Was Jonestown A CIA Medical Experiment? A Review of the Evidence Michael Meiers Studies in American Religion Volume 35 The Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Meiers, Michael. Was Jonestown a CIA experiment?: a review of the evidence/ Michael Meiers. p. cm. — (Studies in American religion ; v. 35) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-88946-013-2 1. Jonestown Mass Suicide, Jonestown, Guyana, 1978. 2. Jones, Jim, 1931-1978. 3. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. 4. Brainwashing. I. Title. II. Series. BP605.P46M44 1989 988* .11—dcl9 88-30698 CIP © 1988 Michael Meiers. All rights reserved. FOR INFORMATION CONTACT: THE EDWIN MELLEN PRESS P.O. Box 450 Box 67 Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario U.S.A. 14092 CANADA LOS 1L0 Mellen House Lampeter, Dyfed, Wales UNITED KINGDOM SA48 7DY Printed in the United States of America LIBRARY CENTRAL WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY ELLENSBURG. WASHINGTON TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page Acknowledgement Prologue I 1 Heil Hitler! 1 2 Deep Cover 25 3 From the Cradle to the Company 103 4 Three Countries, Three Commissions 127 5 A California Concentration Camp 167 6 The 'H' File Homicides 195 7 Moscone, Milk and Murder 277 8 Publicity, Provocateuring and Political Power 333 9 Of Dogs and Monkeys 351 10 It's a Jungle Out There 363 11 The Experiment 385 12 One Cookie 407 13 The White Night 415 14 Various Villains and Victims 459 15 The Phantom Preacher 519 Renegade Faction 539 Epilogue 551 Footnotes 553 Selected Bibliography 563 Index 569 "You have to put fear aside and do what you think is right.” — Leo Ryan on the eve of his visit to Jonestown. And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. — John VIII :32. The unoffi­ cial motto of the Central Intelligence Agency. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT As the author, I am solely responsible for this work but it might never have been published had it not been for the generous efforts of scores of fellow researchers, reporters, librarians and friends who gathered source material, constructively criticized early drafts of the manuscript and proofread my atrocious spelling. I appreciate your help and trust that you will understand that the omission of your names from this acknowledgement is not intended to downgrade your valuable contributions only to spare you the pain of any possible reprisal from those people who would suppress the truth about the Jonestown experiment and the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan. Michael Meiers June 1988 PROLOGUE The Kristallnacht or Crystal Night was the name the Nazis gave to the evening of November 9, 1938; the fifteenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's first attempt to overthrow the German government. As in years past, the Nazi Party bosses gathered to celebrate; among them was Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfurer of the SS, who had planned an event to mark the anniversary. Following the beer hall celebrations, Himmler's SS set out to assault the Jewish citizenry. Before the evening was over, 119 synagogues were set on fire, 7,500 Jewish shops were looted' or destroyed, 171 Jewish homes were burned, and 20,000 Jews were arrested and sent to newly-constructed labor camps. According to Nazi records, 36 Jews were murdered that evening. Through­ out Germany, Himmler's troops inflicted over 25 million marks worth of damage — 5 million in broken glass alone, hence the name, the Crystal Night. In the weeks that followed, German Jews were not only denied insurance claims, but were totally ousted from the economy and fined one billion marks "for their abominable crimes." German Jews had suffered persecution before, but only at the hands of roving bands of "brown shirts" who acted out of their personal prejudices under a government that turned a blind eye to their crimes. The Crystal Night was the first assault to be officially sanctioned by the German government. It was the beginning of the Holocaust. In the six and a half years that followed, over 12 million Jews and other sub-humans were exterminated in the Nazi death camps. Combined with the casualties of World War II, the death toll was a staggering 60 million. Today, outside Munich, near Dachau, the first and most infamous of the German Nazi death camps, there is a memorial to those who died in the Holocaust. Inscribed on the monument are the foreboding words of American philosopher George Santayana, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it." ******************************************************* The White Night was the name the Reverend Jim Jones gave to the evening of November 18, 1978 in which over 900 of his followers died in a mass suicide/murder ritual in Jonestown, Guyana; a community they had carved from the jungles of South America. Sparked by their assassination of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, the predominantly Black American cultists carried out the final performance of the bizarre White Night they had rehearsed for years. Before the evening was over, 913 former U.S. citizens were dead, most from drinking a cyanide-laced concoction. For years, Jim Jones had warned his congregation that the Nazis had infiltrated the Central Intelligence Agency and other departments of the federal government to stage a second holocaust; this time against the Blacks and Native Americans. He claimed their only chance of survival was under his protection in the safe haven of Jonestown. Jones1 warnings were correct, but he neglected to tell his congregation that it was he who was helping to perpetrate the coming ethnic war in America. Jonestown was a medical field test in mind control designed to evaluate two auspicious behavior modification drugs on a representative cross-section of Black and Native American citizens. The unwitting human guinea pigs were divided into three test groups. Three hundred received small dosages of drug A on a regular basis, three hundred received drug B and the remaining three hundred acted as the control group and received no drugs at all. Jim Jones then staged the only definitive test of his control; he asked his followers to commit suicide. Those who did so voluntarily were considered under control, those who refused were murdered and the results so noted in the extensive medical records that are still missing to this day. Jones and several of his top aides were in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time of the experiment; making the White Night the first U.S. government sanctioned persecution of a native minority in peacetime. The 913 dead are important, but not as important as the yet untold millions who will die if the results of the Jonestown experiment are implemented in society. As the earth’s resources steadily deplete, a second holocaust becomes more and more probable but, unlike the first, there will be no goosestepping Nazis, swastikas, concentration camps or gas ovens. People will just drop dead en masse or be reduced to zombie-like slaves to serve a master race. All that remains of the ultimate experiment that made this grim future possible are photographs of the carnage and one in particular. Surrounded by a field of corpses, over the simple, unadorned throne of Jim Jones hung the following hand-painted wooden sign: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." ******************* ************************************ Some say the evil was born in Jim Jones, others say it is inherent in the CIA, still others claim the true source is the Nazis who infiltrated the CIA, and then there are those few who believe it all began with some quasi-religious group founded in the Dark Ages. One might as well say the evil was born with time and will die with time. In order to detail the story within the confines of a book, this work will explore the forty years of ethnic weaponry between the Crystal Night and the White Night. Eight years have passed since the Jonestown "tragedy" or "mass suicide" or "massacre" or "suicide/murder" or "the greatest crime of the century" - no one has really been able to define the event. One author has suggested that it was so unique as to be called "The Event." By now, almost all of the first hand accounts have been published. They are surprisingly consistent in the details of Who? What? When? Where?, but the critical answers to How? and Why? are either misinterpreted, misrepresented or, more commonly, outright omitted. Historic events, like Jonestown, are never understood as they occur or even within a few years after they occur. It takes time to verify and collate the various eyewitness accounts into a comprehensive overview and to place that overview in V the course of history. To date, most reports about Jonestown are autobiographies tainted by the author’s defense of his involvement with Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Some are deliberate cover-ups, but most are just subjective and extremely limited in scope. Assuming the intentions of the eyewitness are honest, that he has not been deceived or overly influenced by his emotions and has 100% recall, what he reports is reality, but an extremely limited reality as he has no knowledge of anything that occurred outside his field of vision. An eyewitness to Jonestown can no more write an accurate history of the event than a soldier in the trenches could write a history of World War I. Such first hand accounts do provide valuable source material, but the definitive history will be a conglomeration of all such accounts; a second generation book, and that is precisely the intention herein. Although this work reaches entirely different conclusions, it agrees with most of what has been published on the subject of Jonestown.