Paula Adams was a member of Peoples Temple who went to Guyana on one of the first trips to that country in 1974 and did not return to the U.S. until after the deaths of November 1978. During those four years, she worked principally in the Temple headquarters in Georgetown, acting as a liaison between the group and the Guyanese government, and rarely went to Jonestown.<\/p>\n
One of the rumors reported in the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy was that Jim Jones had assigned any number of young attractive women to seduce Guyanese officials, initially to get inside information on how the local government perceived the Temple, later to compromise those officials should they turn against the Temple. There is only one known case of such a relationship, and even the motivations behind that one goes counter to the rumot: Paula Adams ended up having a long-standing affair with Laurence Mann, the Guyanese ambassador to the United States, but even from the start, as she herself later said, the two were genuinely in love with each other. As Laura Kohl wrote<\/a> in 2012:<\/p>\n For the next several years, [Paula] had to continually prove her allegiance to Jim, while maintaining her other relationship. Jim obviously sanctioned the liaison \u2013 which is surprising enough \u2013 but somehow Paula was able to hide the depths of her commitment to her lover even while making Jim feel that he was the man who was really in charge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The relationship was nevertheless tumultuous from its beginning, as were Paula\u2019s ultimate loyalties. She secretly recorded a number of Mann\u2019s telephone conversations<\/a> \u2013 some with her, some with Guyanese officials \u2013 transcripts of which ended up in Jonestown.<\/p>\n Paula survived the Jonestown deaths because \u2013 not surprisingly \u2013 she was in Georgetown on November 18. She appeared alongside several other survivors in post-tragedy interviews<\/a>, then quietly returned to the United States.<\/p>\n