a church that was no Sunday-morning ritual of pious inanities. It would not even be just a “good works” church, though its charitable and humanitarian activities are staggering in their scope. More
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than this, Peoples Temple would be a community, a total way of life, a socialistic system of co-operation, human concern, help and sustenance for its members – its “extended family,” – that also reached outward into the community. It would be a church that naturally attracted people not favoured by the American “dream” but, rather, victimized by it. Mostly black, mostly people with problems, who couldn’t “make it,” refugees from the middle-class, seeking and searching for something more than an empty value system, second mortgages, rat-races, and a frustrating, pretentious and phony life-style in the American wasteland. But at Peoples Temple, members were not given some manufactured, cult-like, “new age” morality. The young and idealistic were often disappointed with Peoples Temple because Jim Jones refused to tolerate the basic “class values” that persist even in the “new age” communities which are often subtly racist, elitist, and, in a strange way, middle-class, tolerant of an ethic of “do your own thing,” while insensitive to the masses who are trapped into doing someone else’s “thing.”
No, Jim Jones demands that[51]members of Peoples Temple to identify with the strivings of the wretched of the earth, and not just in some vague, mental way. He views Peoples Temple as a place where people work and struggle for nothing short of what Jesus had in mind when he cried out against the corruption of the world – a revolutionary social order. Jim Jones is no escapist, either. On the contrary, he seeks out the problems, the critical situations, the hardship cases. He doesn’t run from them. His ability to see through the subtle (and not-so-subtle) defense-mechanisms, rationalizations, and insincere posturings of people who want to think of themselves as “enlightened,” or “revolutionaries,” or “sensitive and caring” is uncanny, and he demands[52] a level of honesty, commitment, and identification with the oppressed that most middle-class refugees are unwilling to assume.
Jim Jones, then, wants no token commitment from his followers,[53] but a reasonable sacrifice of one’s own selfish desires and indulgences for the good of the collective. And it has been the building of collective strength in the church/body through the ideal of service to the common good by individual
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members that has been the core of the revolution of Peoples Temple. It represents, in modern terms, a return to the communistic origins of the primitive church and, in its ethic of collective sharing, pooling of resources, cooperating on all levels, it has pointed the way out of the crisis facing a society based upon selfishness, the cult of personality, and the glorification of a few models of privilege at the expense of a growing underclass trapped in frustration and despair. More than that, Jim Jones has clearly exposed the United States, in particular, as being a force that has stifled the movements of people all around the world to free themselves from the shackles of economic domination and petty dictators who have been propped up by U.S. dollars. There has been no contradiction in the mind of Jim Jones between his revolutionary religious convictions, and his speaking out against the abuses of power, money, and a military-industrial monster that is draining the economy, perpetuating poverty, and terrorizing the world.
He charges that those who accuse the church of “getting involved in politics” not only do not realize the essentially inextricable connection of the church with society and the forces that shape social conditions, but, beyond that, are either consciously or stupidly apologizing for an old doctrine that has been utilized to render churches innocuous, to prevent them from being any more than defenders or merely token antagonists of the prevailing social order. The sham dichotomy of “religion” and “politics” (which is now sanctified by the IRS) refuses to recognize that politics is a symptom of a certain value system, certain moral priorities. And the revolutionary Jesus (along with a long series of other profits”) did not hesitate to attack that value system.
In this connection, Peoples Temple has been very active in the support of liberation struggles here in the United Sates and abroad for years. Recipients of this support have been efforts for Southern African liberation from apartheid and economic exploitation, anti-fascist efforts in Chile, Northern Ireland, South Korea, and many other nations. The Temple has assisted Chilean refugees and Native Americans; hosted delegations from the Soviet Union in the interests of understanding and friendship; given strong support to countless victims of injustice and oppression; spoken out militantly against the treatment of the Pendelton 14 (victims of a Klan-infested military); and for the release of Rev. Ben Chavis and the
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Wilmington 10. The racist Bakke decision is another recent issue among many to which the Temple has lent its voice of protest. Support has also been extended to the gay community in its struggle against a resurgence of right-wing “fundamentalist” attacks. The Temple building has been used as a forum for Southern African liberation leaders, the Venceremos Brigade, and for many, many persons who have come before thousands to report on human rights violations in nations such as the Philippines, Chile, and Zimbabwe, as well as our own. The church has sponsored delegates to international conferences, documenting and organizing against racism and oppression.
In addition, the Temple has been active in the recent formation of the Northern California chapter of the World Peace Council, an organization that has worked for twenty-five years against militarism and the neglect of human needs that[54] the military establishment has been responsible for. The Temple’s newspaper, PEOPLES FORUM, has exposed official complicity in shielding Nazi mass-murderers[9], and was one of the first to warn about the rise of neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan activity in San Francisco.[10] The Forum has also run articles about corruption, injustice, and abuse in practically every area of American society, as well as on the international scene.[11]
The congregation of Peoples Temple has helped plan and has attended en masse countless demonstrations in support of press freedom, liberation struggles, civil rights, and vital causes around the world while opposing repression and the denial of human rights in the United States.[12] The church has been the scene of solidarity demonstrations and cultural programs that have brought together leaders of various segments of the community – local, national, and international – for the advancement of the cause of unity of the poor and working masses of the world who are striving for survival and a decent life. In this way, Peoples Temple has taken the “gospel of liberation” to the public as a witness to its revolutionary faith, demanding that the universal brotherhood of mankind be the order of the day. It has done this so that society may one day be rebuilt on a basis of harmony, compassion, and equality.
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Furthermore, the existence of Peoples Temple has exploded several myths purveyed by reactionary and bigoted elements in America. One of this is that people of different races (especially blacks and whites) cannot work, live, and cooperate together on all levels. The Temple is a living refutation of this cruel hoax: it is a model of integration where economic, generational, and cultural differences have been overcome, subordinated to the achievement of a higher human ideal. The Temple has also tried to be a force that forges constructive alliances between our religious communities: ecumenicity has been promoted as the Temple has sought areas of mutual concern among Muslims, Jews, and Christians,[55] along with non-religious people. Jim Jones has continually emphasized the importance of unity. He views religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity as factors that should not divide, but rather enrich and broaden our society. The Temple has always sought the common bedrock of human compassion and aspiration that underlies the great faiths, and even the major secular ideologies of the world, and has built on that foundation a community of tolerance and understanding.
A Heavy Price to Pay.[56]
Obviously, Jim Jones could not go very far in this sort of work without inviting organized, establishment opposition. It would not simply be a question of racists and fanatic venting their bigotry and hatred against an interracial church (although the persecution that has come from this people has been cruel, vicious, and harrowing). When Dr. Martin Luther King went beyond a civil rights platform and looked out at the militaristic adventures of the United States in Southeast Asia; when he talked not only about the poverty of blacks in the U.S., but about the unity of black struggle here with that of the poor and oppressed of the whole world, regardless of race or nationality, identifying[57] a common struggle against a common enemy. When he saw the issues in terms of economic exploitation rather than merely a legislative problem (the Congress could pass laws, but they could easily be sabotaged), Dr. King became a danger to the vested, established interests of the United States and further, to the controlling neo-colonial interests of the capitalist oligarchy. He
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and his movement had to be dealt with. He became the target of a vicious conspiracy that used gossip, lies, blackmail, and a host of “dirty tricks.” Finally, as he was organizing not just black but an interracial group of poor workers, and preparing to dramatize their case in a massive “poor people’s march” on Washington, he was assassinated.
The same pattern of persecution against Dr. King, Malcolm X, and many other outspoken leaders who have cried out against American injustices, is being pursued in the case of Rev. Jim Jones, whose charisma, dynamism, Marxist convictions, refusal to compromise, plus his outstanding organizational abilities, and ability to raise funds for the direct benefit of the donors as well as for liberation causes around the world – have infuriated and frightened establishment, reactionary forces. This is why they are out to “get” him.
Those who are familiar with his ministry know that, over the years, Jim Jones has been made to pay a heavy price for being an apostle[58] of outrage at injustice, and a proponent of thoroughgoing change to bring about a society based upon the common good and not just the profit of a few. He has been branded a “traitor,” a race-mixer, a communist (and with very little qualification, he pleads guilty to all three counts); he has been shot, knifed, poisoned, threatened innumerable times; his family members, children, congregants (and even their pets) have been terrorized, beaten up, run off the road, waylaid. His churches have been fire-bombed, vandalized, and arsoned.[59] His organization[60] has been infiltrated with informers, provocateurs (some of whom are now giving false testimony against him), and subjective to severe, McCarthyistic harassment, bogus investigations, yellow journalism, and torrents of malicious gossip and highly-publicized lies.
But the persistent attempts to discredit and destroy Jim Jones and his work have not succeeded. The original premise upon which he founded Peoples Temple has proven strong and sound. The communal, family-like, fraternal structure of Peoples[61] Temple – a structure of sharing and support, compassion and cooperation – has continued to thrive. It has over the years been enormously
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Successful in helping thousands of people, many of whom had no other recourse, to overcome all sorts of difficulties. Drug addicts have been rehabilitated, persons arrested on trumped-up charges or who had no counsel have been given legal assistance; young people who had no hope of advancement have received educational opportunities, assistance in the form of scholarships, job training, and counselling through Peoples Temple. Senior citizens have been cared for, decently housed, clothed, and fed, assured of medical care, personal care, therapy, an end to the loneliness, despair, and insecurity that are so often their plight. Many people on the verge of suicide have found help, something to live for. Finally, Peoples Temple has consistently reached out, beyond its own membership and closer circles, to extend massive and often critical, life-saving help to hundreds of individuals, groups, organizations and worthy causes that have needed it, or who are working in the interests of human decency, liberation, and justice. In recent years, the Temple has been instrumental in keeping alive fledgling organizations or floundering programs and alternative “peoples” organizations that are trying to provide services to the needy in many areas where established institutional structures are increasingly failing to do so.[13] As a “community within the community,” Peoples Temple has proven that poor people can build a power base, and find a unified voice that will “cry aloud and spare not” against racial and economic injustices of society, even educating the public through its own free newspaper.[14]
Behind the Smear Stories[62]
Meanwhile (and understandably) the attacks against Peoples Temple and Jim Jones have intensified. In 1977, a very well-orchestrated and carefully-planned campaign was mounted, using (typically) yellow Journalism as its front line of attack, to[63] discredit, and ultimately terminate the work of Jim Jones. He has been charged with exploitation, abuse of his members, influence peddling, and other assorted “crimes.” The method of attack is nothing new to those familiar with the way reactionary, McCarthyistic elements in the American political and business establishment have operated to destroy all sorts of progressive organizations and leaders who they determined were a threat to their privileged positions. The particular efforts that have been pursued against Peoples Temple have included blackmail, infiltration, surveillance, wide dissemination of sensationalistic press stories replete with
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lies and gross distortions, pressuring of elected officials, and dubious, possibly fraudulent court proceedings. The Temple has dug and probed behind the sensationalistic, biased garbage that has been printed about Jim Jones. Behind the rotten smell of the New West and Examiner stories, the gross lies, vicious innuendoes, and wild charges, we have found a stinking plot that will be exposed in the following pages, a plot that reaches up into the subterfuge and subterfuge and stratagems of the Nazi-riddled Interpol organization, house within the United States Treasury Department.[64]
“The Media can make monsters out of whomever it chooses,” stated Phil Tracy, author of the article that launched the smear campaign against Jim Jones.[65]
A gullible, credulous public is today particularly vulnerable to press stories that can manipulate opinion, or in the words of the new west author of the antiTemple stories, “make monsters” out of whomever it may choose. It would take a volume to detail how this has been done systematically. Black elected officials, especially, have been the victims of post-Watergate witch-hunting, where the ploy of “uncovering corruption” has been used to mask or smokescreen outright persecution of innocent persons.[15] The use of this tactic against Peoples Temple and Jim Jones is only a very recent chapter in a long, shameful heritage of abuse that has characterized American social history, particularly in this century.[16]
The ‘Tip of the Iceberg”[66]
We hope that the foregoing will help readers understand the reasons behind the organized attacks that have been levelled against Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. What follows will be a presentation and documentation of some of the growing body of evidence which has demonstrated the existence of a complex conspiracy to disrupt and systematically destroy Peoples Temple and its leader. We have good reason to conclude that the collusion we have discovered represents only the tip of the iceberg that ultimately involves very high levels of government, especially in military, police, and intelligence spheres. The scope of the attacks covers the Temple’s local programs in San Francisco, Redwood Valley, and Los Angeles, and its agricultural project/community in Guyana, South America. We charge that the actions of people we know to be involved are totally immoral and
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to a significant extent illegal in a nation that claims to grant and protect freedom of religious and political expression within its bounds.
We remind our readers that what follows is by no means the full story of hate and harassment Peoples Temple has experienced. The destruction of our church building by arson; threats and attempts on the life of Jim Jones and members of his family the planting of sophisticated explosive devices; the endless torrents of hate messages, and numerous other abuses, would take too long to rehearse.[67]
The investigations of the conspiracy that we have carried out have not been easy. There have been difficult obstacles at every turn. But the Temple plans to keep the public informed as more evidence emerges. We are, after all, a single church of mostly poor and minority people who have had to stand up against the combined powers of the establishment media (which has ignored or mangled the Temple’s attempts to expose the truth) and well-financed agents and agencies, informers and infiltrators who have resorted to the most vicious and devious stratagems. As the full story becomes clear, we hope that it will help concerned Americans[68] better understand the vast potential for abuse and subversion of the rights of innocent people by well-financed reactionary forces that are deeply entrenched in positions of power and influence in the American establishment.
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Book II: The Anatomy of a Conspiracy!
Part I: The Lower Levels
A Dirty Deal[69]
In May, 1977, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks was offered a “deal.” As verified by Banks’ own statement, a man named David Conn tried to blackmail Banks by suggesting that a serious matter of extradition hanging over his head would go better for him if he would sign a public statement denouncing Jim Jones.
Dennis Banks notified Peoples Temple right away. This event was the first indication that there was indeed an active conspiracy targeting Jim Jones and his church for defamation and destruction. The sworn statement of Mr. Banks which follows[70] tells a shocking story.
(here reprint – perhaps on a facing page in the text – the entire statement of Dennis Banks)
In subsequent weeks, Temple members and friends gathered information from various sources about David Conn and other individuals whose names came to the surface in connection with his. Confidential sources have revealed that Conn claimed to have a “high priority number” with at least one federal agency: the U.S. Treasury Department. Indeed, he confided to Dennis Banks that he was working with the Treasury Department and an agent of the IRS. We have evidence that he has contacted various individuals who are no longer members of Peoples Temple, and has pressured them for information. He called in to a local radio station and gave his name as a source of information on People Temple, and has pressured them for information. He called in to a local radio station and gave his name as a source of information on Peoples Temple for anyone wishing to contact him. Evidence strongly indicates that he has been conducting an “investigation” of the church for some six or seven years, and there is no doubt that he is being sponsored in his concerted campaign. against the Temple.
The Conn-Klineman-Mertle Connection
The Temple’s investigation has been corroborated by Bay Area journalist Art Silverman. David Conn told Silverman of his collaboration with freelance journalist George Klineman of Santa Rosa in approaching “various police and governmental agencies last fall (1976), offering them witnesses and documents with which to attack the Temple.”[18] Both George Klineman and David Conn are
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Directly connected to articles that appeared in New West magazine[19] written by Phil Tracy and San Francisco Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff, launching the massive media smear campaign against Jim Jones, which still continues. Klineman was credited with helping write the stories, while Conn was a secondary source and appeared at a New West-sponsored press conference held at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in July, 1977, to hep promote the smear campaign. Interestingly enough, David Conn has been for many years an intimate friend of the two key original sources for much of the anti-Temple publicity, Elmer and Deanna Mertle (a.k.a. Al and Jeanne Mills). Mertle and Conn worked together at Standard Oil Corporation up to the time that Mertle joined Peoples Temple with his present wife, Deanna, a veteran of ultra-right win causes. The Mertles were members of the Temple throughout the seven-year period during which Conn was “investigating” it!
Conn, the Mertles, and Klineman each have a special role to play; their collaboration is instruction, and gives us a glimpse at the overall structure and functioning of the conspiracy. First, there are individuals like David Conn with direct connections to federal agencies; next, there are “insiders” (the Mertles) who have infiltrated the organization and can help identify and organize others inside, as well as former “dissident” members who will be willing to co-operate in giving “testimony” against the Temple; finally, there are operatives with media credentials (Klineman) who can work to bring the efforts of the other two into the public eye and, hopefully, turn the general populace against the organization through an “expose.” But the scenario is not complete.
An ‘Investigator’ with a Record
Enter at this point a man who is perhaps the most critical and active figure in all of the anti-Temple activity, an individual who, in his own peculiar fashion, can be said to be a kind of symbol of the conspiracy, embodying its special character: Joseph Mazor.
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Mr. Mazor is working as a ‘private-investigator’ on behalf of a group of former Temple members, led by the Mertles, who have specific “grievances” against the church. In this role, Mazor styles himself as a champion of these unfortunate victims of Jim Jones, who the media portrays as the “Temple Tyrant.”[71] But Temple officials, along with Silverman of the Barb, have investigated this ‘investigator,’ and the results have been most interesting. It turns out that Mazor has a lengthy criminal record, including at least eight arrests in three states for various bogus check and fraud charges, six convictions, and several jail and prison terms. He has also been returned to confinement on three separate occasions for violating probation and parole by committing new crimes.![20]
Art Silverman[21] quotes from a confidential, 16-page California Adult Authority report on Mazor, written in 1970: “He (Mazor) is a smooth ‘con-man’ with an insatiable desire to get ahead…. He is bright, well-educated, and so well-versed in the law that he had five attorneys in the Pomona area convinced that he had a law degree…. It is felt that the subject is a menace to the community.”[22]
Mazor was hired to investigate Peoples Temple back in November, 1976. But he refused to disclose who employed him, beyond the statement that it was an outsider, someone who was not and never had been connected with Peoples Temple. (Later, we will shed some light on that most important matter). It was also disclosed that Mazor hired one of the largest and most prestigious public relations firms in San Francisco (Lowers,[72] Russom, and Leeper) to help promote his anti-Temple activity by fronting material to the media. Who financed this? The Barb reported that Mazor asked this firm to co-ordinate a publicity promotional effort to maximize coverage.[23] A source close to Lowry, Russom, and Leeper also told Silverman that Mazor came to the company “saying that he wanted to become San Francisco’s next Hal Lipset (a famous investigator,” and that the Peoples Temple controversy “presented an excellent opportunity” to garner publicity. Bob Kenney, an account executive at the public relations firm, told Silverman that he had been working for Mazor
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“on this Peoples Temple project, showing him how to handle the media.” Kenney’s work for Mazor reportedly included sending out letters to selected journalists offering them – through Mazor – exclusive material of an “incriminating” nature against Peoples Temple. [24]
So Joseph Mazor is not content, evidently, with just helping out ex-members in various schemes against the Temple. No, Mr. Mazor is busy helping himself in the bargain. The crusading private eye (whose efforts have centered around a “bring ‘em back alive” kidnapping campaign into the jungles of Guyana, complete with chartered jets, bogus[73] court orders, and the like) is hardly ashamed of the naked opportunism with which he has used the situation to cover up his criminal past. And, in his quasi-legal shenanigans, his self-promotional campaign and his eagerness to refashion his image from con-man to a ‘champion of justice,’ good-guy private-eye, and hero of the innocent good citizens whose loved ones have been whisked away to some kind of Devil’s Island ‘prison’ by the evil Peoples Temple, Joseph Mazor is the very pattern, the prototype of the person that is preferred more by more powerful forces that are paying his bills to do their dirty work.
There are several matters involving Mr. Mazor that have not been clarified. One extremely interesting question (which Peoples Temple has asked Governor Brown, and to which it is currently awaiting an explanation), is just how a three-time felon was able to secure a State Investigator’s licence shortly after being released from prison – a licence which[74], incidentally, authorizes Mazor[75] to carry a concealed weapon.
Mazor, Conn, and Klineman, along with their chief accomplices and star media witnesses, the Mertles (who, again, did the “inside” work, infiltrating the Temple for seven years, form the key links[76] on the lower rungs of the[77] conspiracy, reaching with one hand, so to speak, to government, police, and intelligence agencies, and with the other, to the news media.
We are, then, faced with a question of overriding importance. A high-powered public relations firm, several attorneys, reporters,
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infiltrators, and this most questionable ‘private investigator’ have all been working on the campaign to malign and destroy Peoples Temple for over a year. Who has co-ordinated and financed this elaborately planned and orchestrated effort? Evidence points directly to areas “higher up” in military-police-intelligence circles. Before we discuss them in detail, however, let us take a closer look at the “front line” of the conspiracy.
Part II – Media Manipulation
Use of the Public Media to Impugn Jim Jones and Peoples Temple
Laying the Groundwork.[78]
The media plays a critical role in conspiracies such as the one directed against Peoples Temple. As we have mentioned, a sensationalistic ‘smear’ campaign creates a smokescreen that at once covers illegal plotting and justifies its results. Klineman, Conn, the Mertles, and Joseph Mazor began in early 1977 to move on this front.
In order to work effectively through the media, the groundwork had to be laid. We know today that by February, 1977, five full months before the first New West story broke, a group of some thirteen former members of Peoples Temple had already met together with David Conn and an agent of the U.S. Treasury Department and Interpol.[25] The PR firm of Lowry, Russom, and Leeper had already been hired by Mazor to help with promotional angles. According to official reports that have been made available to us, originating in the Treasury Department, the media ‘smear’ campaign was cooked up using this group of former members as its vehicle, because the agencies engineering the plots against Jim Jones could find no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing that could legitimize their efforts. (To date, after a great amount of sound and fury, no formal charges have been filed).
These secret meetings of former members and government agents are a key element in the conspiracy. The efforts to launch the smear campaign in which the former members would paly starring roles finally found its sponsors in Chroniclereporter Marshall
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Kilduff and New West contributing editor Phil Tracy. As we have mentioned, freelancer George Klineman was a key figure in ‘selling’ the material to New West (he even helped write it), though there is evidence that he had tried unsuccessfully to get other periodicals to work with him and his collaborators.
All of this shows that the media was manipulated by the conspiracy, if they didn’t consciously participate from the beginning. The contention of New West editor Rosalie Muller Wright that the former members who have participated in these efforts were taking a “spontaneous, courageous action” because they were “scared to death” is completely, demonstrably false. It is now clear that the impression of ‘spontaneous’ action was deliberately created, along with the vicious innuendo of being ‘scared to death.’ We shall see how this clever fabrication was used as the ‘angle’ for the entire smear campaign. Perhaps Mrs. Wright knows this, along with the rest of the media, who have defended and promoted the fraudulent campaign. Perhaps not. It’s the old story: either a knave… or a fool.[26]
In either case, Tracy and Kilduff were getting ready to release their story in mid-July. But New West would not be content to just print the story. Something else was needed to arouse public interest. This wasn’t going to be any ordinary exposé.
The ‘Great New West Break-In’[79]
On the morning of June 17, 1977 a call came in to Peoples Temple from a San Francisco Examiner reporter. He was impatient: he had only 15 minutes until his deadline, and wanted to know the Peoples Temple’s ‘side’ of the story about a ‘break in’ that had occurred the previous night at the offices of New West. It seems that a file containing the material for the forthcoming story on Peoples Temple had been ‘disturbed.’ (There was no theft – something just seemed to be slightly out of order according to Phil Tracy). Peoples Temple knew nothing of any break-in. Yet that afternoon, front page coverage of the incident appeared in the Examiner (and the story was likewise carried in the Chronicle the next day, also on the front page).[27]
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The coverage was full of innuendoes[80] that Peoples Temple was responsible. And for several days the media continued to cover the ‘break in,’ a highly questionable incident which, strangely, received publicity far out of proportion to its flimsy, unsubstantial nature. Something was up. The effect of the publicity was, of course, to build up suspense in the public about the forthcoming article on the Temple, and to make it seem that Peoples Temple was so desperate to keep the story out of print, or whatever, that it tried to break into New West to glimpse it, or for some other obscure purpose.[28]
Peoples Temple responded by calling for an immediate and thorough police investigation. The official police report of that investigation[29] concluded that there was no break-in, and that if any tampering was done, it was very likely done by one of the magazine’s own employees! The police investigation brought out what the Examiner and Chronicle stories mysteriously did not mention: that Jon Carroll, a New West employee (who has also written columns in the Examiner) only a few days previously had to ‘break in’ to the identical office through the identical window where the burglar was alleged to have entered. Carroll explained that he had “locked himself out of his office when he went to the bathroom” late one night! Mr. Carroll, however, did not offer this information until the police investigation was completed and it was disclosed that the only fingerprints on the window that was allegedly broken into were his.
So what was this ‘break in’ after all but a shoddy publicity stunt, a hoax. Its effect, as we have mentioned, was as clear as its purpose: to promote public interest in the Peoples Temple spear campaign that was soon to follow. And it revealed, too, that the local media, most notably the San Francisco Examiner, would willingly prostitute its front pages to the effort. Its eager, though shameful coverage of the ‘great New West break-in’ was to foreshadow its later role in the attempts to destroy Jim Jones.
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Exposing the Exposé
“We can make monsters out of anyone we choose.”
New West Reporter Phil Tracy (spoken to Rev. Jim Jones in an interview that was never used)
The New West story[30] launched a frenzied, bizarre campaign that has been carried out in the local and even national electronic and print media portraying Peoples Temple as a cruel, exploitative organization. Accusations have been rehashed a hundred times. The public has been barraged with lurid, innuendo-filled press stories, twisting around truth, amalgamating distortions and embellishments with gross lies. Those who have closely followed the attacks have recognised, in the words of one noted columnist, that there has been “a lot of smoke, but no smoking gun.”[31] Wherever investigations have actually been carried out by official agencies, no evidence of wrongdoing has been uncovered: the allegations have proven to be groundless. Beyond the smokescreen of flimsy, unsubstantiated charges parades as “news,” is one of the most highly-coordinated and well-financed attempts to discredit and destroy a politically progressive organization.
We note that the same tactic was used extensively during the McCarthy period – a tactic borrowed from a man who brought it to a state of great refinement several decades ago: Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. According to Goebbels, the first step in destroying an individual or organization was to use the press to law down a relentless, brutal barrage of bad publicity. The strategy is[81] to create, through an almost daily repetition of the ‘despicable acts’ or ‘crimes’ of the person or group (usually in the form of unsubstantiated charges), a prejudicial climate of public opinion, tearing down trust, reputation, and sowing confusion. Then, when something ‘happened’ to the now infamous reprobate, who has now been ‘exposed to the public’, nobody got upset. If anyone raised any objections, they, in turn, were also suspect. A red-baiting, yellow American press, in the hands of media magnates linked right in with the power elite, has been used extensively in this manner. The flimsier the charges, the more they are rehashed. The public is treated to
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a spectacle of which it sees only the outer manifestations. What is not seen, of course, is the massive, politically-motivated persecution that is deliberately covered up by the carefully composed stories, which never discuss the real reasons for the persecution, but shift the grounds to an entirely different set of issues. Thus, the smear campaign is a very clever way to mask a cover up as an “exposé.”
It would take a separate volume to cut through the tangle of lies, distortions, half-truths, and misrepresentations that have been used in creating the smokescreen, the “red herring” that has kept the truth hidden. But the stories follow a general pattern that is worth examining, and helps us understand the anatomy of yellow journalism.
A human interest angle is developed, on a level of third-rate melodrama, designed to generate public sympathy by portraying a “victim” of the “terrible” Temple. A ‘scared father,’ afraid to speak about his son’s involvement with a group he portrays as ‘cancerous’; a distraught mother, battling for her child that has been spirited off to the Temple’s ‘prison-camp’ outpost in the swampy jungles of South America; a frazzled intellectual, who has been ‘publicly humiliated’ in some ‘weird ritual’.[82] The stories call on stage a vomitous parade of ‘courageous’ individuals who, the script goes, have ‘dared’ to stand up to[83] Jim Jones, the ‘Temple tyrant.’ Together, the accounts form a maudlin catalogue of sob-stories, conceived and concocted to appeal to the dregs of popular taste. The Grace Stoens, Joyce Shaws, Nadyne Houstons, (there are many more),[84] and the ever-present Mertles (Al and Jeanne Mills) are cast on the pages of the newspapers or on television as the fatuous symbols of outraged conventional morality.
This is the way that ‘off-beat’ organizations have so often been smeared: by the insinuation that they are somehow offensive or menacing to the God-Apple Pie-Mother totalitarianism that governs American cultural religion. Imperfectly concealed behind the pseudo-liberal, self-righteous posturing of the Tracy and Reiterman articles is the tired old myth of ‘virtue offended.’ Phil Tracy’s statement to Jim Jones during his never-used two-hour
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interview with him, when he blurted out that the media can make ‘monsters’ out of whomever it choses, is more than fulfilled in these shoddy press tales of frightened parents, abducted children, ‘strange suicides,’ and the big, bad, power-brokering tyrannical Jim Jones, who lords it over his quivering flock of brow-beaten, brainwashed boot-lickers.
Throughout, people are given to believe that they have been ‘used’ or ‘tricked’ or ‘really didn’t know’ what was ‘going on inside the Temple… behind those locked doors.’ The press becomes, then, a kind of preliminary tribunal in which the target is accused, given the aura of guilt, convicted, and condemned in the court of ‘public opinion,’ as manipulated by the collaborators in the media who are pursuing the ‘investigation.’ The stream of innuendoes, faceless accusers, coerced[85] testimony, distortions and lies, leads to a form of ‘judgement’. The traffickers in this stuff know well its potency, and the effect it can have in instigating people to take independent action against the target. Already this potential has been realized as the level of harassment, violence, death-threats and other actions has markedly stepped up since the smear campaign got underway. While many people have seen through the sewage that has been aired in the Examiner and other media, and have given their support to the Temple, others have gone so far as to threaten to shoot anyone stepping out of the front door of the San Francisco headquarters. And if anyone is shot, the media provocateurs can take the blame.[33]
Two Investigations[86]
Before closing this chapter on the abuses of the public media, let us briefly look at two instances in which press stories that insinuated wrong-doing and pushed for official investigations actually resulted in such investigations being carried out and concluded. The first instance, initially written about by Phil Tracy in New West[34] and followed up on by Tracy’s collaborator, Marshall Kilduff of the Chronicle, concerned a young man who never was a member of Peoples Temple and who was never more than remotely involved with church services or programs. He knew of the Temple because his family lived in the Ukiah[87] area where the Temple was located several years ago. Members knew his as a sensitive, though deeply troubled youth. He had received a settlement after a serious motorcycle accident, which
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he donated to the Temple’s human service ministry. In October 195, the young man committed suicide. Two years later, under the pressure of Tracy and Kilduff, who were frantically trying to find something to ‘pin’ on Peoples Temple, a second coroner’s inquest was held in Los Angeles. Already, the Tracy story (which had been picked up by other media) had charged that there were ‘strange’ irregularities in the suicide and the outrageous[88] innuendo was clear that Peoples Temple had murdered[89] the man after getting his money from him. Because of pressure from the media, medical examiners and witnesses to the event were summoned to court. On October 20, 1977, the coroner’s jury upheld the verdict of death by suicide.[35]
A second story given heightened media coverage (front page all over San Francisco) was that Temple high school students “dominated” the school that many of them attended. The articles[36] were ludicrous, transparent attempts to grasp at straws and manufacture ‘news’ out of practically nothing at all. Nonetheless, the Temple was maligned in the public eye, accused of some vague form of wrongdoing that hinted of dark plotting and behind-the-scenes finagling. Investigations that resulted from the scandal-mongering articles turned up absolutely nothing. The media’s sources moaned that they were misquoted, and denied their statements.[37] As with other such trumped-up allegations, the rebuttal statements that totally exonerated the Temple were given low-key, low priority coverage, buried in the back pages. But the effect of the smear was achieved. There were no apologies or explanations.
TV Gets into the Act[90]
Electronic media coverage used its own gimmickry. One reporter had former Temple members give interviews with their backs to the camera, as if they were in some kind of danger for “testifying,” contributing further to the monstrous implication that former members of Peoples Temple were ‘scared to death.’ However, hundreds of people in the church who viewed these newscasts knew exactly who these persons were. For whose benefit, then, was the act staged?
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On another occasion, the TV cameraman working with the same reporter ran at breakneck speed to corner a group of Temple senior citizens in a public car park who were preparing to board a bus and, while filming this for television, screamed at the top of his lungs for them to call him a name, trying to bait them into making a response that might make for some sensationalistic footage on the TV news!
News as Promotion[91]
It is important to emphasize that the press smear campaign has been actively promoted around the nation. Tracy and Kilduff have gone on television, talk shows, have held special press conferences, called up investigating agencies, pushing and promoting their stories to the hilt. But[92] the sensationalism and smears of the Examiner and New Westarticles, low and sickening from the start, have succeeded in conjuring up a controversy around Jim Jones, they have not produced the “Watergate” that promoters and perpetrators have hoped for. Some[93] stories have been successfully planted in England and Canada, however, the Toronto Star and London Observer both carried a highly libellous article about Peoples Temple and the mission/community that Jim Jones has established in Guyana. The intensity of the articles is alarming enough, but the fact that they were printed in the two very cities where the largest populations of Guyanese are located outside of Guyana leads to one conclusion: a well-coordinated effort is being made to discredit and run interference with the Temple’s Guyana project. That is another chapter in the conspiracy which we will soon examine in some detail. But, in order to understand that chapter, we need to look behind the media-manipulation of the public, behind the smear campaign which, in the final analysis is a diversion. We even have to look behind the sleazy tribe of slick, fork-tongued operatives and informers, the Mazors and Conns who are busily engaged in blackmail, coercion of testimony, and assorted schemes to build their case.
The Temple’s continuing investigation of the plot against Jim Jones reveals that they are being orchestrated at a higher level.
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Part III – Moving Up to the Higher Levels
Inconsistencies[94]
After hearing that David Conn was in some way connected with the Treasury department, several members of Peoples Temple wrote to that department asking for confirmation or clarification of any kind of investigation that might be going on. Responses came from the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department, and U.S. Customs Service. None acknowledged any investigations involving Peoples Temple.[38]
In April, 1977, however, Rev. James (J.R.) Purifoy, a former member of Peoples Temple, reached Jim Jones by telephone in Guyana, South America. Purifoy had been telephoned by a man who said he worked with the Treasury Department and who wanted to know anything Purifoy could remember about Peoples Temple and its Pastor. Purifoy[95] refused to talk to the caller.[39]
Also, in the written notes taken during his May, 1977, meeting with David Conn, Dennis Banks had noted that “Grace (Stoen) has been visited by Treasury agents.” Mrs. Stoen, a former member of Peoples Temple, was one of the sources used in the original New West story, and has been a key figure in subsequent media attacks against the Temple.[40]
Several other incidents have taken place indicating that the denial of the Treasury and its related agencies of being involved in any investigation of the activities of Peoples Temple is not true. Each event has represented an invasion of the Constitutional rights of Peoples Temple as a religious organization.
“Routine Procedures”[96]
On September 29, 1977, Temple officials learned from the church’s freight forwarder in Miami, Florida, that agents of the U.S. Customs Service (an arm of the U.S. Treasury Department) had held up a Temple cargo shipment bound for the agricultural project in Guyana. Seven Customs men pulled crates at random for inspection. The attorney for Peoples Temple, Charles Garry, wrote to the Customs Service demanding an explanation, or at least a statement of fair cause for this action.[40][97] The response from [text cut off due to scan]
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they were exempt from disclosure and the search was merely a “routine procedure.”
The freight forwarder, however, confirmed that the Customs agents involved were[98] not the regular Customs agents I see around here… some of them were from the West coast.” Clearly, more was going on than a mere ‘routine’ procedure.
Shortly thereafter, a package containing important documents and church-related business arrived in San Francisco from Guyana at the Post Office. The package had been opened, tampered with, and completely ruined. A substance the color and scent of wine had been poured or spilled all over the papers which included important affidavits and legal documents.[99] A letter requesting an explanation was sent to the Postmaster of San Francisco. As yet, no reply has been received by the Temple.
A most recent intrusion is the blatant interference with the Social Security checks of hundreds of senior citizens, members of Peoples Temple who are now residing in Guyana at the agricultural community. The Temple has received word from a confidential source that a message was circulating in the San Francisco Post Office branches ordering that any SSA (Social Security) checks which have a forwarding address to Guyana be returned to the Social Security Administration (Department of Health, Education, and Welfare). For months, these checks had not been received by their owners. All members of Peoples Temple who have taken up residence in Guyana and who are legally entitled to receive these benefits, filed appropriate forms (SSA-21) declaring their intention to live outside the territorial borders of the United States. By law, Social Security checks are sent to the recipient, wherever he may choose to reside.
Letters of inquiry were sent to Congressman Philip Burton and letters of protest were sent to the local postmaster. All responses to date have skirted the real issue.[41] In the meantime, the Temple has secured a copy of the actual memo which ordered the return of all SSI (Gold Checks) and Social Security (Green) Checks to HEW where the post office has a forwarding order for Guyana. The illegality of this order is clear. Still, there has
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been no rectification or even explanation forthcoming from the Social Security administration for what amounts to an outrageous rip-off by the government of a group of elderly people.
Is this another ‘routine procedure?’ What has become clear is that the ‘routine’ is more of a pattern of deliberate official government agency harassment. It is not within the scope of this document to go into the myriad of instances of this type of harassment, which have included multiple instances of surveillance[44], mail tampering, payoffs, bribes, blackmail, and even hired assassins sent through the jungle across international borders, besides what looks like a most cruel and inhuman plot[100] to “starve out” the hundreds of Temple members in Guyana by holding up their Social Security benefits that are rightfully theirs. However, we have begun to uncover areas of what is shaping up as a very far-reaching, insidious conspiracy that can help us to explain all of the foregoing and, hopefully, get to the heart of it.
The Interpol[101] Connection
The irregularities that have been passed off as “routine” received a great measure of clarification when, in November 1977, several Temple officials conducting investigations into the conspiracy were given access (through government sources) to a lengthy document originating in Interpol. The covering letter of the document bore the name of Mr. Louis B. Sims of the F.B.I. and Interpol. The document discussed Jim Jones, Peoples Temple members, and church activities from information provided by thirteen ex-members who had met with an agent identified only by his number. The meeting took place in February, well before any of the smear articles were published. Among these former members was Grace Stoen, the same person who David Conn said (to Dennis Banks) had talked to agents of the Treasury department. Typical of Interpol intelligence reports[42] the document was riddled with fabrications and outright lies about the activities of Peoples Temple and of members
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whose names were cited in the report. The report discusses the ‘political influence’ of Rev. Jones and the Temple in the United States, and affirms that no investigations of any of the allegations in the press have led to anything. It confirms that the thirteen former members had contacted reporters to spur more investigations, and that articles had subsequently appeared in the press. The report confirms that special observers had been stationed in Houston, New Orleans, and Miami, assigned to watch for shipments leaving the country from Peoples Temple. The report mentioned the meeting between Dennis Banks and David Conn. It also alleges that Jim Jones took part in some sort of demonstration in Guyana during a time period when he was not in the country at all.
Significantly, the Interpol document did not even concern itself with the “charges” and allegations out of which the media smear campaign has been fabricated: its concerns revealed the underlying reasons behind the smear campaign and the plotting of Mazor, Mertle, Conn and Co. against Jim Jones and his organization: political persecution. Jim Jones was pictured as a ‘threatening’ presence, a dangerous radical, a friend of ‘black power’ organizations such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, a revolutionary organizer who, along with his ‘subversive’ organization, had to somehow be stopped. The media smear stories were shown by the Interpol document to be precisely what Peoples Temple had said all along that it was[102]: an enormous red herring, a diversion.
The conclusions recommended further action: more observers, more immigration[103] officials to watch for traffic, and more investigations to be initiated.
We are attempting at this time to acquire copies of the report. It is noteworthy that the document has been dispatched to Guyana by Louis Sims. Sims, incidentally, is also the person who has been largely responsible for the campaigns waged against the Church of Scientology in recent years. That organization has done extensive investigations of Interpol, and has documented
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Interpol’s Nazi connections.[46]
What is Interpol?
Interpol is a private international police organization made up of national police representations from over 100 nations. Supposedly organized to apprehend criminals, control drug traffic, etc., Interpol (in the U.S.) is funded, staffed, and housed in the Treasury Department, across the street from the White House. It has a direct hook-up to the computerized National Crime Information Center (NCIC), run by the FBI, and direct contact with State and local police. All Interpol nations have access to US files and records denied to US citizens. Any police state, or private group in any member nation, via their police can obtain information on US citizens, businesses, tourists, immigrants, suspects, etc. without regard to validity, relevance, truth or source. The NCIC computerized files at the disposal of Interpol are massive. A foreign agency, operating through Interpol, could even plant information in US government files.
Interpol is basically a Nazi organization. Its Vice-President, in the 1930’s and 40’s was Nazi General Kurt Daluege, executed later for war crimes. During Hitler’s power period, Interpol was headquartered in Berlin, and has been riddled with high-ranking Nazi police and military officials ever since. Its 1939 conference was held under the patronage of the Reichsfuehrer, the SS, and Nazi Chief of Police Heinrich Himmler. In 1968, Paul Dickopf, a high-ranking official in Hitler’s Secret Service (SD), was elected president of Interpol. During his term in office, the organization became affluent, due to large contributions by three member nations in particular, Venezuela, Brazil, and Switzerland where, coincidentally, the most powerful units of the underground “Odessa” organization of former top Nazis are located, and are still quite active.[43]
The Interpol involvement in the plot against Jim Jones at the upper levels of the conspiracy is interesting and instructive for many reasons. Let us recall again the role of the Treasury Department in much of the anti-Temple activity: Conn’s connections with the Treasury, his insistence that Dennis Banks meet with Treasury agents in the proposed “deal” in which Banks would give false testimony against Jim Jones in exchange for protection in his extradition case, and the various forms of harassment (i.e., Customs) that originated in that department. Let us also be reminded that the Treasury Department has been used, practically as a second FBI, for intelligence gathering and political persecution (especially through the Internal Revenue Service, a major
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agency of the Treasury). Grace Stoen, a key media ‘witness’ and a woman who has played a major role in efforts to harass Peoples Temple, was noted by Conn (in his conversation with Dennis Banks) to have met with Treasury agents. The Treasury Department, by the way, has been increasingly relied upon for the kind of work that was formerly the exclusive domain of the FBI because of the new Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation, which does not cover the Treasury.
Interestingly, Interpol in the United States is directly under the wing of the Treasury Department, which is the official U.S. representative to Interpol. The Chairman of the US delegation of Interpol’s General Assembly is none other than the Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury (for Enforcement). Moreover, all Interpol investigations and activities are farmed out to the U.S. Secret Service, Customs, the Bureau of Narcotics, and the IRS – all agencies of the U.S. Treasury which effectively puts that entirety department at the service of Interpol which, in the United States, is the Treasury Department.
The fact that Interpol is a Nazi-riddled organization is well-known (see box). In fact, it was for many years run by top-ranking Nazis. Even as late as 1972, one of Hitler’s top SD (secret service) officials, Paul Dickopf, was its directly. But what readers may not know is that Peoples Temple has been one of the most militantly outspoken anti-Nazi organizations in the United States. Through its newspaper, Peoples Forum, Peoples Temple has repeatedly and fearlessly denounced and exposed the rise and dangers of neo-Nazism in San Francisco and around the United States.[44] It has also run front-page exposes on U.S. government complicity (within the Immigration and Naturalization Service, especially) in shielding top Nazi butchers from prosecution or deportation, while they live comfortably, even luxuriously, in the United States.[45] Jim Jones has also spoken out publicly on this issue, and has insisted that something be done about it. He has also spearheaded drives, with other concerned organizations in the community, to combat the neo-Nazi upsurge.
Thus it is not surprising that efforts to stop, silence, or destroy Jim Jones would be instigated in the ultra-right,
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neo-fascist recesses of one of the most powerful government agencies. Interpol is especially well-equipped to work through agents outside the United States. (The Temple’s agricultural project is located right near the border of Venezuela, which is reportedly one of the hotbeds of international Nazi activity).
Temple investigations have been checking into possible Interpol/Nazi/ultra-rightist connections of those who are taking leading roles, either publicly or behind the scenes, in the conspiracy. Already the pieces are beginning to fit together. Just recently, our investigators ascertained a most significant fact: the con-man ‘private investigator’ who mysteriously got a California State-issued licence soon after being released from prison, who is doing the key organizing, promotional work and scheming in the anti-Temple/Jim Jones efforts, Joseph A. Mazor, is a current, active member of Interpol. Temple investigators have seen Interpol’s secret 1977 membership list. Mazor’s name is on it. He is also connected with the CIA.[104]
The Mazor-Interpol connection helps us to penetrate into the structure of the behind-the-scenes work of the conspiracy. What, precisely, is Mazor’s modus operandi as Interpol’s man on the Jim Jones assignment? We need to realize one of Interpol’s classic strategies in going after their targets: they specialize in destroying people through vulnerable personal relationships, especially involving children.[105] And, in Guyana, especially, this is the very area in which efforts have been concentrated in activities against Jim Jones and Peoples Temple.
Part IV – Intrusion in Guyana
As the campaign against Peoples Temple has accelerated in the United States, so have efforts increased to disrupt the progress of its agricultural project in Guyana.[50] In fact, the Guyana project has become the central focus of these efforts. Provoking phone calls, letters, and even intruders onto the ground of the project all point to the very same sources that have been
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responsible for harassment in the United States.
One recent development, chronicled herein, illustrates the attempts that have been made to defame Jim Jones and Peoples Temple to Guyanese officials, even causing an international incident that would hopefully embarrass Guyana, or cause enough of a strain in its delicate relations with the U.S. that the young socialist nation might be forced to yield to pressure and oust Jim Jones and his community of nearly one thousand persons. The direct objective, though, is to cause Guyana to lose faith in the intentions and sincerity of purpose that have been clearly demonstrated by Peoples Temple in the establishment of its outstanding co-operative community.
In the fall of 1977, the Ambassador to the United States from Guyana, Mr. Lawrence Mann, was called at the Guyanese Embassy in Washington, D.C. by ‘investigator’ Joseph Mazor. Mazor claimed that Peoples Temple had ‘abducted’ twenty children and that he had a chartered jet on stand-by and was ready to ‘retrieve’ them.[51] The Ambassador told Mr. Mazor that if he had any such problems, he should call the FBI or whatever agency would be responsible for investigating such a matter. Mr. Mann first called the District Attorney in San Francisco and found that no charges had been made against the Temple He then called the Temple to advise of what happened. Meanwhile, Mr. Mazor has by no means abandoned his plotting to ‘retrieve’ individuals that have been ‘abducted’. But more about that later.
Next, the Head of State and the office of the Prime Minister of Guyana both received packets of recent press clippings about Peoples Temple. Of course, these clippings have been far less than complimentary about the work of the church, and included plenty of smear campaign material. They were obviously intended to drive a wedge between the government of Guyana, which has been sponsoring the agricultural project (and has been exceedingly pleasured with its progress), and Peoples Temple, hopefully wit the result of getting Jim Jones kicked out of the country. But
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even if that end could not be achieved, the circulation of press lies would hopefully make it easier for the anti-Jones operation to break down any official resistance to its schemes, and even secure Guyana’s co-operation in carrying them out.
In addition, press clippings of a decidedly uncomplimentary nature about Peoples Temple, have been systematically circulated within the entire Guyana business community with the express intention of causing severe economic problems for the Temple that would cripple its work in Guyana. This, along with other efforts, most notably the illegal blocking of Social Security payments to Temple members residing in Guyana by the Post Office, is another part of what looks to be a calculated effort to economically sabotage the Jonestown community.
On another occasion, the United States Embassy in Guyana received a call from a person representing himself as the “attorney general.” This caller referred to Peoples Temple as being guilty of having ‘abducted some twenty members,’ using the same line that Mazor used when he contacted the Guyanese ambassador in Washington. The Embassy called the Guyanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Fred Wills. Mr. Wills, in turn, contacted members of Peoples Temple in Georgetown about the complaint of the ‘attorney general.’ After extensive checking, we have not been able to find a shred of evidence that the phone call was authentic. We are much inclined to believe that it was made by an imposter.
As it turned out, the call to the U.S. Embassy did not serve to divide the Guyanese from us. Rather, the call was interpreted by Mr. Wills as an act ‘to intrude in the affairs of a sovereign nation….’ Whoever made this call did the United States no service whatsoever. Likewise, members of Guyana’s business and professional community have not shown any interest in the sensationalistic press stories that have been circulated among them.
On August 8, 1977, a Caucasian man came onto the Temple project in the interior of Guyana. He had been stopped by the police in nearby Port Kaituma, and told them he knew some of the
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people working on the Temple’s agricultural project. When the man arrived on the grounds, he pointed out a child to one of the workers, and began interrogating several persons about what the child was doing there. For the first few minutes, the man feigned a Guyanese accent, although he did not maintain it throughout his conversation. He said that his name was Givaio, a Guyanese name. He said that he was staying in[106] Port Kaituma, so he was taken there and dropped off. As the persons who transported him there were leaving Port Kaituma, they observed this man going down the river on a lumber boat. He has not been seen in the area since that day.
While this obvious imposter/spy was on the Temple project, he asked many pointed questions: How do you fund the project? How do you protect it? Do you have weapons? He also interrogated in a similar fashion Guyanese Amerindians he met along the roadside. He asked them how many people were coming, and similar questions. He claimed to have walked the three-mile road from the nearest community to the Temple project, yet, as several persons noticed, there was no trace of mud as would have normally shown on his shoes. It had just rained.
It would turn out, though, that later intruders would use much more covert methods of operation.
A War of Attrition[107]
The revelations of the U.S. Treasury/Interpol involvement broaden the outlines of the conspiracy against Jim Jones, though the picture is by no means complete. Indeed, there are other chapters in this chronicle of political and religious persecution that, in time, will be clarified. Hopefully, they will serve to shed light upon the right-wing ‘shadow government’ that has penetrated deep into the police-military-intelligence establishment of the United States and has, for all practical purposes, subverted it for its own ends. It is already clear that far more than a series of news stories and negative press, the efforts against Jim Jones are manifestly well-coordinated, far-reaching, and have involved regular and intensified harassment in several cities and into Guyana.
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Several agencies are involved. We are now just beginning to clarify CIA connections. These efforts have involved bogus court proceedings, pay-offs, and assassination attempts. The conspiracy is serious, high-level, and very well-financed. Its intent is to stop Jim Jones by any means necessary.[53]
The architects and their operatives now know that they are up against no ordinary adversary in Jim Jones, if they haven’t already understood it. They have understood the fatherly and fiercely protective character of their quarry – especially with regard to the many children and young people in the Temple’s extended family. It has been on this front that they have tried, in recent weeks, to focus their energies and schemes. Mazor’s role has been to engineer and pursue plots to “retrieve” young people through using former members whose relatives remain in Peoples Temple. The devices employed are highly dubious, and involve possibly fraudulent ‘custody’ and ‘conservatorship’ proceedings.
It is interesting, again, that a favorite Interpol method of operation in destroying a person is to look for their vulnerable personal attachments, such as loved ones and children. This helps explain why there has been so much time and money expended in trying to ‘retrieve’ persons from the Guyana community, spearheaded by Mazor. Mazor has even chartered jet planes, and, along with other collaborators, has used various methods to pressure local Guyanese officials into co-operating with and sanctioning illegal[108] proceedings in his schemes.
Through it all, an attempt is clearly being made to manipulate the intense bond of loyalty between Jim Jones and his extended family. The individuals instigating these moves have been advised that this is a point of ‘vulnerability’ in Jim Jones. What they do not realize, however, is that they are playing with fire. It is precisely in this supposedly ‘vulnerable’ area of personal attachment and loyalty that the conspirators are running up against a deep reservoir of tremendous strength. The foundation of Jim Jones’ fierce protectiveness and loyalty to his ‘family’ is a solidarity, a unity of purpose that has been tested over the years, through many trials, and is now tempered
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into a steel-like resolve, almost a kind of battle cry that represents the willingness of Jim Jones and his followers to defend their collective, communal body… to the death, if necessary. It is important to note in this connection that the wide membership of the Temple today is particularly outraged by the campaign that has been mounted against their leader, and are resolved not to countenance any personal harm that may come to him, especially. In fact, it is clear to Temple “insiders” that Jim Jones has been, over the past several months, a “moderating force,” channeling the outrage and indignation of the membership away from any rash courses of action. Immediately after the attacks in New West, he spoke via telephone relay to a public gathering in San Francisco, from Guyana. He said: “I know some of you are wanting to fight, but that’s exactly what the system wants – they want to use us as a scapegoat. Don’t fall into this trap by yielding to violence, no matter what kind of lies are told on us or how many.”[54]
Today it is clear that the effect of the attacks has been to strengthen the resolve and purpose of Peoples Temple to resist and prevail — a determination that even Jim Jones could not alter, even if he wanted to.
In any case, efforts have continued to pressure U.S. and Guyanese government officials to co-operate with a variety of ploys. Several of these have been made under the pretense of people wanting to innocently ‘visit’ their ‘loved ones.’ These are, in reality, calculated and vicious attempts to make legal inroads into the Jonestown community so that machinery can be established for decimating the community, removing people against their will who have legally settled there, through a variety of dubious manoeuvres.[55] There may also be in all of this a design to provoke Jim Jones to some kind of desperate, drastic action.
It is the opinion of Jim Jones – who, because of these efforts, is currently remaining on the Jonestown community –
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that the conspiracy has initiated actions on several fronts to wage a kind of ‘war of attrition’ against Peoples Temple, involving them in so many areas of harassment (including, especially, economic moves such as the withholding of Social Security checks) that they cannot function effectively. These moves recently came to a head in efforts by former member Grace Stoen to retrieve her 5-year old son, John, from Jonestown. The attempts have not been successful. Despite a media effort to cast Mrs. Stoen in the role of a mother “battling” for her child[56], the truth of the matter is that she abandoned her son (born out of wedlock) to the church and to the personal care of Jim and Marceline Jones even before she left the organization with a lover in 1976. The full story behind the Grace Stoen affair is particularly interesting and revealing, illustrating how a certain type of very insecure and hostile personality can easily be used to collaborate with a high-level conspiracy.
Inside the False Witnesses[109]
Many people have wondered why former members of Peoples Temple have made themselves available to ‘testify’ against Jim Jones and the Temple in the media. We need to address ourselves to this, even though people who have been through the McCarthy period or who have a fairly basic understanding of human psychology will find no great mystery here.
Once the communal/socialistic nature of the extended family of Peoples Temple is understood, along with the high standards of responsibility expected of one and all In insuring that the collective good takes precedence over personal privilege, we can begin to understand why a group of former members would emerge that has been all-too-willing to translate their own shortcomings, inadequacies, and hostilities into what has become the stuff of the smear campaign. These people realized only too well that they could not live up to the moral level of commitment and identification with the struggles of poor and oppressed peoples that is intrinsic to Peoples Temple. Every one of them was accustomed to at least the relatively comfortable life of the suburbanite. They could not or would not accept their fair
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share of collective responsibility for others, especially for elderly persons and children. Addicted to the standards of personal comfort and self-indulgence that perpetuate the poverty of the people who the Temple is committed to helping, they found themselves trapped in a desperate contradiction. They refused or were too cowardly to confront their own shortcomings. While inside Peoples Temple they could not easily escape their own bad conscience; above all, they had to witness the daily sacrifices of Jim Jones, whose life was dedicated to the happiness and welfare of others at the expense of his own. Mostly white, they had the classic “liberal” view of “doing something for the poor people,” which meant little more than a kind of weak voluntarism that would in no way interfere with their own life style. So they finally left Peoples Temple, as they were perfectly free to do. All that they were asked was not to harm the church. But, predictably, they could not live with their own guilt or remorse, or, more accurately, the gnawing sense of failure to live up to a higher standard than their own personal self-indulgence. By a kind of psychological twist that is not unusual, they had to find a way to tear down, discredit, or even destroy the painful reminder of their own inadequacy and failure: Jim Jones. If he could somehow be portrayed as a scoundrel, they would, perhaps, be freed of that bothersome sense of having failed their own higher conscience. And this is precisely the form that the smear articles have taken. The picture of Peoples Temple they paint is a projection of the twisted, petty, selfish and guilt-ridden minds of these pathetic individuals.
It is quickly becoming clear that the welter of ‘charges’ against Jim Jones and Peoples Temple reflect more on their inventors and fabricators than on the accused; under investigation, the bizarre tales are literally falling apart, revealing their essential substance: mere newsprint and the ranting of selfish, vindictive moral reprobates who are being paid off, or enjoy basking in the dubious light of media attention (they are portrayed as almost heroic). Underneath, they are small people, driven to besmirching the character, principle, and commitment to a magnanimous man who would have given his life for them, but who they saw only as a disturbing reminder of their own pettiness, they shoddy or, at best, armchair commitment to human liberation which they never could put into practice or sustain, especially when
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it conflicted with their self-indulgent life style. They help reveal the cynical nature of the conspiracy against Peoples Temple, an effort that has been able to capitalize and thrive on the failure and emptiness of American middle-class values, which are inimical to the kind of collective, disciplined organization that poor and minority people need to build in order to survive and hopefully rectify the abuses of capitalism and the racism it breeds.
The major articles in the smear campaign that rely upon these desperate ‘witnesses’ are constructed by singling out socialistic and communal practices and beliefs, and perverting them through a combination of gross exaggeration, and special use of language, recasting them to make them seem like crimes or, at best, highly questionable practices – cruel, bizarre, strange, weird, etc. Any person familiar with the uses and abuses of language knows how a particular event or situation can be wrenched from context, certain features blown out of proportion, others eliminated entirely, and the whole thing cast into a vocabulary replete with deceptive connotations with a result so far from the truth of the matter as to give a completely different impression.
In the case of the articles on Peoples Temple, we have found some method in the madness. As we have previously discussed, the end product appears in the form of an asinine vindication of middle-class or ‘conventional’ morality, personified by the offended or outraged former members. Nothing is spared. The most recent exercise was yet another abominable use of a dead person (who cannot confirm or deny the press version of his life) to testify as a mute witness against the Temple. The low, sickening innuendo is, of course, that the person was either a victim of some sort of foul play engineered by the Temple or Jim Jones, or he was driven to despondency (and suicide) by life ‘inside’ the Temple.[57] Thus, through the dead, the living can find a way to soothe their guilty consciences and rebuild their fractured self-images. A little media-attention also helps – especially if the bearers of the bizarre tales and sensational charges are credited with being death-defying and ‘courageous,’ daring to speak about against the Temple in the face of God-knows-what
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reprisals.
We could delve more deeply into the psychological morass that motivates people to bear false witness, and worse, to willingly co-operate with devious, cruel plots to deprive people of their freedom, livelihood, and future. The stories told against Peoples Temple, one of the most effective and active humanitarian institutions in the United States, if fully analysed, expose the moral bankruptcy of those who contributed to their publication, and, beyond that[110] the pernicious value system that is so terribly threatened by a co-operative socialist structure that gives the little man some power and means to a decent life, that it must use its organs of public opinion to stamp it out, and if it can’t, hound it even into another country where it is re-establishing itself in a setting of peace, free from the harassment that has followed it from one end of the United States to the other.
Epilogu[111]
The chronicle of this conspiracy is by no means finished. The story has only begun to be told. Conn, Klineman, Elmer and Deanna Mertle, Treasury agents, Grace Stoen, Louis B. Sims, Joseph Mazor, the CI.A. and Interpol… we are leaving no stone unturned to get to the bottom of this concerted attempt to destroy the lives of innocent people whose only desire is to live in equality and peace.
Crimes have been committed against Peoples Temple. Our constitutional rights have been violated. We have been tried, convicted, and condemned in the kangaroo court of public opinion by a systematic media campaign carried out by reporters in collusion with reactionary government agencies. An exemplary, compassionate and highly principled leader has been shot at, his family and his organization harassed to the point of fearing for their safety and well-being. The half of it could not be told. All of it has been the result of an attempt to render Jim Jones and Peoples Temple ineffective as a force for desperately needed social change, by reactionary forces working within the establishment, as we have shown. And they are now trying to
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directly interfere with the excellent relations the Temple has built through years of hard work with the government of Guyana. It is in that nation that nearly 1000 members of Peoples Temple have sought refuge from the racism and oppression of American society, and are building a new life as socialists. The community that the conspiracy is portraying as a kind of “Devil’s Island” and wants to crush is, in reality, one of the most invigorating and thoroughly remarkable social experiments ever undertaken. It is proving the superiority of socialist co-operation, its capability of providing the environment necessary for the salvaging of human lives that, under capitalism, have been wasted, thwarted, all be destroyed. No wonder they want to crush it.
The members of Peoples Temple have pledged that they will not stand by and watch this tremendously successful work for social justice, economic equality and a future for mankind be destroyed. They are pledged to pursue this conspiracy of scoundrels who seek to stamp out the rights of a free people. No, they will remain a thorn in the side of monopoly capitalism – a living example of poor and disenfranchised people of all races working together in harmony for the mutual benefit of all – an abundantly successful model of democratic socialism, hopefully worthy of emulation.
Afterword: For Our Leader[112]
Many people have understood. Despite manipulation by the establishment media, despite innuendo and false allegations that have prompted investigations, despite the collaboration between former members and reactionary forces within and under the cover of government agencies, countless friends and supporters have taken a stand alongside Jim Jones in affirmation of the years and years he has continued to devote in service to mankind. Many community leaders, political leaders, clergy, non-establishment news media and many others who have seen through all of the attacks are well aware that enemies of the people trying to destroy Jim Jones today will strike somewhere, someone else tomorrow.
[Page 52]
There are thousands of members of Peoples Temple (and many who may have never become members, but who have been touched and helped by Jim Jones in some way) who also know the truth. Jim Jones is leading us along the difficult road to a better way of life. He works ceaselessly and stands up fearlessly to all obstacles so that we the people – young and old, black and white, working poor by the standards of the affluent, victims of race hate and class distinctions – will secure the blessings of liberty and justice, and make good the broken promises of an old order that is quickly becoming if not now inimical to human welfare, even human life itself. We are privileged to walk with Jim Jones. We are proud to be in this struggle with him. It is our struggle. It is the struggle of people everywhere who are building a new and better way of life.
We shall overcome. We owe this struggle to our children.
[End of document]
—–
Notes
[1] Hand-annotation: “providing”.
[2] Hand annotation: “Put in a title page for Book I”.
[3] Hand annotated.
[4] Hand annotated.
[5] Hand annotation: an arrow indicating “even have” should read “have even”.
[6] Hand annotation: “who”.
[7] Hand annotation: “enthusiasm”.
[8] Hand annotation: “a humanitarian political movement”. Remainder unreadable.
[9] Hand annotation: “However,”.
[10] Hand annotation: “B”. [Note: perhaps for appendix footnote insert?]
[11] Hand annotated.
[12] Hand annotation: “was Lenin the architect of the Russian Revolution. Another was Mao Tse-Tung…”.
[13] Hand annotation: “as”.
[14] Hand annotation: “socialism”.
[15] Hand annotation: “of”.
[16] Hand annotation: “Marxist”.
[17] Hand annotation: “placing”.
[18] Hand annotation: “in Indianapolis, Indiana”.
[19] Hand annotation: “D?”
[20] Hand annotation: “were”.
[21] Hand annotated.
[22] Hand annotation: “It wasn’t long before”.
[23] Hand annotation: “when they”.
[24] Hand annotation: “E.”
[25] SIC.
[26] Hand annotation: “24”
[27] Hand annotation, unreadable.
[28] Hand annotation: “Jim Jones”.
[29] Hand annotation: “People”.
[30] Hand annotation: “A ‘Dangerous Man’”.
[31] Hand annotation: “is”.
[32] Hand annotation: “profit”.
[33] Hand annotation: “does nothing”.
[34] Hand annotation: “Combined”.
[35] Hand annotation: “was”.
[36] Hand annotation: “6.”
[37] Hand annotation: “and”.
[38] Hand annotation: “7”.
[39] Hand annotation: “this rural area”.
[40] Hand annotation: “firebrand”.
[41] Hand annotated.
[42] Hand annotation: “that”.
[43] Hand annotation (unreadable).
[44] Hand annotation: “Early”.
[45] Hand annotation: “irreligious”.
[46] Hand annotation: “see corrections”.
[47] Hand annotation: “see corrections & [unreadable]”.
[48] Hand annotation: “Jim Jones”.
[49] SIC.
[50] Hand annotation: “have been institutionalised thus”.
[51] Hand annotation: “has called for”.
[52] Hand annotation: “encourages”.
[53] Hand annotation: “see correction”.
[54] Hand annotation: “for which”.
[55] Hand annotation: “widely varying religious groups”.
[56] Hand annotated.
[57] Hand annotation: “he identified”.
[58] Hand annotation: “eloquent & impassioned voice”.
[59] Hand annotation: “set afire”.
[60] Hand annotation: “congregation”.
[61] Hand annotation: “the”.
[62] Hand annotated.
[63] Hand annotation: “attempt to”.
[64] Hand annotation: “Departments”.
[65] Hand annotated. Note: “Ital.”
[66] Hand annotated.
[67] Hand annotation: “recount”.
[68] Hand annotation: “individuals”.
[69] Hand annotated.
[70] Hand annotation: “reword if needed, per layout…”.
[71] Hand annotation: “people”.
[72] Hand annotation: “Lowry”.
[73] Hand annotation: “unenforceable”.
[74] Hand annotation: “He also”.
[75] Hand annotation: “is a convicted felon who somehow has authorization”.
[76] Hand annotation: “are the chief plotters”.
[77] Hand annotation: “this right-wing”.
[78] Hand annotated.
[79] Hand annotated.
[80] Hand annotation: “implications”, replaced by “inferences”.
[81] Hand annotation: “was”.
[82] Hand annotation: “omit”.
[83] Hand annotation: “level charges at”.
[84] Hand annotation: “Steve Katsarisis”.
[85] Hand annotation: “fake”.
[86] Hand annotated.
[87] Hand annotation: “No. California”.
[88] Hand annotated.
[89] Hand annotation: “was responsible in some way for the death of”.
[90] Hand annotated.
[91] Hand annotated.
[92] Hand annotation: “while”.
[93] Hand annotation: “of these local press stories”.
[94] Hand annotated.
[95] Hand annotation: “said he”.
[96] Hand annotated.
[97] Hand annotation: “39”.
[98] Hand annotation: “from out of town…”
[99] Hand annotation: “obliterating signatures and documents”.
[100] Hand annotation: “attempt to”.
[101] Hand annotation: a Swastika is drawn over the word “Interpol”.
[102] Hand annotation: “they were”.
[103] Hand annotation: “Customs”.
[104] Hand annotation: “Not true. Take down”.
[105] Hand annotation: “So what authority? (Sheehan)”.
[106] Hand annotation: “nearby”.
[107] Hand annotated.
[108] Hand annotation: “highly questionable”.
[109] Hand annotated.
[110] Hand annotation: “they also offer an insight into”.
[111] Hand annotated.
[112] Hand annotated.