November 27, 1978, Associated Press / The Prescott Courier, Page 1, Jones discussed transplanting cult to Russia, by Peter Arnett, AP Special Correspondent,
Met Twice with Soviet Officials
GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- Top aides of cult leader Jim Jones conferred at least twice in Georgetown with an official of the Soviet Embassy who discussed their problems sympathetically and held out the promise of approval for the exodus of the whole Jonestown colony to Russia, according to a document made available to The Associated Press.
Jones' aide also discussed the "quick transference of money" from Jonestown to the embassy to aid such a move, according to the document. A few months after the meetings, Jones instituted compulsory study of Russian for his Peoples Temple in Guyana, demanding that each speak a Russian phrase before each meal.
Jones was known to be fearful of attacks from across the Brazilian border by mercenaries hired by relatives of some of his followers to return them to the United States. He was known to be seeking a safer haven and spoke of Cuba and the Soviet Union in his speeches.
A five-page typewritten memo found in the house where Jones lived and maintained his office revealed that aides of the cult leader met in Georgetown with the press attache of the Soviet Embassy, Feodor Timofeyev, in December 1977 and again last March 20.
The memo -- signed with the names Marcie, Sharon, Lew, Jimmie, Johnnie and Debbie -- said the cultists discussed the possibility of exodus to Russia at the December meeting, and Timofeyev referred the matter to Moscow. At the meeting in March he said he still had not received a reply.
"He said it was a very difficult thing to arrange exodus," the memo continued. "But when I cried and said it would be very painful for the door to be shut against the children (we adults don't matter so much but we need safety for our children) he said that the U.S.S.R. had taken in 5,000 Spanish children, taken care of them and returned them later to Spain, so he felt it was worth pursuing."
The memo added that Timofeyev told them there would be "no problem of getting visas at any time" for a delegation to visit the Soviet Union to discuss the matter.
The document said at one point "regarding the need for exodus, a quick transference of money, he doesn't see the need for such a situation developing right away, not within a year."
The memo said Timofeyev cautioned Jones about visiting Georgetown, where an emotional hearing over the custody of a child in the Jonestown settlement was in progress.
"He feels that the risks for Jim's life if he came to town might only be 10 percent but it is not worth taking," the memo said.
Timofeyev declined to talk with Jones over the radio-telephone link the cult operated between Georgetown and Jonestown, the memo continued, "but said he'd rather talk to J.J. in person when he comes to Jonestown -- he still is planning to come to Jonestown."
It was after the later visits of Timofeyev and other Soviet officials to Jonestown that the Russian-language classes were instituted on
Please turn to page 11
Cult-Russia
they got out of the settlement, they opened the suitcase and found $500,000 in cash and a letter addressed to the Soviet Embassy. Carter said they abandoned the suitcase and fled into the jungle.
Miss Katsaris was found dead of gunshot wounds in Jonestown. One of the signers of the memo, Sharon Amos, was the public relations director for the cult in Georgetown. a large scale.
Three survivors of the mass suicide-murder told reporters that the settlement's treasurer, Maria Katsaris, ordered them during the height of the death ritual to take a heavy suitcase "to the embassy."
One of the three, Tom Carter, said they thought Miss Katsaris meant the U.S. Embassy. But he said after She and her three children were murdered in Georgetown while the suicide ritual was taking place in Jonestown Charles Edward Beikman, a former U.S. Marine and a member of the cult, has been arrested and charged with the murders.
Timofeyev was not available for comment Sunday night.
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The compelling story for the previous eight days had been, of course, the traumatic murder-suicide of 900 American religious cultists in Jonestown, Guyana, but the only real news this afternoon on that subject is found on page 11 of the Courier, as the contingent of U.S. soldiers delegated the work of retrieving the dead go home with the last of the bodies.
I would need access online to other newspaper's coverage for this date to judge, but apparently some controlling agency prevents archived news of the troubled periods such as this from surfacing on the web, and it's only in chance encounters with small-market outlets on Google News that I've been able to locate national stories of historic importance,
I suspect the big-city editors didn't touch this story with a ten-foot pole, since it's based on a memo found at the former camp site of the recently departed despondents, which, as Peter Arnett put it, was "signed with the names Marcie, Sharon, Lew, Jimmie, Johnnie and Debbie," wherein said cultists "discussed the possibility of exodus to Russia."
Having just experienced a certain remake of the Biblical Masada story, I hear further claims being made on our ancient, collective subconscious, but springing ahead a little bit, this story of planning for the abandonment of one ex-pat community of barely a year's standing, in favor of more protective pasturage, reminds me of the driving out of Osama bin Laden from the sands of the Sudan to the caves of Afghanistan.
I don't ask for solely a subjective reading of the text to make my case for implausible fraudulence either. Unlike the sophomoric Marxist-Leninist screeds and polemics Jim and Marceline were given to as they curried popular favor with the Huey Newton's, the Angela Davis's and the Jane Fonda's of the world, all the while remaining California king-makers of a kind only holders of political snuff-film leverage could wield.
There are a quite a number of references in the record to this possibility of a communist emigration, irregardless of how irreconcilable it is with their former standing and compensation plan. It comes up in the "death tape," that hour of sing-song and Greek lament left behind as proof to the world of an ideological, if not logical, purity.
The memo said Timofeyev cautioned Jones about visiting Georgetown, where an emotional hearing over the custody of a child in the Jonestown settlement was in progress.
In that case, Jim Jones claimed paternity of a five-year-old boy who rightfully belonged to a married couple who were high-level associates of his, and for this reason alone we are told never to sleep with the help. Likewise, his 28-year-old girlfriend, who he made treasurer of the organization, rightfully took a bullet to the brain instead of a sip from a Dixie-Cup. All of which makes for good whoredom but not good communism.
As Peter Arnett (who, don't forget, was also the single Western journalist to broadcast from Baghdad for several weeks at the beginning of the First Gulf War,) wrote:
A five-page typewritten memo found in the house where Jones lived and maintained his office revealed that aides of the cult leader met in Georgetown with the press attache of the Soviet Embassy, Feodor Timofeyev, in December 1977 and again last March 20.Now here the possibility for an empirical comparison is possible.
Once upon a time, something called icehouse.net maintained a collection online called The Jonestown, Guyana Tragedy: Primary Source Materials From The U.S. Department of State. This disappeared down the memory hole some time ago to make way for its replacement, at jonestown.sdsu.edu, an extensive, apparently sincere, and seemingly comprehensive repository of like materials and analysis--that is, until you realize almost nothing predates 1988. At the thirty-year mark the floodgates of releases really opened up, and the collection of essays, even by high-school students, is very impressive, but it does make you realize why there was a 70-year lag for the first written source of the New Testament narrative to appear. Lots of jockeying around between this Saint and that truth I bet.
In the perhaps ten percent of materials from the earlier archive recoverable at archive.org, is a document
dated Saturday, November 26, 1978, called the Jonestown Inventory. A pretty fundamental truth of actuality comes off of this document, which I'm sure applies to situations as diverse as invading Iraq to demolishing the World Trade Center. Created by consular officer Jim Ward for a V. Dikeos, it is self-described as:
The following was dictated mechanically during a walk-through of Jonestown Saturday, November 25, 1978. Although the primary purpose of this walk-through was to compile a limited inventory of the personal effects and communal property at Jonestown, it also provides a subjective description of conditions, and for this reason I have left it in its informal, somewhat disjointed style.
Ward catalogues the interiors throughout Jonestown as being scenes almost totally "victimized by the looters." He includes some interesting sociological data as well. For instance
Jones' son's house is much larger than the normal Jonestown house. On the screened front porch is bedding and an empty foot locker. Again it looks like it was cleaned out by looters. There is an air conditioner still on the wall, the only one I've seen. The hut has its own sink and only two single beds. There is a carton marked "unexposed x-ray film", but broken, so presumably the film is no longer useful.As for Daddy Bear:
Jones' house has been pretty well ransacked. There is a brand new radio receiver transmitter. An adding machine/calculator has been dropped and broken. The interior is really gutted, in bad shape. Its difficult to get to anything. It would take days to get through the books, photos and paperwork lying on the floor. There is a carton lying outside filled with drugs of various types. The safe in the central room of Jones' house is open and empty. I see two small portable typewriters, a case full of drugs, a half-size refrigerator, a case with the name S. Bradshaw on it. Scattered on the floor are large quantities of books, propaganda, old newspapers - the "Communist Manifesto" by Marx, "Street Fighting in the Courtroom", "The Peoples' Advocate", "When New York Succumbed to Riots", etc. The shelves in Jones' room have been emptied out, probably mostly clothes, a lot still on the floor. His bed is the fanciest one here - it is a 4 poster with mosquito netting and built-in draws underneath. Drawers appear to be filled primarily with personal medicines.What's interesting about this description, coming as it does a full week after the mass disappearance of the ownership class, is that apparently no effort has been made to sort, organize, or retrieve "the books, photos and paperwork lying on the floor," which "would take days to get through," but which may have some procedural value. It's as though investigators knew what they they knew---but also knew what they didn't know and didn't need to know.
Is it possible that someone could have come in already, picked something up off the top of the pile, ruched out to share with Arnett his gushy tone of having a major international-relations news scoop? Yes, of course; and there's always still Sunday to work the pile.
But this is a perfect example of why the early factual reporting had to be held down by a foot on its neck in seven inches of water before a reconcilable version of reality could emerge, why I'm eager to recover the record, and why I don't trust the forces behind jonestown.sdsu.edu, even if it's headed up by a likable, and manifestly capable surviving family member who, for the most part, spares us the deadly emotional manipulations that define the later 9/11-versions of her compatriots.
And since the same truths abide in every generation, with the rich, the white, and the connected getting different outcomes than the rest of us--and like my analysis of 9/11 victims as likely to be secretly surviving in seclusion--I have to ask, in all Christian humility--wouldn't she like to see her sisters alive again? Authorities purposely dithered, letting the corpses rot, then pickle, beyond the possibility of autopsy, not only to preclude knowing the how of death, but also the who of death as well. Even Delaware wouldn't issue death certificates on those bags of mush, leading to a kind of legal limbo, like a Guantanamo on the Brandywine. But since the soulless organic portals and lizard people have Henry, Pierre, Eleuthère and Irénée on their side, it all worked itself out.
Well, to lighten up for just a moment, one thing that tickled me pink amongst all the veri·si·mil·i·tu·di·nous details in Timofeyev's memo--the vague talk of money issues, the need for covert communication---is this two-sided gem
Jones was known to be fearful of attacks from across the Brazilian border by mercenaries hired by relatives of some of his followers to return them to the United States.If Jonestown lies somewhere between Matthews Ridge and Port Kaituma on the following map, than I think the approach of mercenaries would likely have to come from Bochinche, in Venezuela; with the Brazilian threat having to travel up the American Highway for the same tactic to avoid the mountainous terrain typical of Cuyuni-Mazaruni. Feodor would have known this. Jim's sex gangstas would know this. But Peter's ghostwriters who needed remedial geography lessons didn't.
Ha, ha.The second giveaway is in the line reading where Jones is afraid of "mercenaries hired by relatives of some of his followers," without paying even lip-service to several alternatives, like narco-terrorists or bill collectors. But the fact remains Guyana's decadent wobble into democratic independence had Langley and Tavistock (or Monsanto and Mobil, if you prefer) written all over it. And while San Francisco does have its foreboding paramilitary leather types, they're all a bit too...um...self-conscious and conspicuous...compared to the real deal.
This would be the mirror boomerang effect dreaded by the creators of illusion and fake reality. I mean, the missing-hyphen Peoples Temple get cause and effect all mixed up. Jones is espousing collective punishment and preemptive retaliation decades before it's fashionable. I can't believe the truth wasn't always this obvious, or maybe before the internet individual insights could be snuffed out before they got any traction in the universal id.
For instance, look at the Moscone–Milk assassinations Wikipedia page
The Moscone–Milk assassinations were the killings of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, who were shot and killed in San Francisco City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White on November 27, 1978. White was angry that Moscone had refused to re-appoint him to his seat on the Board of Supervisors, from which White had just resigned, and that Milk had lobbied heavily against his re-appointment. These events helped bring national notice to then-Board President Dianne Feinstein, who became mayor of San Francisco and eventually U.S. Senator for California.
White was subsequently convicted of voluntary manslaughter, rather than of first degree murder. The verdict sparked the "White Night riots" in San Francisco, and led to the state of California abolishing the diminished capacity criminal defense. It also led to the urban legend of the "Twinkie defense", as many media reports had incorrectly described the defense as having attributed White's diminished capacity to the effects of sugar-laden junk food.[1][2] White committed suicide in 1985, a little more than a year after his release from prison.Dan White had just resigned his seat---why, I don't know, or care. But it should be unthinkable to wonder if his real motive was to goad Moscone into not giving back something he had relinquished for mysterious and explainable reasons---then, like a woman's prerogative, changed his mind, wanted it back, and had motive to get mad and shoot two men in their skulls at point blank range with hollow-point bullets and blame Twinkie-eating for a lapse!
Was the "White Night" riots thing just a coincidence?
This suicide-note-slash-last-will-and-testament of Marceline Jones is beyond unbelievable since it moved into tacky. Like would she really wait to the very last minute to realize, "Oh my God! It's serious! It's on! I've got things to do! To me,the great thing about anticipatory death is that you don't have to pack. Like that hussy, Maria Katsaris, ordering those three guys, at the absolute height of the death ritual, mind you, to carry an extremely heavy suitcase filled with $500,000 all the way to Georgetown, or at least into the jungle past the gates, and miss the fun. How dare she! But Marceline is heading out on the big trip and all she can think of is her resentment to keep her money out of "the hands of my adopted daughter."
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