0-425-04234-0 • $2.50 • A BERKLEY SPECIAL “I lay there, hoping they'd think I was dead..." GUYANA MASSACRE THE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT By the reporter who saw it all happen CHARLES A. KRAUSE -----------WITH EXCLUSIVE MATERIAL BY------------- • Laurence M. Stern, Richard Harwood With 16 pages of on-the-scene photographs and commentary by Frank Johnston IN THIS EDITION ONLY The complete, in-depth, eyewitness record of the days of terror and tragedy the world will never forget. Jonestown, Nov. 17 Someone asked Jones about the beatings... this prompted another rage, and I almost felt sorry for the man. “All I want is peace,” he raged. “If we could just stop it, stop all this fighting. But if we don’t, I don’t know what’s going to happen to 1,200 lives here...” Port Kaituma, Nov. 18 I lay there, hoping they’d think I was dead. Suddenly, my left hip burned. I felt a part of a tooth chip, and I knew I’d been hit... - . - Jonestown, Nov. 20 More than 390 of the bodies were grouped around the altar, many of them arm-in-arm. They were so thickly bunched together that it was impossible to see the ground under them... Dateline: Guyana Charles A. Krause GUYANA MASSACRE: the correspondent and the photographer who lived through it— CHARLES A. KRAUSE, 31, joined THE WASHINGTON POST as a metropolitan reporter in 1972, after graduating from Princeton University. He covered local and state news for the paper’s Maryland desk, and served as Assistant City Editor, before assuming his present position as Latin American Correspondent in 1978. FRANK JOHNSTON traveled for five years with UPI, including 13 months as Staff Combat Photographer in Vietnam, before joining THE WASHINGTON POST in 1968. He is twice winner of the White House News Photographers Award. GUYANA MASSACRE: the award-winning national newsteam who put it on record— LAURENCE M. STERN, 49, is Assistant Managing Editor (National Affairs) of THE WASHINGTON POST. He was the chief of the Saigon Bureau during the Vietnam War, and is the author of The Wrong Horse, a study of American foreign policy. RICHARD HARWOOD, Deputy Managing Editor, came to THE WASHINGTON POST in 1966 from the Louisville (Ky.) COURIER­ JOURNAL. A journalist for 30 years, he has covered both Kennedy assassinations, the killings at Kent State, and the Vietnam War. GLAAXA MASSACRE THE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT CHARLES A. KRAUSE ---------------WITH EXCLUSIVE MATERIAL BY--------------- Laurence M. Stern, Richard Harwood --------;--------------AND THE STAFF OF------------------------- tyc toasljmgton |)ost With 16 pages of on-the-scene photographs and commentary by Frank Johnston A BERKLEY BOOK published by BERKLEY PUBLISHING CORPORATION Copyright ® 1978, by The Washington Post Photographs and insert commentary copyright ® 1978, by Frank Johnston and The Washington Post. 5 Chapter 11, “Cults: The Battle for the Mine,” was written by Henry Allen, and originally published in The Washington Post under the title “The Lure of Our Many Cults.” All rights reserved Published in cooperation with The Washington Post All rights reserved which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form .whatsoever. For information address Berkley Publishing Corporation 200 Madison Avenue New York, New York 10016 - SBN 425-04234-0 BERKLEY BOOKS are published by Berkley Publishing Corporation BERKLEY BOOK ® TM 757,375 Printed in the United States of America Berkley Edition, DECEMBER, 1978 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In addition to the eyewitness account by Charles A. Krause and the narrative written by Laurence M. Stern and Richard Harwood, special appreciation is due the work of Jane E. Freundel for research and editing of the manuscript; to photographer Frank Johnston, whose photographs are central to the special photo section; and to correspondents Leonard Downie, Jr., Karen DeYoung and Fred Barbash, who joined Krause in Guyana as the story unfolded. Among those responsible for editing and directing the coverage in the hectic hours following word of the murder of Representative Ryan and others were: managing editor Howard Simons; assistant managing editor Philip Foisie; foreign editor Peter Osnos; deputy foreign editor Jay Ross; and assistant foreign editors Richard M. Wein­ traub, Terri Shaw, Joe Ritchie, and Lexie Verdon. Assisting from the national staff: assistant national editor Peter Masley, Western bureau chief Lou Cannon; special correspondents Joel Kotkin, Paul Grabowicz, Francis' Moriarity, Bill Wallace, Hal Lipper, and John Jacobs; staff writers Art Harris, Larry Kramer, T. R. Reid, John Goshko, Karlyn Barker, and Henry Allen; and assistant national editors Larry Fox, Robin D. Meszoly, and Joel R. Garreau. William B. Dickinson, general manager of The Washington Post Writers Group, was responsible for publishing coordination in cooperation with Executive Editor Benjamin C. Bradlee. CONTENTS 1. Monday, November 13: “An unbelievable story." 1 2. Leo J. Ryan: His Own Drummer 7 3. Wednesday, November 15: "These people were crazy." 13 •4. The Reverend Jim Jones: Father 25 5. Friday, November 17: The Jungle Utopia 35 6. The Peoples Temple: Handwriting on the Wall 53 7. Saturday, November 18: “A knife at the throat." 65 8. Jonestown: "A feeling of freedom." 75 9. Saturday, November 18: “In the jungle, a press card is just another piece of paper. ” 81 10. Saturday-Sunday, November 18-19: "Let me make it through the night." " 93 11. Cults: The Battle for the Mind 111 12. Scoop: Getting the Story Out 123 13. Monday, November 20: “The babies went first." 129 14. Body Count: End of the White Night 143 15. Aftermath: "The jungle is only a few yards away.” 153 CHRONOLOGY' ' 161 Appendix A 171 Appendix B 177 Appendix C 183 Appendix D 187 Appendix E 195 Appendix F 205 For my family, my friends, and my col­ leagues at The Post whose thoughts and prayers were with me during a long, terrifying night. 1. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 13: “An unbelievable story." I remember thinking, this is crazy. It couldn’t be. I was going to die in the middle of the jungle of Guyana, far away from my family and friends. We were in the process of boarding two small planes at Port Kaituma’s jungle landing strip, nearing the end of a curious story about a Congress­ man who wanted to investigate a freaky religious commune in Guyana. Suddenly the story was no longer zany. Three men on a dump truck and tractor approached our aircraft and began shooting. I went down. The bodies of other passengers started rolling over me as the shooting intensified. The shots were louder—and closer. I could feel dirt spraying over me but I didn’t hear anyone screaming or moaning. Just the pop-pop-pop of the bullets. I lay behind one of the wheels of the plane, hoping they would think I was dead. I knew then I was in the wrong place because they had come around to my side of the plane. Suddenly, my left hip burned. I felt a part of a tooth chip, and I knew I had been hit. I was 1 2 GUYANA MASSACRE helpless. I thought that I wanted to be home. I was waiting to die and, as the seconds went by, I became resigned. O.K., I was ready. Then the shots seemed to come from further away. I don’t know how long the assault lasted— maybe five minutes. I finally got up and it was clear that the expedition led by Congressman LeoJ.'Ryan of California to the Peoples Temple commune at Jonestown in the Guyana jungle had ended in tragedy. It would escalate in the next few hours and become one of the most bizarre and awful massa­ cres of our time. When it was over, more than 900 Jonestown people would be dead and rotting in the blistering heat of a tropical rain forest. They were babies and school kids, old men and women, most of them innocent Americans who had sought a Utopian society thousands of miles from the ghettoes, from the crime, the drugs, and the failure that had been their lot before. They had been led to Guyana by a messianic fundamentalist preacher whose faith­ healing, old-time religion and sophisticated Marxist philosophy attracted to him unlettered blacks, whites from the Okie migrations to California in the 1930s, and cadres of alienated young people—black and white—who despaired of creating in the United States the inter-racial socialist society they longed for. The preacher was Jim Jones, who was called "Father” by his flock; he had built a small religious order in Ukaiah, California, into an influential political institution that was to flower and be destroyed in the Guyana jungle. Whatever his messianic appeal, whatever his high-minded idealism, whatever his good worksand his effort to build God’s kingdom on earth, he will be remembered now as an insane and tragic man. He saw himself as a reincarnation of Christ and Lenin. In death, he more resembles Lucifer. I had never heard of Jim Jones until a few days before the holocaust and even then it was almost by Monday, November 13: 3 accident. It began in theTamanaco Intercontinental Hotel in Caracas. I was in Venezuela to cover the national elections as a correspondent for The Washington Post. I had been living in South America for eight months and it had been an exhausting time. There had been coups in Bolivia, elections in Peru and Ecuador, difficult dealings with dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, and a curious interview with the survivors of an Andes air crash whose book, Alive, described their survival on the flesh of dead companions. There also had been the long days of boredom and frustration that mark the lives of all correspondents.