The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

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!»

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.