1. List of people by groups of listed entry date.
2. List of all people & known entry dates, alphabetically.
3. Diagram of entry dates
http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/AboutJonestown/JTResearch/censuses/arrival.htm
Chapter Eleven
John Ellis and Fox: "Because Jeb Said So: What Really Happened on Election Night in Florida," by David W. Moore, in, edited by Mark Crispin Miller, Ig Publishing, Brooklyn, 2008, p. 36.
2. Volusia County "mistake":, "Diebold and Max Cleland's 'Loss' in Georgia," by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., p. 66.
3. Voter delays; photo IDs; missing ballots: "The Stolen Presidential Elections," www.michaelparenti.org.
4. Felon purge in Florida: Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Plume paperback, 2003, pp. 11-21.5 story: Ibid., p. 19.
6. Russert comment: Ibid., p. 39.
7. Absentee ballots: "Did Bush camp encourage military personnel to vote after Election Day?," by Jake Tapper,www.salon.com, March 5, 2001.
8. Mob and recount: "The Five Worst Republican Outrages," by Wayne Barrett,www.villagevoice.com, December 19, 2000.
9. Scalia on decision: Miller piece,on 2004 election: "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?", by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., posted June 1, 2006 atwww.rollingstone.com.
12. Kennedy on election: Ibid.
13. Voting machine companies: "Diebold and Max Cleland's 'Loss' in Georgia,, p. 66.
14. Vote shift: "The Suspicious, Disturbing Death of Election Rigger Michael Connell," by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2008/3320, December 21, 2008.
15. Ohio events: Kennedy article.
16. Lou Harris: Ibid.
17. Blackwell and Conyers: Fitrakis and Wasserman article.
18. Suit against Blackwell: King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell
August 12, 2007, Cincinnati Enquirer, Missing Ohio records: "2004 Ballots Not Preserved,"
Background on lawsuit: Cliff Arnebeck interview with Dick Russell, August 21, 2009.
Arnebeck on Spoonamore: Interview with Dick Russell, August 2009.
Spoonamore background: "Cyber Security Expert Says KingPin Attack Benefited Bush," www.epluribusmedia.net, October 30, 2008.
SMARTech: "Chattanooga Takes Center Stage in Connecting Voters for President," Chattanooga Times Free Press, March 19, 2004.
Contract between Ohio, GovTech: "Statement of Work Under State Term Schedule Number 533384-1, Secretary of State Contract Number 180."
Spoonamore on Ohio setup: Interview with Dick Russell, August 21, 2009.
Bush/Rove/Blackwell meeting: "Are Rove's Missing E-mails the Smoking Guns of the Stolen 2004 Election?", by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman,The Free Press, April 25, 2007.
2 Connell managing: Mark Crispin Miller on Democracy Now!,www.truthout.org, December 25, 2008.
Triad: "Proof of Ohio Election Fraud Exposed," onwww.michaelmoore.com, December 2004.
Connell admission: Court deposition, 2008.
Conyers letter: "Ballot Scamming," www.americanfreepress.net.
Connell background: "Who is Michael Connell? Why He Should be Investigated by Congress," document prepared for House Judiciary Committee, provided Dick Russell, 2009.
Spoonamore on Connell: Russell interview.
Roy Cales: "Who is Roy Cales and What's his Connection to Mike Connell?", EPluribusMedia.net, August 6, 2008.
34. Cales resignation: "Arrest of Florida CIO Prompts Resignation," Washington Technology , September 4, 2001.
35. Connell and Ohio computers: House Judiciary Committee document.
36. Rove and Connell subpoena: "Cyber Security Expert Says KingPin Attack Benefited Bush."
37. Pre-election predictions: "Obama Hasn't Closed the Sale," by Karl Rove,Wall Street Journal , October 16, 2008;www.rove.com/election, November 2008
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April 15, 2010, tortdocs.blogspot.com,
Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment And Cover-Up?, by Jon E. Lewis, Author,
The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups
Rumours of brainwashing, torture and murder had long attended the People's Temple, an American hippie cult living in Guyana, when Democratic US Congressman Leo Ryan decided to investigate first-hand. Arriving on 17 November 1978 at "Jonestown," the cult's jungle encampment, Ryan was accompanied by Richard Dwyer (a US embassy official in Guyana), media representatives and members of "Concerned Relatives of People's Temple Members." After touring around, making notes and gathering together a small group of People's Temple members who wished to return to the US, Ryan and his entourage made for the airstrip at nearby Port Kaituma. There the Ryan group was ambushed by People's Temple loyalists of the "Red Brigade." Ryan, among others, was shot dead.
Back in Jonestown, the cult's messianic leader and founder, the "Reverend" Jim Jones, called for a "white night," one of the practice mass suicides the cult periodically held. This time, however, it was for real: mixed in to the Kool Aid they drank was potassium cyanide and valium. Nearly 920 of Jones's followers, including 276 children, ingested the poison and died. Photographs taken afterwards show close, orderly rows of bodies, neatly dressed, often with their arms around each other.
A year later, the House Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress issued a 782-page report in which it concluded that the Jonestown massacre was a mass suicide brought on by Jones's "extreme paranoia." Many disagreed. Initial reports by such heavyweight newspapers as the New York Times suggested that 400 People's Temple followers had committed suicide, but more had escaped into the jungle; a week later the death toll had risen to 900. So how did the extra 500 die? A Guyanese pathologist, Dr. Lesie Mootoo, discounted cyanide as the sole cause of death; many of the Jonestown corpses were free of the eerie rictus that is the hallmark of the agonizing death that comes with cyanide poisoning. Some corpses had strange needle marks on them, and some of the People's Temple dead had been shot. In fact, Mootoo thought that all but three of the People's Temple dead had been murdered. Guyanese newspapers reported that Guyanese troops, US green berets and UK Black Watch troops were on exercises near Jonestown at the time of the massacre. Why did they not intervene? Or were they responsible for the deaths of the 500?
Speculation that the CIA might be involved in the Jonestown massacre started up in 1980 when reporter Jack Anderson published a syndicated article called "CIA Involved in Jonestown Massacre." According to Anderson, Jim Jones himself was tied to the CIA, and certainly there were oddities in his political background; Jones' father was a Klansman and Jones Jr. had been a virulent anti-Communist before his damascene conversion to utopianism in the mid-1960's. Was the conversion fake and Jones a CIA mole in the counterculture? Anderson also suggested that Richard Dwyer, who accompanied Ryan to Jonestown, was a CIA operative. On the audio tape made by Jones of the Ryan visit, the cult leader can be clearly heard during a fractious moment saying, "Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him!"
By one conspiracy theory, the CIA used the Ryan visit to Jamestown to assassinate Leo Ryan, who was a vocal critic of the CIA, having co-authored the Hughes-Ryan amendment bill which, if passed, would have required the CIA to disclose its planned covert missions to Congress for approval. The Jonestown congregation was murdered, in this scenario, in an attempt to cover up Leo Ryan's assassination. Another CIA-guilty scenario is advanced by John Judge in "The Black Hole of Guyana"
(in Secret and Suppressed, 1993). Here it is suggested that the People's Temple, from its very origin, was a CIA exercise in mind control. Judge points out that many of the drugs found at Jonestown matched those used in the CIA's MKULTRA programme and that Larry Layton, Jones's right-hand man, was the son of the chief of the US Army's Chemical-Biological Warfare Division. Surviving People's Temple official Joyce Shaw speculated that Jonestown was "some kind of horrible government experiment...a plan like that of the Germans to exterminate blacks". (The majority of the People's Temple congregation were black women.-) Since Jones was showing signs of mental instability, so the story goes, the CIA decided to kill -- literally -- the People's Temple project rather than risk its exposure.
In "Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?" (1989) Michael Meiers posits that Congressman Ryan was about to make such an exposure, hence his assassination. Meiers adds another twist, suggesting that Jonestown was the site of the CIA's HIV/AIDS experiments. Then there is the suggestion by S. F. Alinin, B.G. Antonov and A. N. Itskov that the CIA massacred the People's Temple because it was a socialist, not a religious, organization, and was about to embarrass the US by defecting en masse to the USSR. It's a matter of record that Jones had meetings with Soviet and Cuban officials, and almost his last order was that luggage containing money and documents was to be taken to Guyana's Soviet embassy.
Possible CIA involvement in the Jonestown massacre was investigated by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which concluded in 1980 that the agency had no links with Jones or any part in the massacre. A lawsuit by Ryan's children alleging that the CIA ran Jonestown as part of MKULTRA was thrown out.
Amid the flurry of Jonestown theories, the obvious explanation still holds up: it was the work of a messianic guru who exercised an almost hypnotic hold over his psychologically needy followers. Jones was, if you like, a little Hitler. Affidavits by People's Temple survivors detail all too clearly Jones's long-held plans for a mass suicide should his little Reich be jeopardized. The People's Temple former financial director, Deborah Layton Blakey, who escaped the cult, issued a public affidavit six months before the massacre warning that Jones was intent on a mass suicide. Most convincing of all is the audio-tape retrieved from Jonestown, widely believed to be genuine, in which Jones can be heard discussing the deteriorating situation:
Jones: It's all over. The congressman has been murdered. (Music and singing). Well, it's all over, all over. What a legacy, what a legacy. What the Red Brigade doin' that once ever made any sense anyway? They invaded our privacy. They came into our home. They followed us six thousand miles away. Red Brigade showed them justice. The congressman's dead (Music only).
Please get us some medication. It's simple. It's simple. There's no convulsions with it. It's just simple. Just, please get it. Before it's too late. The GDF [Guyanese Defense Force] will be here, I tell you. Get movin', get movin', get movin'.
Woman 6: Now. Do it now!
Jones: Don't be afraid to die. You'll see, there'll be a few people land out here. They'll torture some of our children here. They'll torture our people. They'll torture our seniors. We cannot have this. Are you going to separate yourself from whoever shot the congressman? I don't know who shot him.
Voices: No. No. No.
Jones: Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? You don't know what you've done. I tried. (Applause, music, singing). They saw it happen and ran into the bush and dropped the machine guns. I never in my life. But not any more. But we've got to move. Are you gonna get that medication here? You've got to move. Marceline, about forty minutes.
[...]
Jones: Please. For God's sake, let's get on with it. We've lived - we've lived as no other people lived and loved. We've had as much of this world as you're gonna get. Let's just be done with it. Let's be done with the agony of it. (Applause). It's far, far harder to have to walk through every day, die slowly - and from the time you're a child 'til the time you get grey, you're dying. Dishonest, and I'm sure that they'll - they'll pay for it. They'll pay for it. This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide. So they'll pay for this. They brought this upon us. And they'll pay for that. I leave that destiny to them. (Voices). Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it's humane. I want to go -- I want to see you go, though. They can take me and do what they want - whatever they want to do. I want to see you go. I don't want to see you go through this hell no more. No more. No more. No more. We're trying. If everybody will relax. The best thing you do to relax, and you will have no problem. you'll have no problem with this thing if you just relax.
[...]
Jones: Where's the vat, the vat, the vat? Where's the vat with the Green C on it? The vat with the Green C in. Bring it so the adults can begin.
Jonestown: a mass suicide called by a delusional, mind-games-playing tyrant. So why, then, do 5,000 pages of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HCFA) 1979 hearing remain classified?
References:
March 16, 23, 30, 1997, Toronto - International Connection, The CIA and Military Mind Control Research: Building the Manchurian Candidate, A lecture by Dr. Colin Ross, Review-article by Wayne Morris: Back to CKLN Series Table of Contents, CKLN-FM 88.1
__________________________________________________________________________________
Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence (Studies in American Religion, Vol 35) by Michael Meiers, Edwin Mellen Press (1989). From the Amazon product description of book:
"A work of investigative journalism that presents the theory that the Central Intelligence Agency employed the Reverend Jim Jones to administer a pharmaceutical field test in mind control and ethnic weaponry to a large test group, namely the membership of the Peoples Temple. The text proposes that Dr. Laurence Layton (former Chief of the U.S. Army's Chemical and Biological Warfare Division) cultured the AIDS virus to be tested and deployed in a CIA-backed experiment in Jonestown, Guyana."
"The Black Hole of Guyana" by John Judge, from Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History edited by Jim Keith, Feral House (1993), pp. 127-165.
Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in The Peoples Temple by Deborah Layton (high-level member of the People's Temple, who's brother Larry Layton, Jones's right-hand man and son of the chief of the US Army's Chemical-Biological Warfare Division, was convicted for the conspiracy to kill Congressman Leo Ryan and is still in prison), Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1998
The Jonestown Carnage--A CIA Crime by S.F. Alinin, B.G. Antonov, A.N. Itskov ; [translated from the Russian by Nadezhda Burova and Sergei Chulaki], 1987
The assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan and the Jonestown, Guyana, tragedy : Report of a Staff Investigative Group to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Staff Investigative Group.Washington : U.S. Govt. Print. Off. : for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1979.
Videos:
Jonestown - CIA Mind Control Part 1 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HULqx4SP46Y (with introductory comment by Dr. Colin A. Ross)
Jonestown - CIA Mind Control Part 2 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikn3AMaZ_Qk&NR=1 (includes part of Joseph Holsinger's statement)
CIA and Jonestown at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW24bC_huG8&feature=PlayList&p=7B78BBCA1F238731&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=12
Joseph Holsinger Statement 5/23/80 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT7dzo_z4V4 (Holsinger was Legislative aide to Congressman Leo Ryan)
This video is private.
The Truth about CIA JIM JONES and Jonestown
at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4026459218720130746#
Jonestown Massacre: A 'Reason' to Die, by Fiona Steel,
- Dr. Colin Ross mentions The Shalom Project (1973 to 1975), a CIA operation for training black mercenary guerrillas for operations in Angola run at what would be the future site of the People's Temple (Jonestown). George Philip Blakey oversaw the engineering development of the site in its transition from the Shalom Project to the People's Temple (http://www.whale.to/b/ross.html). Daniel Brandt in "Cults, Anti-Cultists, and the Cult of Intelligence"
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The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups by Jon E. Lewis, Running Press Book Publishers (2007)
Главная » Книги » Lewis Jon E. » The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups » Страница 47
Jonestown
Rumours of brainwashing, torture and murder had long attended the People's Temple, an American hippie cult living in Guyana, when Democratic US Congressman Leo Ryan decided to investigate first-hand. Arriving on 17 November 1978 at "Jonestown", the cult's jungle encampment, Ryan was accompanied by Richard Dwyer (a US embassy official in Guyana), media representatives and members of "Concerned Relatives of People's Temple Members". After touring around, making notes and gathering together a small group of People's Temple members who wished to return to the US, Ryan and his entourage made for the airstrip at nearby Port Kaituma. There the Ryan group was ambushed by People's Temple loyalists of the "Red Brigade". Ryan, among others, was shot dead.
Back in Jonestown, the cult's messianic leader and founder, the "Reverend" Jim Jones, called for a "white night", one of the practice mass suicides the cult periodically held. This time, however, it was for reaclass="underline" mixed in to the Kool Aid they drank was potassium cyanide and valium. Nearly 920 of Jones's followers, including 276 children, ingested the poison and died. Photographs taken afterwards show close, orderly rows of bodies, neatly dressed, often with their arms around each other.
A year later, the House Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress issued a 782-page report in which it concluded that the Jonestown massacre was a mass suicide brought on by Jones's "extreme paranoia". Many disagreed. Initial reports by such heavyweight newspapers as the New York Times suggested that 400 People's Temple followers had committed suicide, but more had escaped into the jungle; a week later the death toll had risen to 900. So how did the extra 500 die? A Guyanese pathologist, Dr Lesie Mootoo, discounted cyanide as the sole cause of death; many of the Jonestown corpses were free of the eerie rictus that is the hallmark of the agonizing death that comes with cyanide poisoning. Some corpses had strange needle marks on them, and some of the People's Temple dead had been shot. In fact, Mootoo thought that all but three of the People's Temple dead had been murdered. Guyanese newpapers reported that Guyanese troops, US green berets and UK Black Watch troops were on exercises near Jonestown at the time of the massacre. Why did they not intervene? Or were they responsible for the deaths of the 500?
Speculation that the CIA might be involved in the Jonestown massacre started up in 1980 when reporter Jack Anderson published a syndicated article called "CIA Involved in Jonestown Massacre". According to Anderson, Jim Jones himself was tied to the CIA, and certainly there were oddities in his political background; Jones's father was a Klansman and Jones Jr had been a virulent anti-Communist before his damascene conversion to utopianism in the mid-1960s. Was the conversion fake and Jones a CIA mole in the counterculture? Anderson also suggested that Richard Dwyer, who accompanied Ryan to Jonestown, was a CIA operative. On the audio tape made by Jones of the Ryan visit, the cult leader can be clearly heard during a fractious moment saying, "Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him!"
Next page
http://www.namebase.org/news05.html
The Davidians moved to Waco, Texas in 1935, and since then have minded their own business. James Wood, a professor of religion at Baylor University and resident of Waco since 1955, said that before February he hadn't heard of them referred to as a "cult." The librarian at the Waco Tribune-Herald confirmed that until their seven-part series on the Branch Davidians -- the first installment of which began one day before the initial assault on February 28, 1993 -- the Tribune-Herald referred to them as a "religious group," not a "cult."
The reporters for the series relied on "experts" from the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). A year earlier there had been allegations of child abuse, and the child protective services went to the compound, knocked on the door, walked in, and interviewed the children. They found no evidence of abuse and left.[1] But that was before CAN began playing the media like a fiddle.
![[Cartoon]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_v97Kz-L4hmyDFAU5H5eW03oHSULw-ZbP6wHA49tiN-UZ-lpxPIFaefIENz7hIN474bPyTBuf_nL8ovQD-YN0Lj3OEjzLEcJYC8=s0-d)
Rick Ross, who was convicted of jewel theft in 1975 and boasts of more than 200 "deprogrammings," has been praised by CAN executive director Cynthia Kisser as being "among the half-dozen best deprogrammers in the country." In 1992 Ross, Adeline Bova, and CAN national spokesperson Priscilla Coates worked their magic on David Block, a group member for five years. He told them about the guns in the compound, and Ross tipped off the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). The affidavits supporting the search warrant used the word "cult," and BATF even adopted some of CAN's media savvy: they alerted television stations before the February 28 raid so that cameras could catch the action. It was expected to go as smoothly as those drug raids on cop shows, and might prove helpful to next year's budget.
To serve the search warrant, 100 BATF agents approached the compound on February 28. But the Branch Davidians had been tipped off and were in an apocalyptic mood, so four agents and six group members were killed by gunfire. This began a siege that lasted 51 days. CAN "experts" such as Priscilla Coates alleged child abuse, and others consulted further with authorities. CAN president Patricia Ryan recommended the use of lethal force.[2] Janet Reno and Bill Clinton picked up on the allegations of child abuse, and decided to put an end to it. This was finally achieved on April 19, when federal stormtroopers attacked again and over 80 men, women, and children perished in a fire.
During the 51-day siege, David Koresh allowed 13 adults and 21 children to leave the compound. After a nine-week study of these children, the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services concluded that there were no indications of abuse. Even while Reno and Clinton were speaking of abuse, FBI director William Sessions said that his agency had no such evidence. Coates' response was, "I know how these types of groups work and children are always abused." Within a week the press dropped the child abuse angle as effortlessly as they had hyped it. It seemed like a good story at the time.[3]
Before the trial of eleven Branch Davidians began in San Antonio, one defense attorney asked that prosecutors and their witnesses be barred from using the word "cult" during the trial because it has "negative and dangerous" connotations. The judge denied this motion, but did allow the jury to consider self-defense in their deliberations. The verdict was a mixed bag. During the trial, BATF agent Dan Curtis defined a "cult" for the court as "a group of people who live together differently than the rest of society."[4]
Meanwhile, a diverse group of activists, ranging from the ACLU to the National Rifle Association, recommended increased oversight of federal law officers, and less reliance on uncorroborated, paid informants as a basis for obtaining search warrants. NRA legislative counsel Richard Gardiner pointed out that federal agents ignored an offer by David Koresh that would have allowed them to inspect all firearms in the compound.[5] Even Soldier of Fortune magazine, which had never met a well-armed, patriotic assault team they didn't like, referred to the BATF as a "gun gestapo."[6]
But the message appears to have been lost. BATF director Stephen Higgins was replaced by John W. Magaw in September 1993, and two months later the new acting director was still determined to keep an eye on other cults: "They're out there. They don't yet have the weaponry that we saw in Waco ... but they will develop if society allows them to." Magaw said the BATF was currently keeping tabs on cults in "three or four places around the country," but declined to be more specific.[7]
The problem with the word "cult" is not that cults don't exist, nor that they should be left alone. The problem with the term, and with others like "brainwashing" and "mind control," is that they are too easy to use. Larger issues get lost when convenient labels are attached to complex phenomena, and sometimes the larger issue is more important than what the label attempts to describe. CAN, BATF, and the media all used the word "cult," and thereby obscured the fact that these were men, women, and children with civil rights. By the time everyone could see that this issue was more important than whatever weapons they were said to have possessed, it was already too late.
There is no legal or scientific basis for the use of such terms, only a broad and vague recognition that certain techniques (hypnosis, food and sleep deprivation, confinement, degradation, fear of punishment, threats of death, repetitious propaganda, peer pressure, and other forms of abuse) can be effective with certain persons as a means of lowering their resistance to stimuli. In other words, they foster authoritarian social structures in which individuals are content to follow orders. But with other persons, the same techniques may provoke opposite reactions.
The mere fact that orders are followed may also reflect a reasonable decision to subordinate one's individual interests to a higher ideal. And to complicate matters further, the techniques used by so-called "cults" are frequently more subtle. It's a tough call in all but the most flagrant situations. As Judge T.S. Ellis III admonished deprogrammer Galen Kelly, "One man's cult is another man's community, no matter how wacky you or I might think that is."[8]
"Deprogrammers" are guilty of the sort of thinking that forestalls adverse judgments by locating such judgments in a category that they themselves establish. If you object to my deprogramming, then you must still be brainwashed. CAN was originally called the Citizens Freedom Foundation, established in 1974 by Ted Patrick. According to Gerald Arenberg, writing in The Chief of Police magazine, Patrick in 1974 already had a "career of kidnapping young adults from young and little-understood churches in exchange for handsome fees from distraught or overbearing parents."[9] Patrick attempted to deprogram Catholics and Episcopalians, and also deprogrammed four Mormons. "The Mormon Church," said Patrick, "is one of the biggest cults in the nation."[10] According to Dr. Lowell Streiker of Burlingame, California, a deprogrammer named Cliff Daniels once said that "he used the 'sex thing' to see whether the girl was completely out of the cult. If she consented, then he knew that she was completely out. If she did not consent, then he knew that he had more work to do."[11]
At the very least, "deprogrammers" should be more accurately called "reprogrammers." For legal reasons, CAN's referrals to these reprogrammers are done informally, and for the record they now disavow some who have ended up defending themselves against kidnapping charges. The reprogrammers themselves are careful to involve the families in the process. That's where their money comes from, and besides, courts usually give the family the benefit of the doubt if the effort backfires. CAN claims that its informal network was involved in more than 1800 "deprogrammings" in 1992.[12]
Apart from the fact that the techniques of "cult leaders" and "deprogrammers" are distressingly similar, another philosophical problem is the extent to which majority culture itself exhibits characteristics of the cult. Personality cults are common in all hierarchical organizations, while religious and ethnic intolerance is pervasive everywhere. Marxism may be finished, but this doesn't mean Marx was wrong about the alienation of everyday life. And there are still critiques such as Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" (1967), with "its treatment of the erosion of life as lived experience and its replacement by representation, life experienced as the received effects and images of commodity culture -- as spectacle."[13]
Social power, or the ability to manipulate others, is the central issue in the narrow debate over cults. CAN objects to the power of the cult, and tries to transfer this power to the family, the government, or to themselves using cult-like techniques. More sensitive social critics are aware that power and manipulation are found everywhere in society. The winners are those who can harness military potential, or provide bread, or lacking these, can manipulate the masses with circuses. In this view, some of the best examples of imposed duress and manipulation are sponsored by governments and the elites who run them.
One of the documents uncovered by the anti-draft movement in the late 1960s was titled "Channeling." Distributed by the Selective Service System in 1965, it was intended as a rationale for issuing draft deferments in the national interest. The tone was not only blunt, but was actually boastful of the government's capacity for manipulation:
Covert warfare strategists also thrive on mass manipulation. Another document surfaced in the late 1970s, a top secret Supplement B to U.S. Army Field Manual FM 30-31. The manual itself is unclassified and discusses techniques for intelligence support and liaison with "host countries" (HC) where U.S. troops are stationed. Supplement B, which is dated 18 March 1970 and signed by General Westmoreland, describes special operations that may be required "when HC governments show passivity or indecision in face of Communist or Communist-inspired subversion, and react with inadequate vigor to intelligence estimates transmitted by U.S. agencies." In such situations, "U.S. Army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the more radical elements of the insurgency." These groups under U.S. Army control "should be used to launch violent or nonviolent actions according to the nature of the case." The section concluded, "In cases where the infiltration of such agents into the insurgent leadership has not been effectively implemented, it may help toward the achievement of the above ends to utilize ultra-leftist organizations."[15]
This "strategy of tension" accounts for much of the recent history of Italy, along with other factors such as corruption and organized crime. Since the 1970s, electoral politics there has been perverted by coup attempts and nominally left-wing terrorism -- both of which, experts now believe, were covertly sponsored by the Italian secret services and the notorious "Propaganda Due" lodge run by Licio Gelli. Arms and explosives apparently came from the buried caches of NATO's Operation Gladio, and of course there were the inevitable CIA connections. Gelli himself was linked to U.S. presidents; he attended the inaugural ceremonies of Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and called himself a friend of George Bush. In July 1981, Gelli's daughter was stopped at the Rome airport and documents were confiscated from a false bottom in her suitcase. One of these was a photocopy of Supplement B. The "strategy of tension" used some of the same techniques on the entire Italian electorate that cult leaders use to manipulate their followers.[16]
Modern secret services not only mimic the cult leader's cynicism, but intelligence professionals themselves are locked into a self-perpetuating mind-set. Former CIA director William Colby describes the phenomenon:
The CIA began its fascination with mind control in 1950, when the term "brainwashing" was coined by CIA propagandist Edward Hunter to explain the experience of civilians in China and later, American POWs in Korea.[18] Most of the CIA's records on this were destroyed in the late 1970s, at time when Congress and the media were focusing on CIA misdeeds. The documents that were declassified concerned the CIA's research program called MK-ULTRA, in which they experimented with drugs that were thought to have mind-control potential.
Given the CIA's resources, it is reasonable to expect that a commensurate interest in the cult phenomenon has secretly persisted through the years. The early brainwashing scare, it should be noted, concerned the use of non-drug techniques. The Branch Davidians apparently have no intelligence connections, but with some other groups it's a different story. A CIA interest in cults is far more ominous than the phenomenon of cults by themselves, because intelligence elites have the resources and mind-set to manipulate large populations. The Cult Awareness Network itself has no interest in the intelligence angle. This is one glaring example of those larger issues that they and their media hacks ignore.
The first example of such links is the Unification Church (UC) of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Today it is too well-established to be considered a cult; the list of their front groups and businesses in NameBase runs to 28 pages with 667 names.[19] The UC no longer recruits on U.S. campuses the way they used to -- they don't need the money that Moonies would earn from selling flowers at airports, and they don't need this sort of publicity. Instead they buy universities: in 1992 the UC plunked down over $50 million for the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, and one of the UC's new trustees there is Jack E. Thomas, who was assistant chief of staff for U.S. air force intelligence for six years, and then special assistant to the CIA director for nine years.[20] Rev. Moon is also a force in Washington today.
In 1992 he admitted that over its ten-year history, the Washington Times had cost him "close to one billion dollars."[21] The influence and respectability this provides is presumably worth more than that.
Before the Unification Church was incorporated in the U.S. in 1963 by Bo Hi Pak, Moon had the support of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The expansion of the cult into the U.S. was conceived as a means of influencing U.S. politics. Four of Moon's early followers were young army officers close to Kim Jong Pil, the founding director of the KCIA and chief strategist for the Park regime. Bo Hi Pak was the KCIA liaison to U.S. intelligence at the time, stationed in the Korean Embassy in Washington. Today he is one of Moon's top aides and president of the Washington Times. In 1962 Kim made a two-week official visit to the U.S., and Lt.Col. Bo Hi Pak arranged meetings with CIA director John McCone, defense secretary Robert McNamara, and Defense Intelligence Agency director Gen. Joseph Carroll. On his way home, Kim met with some of Moon's followers in San Francisco. Pak's other duties at the Korean Embassy included frequent liaison trips to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland.[22]
Today the Moon empire is similar to a transnational corporation with various subsidiaries. Cult-like aspects remain visible among Moon's entourage, but from the perspective of most employees, many Moon enterprises are just like other corporations. Rev. Moon still considers himself a Messiah, and his far-flung investments are the means he's using to save the world. His politics are essentially reactionary and anti-Communist, and he has received political and financial support from Yoshio Kodama, Ryoichi Sasakawa, and other powerful Japanese right-wing figures. In 1970 the Japanese contingent of Moon's organization sponsored the annual conference of the World Anti-Communist League.
The next example is the Church of Scientology, and the curious habits and connections of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986). Hubbard was secretive and sometimes dishonest about his background, and reliable information is difficult to find. His father was a U.S. naval officer, so as as a young man Hubbard traveled to China, the Philippines, and Guam. He may have been introduced to the Office of Naval Intelligence before World War II, which apart from the FBI and certain cells of army intelligence, was the closest thing this country had to a CIA. During the war he was almost certainly in naval intelligence, as Lt. (JG) Lafayette R. Hubbard.
After the war Hubbard was a science fiction writer, and in 1949 he wrote a best-seller, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health." In 1953 he founded Scientology, and in 1955 he secretly authored the "Brainwashing Manual," in which he identified virtually all of the techniques of mind control now recognized by most psychologists. The Church of Scientology made its money by selling franchises and Hubbard's books to middle-class enthusiasts, and laundering this money through a Panamanian corporation. Low-level franchise Scientologists enjoyed some independence, but to reach higher levels one had to pay for expensive "auditing" and perhaps allow oneself to be abused by the Commodore himself.
Hubbard made many enemies over the years: the American Medical Association in the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration and the Australian government in the 1960s, the British government beginning in 1967, and Interpol and the French governments in the 1970s, along with an assortment of Mediterranean and North African governments. Hubbard amused himself by doing battle with all of them. From rows of telexes on the Apollo, a virtual slave ship with a crew of over 300, the Commodore ran covert ops by sending coded orders to his minions around the world. His luck ran out when his operatives were caught stealing documents from a locked government office. This led to simultaneous FBI raids on Church property in 1977, which produced documentary evidence of the Church's infiltration of the IRS, and even of the FBI itself. Eventually eleven of his top aides were sent to prison, while Hubbard himself couldn't be found.[23]
Toward the end of his career, Hubbard was certainly a renegade, far beyond anyone's capacity to control him. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, it's probable that he had support from U.S. intelligence. His early expertise in mind control is curious, as well as his lifetime interest in intelligence tradecraft. Former CIA officer Miles Copeland claims that his CIA colleague Bob Mandelstam made "arrangements" with Scientology and Moral Re-Armament about this time.[24] (Moral Re-Armament is another cult-like organization; Copeland's information on MRA is confirmed by the late Jim Wilcott, an accountant with the CIA in Japan in the early 1960s, who wrote that MRA "was covertly supported and used by the CIA."[25]) Another well-placed source reports that in the early 1960s a high-level award was given to Hubbard by the prestigious American Ordnance Association. Hubbard, this source says, was "on a friendly basis with top generals and admirals and their military-industrial associates."
Jonestown, which ended in the suicide/murders of over 900 followers in 1978, has long been suspected of intelligence links because of circumstantial evidence. The camp in Guyana was a prison for all but an armed cadre that had special privileges and functioned as guards. All of the classic mind control techniques were utilized. While conditions were miserable, there was nevertheless a modern medical facility, and massive quantities of behavior modification drugs were recovered by the authorities. Jones was on good terms with Richard Dwyer, who was working with the CIA through his position as deputy chief at the U.S. embassy in Georgetown. Other evidence confirms close links between the U.S. embassy and the Jonestown leadership. After Congressman Leo Ryan was assassinated at the airport and Dwyer escaped with some survivors into the jungle, he apparently returned to Jonestown. A tape of Jim Jones' last moments has him saying, "Get Dwyer out of here. Get Dwyer out of here." (Dwyer retired from the foreign service in 1984 and died in 1991. He denied that he was present during the final event.)
Joe Holsinger, an aide to Leo Ryan, became interested in the CIA connections in 1980 and presented his case in public forums. A White House official told him a few hours after the airstrip murders that "we have a CIA report from the scene." A top Jones aide, George Philip Blakey, reportedly recruited mercenaries for the CIA in Angola in 1975. He's the one who arranged the lease for Jonestown with the government of Guyana in 1974. Blakey was the son-in-law of Dr. Lawrence Layton, a former biochemical warfare specialist for the U.S. army. These and other circumstances caused Holsinger to speculate that Jonestown was part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program.[26]
Other curiosities have been noted by researchers. In the early 1960s Jim Jones spent eleven months in Brazil, where he was in frequent contact with the U.S. embassy. His boyhood friend Dan Mitrione, a U.S. intelligence operative and police advisor, was in Brazil at the same time.[27] Jones returned with enough money to start People's Temple in Ukiah, California.
The early reports from the scene of the Jonestown tragedy are conflicting, suggesting an attempt at cover-up. Robert Pastor, an aide to Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, ordered that the U.S. military strip "all politically sensitive papers and forms of identification" from the bodies.[28] (Early photographs show that many bodies had ID tags, which may have been connected to the Jonestown hospital's drug administration program.) No autopsies were possible after the military took a week to bring the bodies back, and many remained unidentified. Press estimates of Jonestown's wealth ranged from $26 million to $2 billion, scattered in banks, foreign investments, and real estate. Much of this money disappeared after it was listed in the press.[29]
Another fun fact is that the Cult Awareness Network itself has a CIA connection. Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA's School of Medicine, is currently on the advisory board of CAN and a similar group called the American Family Foundation. For fifteen years he has been a keynote speaker at CAN conferences. In the 1950s and 1960s, West did contract research for MK-ULTRA and was personally acquainted with MK-ULTRA director Sidney Gottlieb. Under the terms of his CIA-funded contract, West ran a program at the University of Oklahoma that experimented with LSD. (At one point he gave an elephant a huge dosage at the Oklahoma City Zoo, which resulted in its death.) After the Watts riots in 1965, West promoted the view that violence was caused by genetic factors, and offenders could be treated by psychosurgery and chemical castration.[30]
Some speculate that the CIA is working both sides of the street on the cultism issue. This is the approach that any good intelligence agency would prefer; it provides an opportunity to shape the terms of the public debate, and allows maneuverability to protect and promote their interests. Unfortunately our media work only on the anti-cult side of the street, and seem thoroughly uninterested in the larger issues. One problem is that if you need a soundbite or two, it's much less expensive to use a CAN "expert" as opposed to digging out your own facts. And with the intelligence angle especially, layers of deniability must be penetrated. After pursuing this angle, the only thing that a journalist might discover is the fact that his editor or publisher is nervous and unhappy, and wants to pull the plug.
Just as decaying Imperial Rome was rife with cults, today many feel that our majority culture has played out its string, leaving us tied in knots. The systems needed to transmit values from one generation to the next are in serious disrepair. Intentional communities, like it or not, will become attractive in coming decades for both social and economic reasons, if only because we all share a penchant for survival. This makes the problem as vital as it is difficult. It seems reasonable to ask that those who use words like "mind control," "cult," and "brainwashing" be ready to explain themselves on the basis of larger issues, with some measure of logical, philosophical, and scientific coherence, and with a bit more compassion.
1. "Texas Talk Show Host Tells What Really Happened in Waco," Spotlight, 31 May 1993, pp. 12-13. Interview with Ron Engleman of KGBS radio in Dallas.
2. L. Keeton and J. Pinkerton, "Infiltrating Cult Will End Standoff, Expert Suggests," Houston Chronicle, 8 April 1993.
3. Some details in the preceding paragraphs are from a 26-page report by Ross & Green, "What Is the Cult Awareness Network and What Role Did It Play in Waco?," July 1993. This report by a public relations firm (Ross & Green, 1010 Vermont Avenue NW, Suite 811, Washington DC 20005) was prepared in conjunction with the New Alliance Party. NAP is labeled a "political cult" by its enemies, and is concerned that such labeling may affect their civil rights. Their FBI file shows that this label is picked up from media allegations and disseminated to FBI field offices without any substantiating evidence. A different political party, the LaRouche organization, is also concerned with this issue. They were raided, their records seized, and some of their leaders imprisoned after being convicted on dubious financial fraud charges in the late 1980s. LaRouche himself was released on parole in early 1994.
4. Dick Reavis, "Witness for the Prosecution," San Antonio Current, 10 February 1994, p. 6.
5. Michael Hedges, "Diverse Coalition Seeks Oversight of Federal Law Officers," Washington Times, 11 January 1994, p. A3.
6. James L. Pate, "Gun Gestapo's Day of Infamy," Soldier of Fortune, June 1993, pp. 49-53, 62-64.
7. Scott Shepard, "ATF Chief Vows to Keep an Eye on Religious Cults," Washington Times, 2 November 1993, p. A3.
8. Kristan Metzler, "Dad Acquitted of Plot to Kidnap DuPont Heir," Washington Times, 1 January 1993, p. B2.
9. Gerald Arenberg, "The Rise and Fall of Deprogramming," The Chief of Police, March/April 1993, p. 2.
10. Phil Stanford, "The Quiet War on Cults," Inquiry, 15 October 1979, p. 7.
11. Ross & Green, p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 2.
13. John Zerzan, "Review of 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord," Anarchy, Fall 1993, p. 12.
14. "Channeling" was one of ten documents in an "Orientation Kit" put out by the Selective Service in July 1965, and withdrawn after it was publicized by anti-draft activists. The quotation is from a two-page reprint that appeared in Ramparts, December 1967.
15. Reprinted in Covert Action Information Bulletin, January 1979 (No. 3), pp. 9-18.
16. Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991), 375 pages.
17. William Colby (with Peter Forbath), Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 87.
18. John Marks, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), pp. 125-26.
19. Investigative Research Specialists, "List of Moon Fronts," 1992. (IRS, 1390 Chain Bridge Road, Suite 10, McLean VA 22101).
20. University of Bridgeport, Office of Communications, "Press Release: University of Bridgeport Board Elects New Trustees," 6 August 1992, pp. 8-9. (Contact: Walter Wager, 203-576-4525)
21. Paul Farhi and Howard Kurtz, "$1 Billion Invested In Times," Washington Post, 28 May 1992, p. B10.
22. Robert Boettcher (with Gordon L. Freedman), Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), pp. 38-41.
23. Bent Corydon, "L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?" (Fort Lee NJ: Barricade Books, 1992), 459 pages.
24. Miles Copeland, The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative (London: Aurum Press, 1989), pp. 176-77.
25. Jim Wilcott, "The CIA and the Media: Some Personal Experiences," Covert Action Information Bulletin, December 1979/January 1980 (No. 7), p. 23.
26. Joe Holsinger, "Statement to the Forum Entitled 'Psycho-social Implications of the Jonestown Phenomenon,'" 23 May 1980, Miyako Hotel, San Francisco.
27. John Judge, "The Black Hole of Guyana." In Jim Keith, ed., Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (Portland: Feral House, 1993), pp. 127-65. Judge's essay includes 291 end notes.
28. Kenneth Wooden, The Children of Jonestown (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 196.
29. Judge, pp. 139-40.
30. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 22, 189-90.
__________________________________________________________________________________
In August 1984, two twenty-something young men wearing ties knocked on my door and gave their names: Steve Usdin and Jeff Ubois. A tiny newsletter had mentioned the database I was developing, and they were interested. They began pumping me on my activities and associates, and took notes. Their questions reflected a familiarity with obscure leftist personalities and publications that is found only among seasoned activists, and even more curiously, they expressed no politics of their own. Usdin and Ubois had to be "sent men."
But they wanted to be helpful. My own attempts to interest progressives in my project had been met with quizzical looks, because at the time most leftists were still using typewriters. These two fellows at least knew all about microcomputing. So I rewarded them with the first edition of what today is called NameBase. At the same time I mentioned that I needed the IBM BASIC compiler to get the program transferred from CP/M, and a few weeks later they came by with just what I needed, complete with a photocopied manual in a binder. I probably should have asked them for new computers and an office.
They said their group went by the name of "Information Bank," and they wanted to approach certain organizations in the Washington DC area and volunteer their technical skills. The following June I visited their warehouse headquarters and met Randolph A. Winn and Robert M. Meyer. I asked questions about who or what was behind it all, but their answers were evasive. From their perspective, I was a potential recruit.
In July 1985 I got a call from Kris Jacobs, a DC activist who did research on the right-wing. She said that Ubois was caught looking in her office files, and when she confronted him, he claimed to be from the National Journalism Center. Since NJC is a right-wing group that was then doing research on the left, his answer didn't pacify her. Ubois had been dropping my name to talk his way into certain places, so Ms. Jacobs wasn't happy with my excuses either. I alerted two other organizations who were getting assistance from the Information Bank. The next time Ubois came over in early 1986, I casually brought up the name "National Journalism Center" in a different context, and asked him if he had ever heard of it. "Nope." That's when I opened my own file on the Information Bank.
Louis Wolf helped me check crisscross directories and we visited the recorder of deeds. Several group names were listed under each address, and the two properties we knew about were both in the name of Robert G. Terrell, Jr. While returning from the recorder of deeds office, cross my heart, we spotted Usdin walking with an older man. He didn't see us so we followed them on foot for about two miles like Keystone Kops (they kept stopping at store windows), but eventually lost them. Sometime later Ubois dropped in on Wolf (they never call ahead) and whipped out a business card that read "Hong Kong Business Today." He wanted to know how to get a visa for Vietnam. It was clear by then that most group members were world-class travelers, which included travel to numerous Eastern Bloc countries. It was all a game to them. This was a small group -- perhaps 40 adults -- but they had no visible income to support their far-flung activities.
In February 1987, two young men from the group were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida because the van they were driving contained six children with dirty faces. The term "child abuse" was trumpeted in all of the media, all over the country, for several days. Customs, the FBI, and DC police raided three group properties and made off with their files and computers. The group (it was a "cult" to the media) was called the "Finders" (years earlier they had been known as the "Seekers"), and it was run by Marion David Pettie, then 67 years old. At least now I knew who the older man was and I had another name for the group. No charges were filed and the children were soon returned to their mothers in the group. After realizing that they had been feeding on a nonstory, the media suddenly dropped everything with no apologies. I called the Washington Post city desk at the height of the hysteria and explained that there was another angle, but when their reporter called back he was only being polite.
Three years later I obtained a three-page nongovernment memo of undetermined origin that summarizes Pettie's intelligence links. Most of it seems to check out. According to this memo, Pettie began his career with assorted OSS contacts, served as a chauffeur to General Ira Eaker, became a protege of Charles Marsh (an intimate of FDR and LBJ who ran his own private intelligence network), and was trained in counterintelligence in Baltimore and Frankfurt, Germany. His wife worked for the CIA, and Pettie himself was run by Col. Leonard N. Weigner (whose September 1990 Washington Post obituary confirms that his career was spent in air force intelligence and the CIA). Pettie's case officer was Major George Varga, who relayed Weigner's instructions until Varga died in the 1970s. The memo says that on Weigner's advice Pettie resigned from the military and surrounded himself with "kooks" so that he could infiltrate the "beat," human potential, and now the New Age movements.
Okay, so file this memo under "P" for "Paranoia." Except that in December 1993, first the Washington Times (which was picked up by AP), and then U.S. News and World Report, both carried essentially the same story. It seems that the Finders investigation was stopped cold shortly after it started in 1987, and now the Justice Department has formed a task force to figure out what's going on. Why was it stopped? This is from an internal "Memo to File" written by a Customs agent who participated in the raids, dated 13 April 1987:
NameBase book reviews
______________________________________________________________________________
January 27, 1999, Parascope, The CIA at Guyana, and the Two Billion Dollar Black Hole,
January 27, 1999, Parascope, Dan White's Little Game of Solitaire and Other Curious Deaths,
January 28, 1999, Parascope, The Jonestown Genocide, by Robert Sterling,
February 25, 1999, Parascope, The Suicide Hoax
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Body Count Bad Math,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Gangster With a Bible,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Madman or Messiah in Ukiah?,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Countdown to Nowhere
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Did Jim Jones Read Catcher in the Rye?,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Crazy Cult, or Concentration Camp?,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Some Opinions the History Books Forget to Include,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Conclusion,
Jonestown Bibliography: Suggested Reading
Matrix: Conspiracies, Crimes & Cover-Ups
Conspiracy Message Board: Share your views!
part of http://www.whale.to/b/jonestown.html
A Konformist Special:
The Jonestown Jenocide
by Robert Sterling
A LONG, LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...
John Travolta, 70's icon thanks to "Welcome Back Kotter", "Saturday Night Fever", and "Grease", is enjoying a incredible comeback in critical and commercial smashes such as "Pulp Fiction" and "Face
Off". Speaking of "Saturday Night Fever", the Bee Gees are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Black Crowes and Lenny Kravitz wear bell-bottoms and platform shoes. The biggest box-office attraction this spring was "Star Wars", and "The Eagles Greatest Hits, Volume One" has now sold 24-million copies in the U.S. And the biggest concerts of last year were by KISS and The Sex Pistols.
It should be obvious by now that America is in the middle of a huge love affair with the seventies, the wacky and wild decade that was a by-product of the sixties rebellion. But all is not well from that era of long ago. Take the combative anti-gay Anita Bryant politics, for example. Or how about double-digit inflation and high unemployment rates? And then there's that whole ABBA thing.
One recent ugly element of the seventies has returned in the news recently: krazy kults led by psychotic would-be dictators, a la Jim Jones and The People's Temple. Of course, there is the Aum Supreme cult of Japan, the "Branch Davidians" of Waco, Texas, and, with the most disturbing sense of deja vu, the 39 "suicides" of members of Heaven's Gate. Yes, we were told from the korporate media (with a
strong dab of paranoia), the threat of such uncontrolled cults preying on the weakest members of society is certainly something to beware, especially now that cults have the nefarious internet as an
ally. The undercurrent of such talk, of course, is that something must be done about these cults, or a whole bunch of mass suicides are sure to ensue.
What happened at Rancho Santa Fe (as well as in Waco and Tokyo) is still not completely clear, but the real story behind the events in Guyana are fairly evident during an honest inspection of the facts. And when one compares the level of deceit in the reportage of the deaths in Jonestown, there is little doubt that the "mainstream" korporate media is an unreliable source for truth in this area.
THE SUICIDE HOAX
Let's start with the biggest lie of the whole Jonestown affair: that this was a mass suicide. This has been repeated so many times that it is accepted as fact, and the association is so great that when most people hear "Jonestown", the first thing which pops in their head is "Kool-Aid".
The association is false.
The source of the "Kool-Aid Suicide" stories was the U.S. State Department, who presented the story immediately after the "suicides" were reported as though it was the only obvious truth. A U.S. Army
Spokesman pronounced with complete authority, "No autopsies are needed. The cause of death is not an issue here." The bodies were then allowed to rot in the jungle, making it impossible for American
officials to perform any such unneeded autopsy.
Despite the lack of need, Dr. C. Leslie Mootoo, the top Guyanese pathologist, was at Jonestown hours after the deaths, and, refusing the assistance of U.S. pathologists, accompanied the teams that examined the bodies. His conclusions? Dr. Mootoo found fresh needle marks at the back of the left shoulder blades on 80 - 90% of the victims. Others had been shot or strangled. A surviving witness stated that those who resisted were forced by armed guards to comply. Dr. Mootoo's opinion, and that of the Guyanese grand jury investigating Jonestown, was that all but three (only two of which were "suicides") were murdered by "persons unknown."
If one was to go over the deaths in Auschwitz, it is almost a
certainty, considering the horrendous conditions those who were
there were under, that 0.2 % of all deaths could be attributed to
suicides. Yet, if anyone was to argue that Auschwitz was a suicide
camp housing a bunch of religious freaks and not the compounds of
murder that they were, they would (rightfully) be condemned for
intellectual dishonesty, and their motives would be questioned. No
such actions are taken on those who continue to insist the same
about Jonestown, despite how the facts speak to the contrary.
BODY COUNT BAD MATH
But that is merely the beginning of the deception. The original
count of numbers of deaths was 408 (an odd number to use if the
number was an estimate), with the added claim that 700 had fled into
the jungle. The final total was changed to 913. To explain this
rather minor difference in arithmetic, American authorities first
explained that those backward ignorant Guyanese "could not count."
Perhaps because the first "official" explanation of the bad math was
so insulting, it was then proposed that they missed a pile of
bodies, as if a pile of dead bodies is something easily overlooked.
Finally, the "official" explanation that settled the whole question
was presented: bodies were stacked on top of each other.
Of the 150 photos taken of the massacre, not one shows any body
lying under any others. Those who first worked on the bodies, to
release the gasses of decay, had to puncture the dead, making it
unlikely that they missed any of the dead. Even without these
facts, one must wonder how 408 bodies - 82 belonging to children -
could cover 505 others.
With minor exceptions, pictures show the dead were found in neat
rows, face down. The pictures also show drag marks leading to the
bodies, indicating that victims were murdered elsewhere and placed
there by someone else.
These facts have lead to another likely conclusion: 408 was indeed
the correct original body count. The other 505 were hunted down and
slaughtered, then dragged back.
But who would do such a thing? And why? And why were American
officials giving such deceptive answers about Jonestown? To answer
these questions, one must unravel the mystery of who Jim Jones was.
GANGSTER WITH A BIBLE
On May 13, 1931, James Warren Jones was born in Indiana, the state
that would later give us whiny hard-rock megalomaniac Axl Rose and
dim-witted heartbeat-away-from-President Dan Quayle. His father was
in the Ku Klux Klan.
Jones became a Bible-thumping "faith healer", with a side business
of selling monkeys. He used wet chicken livers as evidence of
cancer which he removed by "divine powers." He adopted eight
children, both black and white. Already the stench of criminal
activity surrounded him, and his landlady referred to him as "A
gangster who used the Bible instead of a gun." Fortunately for
Jones, the local police chief at the time was Dan Mitrione, a friend
from childhood. Mitrione kept him from being arrested or run out of
town.
Mitrione would later enter the International Police Academy, a CIA
front for training counterinsurgency and torture techniques.
Despite having few sources for known funds, Jones found the money to
travel with his wife and family to Brazil in 1961. Coincidentally,
Mitrione was there as well, having advanced quickly in the IPA, and,
while training security forces in torture and assassination, had
beggars kidnapped so he could keep in practice. Mitrione was later
kidnapped and murdered by guerrillas in Uruguay, which became the
basis of the Costa Gavras film "State of Siege". Jones made regular
trips to Belo Horizonte, site of CIA headquarters in Brazil - and
where Mitrione was located.
Apparently, this wasn't the only curious intelligence link to Jones.
He claimed he was part of U.S. Naval Intelligence to some of his
neighbors. The U.S. Embassy provided him with transportation,
groceries, and a large home. "Some people here believed he was an
agent for the American CIA," one person was quoted as saying.
Considering his dear friendship to Mitrione and the funding of
"ministries" in Latin America by the CIA, the belief makes quite a
bit of sense.
In any case, according to his neighbor, Jones "lived like a rich
man."
MADMAN OR MESSIAH IN UKIAH?
Soon after the JFK assassination, Jones returned to the states with
$10,000. In 1965, he formed the first People's Temple in Ukiah,
California, and set up Happy Havens Rest Home. Without trained
personnel or proper licensing, Jones' camp drew in elderly,
prisoners, people from mental institutions, and 150 foster children
transferred often by court order. Among those who contacted him:
"missionaries" from World Vision (an international evangelical order
that often fronts for the CIA), the local chapter head to the John
Birch Society, and leaders of the Republican party, whom his
"church" members did voter organization and fund-raising for the
Dick Nixon '68 campaign. His advisers included a mercenary from
UNITA, the CIA-backed Angola army. Also jumping on board was the
Layton family, whose patriarch, UC Berkeley chemist Dr. Laurence
Laird Layton, had worked on the Manhattan Project and was chief of
the Army's Chemical Warfare Division in the early 50's. (Mrs.
Layton was the daughter of Hugo Phillips, a German
banker/stockbroker who became rich representing Siemans & Halske and
I.G. Farben, two notorious Nazi Holocaust profiteers.)
Despite his rather right-wing history, Jones suddenly declared
himself a liberal and a socialist, and a reincarnation of Jesus
Christ and V.I. Lenin. At this point, suspicions were developing of
his church, which was backed by jack-booted armed thugs who dressed
in black uniforms. Using blackmail, extortions, and any other way
possible to swindle money from those in his clutches, Jones took all
he could from his followers, much of it in the form of welfare and
social security checks. The local press reported about "seven
mysterious deaths" of those who attempted to leave the "church" due
to conflict with Jones. Accusations of kidnapping, beatings, and
sexual abuse began to be whispered.
To escape controversy, Jones moved to San Francisco, and became an
important fund-raiser for the political establishment there. Soon,
he was schmoozing with the liberal and radical elite, meeting with
(among others) Rosalynn Carter and Angela Davis.
Jones was rewarded with being put in charge of the city Housing
Commission, and key followers were awarded jobs in the Welfare
Department. The bulk of their membership came from the unemployed
and dispossessed people found here. The cult preyed on the poor and
helpless, going out of the way to enlist women, children, and
minorities. They recruited many of their members directly from S.F.
mental hospitals. The move did little to change the controversy
surrounding his "church", and a 1977 expose was called an attack by
Jones. He then moved his Utopia to Guyana, aided once again by the
U.S. Embassy.
KOUNTDOWN TO NOWHERE
After receiving complaints lodges by relatives of cult members,
Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown of November 18, 1978 to
investigate human rights abuse. Congressman Ryan was a noted CIA
critic, and had authored the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have
required CIA disclosure in advance to the congressional committees
on all covert operations. Ryan had been given no answers or help
from the State department despite the numerous inquiries. He
arrived with U.S. Embassy official Richard Dwyer, as well as some
journalists, including Tim Reiterman (who had covered the Patty
Hearst story for the San Francisco Examiner.) It is likely Ryan
already suspected what was going on.
And then all hell broke loose.
At the airstrip, Leo Ryan soon became the first congressman to die
in the line of duty, along with four other reporters. (The Hughes-
Ryan Amendment was killed in congress soon afterwards.) The
assassins were described by witnesses as "glassy eyed",
"mechanically-walking zombies", and "devoid of any emotion." Others
were shot, including Dwyer and Reiterman. Soon after that, the mass
slaughter began.
A plausible explanation for the events that unfolded is that Jim
Jones (or someone else) ordered the murders when Ryan's unexpected
visit threatened to expose what was happening. In the chaos that
followed, a mass extermination was carried out.
Just who were the zombie assassins? Well, besides the 913 dead,
there were 167 survivors who returned from the camp. All news
reports concede there were at least 1100 individuals at the camp
(and most place it at 1200.) Who are these 20 or more people
unaccounted for?
The survivors report that there was a special all-white group that
were armed, well-treated and free to exit the compound. These
guards were never accounted for by any news reports. Perhaps it is
these same guards (assuming the total population was 1200) a
congressional aide was referring to in a AP quote which stated,
"There are 120 white, brainwashed assassins out from Jonestown
awaiting the trigger word to pick up their hit."
Of course, they may have had a little help. Over 300 American Green
Berets - trained for CIA covert assassinations - were in the area at
the time. So were nearly 600 British Black Watch commandos, who
were there on a "training exercise." Suddenly the death toll seems
relatively low.
DAN WHITE'S LITTLE GAME OF SOLITAIRE AND OTHER CURIOUS DEATHS
But these weren't the last strange deaths involved with Jonestown.
Nine days later, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor
Harvey Milk were slain by Dan White, who was either a "disgruntled
police agent" or "angry about gays." These explanations were
supplied to explain his utterly irrational behavior during the
killings, as, sure enough, he was described as being in a bizarre
zombie state. During the trial, his lawyers came up with the
inventive but deservedly mocked "Twinkie defense", in which they
claimed he went insane by a sugar high caused by eating too many
sweets. Implausible, but easier to report in the news than stating
he was a brainwashed assassin. Moscone and Milk had extensive
financial backing from Jones during his stay by the Bay, and soon
they both were going to be investigated in connection to missing
funds from the People's Temple. That is, until a lone gunman took
care of them.
Michael Prokes, a Jones aide, held a press conference and stated the
CIA and FBI were withholding an audiotape of the massacre. He also
stated that he was an FBI informant. Right after that, he went to
the restroom... and never left. His death was proclaimed a
"suicide".
In Georgetown, several Temple members were killed after the
massacre. The man charged with the murders, Charles Beikman, was an
early follower of Jones and had become an "adopted son" of his.
Beikman was a Green Beret.
Jeanne and Al Mills, who were writing a book on Jonestown, were
bound and shot to death at their home. In Detroit another survivor
was killed near his home, and another was involved in a mass murder
of school children in Los Angeles.
Ironically, the dead may not have included Jim Jones himself, as was
claimed. The body alleged to be his didn't show his tattoos in the
photographs. Fingerprints had to be checked twice, and his dental
records were never looked at. He was known to use doubles.
THE CIA AT GUYANA AND THE TWO BILLION DOLLAR BLACK HOLE
As the massacre unfolded, Jones is tape recorded as yelling, "Get
Dwyer out of here!" Jim Dwyer was later found at the airstrip,
methodically washing his hands.
In 1968, Dwyer was listed in the publication entitled, "Who's Who in
the CIA". When asked if the allegation was true, he replied, "No
comment."
Of course, Dwyer isn't the only link to CIA in Guyana. Besides
those previously mentioned, John Burke, the U.S. ambassador, and
Richard McCoy, another official, were both heavily involved with the
intelligence community. The U.S. Embassy in Georgetown also housed
the Georgetown CIA station. At the time, Guyana had a socialist
government, and thus was a likely target for covert operations. Dan
Webber, sent to Guyana after the massacre, was CIA as well.
The "official" attorney for the survivors, Joseph Blatchford, was
involved in a scandal involving CIA infiltration of the Peace Corps.
Then there is the missing money that just "disappeared" after the
mass death. Conservative estimates place the amount at $26 million.
Others place it at $2 billion. Judging the history of bank loot
understatements, the second figure is likely closer to the truth.
At the time, a major international money laundering operation was
headquartered in Italy involving the Vatican and a mysterious
fascist quasi-Masonic lodge known as the P-2. (The operation
probably led to the murder of Pope John Paul I, but that's another
conspiracy.) The P-2 had a major operation located in nearby
Panama, and had numerous CIA links themselves. All this was
disturbingly echoed in the S & L swindle of the eighties, which had
CIA and Mafia prints all over the place.
Add in the FBI files on the Black Panthers and Weathermen found at
the site, an attempt to lure Mark Lane (JFK assassination critic and
James Earl Ray lawyer, among other things) and Donald Freed (Lane's
sometime JFK collaborator and recent Simpson case investigator who
has linked the Brentwood murders to Mafia in the L.A. underworld) to
Guyana (which succeeded in having Lane witness the airstrip murders
after Jones hired him as a lawyer) and a bizarre plot to kidnap
Grace Walden Stephens (witness to the Martin Luther King
assassination) and smuggle her to Jonestown, and you have the
makings of a full fledge spook operation.
DID JIM JONES READ "CATCHER IN THE RYE"?
Perhaps the strangest CIA connection of all to Jonestown was the
previously mentioned World Vision. As stated, the evangelical order
often fronts for the CIA. They performed espionage work for the CIA
in Southeast Asia while Operation Phoenix (the murderous project
that left 40,000 people dead) was in full effect. In Honduras, they
were a presence at CIA Contra recruiting camps in the war against
the Sandinistas. In Lebanon, their camps were where the fascist
Phalange butchered Palestinians. In Cuba, their refugee camps
hosted numerous members of the anti-Castro terrorist group Alpha 66
of Bay of Pigs fame.
After the Guyana massacre, World Vision developed a scheme to
repopulate Jonestown with CIA-linked mercenaries from Laos. Laos,
of course, was where the CIA was running it's "secret war" during
Vietnam, which for the most part was a smokescreen for a widespread
opium trafficking operation.
One particularly important World Vision official was John Hinckley,
Sr., an oil man, reputed CIA officer, and friend of George Bush.
You may have heard of his son.
Less than four months before Hinckley Jr. became known as Jodie
Foster's biggest fan, another member of the World Vision order, Mark
Chapman, gunned down John Lennon in what may have been a practice
run for the bigger hit on President Reagan. A policeman who found
him was convinced he was a mind-kontrolled assassin. Chapman was
clutching the novel "Catcher in the Rye" - which was also owned by
Hinckley Jr. (The book was written by J.D. Salinger, who worked in
military intelligence with Henry Kissinger in W.W.II.) Before going
to trial, Chapman plead guilty after a voice in his head (he
attributed it to God) commanded him to do so.
Considering the history of World Vision and what went on previously
in Guyana, it is likely that the real purpose behind repopulating
Jonestown was to create another breeding ground for brainwashed
zombies like Chapman and Hinckley. Even after the massacre, nearby
there was a place called Hilltown, a compound of 8,000 blacks that
followed kult leader Rabbi David Hill, who held his flock with an
iron fist. Hill had so much power behind him that he was referred
to as the "vice prime minister" of Guyana. There was also another
place in Guyana called "Johnstown", as well as similar operations in
the Phillipines and Chile. It appears that Jonestown (and World
Vision's later attempt) is hardly the exception to the rule of using
obscure locations in Third World nations as laboratories for kult
operations.
KRAZY KULT OR KONCENTRATION KAMP?
The site in Guyana was originally a Union Carbide mine, and was
loaded with an abundance of precious natural resources. It is very
likely that the site was chosen to exploit these resources with
cheap labor - and cheap labor was plentiful. Members of Jim Jones'
"church" were bound and gagged immediately after landing in Guyana
and taken to the compound. They were pumped with drugs, and
Jonestown had enough to drug 200,000 people for over a year. Among
the drugs found: Quaaludes, Valium, morphine, Demerol, Thorazine (a
dangerous tranquilizer), sodium pentathol (a truth serum), chloral
hydrate (a hypnotic), and thallium (which confuses thinking), and,
of course, cyanide. They had both cramped living quarter and meager
rations of often spoiled food. They were then forced to work slave
labor for 16-18 hours a day and required to stay up day and night
listening to Jim Jones lecture. Among the charming punishments the
flock endured were forced druggings, sensory isolation in an
underground box, physical torture, public sexual rape and
humiliation, not to mention your average ordinary beatings and
verbal abuse.
If all this leaves a strange feeling of deja vu, the reason may be
because all these drugs and treatments were used in the CIA's
notorious MK-ULTRA program, which was implemented to test and
implement brainwashing and mind control techniques, supposedly to
protect us from some nefarious "communist threat". A 1974
government report admitted that certain "target populations" were
used, namely blacks, women, prisoners, the elderly, children, and
inmates of psychiatric wards. The Orwellian-named Center for the
Study and Reduction of Violence, using the research of
Strangelovian-doctors Jose Delgado and Louis "Jolly" West, was
attempting to draw guinea pigs from the "target populations" to test
drugs, implants, and psycho surgery techniques on at an isolated
military missile base in California. The dead at Jonestown were 90%
women, 80% blacks, and included 276 children.
Which leads us back to Auschwitz and the ultimate deja vu.
Auschwitz, after all, was not just a death camp: it also was a slave
labor camp for chemical monolith I.G. Farben. There, the outcasts
and refuse of society that no one cared about were treated to
similar abuses while a select few profited from the misery. The
brains behind the Final Solution became much of the brains behind
MK-ULTRA. The MK is often said to stand for "Mind Kontrol" -
representing the Germanic origins of the project. Going the full
ten yards, however, it is possible that MK merely stands for "Mein
Kampf".
SOME OPINIONS THE HISTORY BOOKS FORGET TO INCLUDE
Much of this was known by Congressman Ryan, who probably suspected
that Jonestown was a front for something even more sinister. In
1980, Ryan aide Joseph Holsinger received a paper, entitled "The
Penal Colony", which explained that CIA MK-ULTRA operations did not
terminate in 1973, as officially proclaimed, but were instead
continued in public hospitals, prisons, and religious kults which
were used as fronts. Holsinger later stated at a S.F. psychologist
forum on Jonestown that he believed the CIA worked with Jones to
perform medical and mind kontrol experiments at People's Temple. If
Congressman Ryan had not been killed - a big if - much of this
information would have undoubtedly been uncovered, and many
skeletons in the CIA closet would have been uncovered with a domino
effect.
Michael Meiers, author of "Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?", had this to say: "The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project as it was Jim Jones's." Layton, remember, was head of the Army's Chemical Warfare Division.
Former Temple member Joyce Shaw said it best, when wondering out loud if Jonestown was "some kind of horrible government experiment, or some sort of sick, racist thing... a plan like that of the Germans to exterminate blacks."
In October of 1981, Jonestown survivors filed a $63 million lawsuit
against Jonestown era Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA
director Stansfield Turner. The suit stated that the State
Department and CIA conspired to "enhance the economic and political
powers of James Warren Jones," conducting "mind control and drug
experimentation" there. The suit was dismissed four months later
for "failure to prosecute timely," and all requests for appeal were
denied. (Turner would become a director of Monsanto, now best known
for providing the world with the benignly named poison and brain-
damaging substance "NutraSweet".)
All this, of course, is forgotten in "official" or "mainstream"
accounts of the event. Instead, the "acceptable" version of
describing Jonestown blames the victims, echoing the ignorant grunt
uttered by Pete Hamill, who dismissed the dead as "all the loose
change of the sixties."
CONCLUSION
Hanging over Jonestown was a mocking sign that proclaimed, "THOSE
WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT." One of
the most elegant slogans of Holocaust survivors is "Never forget."
Jonestown makes it clear that, no matter how well meaning, all these slogans are but words. Never forget? We obviously already have. That Jonestown could unfold before our eyes without the realization of precisely what was going on says volumes. Certainly the blame falls partly at the feet of a powerful military-industrial complex that feels no shame for its deeds, and certainly partly at a Korporate Media that has become the witting mouthpiece (and collaborator) for this same cabal. But ultimately, the blame falls at the feet of the people, their brains dulled from all those Brady Bunch episodes and Bay City Rollers albums they consumed during the glorious seventies. By the time the Guyana massacre rolled around, the masses were too ignorant and apathetic to neither know nor care about the truth. Instead, they swallowed the official version and waited obediently for their next piece of mindless glop.
What's worse, if one was to try to inform people of the truth, instead of outrage at those behind the evil deeds, the attacks would be leveled at the informant for uttering such disturbing facts. See Gary Webb (of CIA-crack fame) and his treatment from his editors and his fellow "journalists" for proof. Or try bringing up this story in polite company and see the kind of response you get.
Could the Holocaust happen again? It already has, and will continue to happen. One wonders if it ever really ended.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"The Black Hole of Guyana," John Judge
From "Secret and Suppressed," edited by Jim Keith
Most of the infomation in this report is taken directly from Mr. Judge's work. It is highly recommended to all interested in learning more to read this vital source.
"Operation Mind Control," Walter Bowart
"Who Killed John Lennon?," Fenton Bresler
"Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A.," Alex Constantine
Donald Freed, Interview by Author
"Raven: The Untold Story of the Reverend Jim Jones and His People,"
John Jacobs and Tim Reiterman
"Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Accounts," Charles Krause
"The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control,"
John Marks
"Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?," Michael Meiers
"The Big Book of Conspiracies," Doug Moench
"A Sympathetic History of Jonestown," Rebecca Moore
"Conspiracies, Coverups, and Crimes," Jonathan Vankin
"60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time," Jonathan Vankin & John
Whalen
"The CIA's Greatest Hits," Mark Zepezauer
http://www.io.com/~patrik/jimjones.htm
__________________________________________________________________________________
November 29, 1978, Wilmington Morning News,
PSYOPS- HTTP://WWW.TELEPORT.COM/~WALTER
SOURCES
Hold Hands and Die! John Maguire (Dale Books, 1978), p. 235
Story of the Century); Raven, Tim Reiterman (Dutton, 1982) p. 575 (citing poll result).
The standard version first appeared in two "instant books," so instant (12/10/78) they seemed to have been written before the event!
The Suicide Cult, Kilduff & Javers (Bantam Books, 1978);
Guyana Massacre, Charles Krause (Berkeley Pub.,1978).
White Night, John Peer Nugent (Wade, 1979);
The Cult That Died, George Klineman (Putnam 1980);
The Children of Jonestown, Kenneth Wooden (McGraw-Hill, 1981);
The Strongest Poison, Mark Lane (Hawthorn Books, 1980);
Our Father Who Art In Hell, James Reston (Times Books, 1981);
Journey to Nowhere, Shiva Naipaul (Simon & Schuster, 1981);
The Assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan & The Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy, Report, House Committee on Foreign Affairs (GPO, May 15, 1979).
Six Years With God, Jeannie Mills (A&W Publ., 1979);
People's Temple, People's Tomb, Phil Kerns (Logos, Int., 1979);
Deceived, Mel White (Spire Books, 1979);
The Broken God, Bonnie Theilmann (David Cook, 1979);
Awake in a Nightmare, Feinsod (Norton, 1981);
In My Father's House, Yee & Layton (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981).
Journey to Nowhere, p. 294 (the period); The Family, Ed Sanders (Avon Press, 1974)
(Charlie Manson); Snapping, Flo Conway (brainwashing);
Ecstasy & Holiness, Frank Musgrove (Indiana Univ. Press, 1974).
In case you missed the decade and what happened: The Sixties (Rolling Stone Press, 1977); The Sixties Papers, Judith & Stew Albert (Praeger, 1984); By Any Means Necessary: Outlaw Manifestoes 1965-70, P. Stansill (Penguin, 1971); Protest & Discontent, Bernard Crick (Penguin 1970); Fire in the Streets, Milton Viorst (Random House, 1982); Blacklisted News: Secret Histories from Chicago to 1984 (Yipster Times, 1984); The Making of a Counter-Culture, Theodor Roszak (Doubleday, 1969).
Inside People's Temple," Marshall Kilduff, New West, 8/1/77; Hold Hands, p. 100.
The People's Temple, William Pfaff, New Yorker, 12/18/78;
"Rev Jones Became West Coast Power," Washington Post (WP), 11/20/78.
Rev. Jones Accused of Coercion," New York Times (NYT), 4/12/79; NYT, 11/27/78 (warning letter to Ryan, 6/78).
Assassination of Leo J. Ryan, op cit., pp. 1-3; "Ryan to Visit," Kilduff, San Francisco Chronicle (SFC), 11/8/78.
Jan-Feb, 1979, Wash. Jrn. Rev., A Hell of a Story: The Selling of a Massacre,
Standard details recounted in books cited above in footnote 2.
Children of Jonestown, p. 201 (mass grave);
NYT, 12/19 and 12/20/78, and 1/10/79 (28 cremated), also 1/25 and 5/25/79 (bodies cremated in mass grave, 248).
My description of Jones is intended without rancor. That he was charismatic is obvious to any who have ever heard him. That he was a sadist is apparent from his mistreatment of dissenters at Jonestown, and from the homosexual attacks that he so often carried out upon his followers. That Jones was Bible-hating, as well as Bible-thumping, is clear from his instruction that the Good Book should be used as toilet paper. Other evidence of Jones's hatred for the Bible abounds in a Journal found at Jonestown. In its pages, the anonymous diarist quotes Jones as saying that "The Bible will be used to put you back into slavery." "...the white man used the Bible to keep blacks in slavery." "That God up there doesn't look after the good people down here.... If Harriet Tubman hadn't torn it up, we'd still be in slavery. We've got to get rid of the Bible or the white man will use it to lead us back into slavery." On the same page, the writer notes that "Jim claimed superiority to Jesus." Elsewhere, we are told that "Jim led the congregation in singing, 'The Old Bullshit Religion Ain't What It Used to Be.'" And, by no means finally, the writer quotes Jones to the effect that "Religion is the opiate of the people....Jim told of God's creation of Lucifer, who led away one-third of the angels. God fouled up. 'Some of you get nervous when I say that.' He said religion was used by the ruling class to control us. 'They" steal, 'they' lie, but they tell us niggers, 'Nigger, don't lie.' They kill all the time, but 'thou shalt not kill.'
Credit for stopping the attack is usually given to the attorneys. In fact, it seems that one of the Templars, Tim Carter, was the first to intervene. Interestingly, Carter reports that Don Sly's attack on Ryan, was most, best half-hearted. "It was like he wanted to be stopped," Carter said. The implication is that Sly's attack was a command performance that Sly himself hoped would fail.
It was Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker who commented on the procedure used in Guyana (trochar embalming). Dr. Breitenecker was the only civilian who participated in the seven autopsies conducted by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology team at Dover Air Force Base. Those autopsied were: Laurence Schacht; William Castillo; James Jones; Violatt Dillard; Maria Katsaris; Carolyn (Moore) Layton; and Ann Moore.
Baltimore Sun, November 21, 1978.
A subsequent report, by the Associated Press on November 25, listed 180 children among 775 cadavers.
The final count, recorded by the Miami Herald on December 17, reported that 260 children were among the dead.
Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1978.
It is literally true that, even before the dead could be buried, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post had published books about the massacre
June 7, 1979, New England Journal of Medicine, Law-Medicine Notes: The Guyana Mass Suicides: Medicolegal Re-evaluation, by William J. Curran, J.D., LL.M., S.M. Hyg.,
Among them: the National Association of Medical Examiners and the Reference Organization in Forensic Medicine and Sciences.
Guyana Operations, After-Action Report, 18-27 November, 1978, prepared by the Special Study Group, Operations Directorate, USMC Directorate, Joint Chiefs of Staff (distributed 31 January, 1979).
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All times are taken from Appendix B, "Chronology of Events."
Los Angeles Times, 9 January, 1986, I:2:5; UPI, 9 January, 1986, National/Domestic News, PM cycle, Los Angles
November 22, 1978, Miami Herald, page 1, Army to Identify Bodies of Cultists,
American Medical News, "Bungled Aftermath of Tragedy," by Lawrence Altman, MD, p. 7.
"Medical Examiners Find Failings By Government on Cultist Bodies," by Lawrence K. Altman, New York Times, Dec. 3, 1978
Dec. 12, 1978, New York Times, Some in Cult Received Cyanide by Injection, Guyanese Sources Say, by Nicholas M. Horrock,
American Medical News, "Bungled Aftermath of Tragedy," by Lawrence Altman, MD, p. 7.
With respect to the absence of cyanide in the vat, see page 4 of the autopsy protocol (AFIP #1680274) for Laurence E. Schacht.
By one conspiracy theory, the CIA used the Ryan visit to Jamestown to assassinate Leo Ryan, who was a vocal critic of the CIA, having co-authored the Hughes-Ryan amendment bill which, if passed, would have required the CIA to disclose its planned covert missions to Congress for approval. The Jonestown congregation was murdered, in this scenario, in an attempt to cover up Leo Ryan's assassination. Another CIA-guilty scenario is advanced by John Judge in "The Black Hole of Guyana" (in Secret and Suppressed, 1993). Here it is suggested that the People's Temple, from its very origin, was a CIA exercise in mind control. Judge points out that many of the drugs found at Jonestown matched those used in the CIA's MK-ULTRA programme and that Larry Layton, Jones's right-hand man, was the son of the chief of the US Army's Chemical-Biological Warfare Division. Surviving People's Temple official Joyce Shaw speculated that Jonestown was "some kind of horrible government experiment… a plan like that of the Germans to exterminate blacks". (The majority of the People's Temple congregation were black women.) Since Jones was showing signs of mental instability, so the story goes, the CIA decided to kill-literally-the People's Temple project rather than risk its exposure.
In Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? (1989) Michael Meiers posits that Congressman Ryan was about to make such an exposure, hence his assassination. Meiers adds another twist, suggesting that Jonestown was the site of the CIA's HIV/AIDS experiments. Then there is the suggestion by S. F. Alinin, B. G. Antonov and A. N. Itskov that the CIA massacred the People's Temple because it was a socialist, not a religious, organization, and was about to embarrass the US by defecting en masse to the USSR. It's a matter of record that Jones had meetings with Soviet and Cuban officials, and almost his last order was that luggage containing money and documents was to be taken to Guyana's Soviet embassy.
Possible CIA involvement in the Jonestown massacre was investigated by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which concluded in 1980 that the agency had no links with Jones or any part in the massacre. A lawsuit by Ryan's children alleging that the CIA ran Jonestown as part of MK-ULTRA was thrown out.
Amid the flurry of Jonestown theories, the obvious explanation still holds up: it was the work of a messianic guru who exercised an almost hypnotic hold over his psychologically needy followers. Jones was, if you like, a little Hitler. Affidavits by People's Temple survivors detail all too clearly Jones's long-held plans for a mass suicide should his little Reich be jeopardized. The People's Temple former financial director, Deborah Layton Blakey, who escaped the cult, issued a public affidavit six months before the massacre warning that Jones was intent on a mass suicide. Most convincing of all is the audio-tape retrieved from Jonestown, widely believed to be genuine, in which Jones can be heard discussing the deteriorating situation:
Jones: It's all over. The congressman has been murdered. (Music and singing.) Well, it's all over, all over. What a legacy, what a legacy. What the Red Brigade doin' that once ever made any sense anyway? They invaded our privacy. They came into our home. They followed us six thousand miles away. Red Brigade showed them justice. The congressman's dead. (Music only.)
Please get us some medication. It's simple. It's simple. There's no convulsions with it. It's just simple. Just, please get it. Before it's too late. The GDF [Guyanese Defense Force] will be here, I tell you. Get movin', get movin', get movin'.
Woman 6: Now. Do it now!
Jones: Don't be afraid to die. You'll see, there'll be a few people land out here. They'll torture some of our children here. They'll torture our people. They'll torture our seniors. We cannot have this. Are you going to separate yourself from whoever shot the congressman? I don't know who shot him.
Voices: No. No. No.
Jones: Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? You don't know what you've done. I tried. (Applause, music, singing.) They saw it happen and ran into the bush and dropped the machine guns. I never in my life. But not any more. But we've got to move. Are you gonna get that medication here? You've got to move. Marceline, about forty minutes.
[…]
Jones: Please. For God's sake, let's get on with it. We've lived-we've lived as no other people lived and loved. We've had as much of this world as you're gonna get. Let's just be done with it. Let's be done with the agony of it. (Applause.) It's far, far harder to have to walk through every day, die slowly-and from the time you're a child 'til the time you get grey, you're dying. Dishonest, and I'm sure that they'll-they'll pay for it. They'll pay for it. This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide. So they'll pay for this. They brought this upon us. And they'll pay for that. I leave that destiny to them. (Voices.) Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it's humane. I want to go-I want to see you go, though. They can take me and do what they want-whatever they want to do. I want to see you go. I don't want to see you go through this hell no more. No more. No more. No more. We're trying. If everybody will relax. The best thing you do to relax, and you will have no problem. You'll have no problem with this thing if you just relax.
[…]
Jones: Where's the vat, the vat, the vat? Where's the vat with the Green C on it? The vat with the Green C in. Bring it so the adults can begin.
Jonestown: a mass suicide called by a delusional, mind-games-playing tyrant. So why, then, do 5,000 pages of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HCFA) 1979 hearing remain classified?
The Jonestown massacre was carried out by CIA to disguise mind-control experiments: ALERT LEVEL 5
Further Reading
John Judge, "The Black Hole of Guyana", Secret and Suppressed, ed. Jim Keith, 1993
Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison: A Survivor of Jonestown Shares Her Story, 1999
Michael Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence, 1989
KAL007
On 1 September 1983 a Korean Air Lines 747 set off from Alaska for Seoul. Instead of following the prescribed route, the civilian flight went 365 miles (590km) off-course and into Soviet airspace. There it was engaged by Soviet fighters, which launched two air-to-air missiles at the airliner, sending KAL007 down into the Sea of Japan with the loss of 269 passengers and crew aboard.
These were the bad old days of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Yuri Andropov in the Kremlin. On the face of it, the shooting down of KAL007 was cold-blooded, unprovoked murder by the Soviets and was condemned as such by the White House. But was it? According to R. W. Johnson in Shootdown (1986), KAL007 was on a CIA/US military mission to fly into Soviet airspace and thereby trigger the Reds' defence systems-which could then be monitored by NATO and Japanese surveillance systems. One of the monitoring stations, Johnson hypothesizes, was the space-shuttle Challenger, which flew over the Sea of Japan four times during KAL007's flight. To lend weight to his argument he details a history of "mistaken" Korean Air Lines infringements of Soviet airspace, including the 1978 gunning-down of a strayed Korean airliner. According to lawyer Melvin Belli, who represented some of the passengers' families, the KAL007 pilot said to his wife before departure: "This is the last trip. It's too dangerous."
________________________________________________________________________________http://www.namebase.org/news05.html
Cults, Anti-Cultists, and the Cult of Intelligence
by Daniel Brandt
From NameBase NewsLine, No. 5, April-June 1994
The Davidians moved to Waco, Texas in 1935, and since then have minded their own business. James Wood, a professor of religion at Baylor University and resident of Waco since 1955, said that before February he hadn't heard of them referred to as a "cult." The librarian at the Waco Tribune-Herald confirmed that until their seven-part series on the Branch Davidians -- the first installment of which began one day before the initial assault on February 28, 1993 -- the Tribune-Herald referred to them as a "religious group," not a "cult."The reporters for the series relied on "experts" from the Cult Awareness Network (CAN). A year earlier there had been allegations of child abuse, and the child protective services went to the compound, knocked on the door, walked in, and interviewed the children. They found no evidence of abuse and left.[1] But that was before CAN began playing the media like a fiddle.
Rick Ross, who was convicted of jewel theft in 1975 and boasts of more than 200 "deprogrammings," has been praised by CAN executive director Cynthia Kisser as being "among the half-dozen best deprogrammers in the country." In 1992 Ross, Adeline Bova, and CAN national spokesperson Priscilla Coates worked their magic on David Block, a group member for five years. He told them about the guns in the compound, and Ross tipped off the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). The affidavits supporting the search warrant used the word "cult," and BATF even adopted some of CAN's media savvy: they alerted television stations before the February 28 raid so that cameras could catch the action. It was expected to go as smoothly as those drug raids on cop shows, and might prove helpful to next year's budget.
To serve the search warrant, 100 BATF agents approached the compound on February 28. But the Branch Davidians had been tipped off and were in an apocalyptic mood, so four agents and six group members were killed by gunfire. This began a siege that lasted 51 days. CAN "experts" such as Priscilla Coates alleged child abuse, and others consulted further with authorities. CAN president Patricia Ryan recommended the use of lethal force.[2] Janet Reno and Bill Clinton picked up on the allegations of child abuse, and decided to put an end to it. This was finally achieved on April 19, when federal stormtroopers attacked again and over 80 men, women, and children perished in a fire.
During the 51-day siege, David Koresh allowed 13 adults and 21 children to leave the compound. After a nine-week study of these children, the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services concluded that there were no indications of abuse. Even while Reno and Clinton were speaking of abuse, FBI director William Sessions said that his agency had no such evidence. Coates' response was, "I know how these types of groups work and children are always abused." Within a week the press dropped the child abuse angle as effortlessly as they had hyped it. It seemed like a good story at the time.[3]
Before the trial of eleven Branch Davidians began in San Antonio, one defense attorney asked that prosecutors and their witnesses be barred from using the word "cult" during the trial because it has "negative and dangerous" connotations. The judge denied this motion, but did allow the jury to consider self-defense in their deliberations. The verdict was a mixed bag. During the trial, BATF agent Dan Curtis defined a "cult" for the court as "a group of people who live together differently than the rest of society."[4]
Meanwhile, a diverse group of activists, ranging from the ACLU to the National Rifle Association, recommended increased oversight of federal law officers, and less reliance on uncorroborated, paid informants as a basis for obtaining search warrants. NRA legislative counsel Richard Gardiner pointed out that federal agents ignored an offer by David Koresh that would have allowed them to inspect all firearms in the compound.[5] Even Soldier of Fortune magazine, which had never met a well-armed, patriotic assault team they didn't like, referred to the BATF as a "gun gestapo."[6]
But the message appears to have been lost. BATF director Stephen Higgins was replaced by John W. Magaw in September 1993, and two months later the new acting director was still determined to keep an eye on other cults: "They're out there. They don't yet have the weaponry that we saw in Waco ... but they will develop if society allows them to." Magaw said the BATF was currently keeping tabs on cults in "three or four places around the country," but declined to be more specific.[7]
The problem with the word "cult" is not that cults don't exist, nor that they should be left alone. The problem with the term, and with others like "brainwashing" and "mind control," is that they are too easy to use. Larger issues get lost when convenient labels are attached to complex phenomena, and sometimes the larger issue is more important than what the label attempts to describe. CAN, BATF, and the media all used the word "cult," and thereby obscured the fact that these were men, women, and children with civil rights. By the time everyone could see that this issue was more important than whatever weapons they were said to have possessed, it was already too late.
There is no legal or scientific basis for the use of such terms, only a broad and vague recognition that certain techniques (hypnosis, food and sleep deprivation, confinement, degradation, fear of punishment, threats of death, repetitious propaganda, peer pressure, and other forms of abuse) can be effective with certain persons as a means of lowering their resistance to stimuli. In other words, they foster authoritarian social structures in which individuals are content to follow orders. But with other persons, the same techniques may provoke opposite reactions.
The mere fact that orders are followed may also reflect a reasonable decision to subordinate one's individual interests to a higher ideal. And to complicate matters further, the techniques used by so-called "cults" are frequently more subtle. It's a tough call in all but the most flagrant situations. As Judge T.S. Ellis III admonished deprogrammer Galen Kelly, "One man's cult is another man's community, no matter how wacky you or I might think that is."[8]
"Deprogrammers" are guilty of the sort of thinking that forestalls adverse judgments by locating such judgments in a category that they themselves establish. If you object to my deprogramming, then you must still be brainwashed. CAN was originally called the Citizens Freedom Foundation, established in 1974 by Ted Patrick. According to Gerald Arenberg, writing in The Chief of Police magazine, Patrick in 1974 already had a "career of kidnapping young adults from young and little-understood churches in exchange for handsome fees from distraught or overbearing parents."[9] Patrick attempted to deprogram Catholics and Episcopalians, and also deprogrammed four Mormons. "The Mormon Church," said Patrick, "is one of the biggest cults in the nation."[10] According to Dr. Lowell Streiker of Burlingame, California, a deprogrammer named Cliff Daniels once said that "he used the 'sex thing' to see whether the girl was completely out of the cult. If she consented, then he knew that she was completely out. If she did not consent, then he knew that he had more work to do."[11]
At the very least, "deprogrammers" should be more accurately called "reprogrammers." For legal reasons, CAN's referrals to these reprogrammers are done informally, and for the record they now disavow some who have ended up defending themselves against kidnapping charges. The reprogrammers themselves are careful to involve the families in the process. That's where their money comes from, and besides, courts usually give the family the benefit of the doubt if the effort backfires. CAN claims that its informal network was involved in more than 1800 "deprogrammings" in 1992.[12]
Apart from the fact that the techniques of "cult leaders" and "deprogrammers" are distressingly similar, another philosophical problem is the extent to which majority culture itself exhibits characteristics of the cult. Personality cults are common in all hierarchical organizations, while religious and ethnic intolerance is pervasive everywhere. Marxism may be finished, but this doesn't mean Marx was wrong about the alienation of everyday life. And there are still critiques such as Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" (1967), with "its treatment of the erosion of life as lived experience and its replacement by representation, life experienced as the received effects and images of commodity culture -- as spectacle."[13]
Social power, or the ability to manipulate others, is the central issue in the narrow debate over cults. CAN objects to the power of the cult, and tries to transfer this power to the family, the government, or to themselves using cult-like techniques. More sensitive social critics are aware that power and manipulation are found everywhere in society. The winners are those who can harness military potential, or provide bread, or lacking these, can manipulate the masses with circuses. In this view, some of the best examples of imposed duress and manipulation are sponsored by governments and the elites who run them.
One of the documents uncovered by the anti-draft movement in the late 1960s was titled "Channeling." Distributed by the Selective Service System in 1965, it was intended as a rationale for issuing draft deferments in the national interest. The tone was not only blunt, but was actually boastful of the government's capacity for manipulation:
The psychology of granting wide choice under pressure to take action is the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.... From the individual's viewpoint, he is standing in a room which has been made uncomfortably warm. Several doors are open, but they all lead to various forms of recognized, patriotic service to the Nation. Some accept the alternatives gladly -- some with reluctance. The consequence is approximately the same.[14]
Covert warfare strategists also thrive on mass manipulation. Another document surfaced in the late 1970s, a top secret Supplement B to U.S. Army Field Manual FM 30-31. The manual itself is unclassified and discusses techniques for intelligence support and liaison with "host countries" (HC) where U.S. troops are stationed. Supplement B, which is dated 18 March 1970 and signed by General Westmoreland, describes special operations that may be required "when HC governments show passivity or indecision in face of Communist or Communist-inspired subversion, and react with inadequate vigor to intelligence estimates transmitted by U.S. agencies." In such situations, "U.S. Army intelligence should seek to penetrate the insurgency by means of agents on special assignment, with the task of forming special action groups among the more radical elements of the insurgency." These groups under U.S. Army control "should be used to launch violent or nonviolent actions according to the nature of the case." The section concluded, "In cases where the infiltration of such agents into the insurgent leadership has not been effectively implemented, it may help toward the achievement of the above ends to utilize ultra-leftist organizations."[15]
This "strategy of tension" accounts for much of the recent history of Italy, along with other factors such as corruption and organized crime. Since the 1970s, electoral politics there has been perverted by coup attempts and nominally left-wing terrorism -- both of which, experts now believe, were covertly sponsored by the Italian secret services and the notorious "Propaganda Due" lodge run by Licio Gelli. Arms and explosives apparently came from the buried caches of NATO's Operation Gladio, and of course there were the inevitable CIA connections. Gelli himself was linked to U.S. presidents; he attended the inaugural ceremonies of Ford, Carter, and Reagan, and called himself a friend of George Bush. In July 1981, Gelli's daughter was stopped at the Rome airport and documents were confiscated from a false bottom in her suitcase. One of these was a photocopy of Supplement B. The "strategy of tension" used some of the same techniques on the entire Italian electorate that cult leaders use to manipulate their followers.[16]
Modern secret services not only mimic the cult leader's cynicism, but intelligence professionals themselves are locked into a self-perpetuating mind-set. Former CIA director William Colby describes the phenomenon:
Socially as well as professionally they cliqued together, forming a sealed fraternity. They ate together at their own special favorite restaurants; they partied almost only among themselves; their families drifted to each other, so their defenses did not always have to be up. In this way they increasingly separated themselves from the ordinary world and developed a rather skewed view of that world. Their own dedicated double life became the proper norm, and they looked down on the life of the rest of the citizenry. And out of this grew what was later named -- and condemned -- as the "cult" of intelligence, an inbred, distorted, elitist view of intelligence that held it to be above the normal processes of society, with its own rationale and justification, beyond the restraints of the Constitution, which applied to everything and everyone else.[17]
The CIA began its fascination with mind control in 1950, when the term "brainwashing" was coined by CIA propagandist Edward Hunter to explain the experience of civilians in China and later, American POWs in Korea.[18] Most of the CIA's records on this were destroyed in the late 1970s, at time when Congress and the media were focusing on CIA misdeeds. The documents that were declassified concerned the CIA's research program called MK-ULTRA, in which they experimented with drugs that were thought to have mind-control potential.
Given the CIA's resources, it is reasonable to expect that a commensurate interest in the cult phenomenon has secretly persisted through the years. The early brainwashing scare, it should be noted, concerned the use of non-drug techniques. The Branch Davidians apparently have no intelligence connections, but with some other groups it's a different story. A CIA interest in cults is far more ominous than the phenomenon of cults by themselves, because intelligence elites have the resources and mind-set to manipulate large populations. The Cult Awareness Network itself has no interest in the intelligence angle. This is one glaring example of those larger issues that they and their media hacks ignore.
The first example of such links is the Unification Church (UC) of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Today it is too well-established to be considered a cult; the list of their front groups and businesses in NameBase runs to 28 pages with 667 names.[19] The UC no longer recruits on U.S. campuses the way they used to -- they don't need the money that Moonies would earn from selling flowers at airports, and they don't need this sort of publicity. Instead they buy universities: in 1992 the UC plunked down over $50 million for the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, and one of the UC's new trustees there is Jack E. Thomas, who was assistant chief of staff for U.S. air force intelligence for six years, and then special assistant to the CIA director for nine years.[20] Rev. Moon is also a force in Washington today.
In 1992 he admitted that over its ten-year history, the Washington Times had cost him "close to one billion dollars."[21] The influence and respectability this provides is presumably worth more than that.
Before the Unification Church was incorporated in the U.S. in 1963 by Bo Hi Pak, Moon had the support of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The expansion of the cult into the U.S. was conceived as a means of influencing U.S. politics. Four of Moon's early followers were young army officers close to Kim Jong Pil, the founding director of the KCIA and chief strategist for the Park regime. Bo Hi Pak was the KCIA liaison to U.S. intelligence at the time, stationed in the Korean Embassy in Washington. Today he is one of Moon's top aides and president of the Washington Times. In 1962 Kim made a two-week official visit to the U.S., and Lt.Col. Bo Hi Pak arranged meetings with CIA director John McCone, defense secretary Robert McNamara, and Defense Intelligence Agency director Gen. Joseph Carroll. On his way home, Kim met with some of Moon's followers in San Francisco. Pak's other duties at the Korean Embassy included frequent liaison trips to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland.[22]
Today the Moon empire is similar to a transnational corporation with various subsidiaries. Cult-like aspects remain visible among Moon's entourage, but from the perspective of most employees, many Moon enterprises are just like other corporations. Rev. Moon still considers himself a Messiah, and his far-flung investments are the means he's using to save the world. His politics are essentially reactionary and anti-Communist, and he has received political and financial support from Yoshio Kodama, Ryoichi Sasakawa, and other powerful Japanese right-wing figures. In 1970 the Japanese contingent of Moon's organization sponsored the annual conference of the World Anti-Communist League.
The next example is the Church of Scientology, and the curious habits and connections of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986). Hubbard was secretive and sometimes dishonest about his background, and reliable information is difficult to find. His father was a U.S. naval officer, so as as a young man Hubbard traveled to China, the Philippines, and Guam. He may have been introduced to the Office of Naval Intelligence before World War II, which apart from the FBI and certain cells of army intelligence, was the closest thing this country had to a CIA. During the war he was almost certainly in naval intelligence, as Lt. (JG) Lafayette R. Hubbard.
After the war Hubbard was a science fiction writer, and in 1949 he wrote a best-seller, "Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health." In 1953 he founded Scientology, and in 1955 he secretly authored the "Brainwashing Manual," in which he identified virtually all of the techniques of mind control now recognized by most psychologists. The Church of Scientology made its money by selling franchises and Hubbard's books to middle-class enthusiasts, and laundering this money through a Panamanian corporation. Low-level franchise Scientologists enjoyed some independence, but to reach higher levels one had to pay for expensive "auditing" and perhaps allow oneself to be abused by the Commodore himself.
Hubbard made many enemies over the years: the American Medical Association in the 1950s, the Food and Drug Administration and the Australian government in the 1960s, the British government beginning in 1967, and Interpol and the French governments in the 1970s, along with an assortment of Mediterranean and North African governments. Hubbard amused himself by doing battle with all of them. From rows of telexes on the Apollo, a virtual slave ship with a crew of over 300, the Commodore ran covert ops by sending coded orders to his minions around the world. His luck ran out when his operatives were caught stealing documents from a locked government office. This led to simultaneous FBI raids on Church property in 1977, which produced documentary evidence of the Church's infiltration of the IRS, and even of the FBI itself. Eventually eleven of his top aides were sent to prison, while Hubbard himself couldn't be found.[23]
Toward the end of his career, Hubbard was certainly a renegade, far beyond anyone's capacity to control him. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, it's probable that he had support from U.S. intelligence. His early expertise in mind control is curious, as well as his lifetime interest in intelligence tradecraft. Former CIA officer Miles Copeland claims that his CIA colleague Bob Mandelstam made "arrangements" with Scientology and Moral Re-Armament about this time.[24] (Moral Re-Armament is another cult-like organization; Copeland's information on MRA is confirmed by the late Jim Wilcott, an accountant with the CIA in Japan in the early 1960s, who wrote that MRA "was covertly supported and used by the CIA."[25]) Another well-placed source reports that in the early 1960s a high-level award was given to Hubbard by the prestigious American Ordnance Association. Hubbard, this source says, was "on a friendly basis with top generals and admirals and their military-industrial associates."
Jonestown, which ended in the suicide/murders of over 900 followers in 1978, has long been suspected of intelligence links because of circumstantial evidence. The camp in Guyana was a prison for all but an armed cadre that had special privileges and functioned as guards. All of the classic mind control techniques were utilized. While conditions were miserable, there was nevertheless a modern medical facility, and massive quantities of behavior modification drugs were recovered by the authorities. Jones was on good terms with Richard Dwyer, who was working with the CIA through his position as deputy chief at the U.S. embassy in Georgetown. Other evidence confirms close links between the U.S. embassy and the Jonestown leadership. After Congressman Leo Ryan was assassinated at the airport and Dwyer escaped with some survivors into the jungle, he apparently returned to Jonestown. A tape of Jim Jones' last moments has him saying, "Get Dwyer out of here. Get Dwyer out of here." (Dwyer retired from the foreign service in 1984 and died in 1991. He denied that he was present during the final event.)
Joe Holsinger, an aide to Leo Ryan, became interested in the CIA connections in 1980 and presented his case in public forums. A White House official told him a few hours after the airstrip murders that "we have a CIA report from the scene." A top Jones aide, George Philip Blakey, reportedly recruited mercenaries for the CIA in Angola in 1975. He's the one who arranged the lease for Jonestown with the government of Guyana in 1974. Blakey was the son-in-law of Dr. Lawrence Layton, a former biochemical warfare specialist for the U.S. army. These and other circumstances caused Holsinger to speculate that Jonestown was part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program.[26]
Other curiosities have been noted by researchers. In the early 1960s Jim Jones spent eleven months in Brazil, where he was in frequent contact with the U.S. embassy. His boyhood friend Dan Mitrione, a U.S. intelligence operative and police advisor, was in Brazil at the same time.[27] Jones returned with enough money to start People's Temple in Ukiah, California.
The early reports from the scene of the Jonestown tragedy are conflicting, suggesting an attempt at cover-up. Robert Pastor, an aide to Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, ordered that the U.S. military strip "all politically sensitive papers and forms of identification" from the bodies.[28] (Early photographs show that many bodies had ID tags, which may have been connected to the Jonestown hospital's drug administration program.) No autopsies were possible after the military took a week to bring the bodies back, and many remained unidentified. Press estimates of Jonestown's wealth ranged from $26 million to $2 billion, scattered in banks, foreign investments, and real estate. Much of this money disappeared after it was listed in the press.[29]
Another fun fact is that the Cult Awareness Network itself has a CIA connection. Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA's School of Medicine, is currently on the advisory board of CAN and a similar group called the American Family Foundation. For fifteen years he has been a keynote speaker at CAN conferences. In the 1950s and 1960s, West did contract research for MK-ULTRA and was personally acquainted with MK-ULTRA director Sidney Gottlieb. Under the terms of his CIA-funded contract, West ran a program at the University of Oklahoma that experimented with LSD. (At one point he gave an elephant a huge dosage at the Oklahoma City Zoo, which resulted in its death.) After the Watts riots in 1965, West promoted the view that violence was caused by genetic factors, and offenders could be treated by psychosurgery and chemical castration.[30]
Some speculate that the CIA is working both sides of the street on the cultism issue. This is the approach that any good intelligence agency would prefer; it provides an opportunity to shape the terms of the public debate, and allows maneuverability to protect and promote their interests. Unfortunately our media work only on the anti-cult side of the street, and seem thoroughly uninterested in the larger issues. One problem is that if you need a soundbite or two, it's much less expensive to use a CAN "expert" as opposed to digging out your own facts. And with the intelligence angle especially, layers of deniability must be penetrated. After pursuing this angle, the only thing that a journalist might discover is the fact that his editor or publisher is nervous and unhappy, and wants to pull the plug.
Just as decaying Imperial Rome was rife with cults, today many feel that our majority culture has played out its string, leaving us tied in knots. The systems needed to transmit values from one generation to the next are in serious disrepair. Intentional communities, like it or not, will become attractive in coming decades for both social and economic reasons, if only because we all share a penchant for survival. This makes the problem as vital as it is difficult. It seems reasonable to ask that those who use words like "mind control," "cult," and "brainwashing" be ready to explain themselves on the basis of larger issues, with some measure of logical, philosophical, and scientific coherence, and with a bit more compassion.
1. "Texas Talk Show Host Tells What Really Happened in Waco," Spotlight, 31 May 1993, pp. 12-13. Interview with Ron Engleman of KGBS radio in Dallas.
2. L. Keeton and J. Pinkerton, "Infiltrating Cult Will End Standoff, Expert Suggests," Houston Chronicle, 8 April 1993.
3. Some details in the preceding paragraphs are from a 26-page report by Ross & Green, "What Is the Cult Awareness Network and What Role Did It Play in Waco?," July 1993. This report by a public relations firm (Ross & Green, 1010 Vermont Avenue NW, Suite 811, Washington DC 20005) was prepared in conjunction with the New Alliance Party. NAP is labeled a "political cult" by its enemies, and is concerned that such labeling may affect their civil rights. Their FBI file shows that this label is picked up from media allegations and disseminated to FBI field offices without any substantiating evidence. A different political party, the LaRouche organization, is also concerned with this issue. They were raided, their records seized, and some of their leaders imprisoned after being convicted on dubious financial fraud charges in the late 1980s. LaRouche himself was released on parole in early 1994.
4. Dick Reavis, "Witness for the Prosecution," San Antonio Current, 10 February 1994, p. 6.
5. Michael Hedges, "Diverse Coalition Seeks Oversight of Federal Law Officers," Washington Times, 11 January 1994, p. A3.
6. James L. Pate, "Gun Gestapo's Day of Infamy," Soldier of Fortune, June 1993, pp. 49-53, 62-64.
7. Scott Shepard, "ATF Chief Vows to Keep an Eye on Religious Cults," Washington Times, 2 November 1993, p. A3.
8. Kristan Metzler, "Dad Acquitted of Plot to Kidnap DuPont Heir," Washington Times, 1 January 1993, p. B2.
9. Gerald Arenberg, "The Rise and Fall of Deprogramming," The Chief of Police, March/April 1993, p. 2.
10. Phil Stanford, "The Quiet War on Cults," Inquiry, 15 October 1979, p. 7.
11. Ross & Green, p. 4.
12. Ibid., p. 2.
13. John Zerzan, "Review of 'Comments on the Society of the Spectacle' by Guy Debord," Anarchy, Fall 1993, p. 12.
14. "Channeling" was one of ten documents in an "Orientation Kit" put out by the Selective Service in July 1965, and withdrawn after it was publicized by anti-draft activists. The quotation is from a two-page reprint that appeared in Ramparts, December 1967.
15. Reprinted in Covert Action Information Bulletin, January 1979 (No. 3), pp. 9-18.
16. Philip Willan, Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy (London: Constable, 1991), 375 pages.
17. William Colby (with Peter Forbath), Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 87.
18. John Marks, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), pp. 125-26.
19. Investigative Research Specialists, "List of Moon Fronts," 1992. (IRS, 1390 Chain Bridge Road, Suite 10, McLean VA 22101).
20. University of Bridgeport, Office of Communications, "Press Release: University of Bridgeport Board Elects New Trustees," 6 August 1992, pp. 8-9. (Contact: Walter Wager, 203-576-4525)
21. Paul Farhi and Howard Kurtz, "$1 Billion Invested In Times," Washington Post, 28 May 1992, p. B10.
22. Robert Boettcher (with Gordon L. Freedman), Gifts of Deceit: Sun Myung Moon, Tongsun Park, and the Korean Scandal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), pp. 38-41.
23. Bent Corydon, "L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?" (Fort Lee NJ: Barricade Books, 1992), 459 pages.
24. Miles Copeland, The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative (London: Aurum Press, 1989), pp. 176-77.
25. Jim Wilcott, "The CIA and the Media: Some Personal Experiences," Covert Action Information Bulletin, December 1979/January 1980 (No. 7), p. 23.
26. Joe Holsinger, "Statement to the Forum Entitled 'Psycho-social Implications of the Jonestown Phenomenon,'" 23 May 1980, Miyako Hotel, San Francisco.
27. John Judge, "The Black Hole of Guyana." In Jim Keith, ed., Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (Portland: Feral House, 1993), pp. 127-65. Judge's essay includes 291 end notes.
28. Kenneth Wooden, The Children of Jonestown (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 196.
29. Judge, pp. 139-40.
30. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, 1985), pp. 22, 189-90.
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Sidebar from NameBase NewsLine, No. 5, April-June 1994:
Marion Pettie and his Washington DC "Finders": Kooks or Spooks?
by Daniel Brandt
In August 1984, two twenty-something young men wearing ties knocked on my door and gave their names: Steve Usdin and Jeff Ubois. A tiny newsletter had mentioned the database I was developing, and they were interested. They began pumping me on my activities and associates, and took notes. Their questions reflected a familiarity with obscure leftist personalities and publications that is found only among seasoned activists, and even more curiously, they expressed no politics of their own. Usdin and Ubois had to be "sent men."But they wanted to be helpful. My own attempts to interest progressives in my project had been met with quizzical looks, because at the time most leftists were still using typewriters. These two fellows at least knew all about microcomputing. So I rewarded them with the first edition of what today is called NameBase. At the same time I mentioned that I needed the IBM BASIC compiler to get the program transferred from CP/M, and a few weeks later they came by with just what I needed, complete with a photocopied manual in a binder. I probably should have asked them for new computers and an office.
They said their group went by the name of "Information Bank," and they wanted to approach certain organizations in the Washington DC area and volunteer their technical skills. The following June I visited their warehouse headquarters and met Randolph A. Winn and Robert M. Meyer. I asked questions about who or what was behind it all, but their answers were evasive. From their perspective, I was a potential recruit.
In July 1985 I got a call from Kris Jacobs, a DC activist who did research on the right-wing. She said that Ubois was caught looking in her office files, and when she confronted him, he claimed to be from the National Journalism Center. Since NJC is a right-wing group that was then doing research on the left, his answer didn't pacify her. Ubois had been dropping my name to talk his way into certain places, so Ms. Jacobs wasn't happy with my excuses either. I alerted two other organizations who were getting assistance from the Information Bank. The next time Ubois came over in early 1986, I casually brought up the name "National Journalism Center" in a different context, and asked him if he had ever heard of it. "Nope." That's when I opened my own file on the Information Bank.
Louis Wolf helped me check crisscross directories and we visited the recorder of deeds. Several group names were listed under each address, and the two properties we knew about were both in the name of Robert G. Terrell, Jr. While returning from the recorder of deeds office, cross my heart, we spotted Usdin walking with an older man. He didn't see us so we followed them on foot for about two miles like Keystone Kops (they kept stopping at store windows), but eventually lost them. Sometime later Ubois dropped in on Wolf (they never call ahead) and whipped out a business card that read "Hong Kong Business Today." He wanted to know how to get a visa for Vietnam. It was clear by then that most group members were world-class travelers, which included travel to numerous Eastern Bloc countries. It was all a game to them. This was a small group -- perhaps 40 adults -- but they had no visible income to support their far-flung activities.
In February 1987, two young men from the group were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida because the van they were driving contained six children with dirty faces. The term "child abuse" was trumpeted in all of the media, all over the country, for several days. Customs, the FBI, and DC police raided three group properties and made off with their files and computers. The group (it was a "cult" to the media) was called the "Finders" (years earlier they had been known as the "Seekers"), and it was run by Marion David Pettie, then 67 years old. At least now I knew who the older man was and I had another name for the group. No charges were filed and the children were soon returned to their mothers in the group. After realizing that they had been feeding on a nonstory, the media suddenly dropped everything with no apologies. I called the Washington Post city desk at the height of the hysteria and explained that there was another angle, but when their reporter called back he was only being polite.
Three years later I obtained a three-page nongovernment memo of undetermined origin that summarizes Pettie's intelligence links. Most of it seems to check out. According to this memo, Pettie began his career with assorted OSS contacts, served as a chauffeur to General Ira Eaker, became a protege of Charles Marsh (an intimate of FDR and LBJ who ran his own private intelligence network), and was trained in counterintelligence in Baltimore and Frankfurt, Germany. His wife worked for the CIA, and Pettie himself was run by Col. Leonard N. Weigner (whose September 1990 Washington Post obituary confirms that his career was spent in air force intelligence and the CIA). Pettie's case officer was Major George Varga, who relayed Weigner's instructions until Varga died in the 1970s. The memo says that on Weigner's advice Pettie resigned from the military and surrounded himself with "kooks" so that he could infiltrate the "beat," human potential, and now the New Age movements.
Okay, so file this memo under "P" for "Paranoia." Except that in December 1993, first the Washington Times (which was picked up by AP), and then U.S. News and World Report, both carried essentially the same story. It seems that the Finders investigation was stopped cold shortly after it started in 1987, and now the Justice Department has formed a task force to figure out what's going on. Why was it stopped? This is from an internal "Memo to File" written by a Customs agent who participated in the raids, dated 13 April 1987:
CIA made one contact and admitted to owning the Finders organization ...but that it had "gone bad." ... [I was advised] the investigation into the activity of the Finders had become a CIA internal matter. The MPD [DC police] report has been classified Secret and was not available for review. I was advised that the FBI had withdrawn from the investigation several weeks prior and that the FBI Foreign Counterintelligence Division had directed MPD not to advise the FBI Washington Field Office of anything that had transpired. No further information will be available. No further action will be taken.
NameBase book reviews
______________________________________________________________________________
January 27, 1999, Parascope, The CIA at Guyana, and the Two Billion Dollar Black Hole,
January 27, 1999, Parascope, Dan White's Little Game of Solitaire and Other Curious Deaths,
January 28, 1999, Parascope, The Jonestown Genocide, by Robert Sterling,
February 25, 1999, Parascope, The Suicide Hoax
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Body Count Bad Math,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Gangster With a Bible,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Madman or Messiah in Ukiah?,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Countdown to Nowhere
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Did Jim Jones Read Catcher in the Rye?,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Crazy Cult, or Concentration Camp?,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Some Opinions the History Books Forget to Include,
April 17, 1999, Parascope, Conclusion,
Jonestown Bibliography: Suggested ReadingMatrix: Conspiracies, Crimes & Cover-UpsConspiracy Message Board: Share your views!part of http://www.whale.to/b/jonestown.html
A Konformist Special:
The Jonestown Jenocide
by Robert Sterling
A LONG, LONG TIME AGO IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...
John Travolta, 70's icon thanks to "Welcome Back Kotter", "Saturday Night Fever", and "Grease", is enjoying a incredible comeback in critical and commercial smashes such as "Pulp Fiction" and "Face
Off". Speaking of "Saturday Night Fever", the Bee Gees are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Black Crowes and Lenny Kravitz wear bell-bottoms and platform shoes. The biggest box-office attraction this spring was "Star Wars", and "The Eagles Greatest Hits, Volume One" has now sold 24-million copies in the U.S. And the biggest concerts of last year were by KISS and The Sex Pistols.
It should be obvious by now that America is in the middle of a huge love affair with the seventies, the wacky and wild decade that was a by-product of the sixties rebellion. But all is not well from that era of long ago. Take the combative anti-gay Anita Bryant politics, for example. Or how about double-digit inflation and high unemployment rates? And then there's that whole ABBA thing.
One recent ugly element of the seventies has returned in the news recently: krazy kults led by psychotic would-be dictators, a la Jim Jones and The People's Temple. Of course, there is the Aum Supreme cult of Japan, the "Branch Davidians" of Waco, Texas, and, with the most disturbing sense of deja vu, the 39 "suicides" of members of Heaven's Gate. Yes, we were told from the korporate media (with a
strong dab of paranoia), the threat of such uncontrolled cults preying on the weakest members of society is certainly something to beware, especially now that cults have the nefarious internet as an
ally. The undercurrent of such talk, of course, is that something must be done about these cults, or a whole bunch of mass suicides are sure to ensue.
What happened at Rancho Santa Fe (as well as in Waco and Tokyo) is still not completely clear, but the real story behind the events in Guyana are fairly evident during an honest inspection of the facts. And when one compares the level of deceit in the reportage of the deaths in Jonestown, there is little doubt that the "mainstream" korporate media is an unreliable source for truth in this area.
THE SUICIDE HOAX
Let's start with the biggest lie of the whole Jonestown affair: that this was a mass suicide. This has been repeated so many times that it is accepted as fact, and the association is so great that when most people hear "Jonestown", the first thing which pops in their head is "Kool-Aid".
The association is false.
The source of the "Kool-Aid Suicide" stories was the U.S. State Department, who presented the story immediately after the "suicides" were reported as though it was the only obvious truth. A U.S. Army
Spokesman pronounced with complete authority, "No autopsies are needed. The cause of death is not an issue here." The bodies were then allowed to rot in the jungle, making it impossible for American
officials to perform any such unneeded autopsy.
Despite the lack of need, Dr. C. Leslie Mootoo, the top Guyanese pathologist, was at Jonestown hours after the deaths, and, refusing the assistance of U.S. pathologists, accompanied the teams that examined the bodies. His conclusions? Dr. Mootoo found fresh needle marks at the back of the left shoulder blades on 80 - 90% of the victims. Others had been shot or strangled. A surviving witness stated that those who resisted were forced by armed guards to comply. Dr. Mootoo's opinion, and that of the Guyanese grand jury investigating Jonestown, was that all but three (only two of which were "suicides") were murdered by "persons unknown."
If one was to go over the deaths in Auschwitz, it is almost a
certainty, considering the horrendous conditions those who were
there were under, that 0.2 % of all deaths could be attributed to
suicides. Yet, if anyone was to argue that Auschwitz was a suicide
camp housing a bunch of religious freaks and not the compounds of
murder that they were, they would (rightfully) be condemned for
intellectual dishonesty, and their motives would be questioned. No
such actions are taken on those who continue to insist the same
about Jonestown, despite how the facts speak to the contrary.
BODY COUNT BAD MATH
But that is merely the beginning of the deception. The original
count of numbers of deaths was 408 (an odd number to use if the
number was an estimate), with the added claim that 700 had fled into
the jungle. The final total was changed to 913. To explain this
rather minor difference in arithmetic, American authorities first
explained that those backward ignorant Guyanese "could not count."
Perhaps because the first "official" explanation of the bad math was
so insulting, it was then proposed that they missed a pile of
bodies, as if a pile of dead bodies is something easily overlooked.
Finally, the "official" explanation that settled the whole question
was presented: bodies were stacked on top of each other.
Of the 150 photos taken of the massacre, not one shows any body
lying under any others. Those who first worked on the bodies, to
release the gasses of decay, had to puncture the dead, making it
unlikely that they missed any of the dead. Even without these
facts, one must wonder how 408 bodies - 82 belonging to children -
could cover 505 others.
With minor exceptions, pictures show the dead were found in neat
rows, face down. The pictures also show drag marks leading to the
bodies, indicating that victims were murdered elsewhere and placed
there by someone else.
These facts have lead to another likely conclusion: 408 was indeed
the correct original body count. The other 505 were hunted down and
slaughtered, then dragged back.
But who would do such a thing? And why? And why were American
officials giving such deceptive answers about Jonestown? To answer
these questions, one must unravel the mystery of who Jim Jones was.
GANGSTER WITH A BIBLE
On May 13, 1931, James Warren Jones was born in Indiana, the state
that would later give us whiny hard-rock megalomaniac Axl Rose and
dim-witted heartbeat-away-from-President Dan Quayle. His father was
in the Ku Klux Klan.
Jones became a Bible-thumping "faith healer", with a side business
of selling monkeys. He used wet chicken livers as evidence of
cancer which he removed by "divine powers." He adopted eight
children, both black and white. Already the stench of criminal
activity surrounded him, and his landlady referred to him as "A
gangster who used the Bible instead of a gun." Fortunately for
Jones, the local police chief at the time was Dan Mitrione, a friend
from childhood. Mitrione kept him from being arrested or run out of
town.
Mitrione would later enter the International Police Academy, a CIA
front for training counterinsurgency and torture techniques.
Despite having few sources for known funds, Jones found the money to
travel with his wife and family to Brazil in 1961. Coincidentally,
Mitrione was there as well, having advanced quickly in the IPA, and,
while training security forces in torture and assassination, had
beggars kidnapped so he could keep in practice. Mitrione was later
kidnapped and murdered by guerrillas in Uruguay, which became the
basis of the Costa Gavras film "State of Siege". Jones made regular
trips to Belo Horizonte, site of CIA headquarters in Brazil - and
where Mitrione was located.
Apparently, this wasn't the only curious intelligence link to Jones.
He claimed he was part of U.S. Naval Intelligence to some of his
neighbors. The U.S. Embassy provided him with transportation,
groceries, and a large home. "Some people here believed he was an
agent for the American CIA," one person was quoted as saying.
Considering his dear friendship to Mitrione and the funding of
"ministries" in Latin America by the CIA, the belief makes quite a
bit of sense.
In any case, according to his neighbor, Jones "lived like a rich
man."
MADMAN OR MESSIAH IN UKIAH?
Soon after the JFK assassination, Jones returned to the states with
$10,000. In 1965, he formed the first People's Temple in Ukiah,
California, and set up Happy Havens Rest Home. Without trained
personnel or proper licensing, Jones' camp drew in elderly,
prisoners, people from mental institutions, and 150 foster children
transferred often by court order. Among those who contacted him:
"missionaries" from World Vision (an international evangelical order
that often fronts for the CIA), the local chapter head to the John
Birch Society, and leaders of the Republican party, whom his
"church" members did voter organization and fund-raising for the
Dick Nixon '68 campaign. His advisers included a mercenary from
UNITA, the CIA-backed Angola army. Also jumping on board was the
Layton family, whose patriarch, UC Berkeley chemist Dr. Laurence
Laird Layton, had worked on the Manhattan Project and was chief of
the Army's Chemical Warfare Division in the early 50's. (Mrs.
Layton was the daughter of Hugo Phillips, a German
banker/stockbroker who became rich representing Siemans & Halske and
I.G. Farben, two notorious Nazi Holocaust profiteers.)
Despite his rather right-wing history, Jones suddenly declared
himself a liberal and a socialist, and a reincarnation of Jesus
Christ and V.I. Lenin. At this point, suspicions were developing of
his church, which was backed by jack-booted armed thugs who dressed
in black uniforms. Using blackmail, extortions, and any other way
possible to swindle money from those in his clutches, Jones took all
he could from his followers, much of it in the form of welfare and
social security checks. The local press reported about "seven
mysterious deaths" of those who attempted to leave the "church" due
to conflict with Jones. Accusations of kidnapping, beatings, and
sexual abuse began to be whispered.
To escape controversy, Jones moved to San Francisco, and became an
important fund-raiser for the political establishment there. Soon,
he was schmoozing with the liberal and radical elite, meeting with
(among others) Rosalynn Carter and Angela Davis.
Jones was rewarded with being put in charge of the city Housing
Commission, and key followers were awarded jobs in the Welfare
Department. The bulk of their membership came from the unemployed
and dispossessed people found here. The cult preyed on the poor and
helpless, going out of the way to enlist women, children, and
minorities. They recruited many of their members directly from S.F.
mental hospitals. The move did little to change the controversy
surrounding his "church", and a 1977 expose was called an attack by
Jones. He then moved his Utopia to Guyana, aided once again by the
U.S. Embassy.
KOUNTDOWN TO NOWHERE
After receiving complaints lodges by relatives of cult members,
Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown of November 18, 1978 to
investigate human rights abuse. Congressman Ryan was a noted CIA
critic, and had authored the Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have
required CIA disclosure in advance to the congressional committees
on all covert operations. Ryan had been given no answers or help
from the State department despite the numerous inquiries. He
arrived with U.S. Embassy official Richard Dwyer, as well as some
journalists, including Tim Reiterman (who had covered the Patty
Hearst story for the San Francisco Examiner.) It is likely Ryan
already suspected what was going on.
And then all hell broke loose.
At the airstrip, Leo Ryan soon became the first congressman to die
in the line of duty, along with four other reporters. (The Hughes-
Ryan Amendment was killed in congress soon afterwards.) The
assassins were described by witnesses as "glassy eyed",
"mechanically-walking zombies", and "devoid of any emotion." Others
were shot, including Dwyer and Reiterman. Soon after that, the mass
slaughter began.
A plausible explanation for the events that unfolded is that Jim
Jones (or someone else) ordered the murders when Ryan's unexpected
visit threatened to expose what was happening. In the chaos that
followed, a mass extermination was carried out.
Just who were the zombie assassins? Well, besides the 913 dead,
there were 167 survivors who returned from the camp. All news
reports concede there were at least 1100 individuals at the camp
(and most place it at 1200.) Who are these 20 or more people
unaccounted for?
The survivors report that there was a special all-white group that
were armed, well-treated and free to exit the compound. These
guards were never accounted for by any news reports. Perhaps it is
these same guards (assuming the total population was 1200) a
congressional aide was referring to in a AP quote which stated,
"There are 120 white, brainwashed assassins out from Jonestown
awaiting the trigger word to pick up their hit."
Of course, they may have had a little help. Over 300 American Green
Berets - trained for CIA covert assassinations - were in the area at
the time. So were nearly 600 British Black Watch commandos, who
were there on a "training exercise." Suddenly the death toll seems
relatively low.
DAN WHITE'S LITTLE GAME OF SOLITAIRE AND OTHER CURIOUS DEATHS
But these weren't the last strange deaths involved with Jonestown.
Nine days later, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor
Harvey Milk were slain by Dan White, who was either a "disgruntled
police agent" or "angry about gays." These explanations were
supplied to explain his utterly irrational behavior during the
killings, as, sure enough, he was described as being in a bizarre
zombie state. During the trial, his lawyers came up with the
inventive but deservedly mocked "Twinkie defense", in which they
claimed he went insane by a sugar high caused by eating too many
sweets. Implausible, but easier to report in the news than stating
he was a brainwashed assassin. Moscone and Milk had extensive
financial backing from Jones during his stay by the Bay, and soon
they both were going to be investigated in connection to missing
funds from the People's Temple. That is, until a lone gunman took
care of them.
Michael Prokes, a Jones aide, held a press conference and stated the
CIA and FBI were withholding an audiotape of the massacre. He also
stated that he was an FBI informant. Right after that, he went to
the restroom... and never left. His death was proclaimed a
"suicide".
In Georgetown, several Temple members were killed after the
massacre. The man charged with the murders, Charles Beikman, was an
early follower of Jones and had become an "adopted son" of his.
Beikman was a Green Beret.
Jeanne and Al Mills, who were writing a book on Jonestown, were
bound and shot to death at their home. In Detroit another survivor
was killed near his home, and another was involved in a mass murder
of school children in Los Angeles.
Ironically, the dead may not have included Jim Jones himself, as was
claimed. The body alleged to be his didn't show his tattoos in the
photographs. Fingerprints had to be checked twice, and his dental
records were never looked at. He was known to use doubles.
THE CIA AT GUYANA AND THE TWO BILLION DOLLAR BLACK HOLE
As the massacre unfolded, Jones is tape recorded as yelling, "Get
Dwyer out of here!" Jim Dwyer was later found at the airstrip,
methodically washing his hands.
In 1968, Dwyer was listed in the publication entitled, "Who's Who in
the CIA". When asked if the allegation was true, he replied, "No
comment."
Of course, Dwyer isn't the only link to CIA in Guyana. Besides
those previously mentioned, John Burke, the U.S. ambassador, and
Richard McCoy, another official, were both heavily involved with the
intelligence community. The U.S. Embassy in Georgetown also housed
the Georgetown CIA station. At the time, Guyana had a socialist
government, and thus was a likely target for covert operations. Dan
Webber, sent to Guyana after the massacre, was CIA as well.
The "official" attorney for the survivors, Joseph Blatchford, was
involved in a scandal involving CIA infiltration of the Peace Corps.
Then there is the missing money that just "disappeared" after the
mass death. Conservative estimates place the amount at $26 million.
Others place it at $2 billion. Judging the history of bank loot
understatements, the second figure is likely closer to the truth.
At the time, a major international money laundering operation was
headquartered in Italy involving the Vatican and a mysterious
fascist quasi-Masonic lodge known as the P-2. (The operation
probably led to the murder of Pope John Paul I, but that's another
conspiracy.) The P-2 had a major operation located in nearby
Panama, and had numerous CIA links themselves. All this was
disturbingly echoed in the S & L swindle of the eighties, which had
CIA and Mafia prints all over the place.
Add in the FBI files on the Black Panthers and Weathermen found at
the site, an attempt to lure Mark Lane (JFK assassination critic and
James Earl Ray lawyer, among other things) and Donald Freed (Lane's
sometime JFK collaborator and recent Simpson case investigator who
has linked the Brentwood murders to Mafia in the L.A. underworld) to
Guyana (which succeeded in having Lane witness the airstrip murders
after Jones hired him as a lawyer) and a bizarre plot to kidnap
Grace Walden Stephens (witness to the Martin Luther King
assassination) and smuggle her to Jonestown, and you have the
makings of a full fledge spook operation.
DID JIM JONES READ "CATCHER IN THE RYE"?
Perhaps the strangest CIA connection of all to Jonestown was the
previously mentioned World Vision. As stated, the evangelical order
often fronts for the CIA. They performed espionage work for the CIA
in Southeast Asia while Operation Phoenix (the murderous project
that left 40,000 people dead) was in full effect. In Honduras, they
were a presence at CIA Contra recruiting camps in the war against
the Sandinistas. In Lebanon, their camps were where the fascist
Phalange butchered Palestinians. In Cuba, their refugee camps
hosted numerous members of the anti-Castro terrorist group Alpha 66
of Bay of Pigs fame.
After the Guyana massacre, World Vision developed a scheme to
repopulate Jonestown with CIA-linked mercenaries from Laos. Laos,
of course, was where the CIA was running it's "secret war" during
Vietnam, which for the most part was a smokescreen for a widespread
opium trafficking operation.
One particularly important World Vision official was John Hinckley,
Sr., an oil man, reputed CIA officer, and friend of George Bush.
You may have heard of his son.
Less than four months before Hinckley Jr. became known as Jodie
Foster's biggest fan, another member of the World Vision order, Mark
Chapman, gunned down John Lennon in what may have been a practice
run for the bigger hit on President Reagan. A policeman who found
him was convinced he was a mind-kontrolled assassin. Chapman was
clutching the novel "Catcher in the Rye" - which was also owned by
Hinckley Jr. (The book was written by J.D. Salinger, who worked in
military intelligence with Henry Kissinger in W.W.II.) Before going
to trial, Chapman plead guilty after a voice in his head (he
attributed it to God) commanded him to do so.
Considering the history of World Vision and what went on previously
in Guyana, it is likely that the real purpose behind repopulating
Jonestown was to create another breeding ground for brainwashed
zombies like Chapman and Hinckley. Even after the massacre, nearby
there was a place called Hilltown, a compound of 8,000 blacks that
followed kult leader Rabbi David Hill, who held his flock with an
iron fist. Hill had so much power behind him that he was referred
to as the "vice prime minister" of Guyana. There was also another
place in Guyana called "Johnstown", as well as similar operations in
the Phillipines and Chile. It appears that Jonestown (and World
Vision's later attempt) is hardly the exception to the rule of using
obscure locations in Third World nations as laboratories for kult
operations.
KRAZY KULT OR KONCENTRATION KAMP?
The site in Guyana was originally a Union Carbide mine, and was
loaded with an abundance of precious natural resources. It is very
likely that the site was chosen to exploit these resources with
cheap labor - and cheap labor was plentiful. Members of Jim Jones'
"church" were bound and gagged immediately after landing in Guyana
and taken to the compound. They were pumped with drugs, and
Jonestown had enough to drug 200,000 people for over a year. Among
the drugs found: Quaaludes, Valium, morphine, Demerol, Thorazine (a
dangerous tranquilizer), sodium pentathol (a truth serum), chloral
hydrate (a hypnotic), and thallium (which confuses thinking), and,
of course, cyanide. They had both cramped living quarter and meager
rations of often spoiled food. They were then forced to work slave
labor for 16-18 hours a day and required to stay up day and night
listening to Jim Jones lecture. Among the charming punishments the
flock endured were forced druggings, sensory isolation in an
underground box, physical torture, public sexual rape and
humiliation, not to mention your average ordinary beatings and
verbal abuse.
If all this leaves a strange feeling of deja vu, the reason may be
because all these drugs and treatments were used in the CIA's
notorious MK-ULTRA program, which was implemented to test and
implement brainwashing and mind control techniques, supposedly to
protect us from some nefarious "communist threat". A 1974
government report admitted that certain "target populations" were
used, namely blacks, women, prisoners, the elderly, children, and
inmates of psychiatric wards. The Orwellian-named Center for the
Study and Reduction of Violence, using the research of
Strangelovian-doctors Jose Delgado and Louis "Jolly" West, was
attempting to draw guinea pigs from the "target populations" to test
drugs, implants, and psycho surgery techniques on at an isolated
military missile base in California. The dead at Jonestown were 90%
women, 80% blacks, and included 276 children.
Which leads us back to Auschwitz and the ultimate deja vu.
Auschwitz, after all, was not just a death camp: it also was a slave
labor camp for chemical monolith I.G. Farben. There, the outcasts
and refuse of society that no one cared about were treated to
similar abuses while a select few profited from the misery. The
brains behind the Final Solution became much of the brains behind
MK-ULTRA. The MK is often said to stand for "Mind Kontrol" -
representing the Germanic origins of the project. Going the full
ten yards, however, it is possible that MK merely stands for "Mein
Kampf".
SOME OPINIONS THE HISTORY BOOKS FORGET TO INCLUDE
Much of this was known by Congressman Ryan, who probably suspected
that Jonestown was a front for something even more sinister. In
1980, Ryan aide Joseph Holsinger received a paper, entitled "The
Penal Colony", which explained that CIA MK-ULTRA operations did not
terminate in 1973, as officially proclaimed, but were instead
continued in public hospitals, prisons, and religious kults which
were used as fronts. Holsinger later stated at a S.F. psychologist
forum on Jonestown that he believed the CIA worked with Jones to
perform medical and mind kontrol experiments at People's Temple. If
Congressman Ryan had not been killed - a big if - much of this
information would have undoubtedly been uncovered, and many
skeletons in the CIA closet would have been uncovered with a domino
effect.
Michael Meiers, author of "Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?", had this to say: "The Jonestown experiment was conceived by Dr. Layton, staffed by Dr. Layton and financed by Dr. Layton. It was as much his project as it was Jim Jones's." Layton, remember, was head of the Army's Chemical Warfare Division.
Former Temple member Joyce Shaw said it best, when wondering out loud if Jonestown was "some kind of horrible government experiment, or some sort of sick, racist thing... a plan like that of the Germans to exterminate blacks."
In October of 1981, Jonestown survivors filed a $63 million lawsuit
against Jonestown era Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA
director Stansfield Turner. The suit stated that the State
Department and CIA conspired to "enhance the economic and political
powers of James Warren Jones," conducting "mind control and drug
experimentation" there. The suit was dismissed four months later
for "failure to prosecute timely," and all requests for appeal were
denied. (Turner would become a director of Monsanto, now best known
for providing the world with the benignly named poison and brain-
damaging substance "NutraSweet".)
All this, of course, is forgotten in "official" or "mainstream"
accounts of the event. Instead, the "acceptable" version of
describing Jonestown blames the victims, echoing the ignorant grunt
uttered by Pete Hamill, who dismissed the dead as "all the loose
change of the sixties."
CONCLUSION
Hanging over Jonestown was a mocking sign that proclaimed, "THOSE
WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT." One of
the most elegant slogans of Holocaust survivors is "Never forget."
Jonestown makes it clear that, no matter how well meaning, all these slogans are but words. Never forget? We obviously already have. That Jonestown could unfold before our eyes without the realization of precisely what was going on says volumes. Certainly the blame falls partly at the feet of a powerful military-industrial complex that feels no shame for its deeds, and certainly partly at a Korporate Media that has become the witting mouthpiece (and collaborator) for this same cabal. But ultimately, the blame falls at the feet of the people, their brains dulled from all those Brady Bunch episodes and Bay City Rollers albums they consumed during the glorious seventies. By the time the Guyana massacre rolled around, the masses were too ignorant and apathetic to neither know nor care about the truth. Instead, they swallowed the official version and waited obediently for their next piece of mindless glop.
What's worse, if one was to try to inform people of the truth, instead of outrage at those behind the evil deeds, the attacks would be leveled at the informant for uttering such disturbing facts. See Gary Webb (of CIA-crack fame) and his treatment from his editors and his fellow "journalists" for proof. Or try bringing up this story in polite company and see the kind of response you get.
Could the Holocaust happen again? It already has, and will continue to happen. One wonders if it ever really ended.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
"The Black Hole of Guyana," John Judge
From "Secret and Suppressed," edited by Jim Keith
Most of the infomation in this report is taken directly from Mr. Judge's work. It is highly recommended to all interested in learning more to read this vital source.
"Operation Mind Control," Walter Bowart
"Who Killed John Lennon?," Fenton Bresler
"Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A.," Alex Constantine
Donald Freed, Interview by Author
"Raven: The Untold Story of the Reverend Jim Jones and His People,"
John Jacobs and Tim Reiterman
"Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Accounts," Charles Krause
"The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control,"
John Marks
"Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?," Michael Meiers
"The Big Book of Conspiracies," Doug Moench
"A Sympathetic History of Jonestown," Rebecca Moore
"Conspiracies, Coverups, and Crimes," Jonathan Vankin
"60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time," Jonathan Vankin & John
Whalen
"The CIA's Greatest Hits," Mark Zepezauer
http://www.io.com/~patrik/jimjones.htm
__________________________________________________________________________________
November 29, 1978, Wilmington Morning News,
PSYOPS- HTTP://WWW.TELEPORT.COM/~WALTER
SOURCES
Hold Hands and Die! John Maguire (Dale Books, 1978), p. 235
Story of the Century); Raven, Tim Reiterman (Dutton, 1982) p. 575 (citing poll result).
The standard version first appeared in two "instant books," so instant (12/10/78) they seemed to have been written before the event!
The Suicide Cult, Kilduff & Javers (Bantam Books, 1978);
Guyana Massacre, Charles Krause (Berkeley Pub.,1978).
White Night, John Peer Nugent (Wade, 1979);
The Cult That Died, George Klineman (Putnam 1980);
The Children of Jonestown, Kenneth Wooden (McGraw-Hill, 1981);
The Strongest Poison, Mark Lane (Hawthorn Books, 1980);
Our Father Who Art In Hell, James Reston (Times Books, 1981);
Journey to Nowhere, Shiva Naipaul (Simon & Schuster, 1981);
The Assassination of Representative Leo J. Ryan & The Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy, Report, House Committee on Foreign Affairs (GPO, May 15, 1979).
Six Years With God, Jeannie Mills (A&W Publ., 1979);
People's Temple, People's Tomb, Phil Kerns (Logos, Int., 1979);
Deceived, Mel White (Spire Books, 1979);
The Broken God, Bonnie Theilmann (David Cook, 1979);
Awake in a Nightmare, Feinsod (Norton, 1981);
In My Father's House, Yee & Layton (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981).
Journey to Nowhere, p. 294 (the period); The Family, Ed Sanders (Avon Press, 1974)
(Charlie Manson); Snapping, Flo Conway (brainwashing);
Ecstasy & Holiness, Frank Musgrove (Indiana Univ. Press, 1974).
In case you missed the decade and what happened: The Sixties (Rolling Stone Press, 1977); The Sixties Papers, Judith & Stew Albert (Praeger, 1984); By Any Means Necessary: Outlaw Manifestoes 1965-70, P. Stansill (Penguin, 1971); Protest & Discontent, Bernard Crick (Penguin 1970); Fire in the Streets, Milton Viorst (Random House, 1982); Blacklisted News: Secret Histories from Chicago to 1984 (Yipster Times, 1984); The Making of a Counter-Culture, Theodor Roszak (Doubleday, 1969).
Inside People's Temple," Marshall Kilduff, New West, 8/1/77; Hold Hands, p. 100.
The People's Temple, William Pfaff, New Yorker, 12/18/78;
"Rev Jones Became West Coast Power," Washington Post (WP), 11/20/78.
Rev. Jones Accused of Coercion," New York Times (NYT), 4/12/79; NYT, 11/27/78 (warning letter to Ryan, 6/78).
Assassination of Leo J. Ryan, op cit., pp. 1-3; "Ryan to Visit," Kilduff, San Francisco Chronicle (SFC), 11/8/78.
Jan-Feb, 1979, Wash. Jrn. Rev., A Hell of a Story: The Selling of a Massacre,
Standard details recounted in books cited above in footnote 2.
Children of Jonestown, p. 201 (mass grave);
NYT, 12/19 and 12/20/78, and 1/10/79 (28 cremated), also 1/25 and 5/25/79 (bodies cremated in mass grave, 248).
My description of Jones is intended without rancor. That he was charismatic is obvious to any who have ever heard him. That he was a sadist is apparent from his mistreatment of dissenters at Jonestown, and from the homosexual attacks that he so often carried out upon his followers. That Jones was Bible-hating, as well as Bible-thumping, is clear from his instruction that the Good Book should be used as toilet paper. Other evidence of Jones's hatred for the Bible abounds in a Journal found at Jonestown. In its pages, the anonymous diarist quotes Jones as saying that "The Bible will be used to put you back into slavery." "...the white man used the Bible to keep blacks in slavery." "That God up there doesn't look after the good people down here.... If Harriet Tubman hadn't torn it up, we'd still be in slavery. We've got to get rid of the Bible or the white man will use it to lead us back into slavery." On the same page, the writer notes that "Jim claimed superiority to Jesus." Elsewhere, we are told that "Jim led the congregation in singing, 'The Old Bullshit Religion Ain't What It Used to Be.'" And, by no means finally, the writer quotes Jones to the effect that "Religion is the opiate of the people....Jim told of God's creation of Lucifer, who led away one-third of the angels. God fouled up. 'Some of you get nervous when I say that.' He said religion was used by the ruling class to control us. 'They" steal, 'they' lie, but they tell us niggers, 'Nigger, don't lie.' They kill all the time, but 'thou shalt not kill.'
Credit for stopping the attack is usually given to the attorneys. In fact, it seems that one of the Templars, Tim Carter, was the first to intervene. Interestingly, Carter reports that Don Sly's attack on Ryan, was most, best half-hearted. "It was like he wanted to be stopped," Carter said. The implication is that Sly's attack was a command performance that Sly himself hoped would fail.
It was Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker who commented on the procedure used in Guyana (trochar embalming). Dr. Breitenecker was the only civilian who participated in the seven autopsies conducted by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology team at Dover Air Force Base. Those autopsied were: Laurence Schacht; William Castillo; James Jones; Violatt Dillard; Maria Katsaris; Carolyn (Moore) Layton; and Ann Moore.
Baltimore Sun, November 21, 1978.
A subsequent report, by the Associated Press on November 25, listed 180 children among 775 cadavers.
The final count, recorded by the Miami Herald on December 17, reported that 260 children were among the dead.
Los Angeles Times, November 24, 1978.
It is literally true that, even before the dead could be buried, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post had published books about the massacre
June 7, 1979, New England Journal of Medicine, Law-Medicine Notes: The Guyana Mass Suicides: Medicolegal Re-evaluation, by William J. Curran, J.D., LL.M., S.M. Hyg.,
Among them: the National Association of Medical Examiners and the Reference Organization in Forensic Medicine and Sciences.
Guyana Operations, After-Action Report, 18-27 November, 1978, prepared by the Special Study Group, Operations Directorate, USMC Directorate, Joint Chiefs of Staff (distributed 31 January, 1979).
All times are taken from Appendix B, "Chronology of Events."
Los Angeles Times, 9 January, 1986, I:2:5; UPI, 9 January, 1986, National/Domestic News, PM cycle, Los Angles
November 22, 1978, Miami Herald, page 1, Army to Identify Bodies of Cultists,
American Medical News, "Bungled Aftermath of Tragedy," by Lawrence Altman, MD, p. 7.
"Medical Examiners Find Failings By Government on Cultist Bodies," by Lawrence K. Altman, New York Times, Dec. 3, 1978
Dec. 12, 1978, New York Times, Some in Cult Received Cyanide by Injection, Guyanese Sources Say, by Nicholas M. Horrock,
American Medical News, "Bungled Aftermath of Tragedy," by Lawrence Altman, MD, p. 7.
With respect to the absence of cyanide in the vat, see page 4 of the autopsy protocol (AFIP #1680274) for Laurence E. Schacht.
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