{"id":70360,"date":"2017-10-01T18:18:23","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T01:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=70360"},"modified":"2025-02-16T17:01:01","modified_gmt":"2025-02-17T01:01:01","slug":"jim-jones-mk-ultra-poster-child","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=70360","title":{"rendered":"Jim Jones, MK-ULTRA Poster Child?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cNobody will ever be able to figure me out.\u201d \u00a0<\/em>
\n\u2014Jim Jones to his recording secretary<\/p>\n

I take that as my challenge. I\u2019ll start at the beginning.<\/p>\n

Fly on the Wall, Me<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m 22, so it is 1969. I\u2019m sleeping in the living room of our little blue cabin on Pinecrest Drive in Redwood Valley, where the wood stove is. Dick is gone, must be on a trip to San Francisco. The dream elapsed in 10 to 15 seconds. This is how it went:<\/p>\n

A scene bursts upon me and I try to take it in. A voice in my head says, \u201cYou’re in Brazil.\u201d From my perch maybe 15 feet up, near the ceiling of a large, empty ballroom, I survey a rich wood floor, its polished surface reflecting the lights from the ceiling, extending into the distance. It is bordered at the far end by a low railing with carved balusters. The room is empty. I hear a door opening in the far corner and, peering through chandeliers toward the sound, see a knot of men emerge, walk along the wall to a gate in the railing, open it and move quickly across the floor towards the center, where I am. They are closely grouped, and the one leading them is robed, striding briskly and purposefully forward, carrying a folder of papers in his left arm. The others are all in gray suits. It is that walk, more than his face, that IDs him to me today. He\u2019s dark-haired, handsome.<\/p>\n

The group is not yet under me, but almost, when the robed man stops short, turns to look at the man behind him, then at his fellows one by one, as he sags, then spirals to the floor. I zoom down to see his head hit the floor, through the forest of legs, with the look of shock still etched on his features. I rise back toward the ceiling as the men, like swooping vultures, all kneel down around him. Making sure he was dead, I thought, and continued to think for another ten years.<\/p>\n

It was over. I can\u2019t say I woke up, because I was already sitting, wide awake, with an urgent feeling that I had seen something happen and I had to tell somebody. But Dick was gone, so there was no one to tell. I went down to the market in Redwood Valley and bought a newspaper the next morning, and the next few mornings, scanning them to see what leader was assassinated in South America.<\/p>\n

Inside Peoples Temple<\/strong><\/p>\n

A year would pass before Dick and I would know about Jim Jones, as we joined in spring of 1970. Yes, I wondered about the likeness, but that man died, so how could it be him? And no, I never had another dream in my life before or after like it, where I woke up sitting and already awake. But I never mentioned it during my years in the Temple, since no one was supposed to have a power of discernment but Jim.<\/p>\n

Brazil loomed large in Jim Jones\u2019 mind. Always the same story, retold repeatedly. It marked his point of departure from marital fidelity, detailed ad nauseam in crude and explicit language, of his 12-hour sexual exploits and how much revulsion he had for \u201cthe woman\u201d he serviced. That he was fixated on it was obvious.<\/p>\n

There were Rheaviana Beam\u2019s eyes burning into mine the night we made centerpieces at her house for something, for hours into the night, until she started hallucinating little animals out of the corner of her eye, and she said, her voice rasping hoarsely, \u201cWe was with him in Brazil.\u201d The \u201cWe\u201d were Rheaviana and Jack Beam, and their daughters \u00ad\u2013 though they went back to the U.S. six months or more before Jim did \u2013 and Marceline and Jim\u2019s kids.<\/p>\n

Hindsight, Not 20\/20, but Close<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first morning I woke up after knowing what happened in Jonestown, my first thought was how often and when he uttered that particular final line, \u201cand we\u2019ll die together!!!!\u201d It was said as the last line, when we, with one voice, were already rattling the rafters, windows and walls with cheers for his revolutionary message. And he would end with that, then stand and listen, like a piano tuner, to the pitch of our fervor still stuck on full blast. It went back to my earliest memories, that pattern. His only intention.<\/p>\n

I mentioned this to someone six months after the 1978 implosion, and his blurted response was, \u201cJim Jones worked for the CIA in 1963 in Belo Horizonte.\u201d In the following days, I returned to my dream, remembering its ending. I realized the men in the gray suits were making sure he was still alive.<\/p>\n

Jim\u2019s day job was \u201cselling business investments\u201d in Belo Horizonte. It would be a decade into this century before I would read John Perkins\u2019 Confessions of an Economic Hit Man<\/em>. I heard on a newscast that Belo Horizonte was the most polluted city on earth. It is still one of Brazil’s most polluted cities, though automobile exhaust has replaced the now-closed iron mine as the main source, the continuing “fallout” of the rapid industrialization resulting from said business investments sold by Jim and others.\u00a0Perkins\u2019 description of his own initiation into \u201cthe business\u201d parallels some of the high or low points, depending on your perspective, of Jim\u2019s incessant recounts of his famous \u201csexcapade.\u201d<\/p>\n

What I was shown in my dream goes beyond the economic hit man initiation, into MK-ULTRA territory, that radioactive zone where nothing is known, shown or admitted, leaving only the effects to bear testimony. My best guess and conjecture, based on my dream, is that I saw Jim get his commission: to gather his utopian, perfect society using his mix of political and religious tools, get it as big as possible, and take it down with him in mass extinction when it was threatened.<\/p>\n

We do know that communal religious organizations (MOVE, Branch Davidians) were fair targets for elimination. A CIA whistleblower’s \u201creason\u201d for MK-ULTRA \u2013 that \u201cWe weren\u2019t about to let the Hare Krishnas take over the government\u201d \u2013 is as much detail as we\u2019re likely to get about what transpired under it 1954 to 1965. Supposedly the files were destroyed in 1974. Media consolidation allowed MK-ULTRA’s tactics to fuse into mainstream media’s echo chamber(s), and we’re heavily immersed in that brainwashing today.<\/p>\n

Circumstantial Evidence re Jonestown\/CIA Links<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the mid-70s, at the time of the death of Dan Mitrione \u2013 a man whose crossed paths with Jim may have been inevitable, either as a police officer in Richmond, Indiana in the late 40\u2019s and\/or as a CIA agent in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in the early 60\u2019s \u2013 Jim’s 201-C file was destroyed by the CIA or went missing. Congressman Leo Ryan was about to investigate the CIA, specifically its recent history of dirty tricks and MK-ULTRA. A lawsuit by his children against the CIA after his death was dismissed on a technicality. Years later, Leo Ryan\u2019s aide Joe Holsinger said he refused to discount the possibility of a wider conspiracy. A Congressional Inquiry at which noted Temple defectors Al and Jeannie Mills were to testify, was abruptly cancelled as soon as it convened and rescheduled\u2026 to a date after their murders. There\u2019s more, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n

Media’s nearly unanimously refused to touch this subject, despite the \u201cmystery tape,\u201d despite evidence of a cleanup crew variously described as Navy seals or British intel that went in overnight on a reconnaissance and site-scrubbing mission involving several helicopters, despite one survivor’s accounts of hearing planes and gunfire “all night.”<\/p>\n

Other Writings<\/strong><\/p>\n

I bought Jesse Ventura\u2019s American Conspiracies<\/em> in 2015, and Will Savive\u2019s Jonestown: Don\u2019t Drink the Kool-Aid<\/em> in 2016. Reference Chapter 8, entirely on Jonestown, in Jesse\u2019s book, which is footnoted with his sources, and pages 34-40 in Savive\u2019s, on Jim\u2019s travels in the late 50\u2019s and early 60\u2019s up to 1963 and apparent contacts with the CIA. His repeated concerns about Dwyer\u2019s safety \u2013 as opposed to Ryan\u2019s \u2013 and the many indications he was a proteg\u00e9 of Mitrione\u2019s in South America, all make me conclude he was acting in tandem with them on the predetermined outcome, contained in his commission. The one he was accepted on his return to consciousness from the scene I saw in my dream.<\/p>\n

What was he Thinking?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The inexorable unfolding of events that day to attempt to trigger violence were at his instruction. Consider Don Sly’s knife attack, sobbing as he attempted it; but he would have one more chance to make good on his mission, the dispatch of mostly young men to draw first blood. All these point to the necessity to stage that trigger act as a secret mission, (1) to Don; (2) to Larry Layton; (3) to the airstrip shooters, to put whatever preconceived plan was refined at the leadership level into motion to accomplish what he did, the mass extinction.<\/p>\n

It’s at that point I think I see how Jim sees it: Better for all of them to die and make the statement of tacit support for his “model” than to die by slow cuts, as once the door opens, after all the White Nights, there would have been another mass exodus of people from Jonestown, and its pressures, strictures, and actual dangers to continued existence, and who would be left behind? Then the inevitable blowback from families and lawsuits. And disgrace, expulsion. No choice but to pull the plug on it.<\/p>\n

Or he was ordered. Or both. Orders would have helped, but were probably not necessary. If I were to give Jim the benefit of the doubt, another conjecture is that he was prepared to take the karma of interrupting all these lives, under the assumption that under his arduous and rigorous tempering of the people he was shepherding, they would do better in the afterlife. Having created it, in a sense, he felt entitled to take it down with him rather than let it decay and dissolve in chaos.<\/p>\n

It was a perfect marriage of his rage at anyone who wanted to leave him and the aims of his handlers. Secretly, Jim may have considered himself a double agent, hoping his death would accomplish the opposite of what they intended with the massacre. I don\u2019t know. But it explains much of the misery and duress that he increased and intensified, over the final 11 months, as Jim by degrees prepared the population for violence, invoking their savagery toward \u201cthe enemy\u201d and glorifying death as the only release to be found.<\/p>\n

Perfect Subjects<\/strong><\/p>\n

My personal experience as a member from 1970 to 1978, augmented with taped recordings of meetings and broadcasts in Jonestown, yields a three-dimensional form that combines the many, many interwoven and overlapping mechanisms that kept us insular and oriented to follow cues from Jim, to be self-enforcing, unquestioning, and loyal, as the group burgeoned and responded to Jim\u2019s imperatives of the moment and constant pressures and panics.<\/p>\n

As members, we learned early on to overlook practically anything Jim said, as long as it \u201cwas needed\u201d to send a message to someone of wavering mind or possible ill intent. Efficiency and unanimity seemed worth that, and any doubt was evidence of the resistance of our selfish nature. This wiggle room would be used to full advantage. Likewise, our solidarity had its own identity quotient. We were often praised passionately and just as often berated for draining him, weighing on him, killing him with our little jealousies, pettiness and rebellion.<\/p>\n

It helped that the move had to be made as stealthily as possible, taking everyone who could go, in an evacuation that is still little understood, even though it happened right under my nose. I depend on narratives of writers like Glenda Bates, or Edith Roller’s journal accounts of people who tried to bolt, only to be urgently solicited \u2013 or convinced, in Jossie Chambliss\u2019 case \u2013 by a personal phone call from Jim Jones. In other cases, calls made by other relatives, with groups often privately picked up and flown to Guyana. I don\u2019t have a total of the unrecorded dates of entry, but they number about 100, and in at least one case we know the person, a minor, did not want to go, but was forced and accompanied by a guard. I know now, but didn’t then. There is now a name for that: trafficking.<\/p>\n

Ignorant of the trap that was closing over those already there, I realized only recently, reading Jim\u2019s continual fulminations (\u201cAnybody starts some shit, we\u2019ll all die\u201d) against those who wanted to \u201cgo back.\u201d It was people like me \u2013 and me personally \u2013 still functioning as their stateside support team, whom they needed to keep carefully insulated from knowing what was happening in Jonestown. Even as those trapped there saw their prospects get increasingly desperate as the White Nights became more frequent, brought closer by each defection.<\/p>\n

Que Bono? Looking at the Follow-Through <\/strong>(1978-2017)<\/p>\n

Jonestown is the black hole of history, the invisible line at which history turned and the US population, still in shock, turned with it, into what it is today.<\/p>\n

With 38 years of hindsight, still as a fly on the wall, I see that the CIA more than triumphed on this one. Not just were 918 lives lost, the worldwide shock, and revulsion associated with all things integration, communitarian, and left-wing was ushered in. Four days after the final number of the dead was known, the assassination of Milk and Moscone occurred in San Francisco. Classic \u201cshock doctrine\u201d brought home.<\/p>\n

Then began the unwinding, the turning by degrees of battleship USA from an antiwar, antinuclear consensus, to our present perpetual war posture, frog-march though it may be. It is more a stupefaction, a paralysis in comprehension of daily events and their significance to us amid the blur of technological change. There began the rollout of goodness and purity to be found only in acquisition, consumption and diversion, surrender to the warm and fuzzy world of entertainers and advertisers ready to fulfill us, make or remake us.<\/p>\n

No antennae for anything else. No more history, no more civics, no more news, eventually.\u00a0 Another crop of perfect subjects.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

My case rests, what there is of it. A spectacularly successful hit. But success has its own failures contained in it. We are now in the Aquarian Age whether we like it or not. And cooperation is our only hope. It’ll be a steep climb, now that we’ve forgotten all our survival skills. Replacing the authoritarian leader with dire necessity and group consensus on hard work, and hopefully survival may be the next model. If we can manage it.<\/p>\n

(Kathy [Tropp] Barbour joined Peoples Temple in 1970 with her companion, Richard Tropp, and was living in the San Francisco Temple on November 18, 1978. Her other articles in this edition of\u00a0<\/em>the jonestown report\u00a0are <\/em>The United States of Jonestown, Alive and Well<\/a>; The Birthday Project Comes to an End<\/a>; and <\/em>Status of Plans for Who Died, Edition 2<\/a><\/em>. Her earlier writings on this site can be found\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cNobody will ever be able to figure me out.\u201d \u00a0 \u2014Jim Jones to his recording secretary I take that as my challenge. I\u2019ll start at the beginning. Fly on the Wall, Me I\u2019m 22, so it is 1969. I\u2019m sleeping in the living room of our little blue cabin on Pinecrest Drive in Redwood Valley, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":70528,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-70360","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70360"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120505,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70360\/revisions\/120505"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/70528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}